Homeland Elegies(51)
A year of harassments followed, culminating with his father being accosted by the aforementioned sheriff when Riaz’s younger sister—then fourteen—attempted suicide and ended up in the ICU. It seems the sheriff had seen some Nightline piece about a Muslim honor killing in Germany, which convinced him there was more to the girl’s attempt on her life than adolescent angst. He stopped Aftab in the hospital corridor and demanded to know how often he beat his children. The episode would turn out to be one humiliation too many. Aftab resigned his position at the Wilkes-Barre mosque, which shuttered its doors.
At that point, Aftab was working in Scranton. Interest rates were falling, and the junk-bond craze had begun. Young financiers were flush with easy money and using it to take over companies, chop them up, sell them off, and pocket the proceeds. The glass manufacturer where Aftab supervised operations was just one of countless companies to succumb to this, the era’s poisoned fate. For months Aftab worried about what would happen to his job until he realized his managers would keep him if he helped them figure out how to cut costs. Aftab worked up a solution to increase the plant’s efficiencies that resulted in eighty-five pink slips, and now the Rinds became local pariahs for a reason other than their Islam.
As all this was transpiring, Aftab was hatching plans for a new mosque in Scranton. He found a small building on the city’s north side he expected would draw less attention. He collected funds from the community for a deposit and was waiting now for approval of the land-use permit allowing a mosque on the premises. All the trouble down the road in Wilkes-Barre meant that the Scranton city council was treating the issue with extra attention. At the council hearing, a group of locals from the glass plant who’d lost their jobs thanks to Aftab’s memo showed up and caused a ruckus. They jeered and chanted against Iran, though of course Iran had nothing to do with any of it. Aftab wasn’t even from Iran, he tried to explain when it was his turn to speak. But one of the city council members had a sister who’d also lost her job at the glass plant and moved for a vote to adjourn the hearing. For months to come, Aftab’s permit would languish, neither approved nor denied.
It was early 1983, and the season of the Rinds’ misfortunes had only just begun: Though the nation’s economy was finally recovering from the oil shock, the new owners of Lackawanna Glass Works were flirting with insolvency from all the debt they’d taken on to buy the company. It was time to sell it piecemeal. The complex was shut down, and everyone lost their jobs—including Aftab. A few weeks later, Riaz’s sister attempted suicide again and, this time, succeeded. Aftab fell to pieces. He and his wife sold their house and moved to Arizona to be close to relatives who’d settled there. It helped his parents to be near family, Riaz said, but neither of them would ever truly recover.
And neither would he, I thought.
Night had fully fallen over the East River, and the lights along Astoria’s waterfront twinkled, sparse, serene. Riaz stood and emptied what was left of that sublime whiskey into our tumblers. Throughout his telling, I’d watched the flashing anger in his eyes grow stronger, steadier, watched the incandescence of his rage brighten and consume some essential kindling that, now spent, left him looking enfeebled next to that vibrant magenta thistle. “You can probably understand why I wanted a life for myself where I was never at anyone’s mercy,” he said. “And I mean never.”
I certainly could. That and more.
He proposed we go out for dinner; I accepted. Over a dry-aged rib eye and a Duckhorn Merlot our conversation wound its way back to the money my mother had left me. He was spinning off a division of his fund, he said. The new company would do exactly what his fund already did, but now for itself rather than for client investors. When you ran a fund, he explained, you saw fees, which were great, but no one went supernova on fees. But that—going supernova, that is—was exactly what was about to happen to him. “We’re going public in two months. We’re oversold. I’ve been turning money away from people I owe big.” He paused and smiled at me before completing the thought: “But if you want to give me the three hundred K, I’ll wedge you in from my end.”
6.
My $300,000 bought me 125,000 shares of Riaz’s new outfit, Timur Capital, at the pre-public-offering share price of $2.40 a share. On the first day of trading, the price jumped to just north of five dollars. Riaz warned me this might happen, that I would be tempted to double my money, but he didn’t advise it. If I could, he said, I should resign myself to holding on through the inevitable ups and downs for twelve to eighteen months. The company was putting together something big, which, once announced, would change everyone’s perception of what could be done in the space. At that point, he thought a share price closer to $20 was likely.
The following year I saw less of him. I had plays going up all over the world, and what time I didn’t spend traveling I spent trying to write. I was in Finland when the announcement finally came, the one that Riaz had promised. Timur Capital had been buying apartment buildings in advantageously priced urban upmarkets: Chicago, Austin, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Orlando, among others; they bought the buildings outright, lowered rents modestly for tenants who never missed payments, then bundled the accumulated rent payments into bonds they sold on the open market. The demand was startling. Renting was the new long-term housing paradigm; fewer and fewer could afford to buy. Figuring out how to transform rent payments into liquid bonds was a lucrative—and news-stealing—alternative to the much-maligned bundled mortgage bond. Within a week, Timur was trading at $16, and then, after making the front page of the Wall Street Journal two months later, the price would jump to $22. That’s where I sold, in January of 2017.