Homeland Elegies(13)

I remember his office on one of those Sunday mornings. We were on our yearly visit to the Florida Panhandle to spend time with the Awans. It was one of two weeks a year that our families spent together. They would come to Wisconsin in the winter; we would visit Pensacola in the spring. I was breathlessly involved in a game of tag with the Awan kids that morning—there were four of them, twin sons followed by two daughters, all within five years of one another—when I fell to the ground and felt something pierce my knee. I looked down and saw a slim silver shank emerging from the fleshy bump just beneath my kneecap. A fishhook. I pushed at it, following the bend of the shank, thinking I could dislodge the barb. That’s when the blood started to bubble up and spurt. Soon, my knee and ankle were covered in it.

Mother panicked. She tied my leg in a kitchen-towel tourniquet, and Anjum drove us both to her husband’s office. I limped up the driveway between them and into the long, flat building that looked more like a construction-site trailer than a doctor’s office. The waiting room was completely filled. There must have forty people there to see Latif. Almost everyone was black. What I remember most about that afternoon—other than the odd experience of feeling nothing in my knee as I watched Latif cut it open with a surgical knife and release the barb from the fleshy pink-and-white tendon in which it was embedded—the thing I most remember is his face as he emerged from the hallway, before he knew that we were there. He looked like a different man. Not gentle, but absorbed; not soft, but resolute; the usual ineffable inwardness now visible and thrust outward, pushed to every edge of his considerable frame, as if the sleeves of his soul—if you’ll forgive the awkward metaphor—had been rolled up in preparation for the real work of his life. Even his eyes looked rounder to me, more awake. It was clear he was at home here, surrounded by those who needed him, his true kin, the kind to whom he belonged, I think, more than he ever would to us.





December 1982


The Soviets had been in Afghanistan almost three years. I was ten. Latif and Anjum’s twin boys were twelve, the two daughters nine and seven. They showed up at our house a week before Christmas break, and I was surprised to find Ramla, the older daughter, wearing a hijab. I’d never seen any of the more restrictive forms of head covering—hijab, burka, purdah—on any of the women or girls I knew. Both Anjum and my mother would sometimes wear loose-fitting dupattas, for the sake of fashion, I always supposed, more than religion. Maybe that’s what was so surprising about seeing Ramla’s face tightly framed by that dull forest-green cloth: just how stark and severe it made her look. She didn’t like it, and she told me so more than once on that trip. I’d always thought her the most “American” of her siblings, more American, certainly, than I was. That December, she’d come to Wisconsin knowing the lyrics to most of the songs on Michael Jackson’s Thriller—no matter that the album had just been released or that her father wouldn’t let her buy it. She’d made a secret tape at a friend’s house and carried the cassette with her everywhere, always ready to pop it into a tape deck for a song or two when her father wasn’t around.

Latif was getting stricter, not only with his kids but also with himself. He’d taken now to wearing—when he wasn’t in scrubs—a loose-fitting white jalabiya. To a non-Pakistani, the nuance would have been lost. The long, free-flowing gown was Arab attire and tended to signify a deepened commitment to the faith. The battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan was transforming him, shedding new light on a more frivolous life in the West than perhaps he’d expected, more frivolous than he felt he could bear. Fellow Muslims were being slaughtered daily in their battle against an evil empire, and here he was raising children who complained there were not enough marshmallows in their bowls of Lucky Charms.

For us, the true Soviet evil wasn’t socialism—as it was for most Americans—but atheism. Even the least religious of us couldn’t imagine a fate more abhorrent than subjugation to those who imagined there was no God at all. And if the mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan were enacting a great American myth of demanding liberty or demanding death, it was in the service of a freedom uniquely creedal, a distinction ignored by Ronald Reagan a few years later, when he extolled the fighting Afghans—precursors to the Taliban—as freedom fighters, comparing them to the Contras and others, who were, in his words, “the moral equivalents of our founding fathers.” To us, the founding fathers had nothing on these holy warriors. Sure, those men in hoary wigs had fought, too, but not for God. They didn’t want to pay taxes to a king who they felt exploited them, so they took up arms. Where was the nobility in this? More apposite would be the future example of those first responders walking into the second burning tower knowing their attempts to save trapped souls were likely to end in an avalanche of fire and steel from which they wouldn’t return. This is what we saw in those Afghan fighters, an unflinching, inexpressibly noble willingness to die for something more important than their lives, or their liberty, or their happiness.

On the first night of the Awans’ visit that winter, the meal was long and splendid. Though she was a wonderful cook, Mother hated the kitchen except for those two weeks a year, when, on the contrary, she seemed, happily, to pass hours there alone (or with Anjum) absorbed in the preparation of what could only be called our feasts. For that first night, she’d prepared a sumptuous reminder of the Lahori past the adults at the table all shared—paaya, or hoof stew, which, as students, they would seek out on weekend mornings from street vendors in Mozang, Old Anarkali, along Jail Road, and even in the red-light district, where Father said it was best. The stew took a long time to make well, and Mother had had it simmering on low heat in the kitchen since sunrise the day of their arrival. When I saw her scrubbing the short goat legs the day prior, scraping the hooves clean in the sink, I couldn’t imagine putting anything like it in my mouth. But at dinner, Father and the Awans were all in a state, unaware how silly they looked as they sucked at the marrow and scooped fingerfuls of dripping, fatty paaya and naan into their mouths; I succumbed to curiosity. The rich flavor—round with familiar hints of clove, garlic, coriander seed, bay leaves—was astonishing.