Homeland Elegies(50)
“How much?” he asked.
I was embarrassed to say, but I did. To my surprise, he was impressed. He knew my mother, though trained as a doctor in Pakistan, had only briefly worked as one here in America. That she’d been able to put aside that much money to leave me when she died was no insignificant feat. “She left another three hundred to our local mosque in Milwaukee,” I added.
His eyes lit up at the mention of the mosque; he wanted to know who’d started it and when. I told him I wasn’t exactly sure who, but it opened in the late ’70s. I recounted the troubles I remembered between the various ethnic groups—Albanians, Arabs, Hindustani Muslims—who had raised the necessary funds together but then couldn’t agree who was in charge.
“What was the process with the municipality?”
“What do you mean?”
“The city paperwork. Was there any trouble with that? I mean, because it was a mosque?” His interest was uncharacteristically pointed.
“I don’t know. I never heard anything about it. This was so long before 9/11. I don’t think folks in Wisconsin had the first clue what Muslims even were back then.”
“Where I grew up, they knew, all right,” he said with a sudden, vivid anger. “And they were vicious about it.” He paused and got up, then went to the kitchen counter, where he stood beside a thick bouquet of large round purple-pink burrs in a crystal vase. He loved these flowers—if you could call them that—and always had them in vases around the house. I didn’t see the appeal. They had no scent, they weren’t particularly pretty, and if you weren’t careful, the thorny stems and bulbs could draw blood. He set down his glass and reached in carefully to arrange the bouquet.
“What is that stuff, by the way? I always see it when I’m here.”
“Tartar thistle,” he said. “There was a field of it behind my mother’s backyard when she was growing up in Rawalpindi. She found some in the Poconos one summer, and you would have thought she’d struck gold. She clipped a bagful and planted it in our backyard in Pennsylvania. That first summer it took over the garden like wild mint. Tough as hell.”
“Looks it.”
“Full of life. Whenever it spilled out into the yard, it was impossible to kill. There’s only one store in the city that carries it. And the only reason they do is because I have ten dozen delivered to me every week. One of the great things about having money.”
“Unlimited thistle delivered to your East End Avenue doorstep anytime.”
He smiled, but thinly, as if battling a disturbing thought. Back at his seat, he poured himself—then me—more whiskey and, setting the bottle down on the floor alongside his chair, began to tell me a story in which I would eventually descry the outline of all his essential choices. It was about his father’s attempt to start a mosque, first in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and later up the road in Scranton. His father’s name was Aftab, and he’d never been particularly religious back in Pakistan—or so Riaz had been told by people who’d known his father back then. In America that all changed. Homesick, Aftab substituted faith for his homeland, Riaz believed, and became the sort of Muslim who always fasts and never misses a prayer.
Back then, there was nowhere to pray with the community on Fridays, nowhere to take your kids to learn their Quran, nowhere to practice your Islam with others like you. As the Muslim population in the Lackawanna Valley grew—and it grew quickly—Aftab became fixated on the idea of opening a mosque. He was no imam, so he didn’t feel he could do it on his own, but he knew a grocer in town from Egypt, Alaa Ali, who’d studied at Al-Azhar University, in Cairo. Aftab approached Alaa Ali, and the two of them plotted to get something going.
On Main Street in Wilkes-Barre, not far from the barbershop where they both got their hair cut, there was an empty storefront. Both had the thought it would make a perfect little mosque. They walked by it together one Saturday morning and noted the phone number in the window. Aftab called it when he got home. By week’s end, they’d put a deposit down on a lease.
Word got out through the chamber of commerce that a mosque was going into the empty storefront, and neighboring businesses went to the city council to stop it. But Aftab and Alaa Ali prevailed; in less than two months, after a modest build-out, their new mosque was open—and there was trouble from the start. It was early fall, 1979. There was no longer a shah in Tehran, and Khomeini was saying lots of very nasty things about what America had done to the Iranian nation. Then, of course, came the hostage crisis. That first week in November, the front door of the mosque was spray-painted with silver crosses; not too long after that, someone smashed a window and tossed a pig’s head into the foyer. Riaz remembered helping his father scrub at the bloodstained grout between the tiles. It wouldn’t come out, and they would end up retiling the entry.
Police reports were filed, but nothing was done. The local sheriff looked like Mr. Clean and knew what he thought of Muslims, namely, that they needed to go back to wherever they came from, which is what he told Aftab to his face when he tried to follow up about the complaints. On the last day of Ramadan that year, the congregation at the new mosque was so large there wasn’t room inside for everyone to pray. Worshippers spilled out onto the sidewalk and front lawn, prostrating themselves in unison, muttering Arabic verses—to the abject horror of many a Main Street onlooker that day. Sheriff Clean showed up with his men in the middle of prayer, barking orders and manhandling the prostrated Muslims to their feet. Riaz was twelve and saw his father thrown against a squad car and cuffed.