by Rafiq Kathwari
As Fareed drove in soft rain through red lights to Maimonides, my sister-in-law Farrah, and I sat in the back seat of the sky-blue Volkswagen van.
“Kicking,” she said, placing my hand on her round belly. Shy, I gazed at her polished toes in flip-flops.
A stork dropped a boy in Brooklyn eight years to the day JFK was slain in Dallas. New alien in New York, I babysat my curly-haired nephew in a stark rental on Park Avenue where the doorman first thought of us as the move-in guys, and where our Numdha rugs, hand-made in Kashmir, screamed to come out of our walk-in closets.
“Make money fast carpeting America from sea to shining sea,” grandfather had penned in an aerogram. Fareed rode the subway to Pine Street; Farrah was a cashier at Korvettes. The boy and I together discovered Big Bird on a Zenith console, my first TV exposure at age 22.
I watched the boy dunk hoops in purturbia, his long hair swishing to Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes.” He enrolled in the local chapter of the National Rifle Association, his dad’s rifle slung across the boy’s shoulder to hunt jackrabbits upstate.
He climbed a peak one summer in Kashmir, a paradise in pathos, a heated topic at our dinner table, but on the periphery of America’s mind, rarely mentioned on the Evening News, never on “All in the Family,” a popular sitcom that dared to shake America’s somnolence even as B-52 bombers rained napalm on Vietnam, fueling our rage.
In our hearts we knew we had to do what we could with what we had to help untie the Gordian knot of the Kashmir dispute, never again to let mad men tear apart husbands from wives, siblings from siblings, sons and daughters from mothers and fathers across the Line of Control since 1947 when India divided herself.
I can imagine how our family history seized my nephew’s receptive mind as he and his mates chilled every Sunday at the Islamic Cultural Center on California Road in Eastchester, once a Greek Orthodox Church, now embraced as a house of worship by a fresh wave of immigrants anxiously learning new ways of seeing and thinking.
Eager to impart their native cultural heritage to American-born kids, parents seemed unconcerned as weekday shop owners moonlighted as Sunday school teachers who were seemingly unable to equate the paradox of America’s ample prosperity at home with its wanton militarism abroad.
Many shop owners grasped only the literal value of 72 Virgins in Paradise, urging my nephew to shame his sister for wearing leotards to ballet class she loved and to sway his dad to stop serving liquor at home. Yet the self-styled teachers taught him to learn the Call to Prayer which he recited aloud at an annual apple-picking gathering, a holy ritual on a crisp autumn day made me gloomy, for I like my cider with a splash of vodka.
I remember standing next to friends in single file amidst a row of trees, facing East, the women in bright outfits at the rear. Children ran from tree to tree with glee and gathered fallen fruit. Sunrays pierced abundant boughs. I remember being high on the aroma. Apples have mapped the fate of mankind, after all.
Fareed plucked his boy from Purturbia High, and enrolled him into High Prep, hoping the discipline Christian brothers had drummed into himself when Fareed was a lad growing up in Kashmir would shape the apple of his eye as well. The brothers decored the boy.
I am struck by the eloquence in the title of this story, copied here from my nephew’s senior year essay, sealing his fate to the most compelling moral imperative of our generation: how do Muslim youth from Seattle to Srinagar manage their rage at the organized ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionists, aided by the world’s mightiest democracy?
His rage was raw: he totaled a Toyota on the Bronx River Parkway, walking away from the wreck, his sack of bones intact. He searched for a purpose, plumbed Islamic studies looking for himself… he made a U-turn at McGill University, and flew to Faisal University in Islamabad, Pakistan.
“We shall meet again,” he wrote, “on Judgment Day.”
April is the cruelest month. Taliban. . .err. . .sorry. . .Mujahedeen. . . “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” an honorific bestowed on them by Ronald Regan, who in turn was dubbed by Gore Vidal, “cue-card-reader President” . . . Mujahedeen had taken Kabul.
It was the best of times; it was the worst . . . a spectacle unfolded. The Mujahedeen, led by a certain Osama Bin Laden, ostracized by his Saudi tribe, trained by the CIA, hunted by the FBI, and armed by capitalist gunrunners, had driven the Soviets out.
What happened to my nephew, what makes sense? I imagine the tall, bearded boy in red and white plaid over slim blue jeans, and a handful of his classmates, driving a rented Toyota pickup on Asian Highway One. I imagine them crossing the porous Durand Line into Afghanistan to see first-hand the drama, the tamasha.
I imagine them trapped in a firefight between two Taliban factions. Wrong time. Wrong place. I imagine infernal arcs across a cobalt sky. I imagine a hurried mass grave near Torkham. In New Rochelle, under a gun-metal sky in April, my sister-in-law Farrah was pruning roses the day the call came.
***
Note: Fareed and Farrah are name changes.