Homeland Elegies(12)

She rarely talked about all this. Much of what I know comes, as so much does to children, by learning the unspoken family rules, the assumptions gleaned from frowns of disapproval, shifts in mood at the mention of the wrong thing. I would piece together a better picture of her inner life from the dozen diaries she left when she died, diaries in which I would also discover that what she’d seen as a child during partition, she believed, was at the root of her recurring cancer. She wrote of her body being riddled with affective scars, buried feelings she’d never known how to feel, emotions she still didn’t know how to make sense of, a baleful store she worried was metastasizing into the tumors threatening her life every seven or so years. The picture my aunts—her sisters—conveyed to me of my mother as a child seemed to support at least the assumption of an early, powerful repression at work in her makeup. They remembered an often bold, always curious, lighthearted girl who bore little resemblance to the quiet, tense, reserved woman I knew, though I did spy that eupeptic person peeking through her eyes from time to time. The oddest things—polka music, Reese’s peanut butter cups, tea roses, and (later, in the era of TiVo) David Letterman—could conjure a softened, playful mien that made her look like a different woman entirely. The other thing that always did the trick was seeing Latif.





Zakat


By the time Mother met Latif, during her first year of medical school, he was in his third year and already betrothed. I don’t know the exact circumstance of their meeting—likely through the man who would eventually become her husband, my father, Latif’s best friend—but I do know what she wrote in her diary two days after Latif was shot to death, in 1998:

We knew when we met. But what could he do? He was already promised to Anjum. I thought if he loves S so much, there must be something more to him. Give him a chance. I didn’t realize it was nothing but selfishness. (You did know.) Quite the opposite of L. I still remember my hand in his hand, as big as a giant’s. That gentle smile. “I’ve heard so much about you, Fatima.” What he heard I never asked. And now he’s dead.



The S was my father, Sikander, whom she chose—according to more than one bitter entry in her diaries—on the grounds that Latif loved him.

Latif was big. Very big. A half foot taller than my father—who is almost six feet himself—and a hundred pounds heavier. His forehead, too, was tall, defined by a hairline set farther back on his head than seemed to make sense for a man still so young. His eyes were slim and brown, his face long, his mouth wide. He looked not unlike a Punjabi version of Joe Biden, which mostly accounts, I think, for my mother’s enduring love of the Delaware senator and eventual vice president. A big man with a big head and very big hands, but she was right: he was so gentle. It endeared him to me as a child, too. Sure, it was thrilling to be lifted aloft, to tower above everything nested on those massive shoulders, but it was the tender grip of those massive hands on my ankles as we walked that I recall most vividly, the pleasure of feeling such power so completely corralled, and not as a mitigation of the threat his size implied to others but as an expression of kindness—a kindness that, yes, you could absolutely see in his smile.

Latif and Father graduated from medical school two years before Mother did and were among the first recruited by American hospitals in the States under a new program that offered young foreign doctors visas, jobs, plane tickets, and apartments. Father found a position in cardiology in New York City, and Latif ended up as a resident in internal medicine not far from Trenton. (By then, Latif had married Anjum, the fair-skinned second cousin he’d grown up always knowing he would have to marry; Mother and Father had also wed, but she wouldn’t join him here in America until she graduated.) Trenton was close enough for Father to make a quick trip down for biryani with his friends on a homesick weekend but far enough for him to live his new American life unobserved, unimpeded. Latif was religious—always had been—and Father didn’t want him to know just how much fun he was having with whiskey and cards. Which isn’t to say Latif had ever been one to hector others about their faith, at least not back in Pakistan. But being here worried him, as he saw his fellow classmates taking the American lifestyle too much to heart. Remember the British, Latif would say. They mingled with us back home for centuries, but never too closely. They were careful to safeguard what was theirs. The lesson was one worth heeding, Latif thought, lest they forget who they were and where they really came from.

Whereas to Father, not forgetting who he was would have meant not forgetting he was Punjabi, to Latif it meant never forgetting he was Muslim. Land was an earthly tie; faith a celestial one. But if Latif never missed prayer, or a fasting day in Ramadan, it was not only—or even mainly—out of concern for his eventual entry into heaven. Heaven above, he would say, was an image from which to build a life here below. It’s true that my recollections of him—loping gracefully through his backyard (or ours) in shalwar kameez, exuding an inner quiet, in whose presence discussion of the higher things felt not only natural but also necessary—so many of my recollections are marked by something angelic, by which I mean nothing fey or diaphanous or otherworldly but potent, light-giving, concerned with helping others in the here and now. When he spoke about what it meant to be Muslim, he didn’t refer to the afterlife tomorrow but to the lives of those around him he wanted to make better today. Above all, it meant a commitment to zakat. The term usually refers to the yearly Muslim tax paid from one’s assets and distributed to the poor, but in his family it had come to mean not just the redistribution of their (considerable) wealth but also active service to those in need—the Muslim version, if you will, of Christian charity. Latif’s zamindar (landowning) grandfather in North Punjab had started an orphanage—the care of orphans being a particular involvement in the Muslim world, as the Prophet was allegedly orphaned at the age of six—which his father continued to maintain. Latif grew up spending Sundays there, playing with the kids as his father did the rounds. It must have felt natural to him, later, in medical school, to give up what little free time he had on the weekends to volunteer at a local clinic for the poor. In Trenton, he would do the same through his residency and internship, and five years later, when he left New Jersey to join a practice in Pensacola, he initiated a free Sunday morning clinic at his office. Latif’s aggressive and entirely unselfconscious Samaritanism provoked leery reluctance in his new partners, but when word got out about the generous new doctor in the heavily churchgoing community, it started to bring in patients who could pay their bills, too.