Homeland Elegies(34)

As I scribbled, I remembered something else: my father always said he wanted to be buried back in his village when he died. But Father’s village was in Punjab, not in Kashmir, as this grave was in the dream. I lingered for a while on the mention of Kashmir, the dream’s closing detail. I wrote around it. About how little we had talked of Kashmir in my Punjabi home, aside from the usual Indo-Pak chatter about the rightful owners of that disputed land, whether Pakistan or India, and how devious had been the British strategy to leave the matter unresolved, a site of perpetual conflict at the heart of their sometime colony. I wrote about the odd pink Kashmiri chai—served with salt, not sugar—that my father sometimes prepared when guests called. Neither association yielded any insight. I persisted, freely associating to the place, the word, the name, its constitutive phonemes. It wasn’t until I gave up, closed and stowed my notebook, and was sitting on a toilet seat reading latrinalia on the stall door that I recalled: Shafat—my remarrying uncle—had come to America after a stint in the Pakistani army. His sister, my mother, sponsored his green card. I remembered her worries about how long the process seemed to be taking, which especially concerned her given that there was new trouble brewing with India and that Shafat was then stationed where the fighting was likely—in Kashmir. All at once, the dream’s deeper structural logic was clear to me: it began with a hidden reference to Shafat, and it ended with one, too!

Shafat’s complicated saga in this country deserves a treatment all its own, but here’s the piece of it I must share now to convey why, as I sat on that toilet in a Scranton coffee-shop bathroom, my dream made sudden poignant sense to me: three years after 9/11, Shafat, a handsome, fair-skinned Pakistani man of above-average height, with a head of wavy hair he doused with tonic and combed flat against his skull; a military man by disposition and an engineer by training who was then working for a construction-crane manufacturing outfit in northern Virginia, where he was liked and his work was valued (as evidenced by the fast track of his multiple promotions and his $200,000-a-year salary); an amateur handyman who watched This Old House and spent whole weekends fixing up his two-story saltbox colonial; a reader of the classics who’d gone to the finest boarding school a lower-middle-class family in Pakistan could have afforded, where he’d read Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, whose timeless and canny moral guidance he claimed to live by; a champion bowler on his school cricket team; a father to three sons who loved him enough not to abandon him after he married his mistress, despite the anguish this would cause their equally beloved mother; this Shafat, a criminal to his wife, perhaps, but in no way to the state, would end up in a Norfolk, Virginia, jail one night, where he was beaten purple by a fellow inmate egged on, he alleged, by two cops who sat and watched as they drank beers. Earlier that night, after a beer of his own, Shafat had made the mistake of talking politics at a local bar where he liked to go, not far from the naval base. Perhaps it was his own army background that made him feel more at ease in this military town than he ever should have allowed himself to feel. I certainly doubt he’d had only one beer, as he’s always claimed, and I can’t help but wonder what Gracián would have made of his decision to share a tale about being assigned to a detail that picked up a covert American shipment at an airfield in Quetta in the late 1980s: two crates of new, mint-crisp $100 bills he said they’d been ordered to deliver to US allies in Afghanistan. They drove the crates to the border, where they were met by the man who would later be known to the world as the evil one-eyed Taliban cleric Mullah Omar but who, back then, was just another member of the mujahideen fighters battling the Soviet enemy. Omar had already lost his eye to a piece of shrapnel, which, legend had it, he cut out of its socket with his own knife. After the victory over the Soviets, Omar returned home to Kandahar and rose to prominence as an opponent of the corrupt warlords now in charge of much of the country. Omar was particularly incensed by the pedophilia widespread among the tribal elites. He and his vigilantes staged a series of guerrilla campaigns, freeing children kidnapped and held as sex slaves by various militia leaders, and word of these righteous exploits sent his popularity soaring. Such was the beginning of the movement that would come to be known as the Taliban. Or so Shafat explained to the bargoers around him, adding that, as much as we hated the Taliban in this country—and we had good reason; he wasn’t denying that—we might do well to remember that those same people had once been on our payroll. They weren’t always the monsters folks now made them out to be.

Or something to that effect.

What was he thinking? Is it really surprising that, just as he exited the premises, two officers greeted him in the parking lot with the news that someone had called to report he was making threats against America? It may not be obvious from this tale, but Shafat is not a stupid man, so I find it difficult to account for the infelicitous response he gave to this admittedly absurd question: “If, Officer, you consider a basic history lesson a threat against America…”—which was all those cops needed to hear to hurl him to the ground, put a boot to his face, and twist his left arm so far behind his back that he’s since had to have the glenohumeral joint in his left shoulder replaced. Cuffed, taken in, thrown into a jail cell with a veteran who’d gone off his antipsychotics, Shafat had only just begun his journey into pain that night. For when that veteran heard the officers referring to Shafat as a member of the American Taliban, he started whaling on Shafat’s face. As he cowered in the corner of the cell, being kicked and punched, Shafat spied the officers popping open their cans of Coors Light and settling into their chairs. The troubled vet ended up breaking two of Shafat’s ribs and landed him in the hospital with internal bleeding. For a time, it looked like Shafat would be charged—not only with drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest but also with the attempted assault of a police officer. All the charges were dropped when it became clear that Shafat wouldn’t be filing a complaint.