Homeland Elegies(43)
Fine, I replied. I didn’t expect a follow-up.
Two weeks later, on the eve of Ramadan, I was surprised to see his name come up in my in-box. He wanted to wish me well, whether I was planning to fast or not. (I wasn’t.) For him, our holy month was a time to reflect, he wrote, to indulge his gratitude for what he had rather than his desire for what he didn’t. Even on the days he didn’t fast—which was most of them, some years—he tended to moderation and appreciation amid the striving. It was a sane-making time of the year. The email contained no changes of font style or size, which might have signaled formulaic copy interpolated into the body, and it was specific enough in places for me to conclude he’d actually taken the time to write this note to me alone. Another note arrived two days later, just after a series of suicide bombings in Rawalpindi, where much of his extended family still lived and where—I’d mentioned in an earlier email to him—he knew some of mine did, too. The tragedy initiated an intimacy, and our correspondence now took a self-revealing turn. I would learn that his parents, like my own, had immigrated to America after the quotas for people from the subcontinent were lifted in 1965; they’d settled first in Philadelphia, then moved to Pittston, a town along the Lackawanna River just south of Scranton, where his father found a job managing the furnaces at an industrial glass manufacturer called Lackawanna Glass Works. I learned, too, he was not only the firstborn son on either side of an enormous family but also the first of the extended brood to be born in America. This fact alone, he wrote, he thought largely responsible for his success; it had meant expectations of existential magnitude; he guessed his name was likely uttered in the prayers of no less than a hundred members of his family each and every day—after all, he financially supported more than twice as many.
I didn’t know much about his business back then. He would never walk me through the details of what he actually did (and I wouldn’t do my writer’s due diligence until much later, when I decided to tell his story here). I remember him describing himself to a group of my friends—the evening of my forty-second birthday—as a merchant of debt, riffing off the birthday gift a group of my theater mates had pooled their resources to buy and frame for me that year: a single page of The Merchant of Venice from the Second Folio. Riaz’s quip drew a flurry of questions about the apparent absurdity of selling debt, all of which he fielded graciously, answering in simpler terms than I would have thought possible:
Debt had value?
Yes. Like any loan, debt generated a regular payment, and that payment, the simple fact of it—depending on how reliably it was expected to be made—could be sold.
But who would want to buy it?
Big money. And the bigger the money, the more urgent the need to find a lucrative parking place, a spot you could put all that cash and watch it grow.
How did it work?
Managers in control of the world’s various mountains of money bought loans from original lenders in order to have the scheduled loan payments appear on their books; cash flowing in like that—month in, month out—was enough to put those managers’ restless minds at ease, and for good reason. It was usually easy money.
But how did it work, exactly? How did you make money holding debt?
Holding a good loan—whether for a car or credit card, home or university tuition—meant you could expect it to be paid in full, pocketing not only the profit from the interest paid but also the entirety of the underlying principal as well. As long as you’d done your homework right and bought the right loans to the right loanees, he explained, debt was the best investment out there.
Assessing the viability of loans of all sorts—according to Google—was the expertise of Riaz’s firm, Avasina Associates. Their website was sleek and unrevealing, like a willfully spare downtown storefront, advertising exclusivity by signaling its lack of interest in your business. The clutter of press on the first page of the search results revealed that he’d made a fortune in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, loading up on home loans nobody wanted anymore, renegotiating the terms to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, later selling those renegotiated loans to municipalities across the country. He was much lauded in the pieces I read and had even ended up on a CBS Sunday Morning segment about compassionate finance. How had he kept people in their homes and made a killing? “There’s no substitute for good old hard work,” he replied coyly against the backdrop of the East River as seen through the mural-size windows of his kitchen. In 2011, Forbes magazine had lauded the “monster trade” that returned to its municipal investors an “eye-popping” 30 percent and went on to wonder if—with a little luck!—Riaz might soon end up on its list of the four hundred richest Americans. Cheekily, I sent him a link to the article with a note asking if he might have some good news in the coming year. He sent back one that read: “Fake it ’til you make it”—punctuated by a winking-face-with-tongue emoji.
I’ve skipped around a bit…
It would take another half year of appointments scheduled and rescheduled over email before we were to meet again in person. It was the fall of 2013, and the occasion was an invitation to join him at a gala in honor of the New Khalwati Order, a modern Sufi dergah on Duane Street across from Duane Park in Tribeca, led, since the death of its founder, by a white convert, the wayward scion of a famous Austrian mining family who called herself Mariam Meriha. I was already acquainted with Sheikha Maria—as she was known to her followers—having met her on two occasions, once at the dergah itself, where I’d gone one Ramadan Thursday in the mid-aughts to participate in their weekly service. I found her kind and clueless in her tall white sikke and abundant shawls. After a sermon in which she exhorted us all to care for ourselves, she led us through a disheveled hourlong dhikr—or Sufi ceremonial chanting of the divine name—that culminated, comically, in a welter of whirling urban professionals tumbling into each other and over themselves, a scene that I could only have imagined, before seeing it with my own eyes, as a scene in some satiric novel about Muslims in America.