Homeland Elegies(39)
Before I say more, I should make one thing clear:
Yes, what Riaz did made me rich, but I knew nothing about it—nothing, that is, until well after there wasn’t a thing I, or anybody else, could do to stop it.
1.
In the fall of 2012, I was introduced to one Riaz Rind, founder of a Wall Street hedge fund called Avasina—named for the medieval Muslim polymath Ibn Sina, whose original manuscripts he’s collected for years. (Riaz is also one of the world’s foremost collectors of rare Kentucky bourbons and Japanese whiskeys.) If his name sounds vaguely familiar, you’ve probably heard it at the end of some segment of public broadcasting “made possible” by the foundation that bears his name, the Riaz Rind Philanthropic Trust, committed to “changing conversations and improving lives.” The conversations he wants to change are about Islam, and the lives he wants to improve are Muslim. Considering the scope of what he’s admitted to me about his ultimate ambitions, the formulation is humble indeed: Riaz is not reserved in his praise of Sheldon Adelson—Zionist casino mogul and Republican kingmaker—or at least of Adelson’s unapologetic advocacy for Jewish causes. Like Adelson, Riaz wants to shape not only the nation’s policy but also its governing personnel, which is the only way he thinks we, Muslims, will ever truly be welcome here. The brass ring, that’s what he’s after. If anyone I know has a shot at it, it’s Riaz.
We were introduced that fall because I had a play up in New York, the same work I mentioned earlier, containing dialogue adapted from the phone call with my mother in the wake of Latif’s death. It was the second of the works to result from my so-called Scranton epiphany. Cast in the leading role was an American comedian of Muslim origin, one of the first to break through into renown, a man who owed a national following to regular stints on one of the popular nightly talk shows. (I will call him Ashraf.) Ashraf’s many fans were surprised to discover he was a wonderful dramatic actor, and I attribute the frenzy for tickets during the final weeks of the play’s run—with scalpers getting more than $1,200 a seat—to his performance in the role of a Pakistani-American corporate attorney whose warring inner loyalties tear his life apart. The show made Page Six not once but twice, and that’s when the celebrities started showing up: Salman Rushdie, Tyra Banks, Cherry Jones, Jon Stewart, Connie Britton, William Hurt. Members of the Saudi royal family came. So did Chelsea Clinton and Huma Abedin. In the men’s room, I waited at the sink for Steven Spielberg to finish washing his hands; at concessions, I spilled seltzer on Tim Geithner’s cross-trainers. I recall one surreal afternoon two weeks before the end of the run, when—first on a bus, then on the street, and finally at a Starbucks in the East Village—I overheard three separate, unrelated conversations about “that new play with the Muslim comic,” which, it turned out, none of the conversers had actually seen; all were wondering how they could get tickets.
Riaz heard about the show from one of the employees at his hedge fund, an analyst of Pakistani origin named Imran, who loved it and had gone to the considerable trouble of procuring a bootleg copy of the script. That copy made the rounds at the office—where there were two dozen other South Asians working—finally ending up in Riaz’s hands. He sat down at his desk with the script one morning and, he would later tell me, on turning the final page some seventy minutes later reached for his phone not to place a call to a scalper he knew—what he was after a scalper couldn’t provide—but to ring up the theater’s development office. That was how I ended up with an email asking me to meet with a prospective donor who had offered $20,000 for house seats and a visit backstage.
It was a rainy night in late November. I was in the greenroom drinking tea with some of the actors after the show when a thick bald man in a beige gabardine coat and olive Wellingtons stepped through the double doors, held open by a member of the theater’s staff. The maple-wood handle at the end of his umbrella gleamed oriole in his grip. I recognized him immediately as Pakistani—not Indian—from the pallid fallow-brown of his skin, the sharp nose, the wide humid eyes lined with impossibly long lashes. There was something almost animal about his self-assuredness as he made his way toward us, an ample, undivided alertness in his movements that seemed to radiate from some unseen middle. Plump confidence was the impression conveyed by the secure grip of his green eyes and the knowing press of his thick fingers as he shook my hand and introduced himself. “Riaz Rind,” he said warmly. As he turned to offer congratulations to the actors, I was struck by something gnomelike about him despite both his relative youth and adequate height and despite the teeming stubble along the bottom half of his face, which hardly qualified as a beard. I couldn’t tell if his coat was hiding a disproportionate girth that would have accounted for the striking impression he gave of abundant solidity. “I worked at Skadden, Arps for two years,” he said, turning to me. This was the New York law firm where my lead character worked, though naturally I had given it another name. “I know all about what your character was going through. And what a performance. I had no idea Ashraf was such a good actor.” He turned to address the rest of us: “Is he here? I’d love to share my congratulations.”
“Still in his dressing room,” groused Emily, the actress playing Ashraf’s well-meaning white American wife in the play. “Getting the lotion off his legs.”