Homeland Elegies(25)

Father abandoned us to our conversation shortly after Naseem’s mention of FDR. After I went to bed, I heard him talking softly with his sister in the backyard late into the night. I didn’t see him again until the following morning at the same dining table, where, after fried livers and parathas, we said our goodbyes. My cousin Yasmin—on two hours of sleep after her all-night duties at the hospital—was particularly moved and having some trouble feeling her arms. Emotions, she said, aggravated her MS symptoms. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her midtwenties, she’d spent four weeks with my parents in Wisconsin in the mid-1990s seeing specialists and depended now on the American medications Father sent her regularly, medications she could neither get in Pakistan nor afford on her own and that had put at least fifty pounds on her otherwise delicate frame. She joked about the weak embrace as she hugged me, then kissed Father, her face slick with loving tears. Father’s parting with his sister was especially moving. By daylight, my aunt Ruxana looked even gaunter than she had at dinner, but as she held her brother, her eyes blazed with grave and vivid joy. Naseem watched the siblings touch foreheads, my father’s hand to the back of his dying sister’s bald head, their eyes filling with tears.

After the crying and the goodbyes, we walked out to the car Naseem had hired to take us back to Rawalpindi, a midnight-blue Mercedes sedan driven by a dark young man with a shawl folded across his shoulder. His name was Zayd, a cognomen of the Prophet’s beloved adopted son, Zayd ibn Harithah, whose pulchritudinous wife—Zainab bint Jahsh—Muhammad would marry and make his seventh spouse after his Zayd divorced her, to my knowledge the only instance in which our Prophet married a sometime daughter-in-law. Our Zayd was clearly a religious man, his dark shoulder-length locks fanning out from beneath the strict enclosure of a tight white kufi on his head; every effort he made—opening the trunk, lifting and laying our bags inside, shutting the lid and opening our car doors—was accompanied by a quiet invocation: “Bismillah al-rahman, al-rahim.”5 Once we were settled in our seats, Zayd took his own in front and paused ever so briefly before turning the key to start the ignition: “Bismillah…” he whispered.

Father shot me a look and rolled his eyes.

The drive out of the northeastern part of the town took us past the dirt-road entrance that led to the compound where, at that very moment, Osama bin Laden was residing. We couldn’t have dreamed it. After wending our way along the side streets, past fields and houses surrounded by mud-brick walls, we found the main road. We drove until we came upon the military academy where Naseem taught—which Zayd pointed out—and where we paused for a cavalry unit at least forty strong to trot across the asphalt. Once we were moving again, it wasn’t long before we’d left the city limits and were speeding along the Karakoram Highway back south. That was when Father turned to me—irritated—and asked what was wrong with me. I told him I didn’t understand the question.

“I don’t remember the last time I got a word in without you adding your overeducated two cents—”

“Overeducated two cents—?”

“For a change you butting in would have been welcome. All that phony military talk, pontificating. I don’t know how Ruxana’s put up with him for so many years.”

“I wanted to let him speak.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know what he thought.”

“Thought? Is that what he was doing? Thinking?”

“Dad—”

“Ingrates. That’s all they are. When he had heart trouble a few years back? What did he do? Came to America. The medication that helps his daughter? Comes from America. It doesn’t matter how much money they take from us, how much support—”

I cut him off; I knew this drill: “He wasn’t saying anything against America. All he said was that 9/11 was a brilliant tactical strike. That’s hard to deny.”

Father was incredulous. “So you agree with him?”

“Agree about what? I was trying to understand where he was going with it.”

“I know exactly where he was going. He was taking a highbrow shit on our country. It took all I had to keep out of it.”

“I think it was wise you did.”

He glared at me, then shook his head. “Unhappy. Both of you. You and your mother. You don’t know how to be happy. You don’t even want to be happy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think it’s so much better here than back in America?”

“I never said that. I don’t know why you’re—”

“Trust me, you don’t have a clue how terrible your life would have been if I’d stayed here. Not a clue.”

“Dad. Stop.”

“A writer? Hmm? Theater? You think they have that kind of bullshit here? Thirty-six years old and still asking me for money? You think anybody here would let you get away with it? You’d get laughed off the streets. If we were here?! You would be supporting me! Do you understand that? Why do you think Yasmin is still living at home? She goes to the hospital, makes her salary, brings it home, and puts it in her father’s hands. That’s how it works in Pakistan.” I’d heard it all before: that my mother pined for a Pakistan that no longer existed; that I’d stupidly bought into her nostalgia; that I was avoiding the hard truth about myself as a writer—if I still couldn’t make a living doing it, I probably wasn’t any good—and of course, above all, that I always failed to recognize just how much I owed my life to his decision to come to America. This last matter was a point of often injured pride with him. He’d been brandishing my supposedly unprecedented privilege and his exclusive role in it—for indeed, my mother had never wanted to leave their homeland—since the moment I could understand language. This line of attack always hurt, and this instance was no exception. But he’d paid for the trip, and I was only too aware that the familiar slights and complaints and his pleas for credit were part of the cost to me. Perhaps what also made it easier to bear with grace was knowing where the emotional strain in his voice was really coming from. He’d already lost one sister—when he was twenty-four—a wound he used to say would never heal. Yes, he’d been irritated by Naseem’s pedantry, but at root, even this irritation was about his sister’s illness. I knew it the night prior and knew it now as I listened to him go on: “Roosevelt? What does that stooge know about Roosevelt? What’s the use spending all that time reading those books about Roosevelt if you can’t be bothered to use the information when it’s needed?”