Homeland Elegies(23)
But I digress.
To resume: the setting is my aunt Ruxana’s home in Abbottabad, a bungalow-style construction dating from the Raj, its spacious rooms appointed with flourishes of British style. In the living room, the cherry wainscoting gives way to a fading William Morris wallpaper of boughs and branches; over the various fireplaces scattered through the house are mirrors and candelabra and mantel clocks; and, in the guest room where my father and I are staying—my mother isn’t feeling well and opted to stay back with her parents in Rawalpindi—the taxidermied head of a blackbuck mounted over the bed. Ruxana has made us an extraordinary dinner of shaami kebabs and okra masala and tandoori naan baked in the clay tandoor oven out back. Her head is covered with a shawl, but not for modesty’s sake. She has no hair left. Her light brown skin is turning yellow-gray. She moves with the labored effort of one summoning strength she doesn’t really have.
Ruxana returns from the kitchen, drops a new round of hot naan into the bread basket, takes her seat alongside her husband, Naseem, a short, stout man with a straight, strong back. His speech, like his mustache, is clipped and confident. I have never not seen that scowling smirk on his face, not a look of contempt but of a man enamored with control. Even his arm as he lifts the cup of lassi his wife has prepared bears the self-curtailment of a life made sense of through military drill. My cousin Mustafa, twenty-nine, a bank teller, is here. His sister, Yasmin, thirty-two, a pediatrician, is not. The conversation has turned to the bombings that have become a fact of daily life in Pakistan. In his usual peremptory manner, Naseem explains the dilemma in brief, declarative sentences. The problem is simple, he says, though no one wants to admit it. Pakistan created this cancer in its fight with India; now the cancer has turned on its host. I ask him for clarification, and this leads to a vigorous lesson in Pakistani foreign policy, circa 2008:
“We are stuck between two enemies. Afghanistan to the west. India to the east. The history of politics in this country is defined by our borders. India, through Kabul, has meddled in our affairs from the beginning on the western front. I hope I don’t need to explain to you what they’ve done to us along the northern and eastern fronts.” He paused, waited for me to respond. I shook my head, affirming that, of course, I needed no explanation of the existential threat Pakistan has always felt along its Indian border. “So what are the means of control? The militants were willing to fight our fight in the north. We befriended them along the western front to keep our influence alive in Afghanistan. But when you feed a monster, it grows. When it attacks you—because it always will—you have only yourself to blame.”
My father was hunched over his plate on the other side of his sister, her arm resting on his shoulder as he ate. She gazed at the side of his face and brought her finger to his cheek. Feeling her caress, he looked like he was going to cry.
“The problem is the children,” Naseem continued. “The madrassas are filled with them. Filled! Madrassas teach them, feed them, fill their heads with talk of jihad from the time they’re four and five. By the time they’re ten they want to fight! We’re filling the country with boys like this. That’s where this endless supply of young men is coming from, young men happy to blow themselves to bits.” As Naseem stopped on a thought, I reached for a kebab from the plate at the center of the table; I broke up the patty into pieces as he continued: “Tactically, I understand it. It makes sense why we did what we did. In theory, it’s a playbook taken from the Americans. Terrorism worked well for them in Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua. What we didn’t account for was the difference in proximity. Using a strategy like this so close to home was bound to have an effect it would never have had for the Americans.”
“That’s not true, Abu.” It was my cousin Mustafa, who sat on the other side of the table. He was holding an apple from which he’d yet to take a bite. The assertion had been softened by an upturned, halfhearted interrogative tone. Like his father, Mustafa was short and stout, but there was nothing rigid or severe about him. He cowered in the shadow of his father’s carefully groomed imperiousness. Since the onset of his late adolescence, I’d suspected Mustafa was gay. For the better part of the following decade, I hoped—arrogantly, no doubt—to find some way to broach the subject with him, somehow to convey that, should he need support from within the family to live his truth, whatever that might be, I could be counted on. No such conversation ever transpired. Two years ago, I heard from someone in the family that he’d left Pakistan and was living in Holland with a male partner.
“How so, beta?” Naseem asked.
“The Americans put off the payback. But it came, sooner or later.” He shrugged as he spoke, seeming almost to retract the thought as he offered it. When he was finished, he took a bite of the apple in his hand and studied his father’s face as he chewed.
“But you see—that was tactical genius. September eleventh was an act of war that changed the history of how war will be fought as long as there is fighting to be done.” He looked at me, then at Father, whose gaze—now glaring—had lifted from his plate. “I’m not saying it was a good thing, Sikander. I’m talking tactics. From a pure military point of view. You have to be able to see the genius in it.”
“Genius? What genius, Naseem-bhai?” Father’s tone was sharp, a clear contrast to the affectionate address. “Look at the chaos it started.”