Homeland Elegies(28)
3 Urdu for “Holy Messenger”—commonly used to refer to Muhammad.
4 By the time Malala was awarded the Nobel, in 2014, the conspiracy paranoia in my parents’ home country had started to show symptoms of widespread social psychosis—that is, wide-scale diminishment of any sense of reality, the rise of mass delusions impairing functional operation of the social body and state—with talk of Malala staging her own shooting for a visa to America, or being the Hungarian child of Christian missionaries or an agent working for the CIA, opinions espoused by more people in my family and in the country at large (and by those with a greater level of education) than you would ever believe possible.
5 In the name of God, most good, most merciful.
6 Another common Muslim invocation, meaning: “As God has willed it.”
Scranton Memoirs
IV.
God’s Country
A Blown Gasket
A decade ago, while driving back to Harlem from upstate New York—where I’d spent the weekend with my parents at the Finger Lakes resort they visited every few years, an excursion memorable not only because it was then my father announced I’d been conceived on the resort’s second floor, in a room on the “lake” side (he couldn’t remember any longer exactly which one), but also because it was the last time I would see my mother before she was diagnosed with the recurrence of the cancer that would eventually take her life—it was while driving back along I-81 that my Saab 900’s exhaust started sending out white smoke, or so a Pennsylvania state trooper would inform me once he’d pulled me over to ask if my engine had overheated. That was when I first noticed that the needle of the car’s temperature gauge was pointing in the wrong direction. We popped open the hood to take a look inside, and foul-smelling steam nearly singed our faces. He laughed as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and forehead; I wiped mine on my sleeve. The trooper’s earlier approach to the car had put me at ease—his slow, deliberate movements; his measured, cheery tone intended, I’d thought, to announce he was just there to help—and his reaction now only reinforced the message.
He was bone-white, his features boyish, though there was something ancient about his vaulted cheekbones and the Tartar slant to his eyes. Polish or Serbian, I thought, though the last name on his tag betrayed no obvious ethnic origin: MATTHEW. As we stepped away from the car, he pointed ahead at an exit. We weren’t far from Clarks Summit, he said, where there was a garage. He suspected that was where AAA would take me, though he had to admit he’d only ever heard bad things about the service there. “I know a garage in Scranton where I always go. It’s a little farther, but they’ll come get you with their own truck. I know the owner. They do great work. I’d be happy to call him for you.”
It was a bright, mild day in late October. The surrounding hills were ablaze with autumn color. As Trooper Matthew and I waited for the tow truck, his cruiser between us and the traffic’s noisy ebb and flow, he turned to me and asked—entirely benignly, I thought—where my name was from. I knew from experience that an honest answer to this not infrequent question could raise suspicions where there might otherwise have been none, my well-intentioned interlocutors suddenly beclouded by some reflexive evocation of terror. In the trying months after 9/11—when the simple act of mounting the city bus and paying my fare had become a provocation, met with fearful, watching glares—I’d settled on a prophylactic strategy: “India,” I would say. It was a lie. The name wasn’t Indian. But I knew the question usually masked a curiosity about my origins, and as you already know, my parents were born in what was then India. This answer had the obvious advantage of connoting not the referents of terror, murder, and rage that most associated with Pakistan but rather the bright colors and spicy tastes of delightful dishes like tikka masala, gyrating flash mobs in Bollywood movies, and yoga pants. To complicate all this further, my name is actually Egyptian, and depending on the political moment—in the wake of attacks like those on tourists at Luxor and Sharm el Sheikh, or two years later, during the misleading months of the so-called Arab Spring—mentioning Egypt can become a prompt to more questions, each riddled with a particular pitfall that often leads to the very sort of mistrust I am ever keen to avoid in the first place. If all this sounds somewhat paranoid, I am happy for you. Clearly you have not been beset by daily worries of being perceived—and therefore treated—as a foe of the republic rather than a member of it.
Standing alongside Officer Matthew, surrounded by the painted hills, grateful for his charitable interest in my vehicle’s proper repair, disarmed by gratitude, I opted for the complicated truth. “The name is Egyptian,” I said.
“Really?”
“My parents aren’t from Egypt, but when my father first came to this country, he had an Egyptian friend who had my name. He’d never heard it before and really liked it. So when I was born, he used it for me. Funny thing is, he doesn’t say it right. Or at least not how he heard it said by his friend…”
“How are you supposed to say it?”
I joked my way through the various pronunciations of my name—the original Arabic, which sounded nothing like how my parents said it and which was different still from the way my kindergarten teacher had coined the American pronunciation, which had stuck ever since.