I shall devote today’s installment to the story of my bathing partner. I cannot, in good conscience, keep it to myself any longer. (I trust my special agent will know what to do with this information.) You see, over the last few weeks I have gotten to know this man, my bathing partner, and from what I have learned about his situation, I believe a mistake has been made. Just as a mistake has been made with me. I do not mean to abuse my writing privileges by indulging in what the officials here may deem a cryptic tangent, and so I will respectfully curtail this digression.
Riad S—, my bathing partner, had trained as a civil engineer but left his discipline for something nobler in his eyes. He became a bookseller, opening his own specialty bookshop with the small amount of money he had inherited from a distant uncle in Pakistan. The shop was in Birmingham, England. The uncle was a real loner, as I understand it, and so he left everything to Riad, his favorite nephew, the boy who was already so well traveled—Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Asia. It wasn’t as if the uncle didn’t have any other descendants. Riad came from a big family. But the uncle knew that by giving the money to Riad he was ensuring that it would not be squandered. And good for the uncle, because he was right. Riad opened his own business, the only bookshop of its kind in this working-class section of Birmingham.
Unfortunately, the shop was not much of a success, and Riad had to close its doors within a year. There were really too many factors to say why the shop failed. Now a failed bookseller, Riad gathered his very pregnant wife, packed their bags, and moved the whole family to Pakistan, a place he often mythologized. Why? Several reasons. For one, this is where his family was from. The S—’s of Islamabad. And Riad felt he could do some good in Pakistan, perhaps by returning to his career as an engineer. The decision was also one of faith. Riad, a practicing Muslim, wanted his unborn daughter to grow up in a country where she would be surrounded by other little Muslim children. And there was no shortage of those in Pakistan. As we all know, childhood can be such a cruel stint, and Riad felt it best that his daughter not grow up in a place consumed by fear. This was the age of fear, remember. Riad saw Pakistan as a second chance, a new way of life for his family, one where they could live comfortably numb. His wife could have a maid to help with the baby. And when the baby got older, she could attend a Muslim school with other little Muslims just like her. Life would be sweet in Pakistan.
And so the young couple moved to Islamabad, where the wife, we’ll call her Manal, did get her own maid. Riad was able to find work as an engineer, for the government. And the baby, born by a reputable doctor, was healthy and fat. And then there were three, plus the maid. But Riad had a weak spot. His empathy. After all his good fortune in his new country, he just wasn’t satisfied. Even as his boss at the government office, aware of Riad’s talents, showered him with promotion after promotion, would you believe that Riad still wanted more? Not more, I should say, but less. Riad longed to help the lesser off, the poor. Call it a hobby. We all have those. There were plenty of corners in Pakistan for Riad to practice his new hobby. Which led him to travel outside of Islamabad, where the lesser off seemed to proliferate. He traveled to the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan and to the western towns bordering Afghanistan (a horrible place at the time, and even more horrible today, as I understand it).
What can be said? Riad had a soft spot for the poor. He was, in the classic sense of the term, a real “do‑gooder.” Eventually his empathy led him away from his career. He began to take more and more time off to travel to these impoverished areas, where he brought along, among other things, books. Literature. He still had a passion for books. He never gave up on them. (His words.) He frequented bookshops all over the country. Books were cheap in Pakistan, and he bought them in bulk, as he once had as a bookseller. Then he distributed the literature to these impoverished towns, where the people could barely write their own names. Though Riad claims never to have stepped foot in Afghanistan, his charity brought him into tribal-run areas in the north where the border between the two countries is somewhat blurry—where Riad may as well have stepped across the border. “What’s the difference?” his interrogators would say to him anyway.
And yet Riad wasn’t arrested in one of the poor districts or the dangerous tribal areas. Riad S—, of Birmingham, was in no way connected with weapons or jihad; in fact, he was promoting just the opposite—the word. Not just God’s word but poetry and literature—Islamic, sure, but also translations of English classics, like Charles Dickens. And he had help. Friends, translators, others involved in his cause. A whole caravan of book peddlers. No matter. You see, the man we perceive as a do‑gooder was to others an antagonist. Throughout his travels he got on many people’s nerves. One such nerve belonged to a mullah who was up for reelection in some poor, shitty district. This mullah saw Riad as someone trying to undermine his campaign, administering foreign literature to eligible voters who couldn’t even read. The mullah had ties in the government, a cousin’s cousin or what have you, and it might have been as simple as placing a call, speaking Riad’s name into a receiver to so‑and‑so, who gave the name to so‑and‑so, and on up the chain of command. Well, what happened next wasn’t so pleasant, and it is the only part of Riad’s story that mirrors mine.
The knock on the door in the middle of the night.