Homeland Elegies(98)

I shook my head. “David Letterman.”

“Him and that polka. That’s what kept her going at the end.” He paused. His right hand had found his heart. He grimaced as he rubbed there, mindlessly. And then, all at once, he was on his feet: “We should get to the baggage claim. So we don’t miss him.”

Downstairs, it wasn’t long before Sultan emerged from the gates in his billowing light-brown shalwar kameez; he had a shawl over his shoulder, and on his head was a flat off-white skullcap.

Father didn’t miss a beat, gibing in Punjabi: “There he is, in his tortilla.”

Sultan bit down on his grin: “Very funny, very funny.” His accent wasn’t nearly as strong as most I’d grown up hearing in my father’s generation of South Asian immigrants.

“I like tacos, too, yaar. But who puts them on their head?”

“Dad—”

“What?”

“That’s offensive.”

Sultan stopped me. “This is nothing, beta. Compared to what I’m used to.” He hugged Father. “It’s so very nice to see you, too, Sikander.” Then he brought me in for a hug as well. “I hear it’s your birthday?”

“Well, we’ve all got one.”

“I got you something. But it’s in my bag. So I’ll give it to you when we’re at the house…”

He’d lost weight since I last saw him—close to eighty pounds, he would later tell me, the result of a stapled stomach—and it showed in the sagging skin under his chin and along his neck. I’d always thought he looked a little like a sea lion, his eyes lower on his face than was perhaps usual, his button nose and flat upper lip protruding almost like a snout. With thinner cheeks, his now narrower face no longer had the same benign appeal.

“You didn’t need to get me anything, Uncle.”

“But I wanted to.”

Behind us, the belt was moving; bags dropped from the chute. “Which one’s yours?” Father asked.

“Brown duffel,” Sultan said.

“Not that silly Louis Vuitton.”

“Yes, Sikander. That silly Vuitton.” Sultan turned to me, winking. “I just love it so.” He clapped Father on the back as they stepped to the carousel’s edge. To either side of me, I felt the disbelieving white gazes—an older couple to my left; a younger family of four to my right—looks that conveyed not just the affront of our swart joy but also, even more keenly, its apparent implausibility: How was it possible? their faces seemed to say. How was it possible people who looked like us would not be eternally subdued by the fact of their unceasing suspicions?

I glared at them all until it was only the children not looking away.

Father grabbed Sultan’s Vuitton duffel when it appeared, and we made our way out to the car. On the way home, Sultan told us about the passenger first seated next to him on the plane, an elderly woman with an emotional-support terrier who’d inquired if he was a “Moslem”—he told her he was—and then, assuming he would want to be reseated because of the dog, apologized to him for forcing him to move. The woman was surprised to learn that Sultan didn’t have a problem with dogs and so wouldn’t need to be moving, at which point she then requested to be moved. Sultan seemed amused by the episode as he relayed the apology offered by the fellow who took her place—also older, also white—which included a comment about the unfortunate direction the country had taken under our “orangutan in chief.” As he repeated the insult, I noticed Sultan watching for Father’s reaction. If Father had one, he wasn’t showing it.

By the time we got home, it was time for late-afternoon prayers. Sultan asked if we had a prayer rug he could use. If not, a clean towel would do. I went searching through the house. In my parents’ room, I found my mother’s red-and-black rug—given to her by her parents on the eve of her departure for the New World—still laid out, its top left corner folded over, indicating a final interrupted prayer she intended to come back and finish but never did. Father hadn’t picked up the rug since her death. We’d both avoided dealing with her things for more than two and a half years now—her closets were still full; so was her vanity counter in the master bathroom; even the glass tumbler she used was still perched on her nightstand. I muttered an apology to some imagined maternal ghost, folded the rug up, took it down to Sultan, and pointed him in the direction of Mecca. I lingered in the hall just beyond the doorway and watched him lower his head and bow, then prostrate himself, his lips silently moving with ritual verses; the calm that came over me was hard to ignore. It had been two decades since I’d prayed in the Muslim way. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to try again.

Back in the kitchen, I found Father tinkering with a cocktail set, measuring out vermouth into a jigger, then dumping it into a shaker. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making martinis,” he said with a puckish grin.

“Since when do you drink martinis?”

“I don’t. But he loves them.”

“Sultan-Uncle?”

“First time I ever had a martini—it was with him,” he said as he screwed on the cap of the shaker. “Back then, he was a martini junkie. We’ll see how serious he is about all this new holy baloney,” he said as he started to shake the mixture.