Homeland Elegies(104)

I staggered a little farther into the park and fell onto an empty bench. My eyes burned. I buried them in my palms and rubbed, and kept rubbing. There, inside, I saw him. He was large, and I was small. I remembered watching him from a doorway in our first house, standing by a window, impossibly grand in the daylight, opening and reading mail. I longed for him then, to be lifted in his arms, in that light. It was a yearning I’d felt my whole life. Hadn’t he done that? Hadn’t he and Mother given all they could? Why hadn’t it been enough? Why, despite all they’d given, all they’d done—both of them, their whole lives—why had it still never felt like enough?

The tears were coming up now from a pain in my chest, from a longing fissure in a heart I’d always known was broken.

I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out to see two missed calls from him. I had to go back inside. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want to. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t need him.

I headed back to the restaurant.

As I emerged from the park, I saw him on the other side of Madison Avenue. He was standing beside a cab and helping her into the back. It looked like he was going to follow her in. “Dad!” I cried out. And again: “Dad!” He heard me and looked up. I saw her long, worried face appear in the window. He leaned in and spoke to her, then shut the door and stepped away from the car, watching it pull off and disappear up the avenue.

I crossed the street and found him leaden, retreated.

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting to cry again. I didn’t know what I was apologizing for, but I knew I had to apologize.

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “No,” he said again.

“Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said again, grabbing his coat and pulling him toward me. He resisted my embrace.

“No, beta, no.”

But I pressed in and drew him closer, pressing myself to him, feeling him as tightly against my body as I could. I held him there until he stopped resisting. It wasn’t until he tried to speak that I realized he was also crying now.

“I lost it all,” he moaned into my shoulder. “All of it. I lost it all.”

I didn’t ask for an explanation. I didn’t want one. I didn’t need one. I was sure I would find it all out soon enough. Only the embrace between us mattered now. If only I could hold him closer, I thought, hold him longer, maybe what was broken in both of us would finally be mended.





Footnotes


1 After three years of passing on offers from Tinseltown, I’d finally capitulated. The project was an adaptation of a French detective novel in which one of the protagonists was a Muslim. The producer who’d persuaded me to come aboard was, like me, the child of Pakistani immigrants. She didn’t last six months on the job. After she was fired, I started to get notes from the studio about adding a terrorist subplot. I refused. And then I was fired.





I don’t know if, when he boarded that plane for Pakistan the next morning, Father knew he wouldn’t be coming back. Some part of me thinks he did. He left behind a Gordian knot of liabilities, unpaid bills, and loans—the second mortgage he’d taken out on the house was three months in arrears, and foreclosure proceedings were already in the preliminary stages—and his bank accounts were empty, even his IRA, to fund a gambling habit that had enriched the coffers of our local casino by almost $2 million. It was all so clear in hindsight, the disrepair into which his life had been falling for some time; I was angry at myself for not noticing the magnitude of the problem in time to do something.

I won’t bore you with the details of how his legal and financial troubles were eventually untangled, but the fact that his attorneys in America had been fully empowered with the necessary authorities before he left indicated to me—despite his protestations to the contrary—he’d been thinking about an escape for some time. The process of discarding his and my mother’s things—he didn’t want anything saved except the family photographs—was undertaken on the weekend of April Fools’ Day in 2018. By the second week of May, the house in which I’d grown up was sold and painted a bright new shade of gray. As for Father’s situation, his Social Security benefits were enough to ensure a secure, if modest, life on sixteen acres of mango groves in Bahawalpur. I missed him, of course. And he said he missed me, too. But in our Skype sessions and phone calls, I could tell he was doing better than he had done in years. He wasn’t drinking nearly as much, though finding a drink when he wanted one wasn’t as hard—he was happy to relate—as he worried it might be. He was also relieved there was no way to gamble away what little money he had left. Islam had at least that much going for it. “Better than a twelve-step program,” he joked as the muezzin’s call sounded from the village mosque in the background. Yes, the Pakistani homeland he’d hated for the entirety of his American life—or so he’d led us all to believe—was now his homeland again. And it didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

He’d been in Pakistan just about a year when I finally confessed I was almost finished with a book in which I wrote it out—what had happened to him and her and to me in our American journeys. I was surprised how lackadaisically he took the news. There was no entreaty to deal with him justly, no admonition to strike a fair balance about my American homeland. Instead, he had this to add about his own experience and suggested I might not want to leave it out: That when he thought of the place now, America, he found it hard to believe he’d spent so much of his life there. As much as he’d always wanted to think of himself as American, the truth was he’d only ever aspired to the condition. Looking back, he said, he realized he’d been playing a role so much of that time, a role he’d taken for real. There was no harm in it; he’d just gotten tired of playing the part. “I had a good life there, so many good years. I’m grateful to America. It gave me you! But I’m glad to be back in Pakistan, beta. I’m glad to be home.”