Homeland Elegies(26)
“What books?”
“The ones about Roosevelt you were carrying around every time I saw you.”
“Those were about Teddy, Dad.”
“Mhm?”
“The first Roosevelt president? Teddy Roosevelt? Not FDR.”
A brief pause would be his only acknowledgment of the misunderstanding: “It makes no sense. What’s it good for? All the education and you don’t say a useful thing when the idiot starts in with the nonsense. A fool like that will never understand the first thing about a man like FDR. That was a great man.”
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t such a fan, Dad.”
“Now you’ve got the wisecrack?—That’s nonsense, and you know it. Reagan voted for the man every time. I know for a fact.”
“And then spent every hour of his political career undoing the man’s legacy.”
He stared at me now, blankly, then turned away in disgust.
Out the window, the dramatic mountain vistas had given way to the familiar concatenation of sometimes ramshackle roadside constructions, stores and schools and homes, tea stands, food stands, pumping stations; the earlier evergreen of the Hazara steppes now replaced by sundry shades of drying earth, from ecru to umber, mud-brick walls and sand-brown lots and road shoulders, tan trails leading into the darker sunbaked fields beyond, and everywhere around us, clouds of turbid beige kicked up by the chaos of jockeying buses and painted trucks passing, honking, themselves dun with dust; even the late-morning sun seemed to color everything with a straw-taupe hue.
We rode in silence until Zayd’s flip phone sounded with a call. He answered in a dialect—Gujarati, Father would later tell me—I didn’t follow. But Father did, and when the call was over, he leaned forward to ask—in Punjabi now—for details about Zayd’s son. The boy had been burning up with fever since the middle of the night. Zayd and his wife had been trying to get a doctor to see him, but no doctor had shown. Father pressed him for details, and when he realized we weren’t far from where Zayd lived—outside the town of Hasan Abdal—he offered to take a look at the boy himself. In the rearview mirror, I saw Zayd find Father’s eyes, his hooded gaze bouncing from the road to the mirror and back. He seemed to be working through his surprise at Father’s kindness. There was no need for that, he finally said; the doctor they knew would eventually come and the boy would be fine, of course. Zayd was clearly moved by Father’s offer but didn’t seem to know how he could possibly accept it; the gap between us—poor rural driver in front, wealthy urban American expatriates in back—was not a gulf easily bridged.
But Father was insistent, and finally Zayd relented.
It was another ten minutes before we slowed and turned into a steep dip off the National 35. The bottom of the car’s front end scraped against the pebbled shoulder, and its wheels now searched for new purchase on a pockmarked path in the dirt. We sped up again, moving past a row of stores selling cell phones, wicker beds, fried fish. The road—if you could call it that—narrowed as it passed through a grove, and beyond it was what could only be described as a shantytown.
We slowed to a crawl as we entered. Everywhere around us were makeshift one-story structures built from soiled cloth, worn straw, broken bricks, rusting tin, plastic sheets, cardboard. They were tied with twine, bound with mortar, wrapped with ribbons of duct tape. Dogs rummaged and children played in eddies of debris—paper, plastic, rags, bags, bottles, the discarded appurtenances of modern, disposable life. From within these poorest of poor houses, families looked out at us as we passed, dozens at a time crowded into the tiny threadbare rooms. I’d been to my parents’ homeland many times but not once to a place like this.
As we crept along, our car wheels sloshed through a runnel of thick black standing liquid on the left side of the road—from the smell, clearly human waste—and children started to gather around us. They pressed their smiles into the glass. Two of them, a boy and girl, mounted the back fender, and the girl stood and waved like a festival queen on a parade float greeting her onlookers. Zayd honked lightly, and the children spooked—but not for long. Soon there were more of them than before, some now holding sticks they used to urge us along. Their heads were tousled, their clothes smudged with dirt, their faces lit up with a joy particular to each—the half-held smile of one, the crow’s-feet already forming at the edges of another’s eyes, the dimples, the delighted gazes. They were singing now, a song whose words I couldn’t follow, and as they sang, more faces appeared in the open doorways and windows with only hanging cloths to keep the heat and cold and fetid odors out. More children appeared, dozens and dozens of them, their gathered voices ringing out with a melody everyone knew.
And then, all at once, the singing stopped. They scattered and were gone.
I looked over at Father. His eyes were wet. “So poor, but still so happy,” he said with a sniffle. I wasn’t sure what he was crying about, really. I doubted it was the children.
We’d turned off the main artery onto a path just wide enough for the car, and shortly Zayd stopped before a large rusted box—what looked like the severed back third of a shipping container—with a clean green curtain mounted at the mouth, drawn shut now, the whole structure lifted from the ground and perched on a set of concrete blocks. The elevation, the simplicity of the single window treatment, set this shanty apart.