Homeland Elegies(56)

In the four months Asha and I spent not quite dating and not quite not dating, I would meet her folks three times: twice at the ranch-style house in Spring, Texas, where she (and her two sisters) grew up; once when they all came through New York and we spent an afternoon wandering the halls at the Museum of Natural History. By that point, her parents knew I was more than just a “friend of a friend” who happened to be in Houston on the weekend of the Prophet’s birthday, which her family always celebrated by having friends and family to the house for dinner. I think they liked me, though mostly—I suspect—because I was nothing like the man they’d spent seven years desperately hoping their daughter would leave.

More on that shortly.

Her father, Haris, is not entirely dissimilar to mine. Though physically they look nothing alike—Haris is short and built like a barrel; he’d played rugby as a young man and then “put on the pounds,” he joked, patting his gut as we passed beneath the Blue Whale—he and my father share a fundamental optimism about this country that shaped their saucer-eyed, New World wonder as well as a blunt brashness encouraged by their adopted culture: sunny and sure to some, naive and cocky to others. Central to their ideas of themselves as American is that they “get” this country, “get” how the system here works, and, above all, that they “made it.” For Haris, “making it” meant growing that initial gas station–convenience store, for which he’d barely been able to gather a down payment in 1975, into a chain of a dozen such across the Houston area; acquiring more real estate—the reason why Asha owns a fourplex, living in one apartment, renting out the others; and, finally, what he was most proud of, the board positions at the local chapter of the Lions Club and the chamber of commerce. When he became a citizen, in ’86, Haris promptly raised an American flag in the front yard and began an epistolary second life that, when Asha told me about it, conjured up a middle-class Muslim analogue to Bellow’s maniacal, missive-writing Moses Herzog. Inspired, Asha said, by the judge’s stirring paean to America’s democratic ideals at his swearing-in ceremony, Haris started to pen fawning admonishments—and later, provocations—to famous now-fellow Americans: Lee Iacocca, Armand Hammer, Ann Richards, Muhammad Ali, John Wayne, Tip O’Neill, Lee Meriwether, James Michener, Ross Perot…just to name a few. Enshrined on the fridge door were two of his prized possessions: a signed reply from George H. W. Bush himself—with a blue smudge of ink the color of the autograph proving it was real—affixed by a magnet next to a snapshot of Haris posing with then vice president Bush at a Fourth of July parade in downtown Houston.

Despite the accumulation of outward markers denoting his American belonging, Asha thought her father was still at heart an Old World man. The light of a Texas sun may have poured through their windows, but in those rooms, her father’s beloved Urdu ghazals drenched the family’s ears with loss, lamentation, lush and endless regret. His self-styled American extroversion, too, she thought was fundamentally Punjabi in origin, loud and warm and overly familiar, disarming to the stoic locals who came by to do house repairs or meter readings, an amusing eccentricity to his employees and customers alike. Even those letters to the powerful and famous that he spent so much of his time on—and collected into a self-published book that Asha kept on her nightstand—even these were quintessentially Pakistani in their themes, containing as they did: exhortations to recognize the border threat; warnings about corruption in politics both local and national; reminders of the myriad forms of succor America had enjoyed from Muslims during its long battle with the Soviets; and, most amusingly, abundant references to a rumor still current in much of the Muslim world, namely, that Neil Armstrong had converted to Islam.2

As she did in her father, Asha saw signs of a less-than-easy Pak-American alloy in her mother. There were the obvious, amusing juxtapositions—a PTA president who wore shalwar kameez and dupattas to meetings populated with mostly white suburban Texas housewives; the horoscopes she brought to her weekly Quranic study group; the Iftar dinners that took place at Burger King—but the more telling contradictions were subtler, darker, and most encompassed, for Asha, by her mother’s inability to imagine that women had any other place than behind their men—and that those men must be Muslim. Indeed, trouble over the white boys who filled Asha’s girlhood dreams would be long, protracted, decisive, and violent.

Asha’s parents didn’t let her leave town for college, so she went to the University of Houston, graduating summa cum laude. She aced her LSATs and got into law school at the University of Chicago, which made it hard for her father to stop her from leaving home, though before she left he wanted her to arrange her marriage to a first cousin in Pakistan. She refused. Unbeknownst to him or her mother, she was already in love with someone. His name was Blake. He was from Kansas and was playing basketball for Houston on scholarship. They met at a frat party her sophomore year. She got so drunk she passed out, and Blake took her back to his room, where he tucked her into his bed. She found him snoring on the floor on the other side of the room the following morning. So began a tumultuous on-again, off-again romance that would last through college and lure her back home once she took her law degree.

While she was away in Chicago, Blake, passed up in the NBA draft, signed a two-year offer to play professionally in the Baltic States, and the consequences of his itinerant life in the arena towns of Latvia and Lithuania would affect not only Asha but also, eventually, me. Baltic life offered few consolations: the hotel rooms were frigid and small; the food was revolting; worst of all, almost no one spoke English. Longing for comfort and distraction, Blake found it the only place he could, in the arms of local girls bewitched by the spindly, redheaded young American grimacing through the pork-and-herring salads and sipping lager in their town squares in his down winter coat. This was where Blake developed the sexual habits that Asha would complain to me about—the choking, the wanting to be choked, the video cameras through which they watched themselves in the act, the prostitutes. In Minsk, he tore his ACL at a playoff match, extinguishing his hoop dreams for good. Back in Houston, he took a job at a Honda dealership, where he was still working when Asha accepted a position at the Houston-based Saudi-American oil services conglomerate Aramco so she could move back home to be near him. It was through her job at Aramco that I met her.