“You are back,” the Sheikh says with a hint of amusement. “The passport isn’t ready. Do you need money?”
“No. I’ve come for another reason.”
He points for me to sit in a chair across from his desk, he has received me in an office rather than the sitting room where he saw me before. He glances repeatedly at the screen of his laptop computer. “Yes, tell me quickly, I am monitoring something in Europe.”
“I want to see my mother, my siblings. Can you send them a message and arrange for a safe place for us to meet?”
“Here in Pakistan?”
“Yes. My mother is old, she shouldn’t be traveling abroad.”
Behind him on the wall hangs a giant photograph of Mecca, a sea of pilgrims swirling around the Kabba, the central axis of the Muslim world captured within a gold picture frame. “Can she come to Karachi? Do you have other relations here?”
“Yes, I think she can come,” I perch uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair beneath me. “We have no family here.”
He looks back at the screen, distracted. Next to him, the Koran sits open in a carved wooden bookholder, atop a shelf of scholarly Islamic books in English and Urdu. “I cannot address your request right now,” he says.
I gather my thoughts to protest, to try to explain how he is in some way obligated to arrange this.
“Just leave me their names and contact information. I will leave word for you with the same Pathan who brought you here.” He hands me a pen and a notebook opened to a clean page. I write down my mother’s name and address and numbers. The pen, I notice, bears the name and logo of an upscale hotel in Dubai, one I knew for its flashy bar tucked discreetly on the third floor, away from the rich Emirati families who mingled in the lobby. I look up to ask him when I should expect an answer, but he dismisses me, holding up his hand to prevent me from speaking again.
In a tiny cubicle in a cyber café sandwiched between a tailor and a shoe store, I type in Kathryn’s name. For months I have avoided this portal to global culture, have sought to disappear into the backwater eddies of people and tradition that swirl far away from the international current in this city. But I must confirm her address, want to be sure the payments I am sending are reaching her. I ignore the references to her in news articles with headlines about the bombing, the Pakistani terrorist, the Palestinian Pakistani Islamist cell. I type in the name of her international policy journal. I click through, but don’t find her name with the editorial staff.
I want to reach through the screen to find her. I imagine our home in Los Angeles now empty. I tap the Sheikh’s pen between my fingers. She had told me the bar in that Dubai hotel was too Western, the night we went together the dance floor was packed with blonde Lufthansa air hostesses and awkward young British businessmen. That night she was not yet Kathryn Siddique, but Kathryn Capen. I type her maiden name.
My screen offers a couple of links to articles about sports; tennis fashion, beach volleyball styles. I scroll down and recognize some of her articles from her days at the Chamber of Commerce. I click through to the tennis fashion, wondering who might share Kathryn’s name. Last week, a woman named Kathryn Capen wrote a brief about how tennis unitards and form fitting miniskirts are now being designed from high tech materials. I click through to the publication’s home page, the San Diego Sentinel, and then to the masthead. The name appears again with a photo of a woman in a short haircut with an artificial looking blonde stripe and bright red lipstick. After a few seconds I recognize this unfamiliar image as the face of my wife.
My limbs tingle. I touch the screen and then my lips. Perhaps she feels she has gone underground also. Her costume is so American, just as mine is so Pakistani. Our lives have pivoted 180 degrees. When she came to Lahore with me, those many years ago, she so carefully mimicked my sisters in their chunnis and bangles, their juttis and hennaed hands, while I strutted next to her in my jeans and t-shirt, showed off my expensive tennis shoes and Swiss watch. Were we just pretending? Were we playing our parts like actors on a stage, shedding these contrived appearances when the effort proved too difficult, too dangerous? No. She must know this is only temporary. Like me, she will return to herself when we come together again. I write down the mailing address of the San Diego Sentinel with the pen from Dubai.
I cross the street and step into a tea shop, taking a chair in the rear, my back to the rest of the world. The waiter, hardly older than a boy, comes and stands mutely next to my chair, waiting to be commanded.
“Bring me chai and namkeen.”
He retreats without a word.
Why do we teach our children to be so passive in this country? I think of my own sons; Michael jumping and talking and laughing, Andrew happy in his baby play. Never will they have to work like this boy. American children go to school. American children must grow up before they are allowed to take a job. American children grow into American men, the kind of men who then go out into the world and kill the kind of men this Pakistani boy may become. No. Not my children.
The waiter comes with my chai and salty cracker snacks. Not my children. I stir the tea. Me. I bring the cup to my lips. I became the kind of man who killed people. I sip the liquid. The Americans must know their actions are not without consequence. I pick up a little crunchy square of namkeen. We all know that if you harm someone, the revenge of their family will be visited upon you. The snack crumbles between my teeth. Why don’t the Americans ever learn that? I lick the salt from my fingers. How many bombs must explode in the buildings, on the buses, the trains of the West before they stop attacking us?
The azzan interrupts my thoughts. I drink the rest of my tea quickly, without enjoyment. Too much thinking. Too much waiting—for the passport, the visit with my family, the chance to leave this country. I will rot with all this waiting.
I leave my money with the boy and step out quickly. Passing through the door I nearly knock over a policeman on his way in. He reaches out, grabbing my arm to steady himself. He looks me directly in the eye, pausing for a moment as if he recognizes me. I pull away from his hand, dart out into the brightness of the street. I take my steps almost at a run. I think I hear him call out behind me but I don’t look back, turning into the next alley, then around a corner into a narrow lane which opens out onto another street.
I duck into another tea shop and hear all the customers laugh. Confused, I think they are laughing at me. But all eyes are focused on a television screen, where actors shout their lines from a flimsy stage set and the broadcast station’s logo occupies the lower quarter of the screen. A teenaged boy approaches me, “Chai? Samosa? Biscuit?” he chirps energetically.
“Uh…samosa.”
He pulls out a chair for me to sit at a table already occupied by two other men, almost every other chair is taken. Then he turns on his heel toward the kitchen. On the screen, the low quality production continues. A woman and then a man run across the stage and duck behind a curtain, followed by a stout man wearing a policeman’s uniform two sizes too small. Two other actors, sitting on a sofa center stage, shout at the policeman. “Why have you run into our house?” they demand. He demands in return, “You saw that man and that woman? They are not married! I saw them holding hands in the park, making lewd expressions with their eyes, and they are not married!” One of the men on the sofa stands to confront the officer, “So what? She has done nothing wrong, you cannot arrest them for that.” The policeman shakes his head and grins, “No, I am just hoping she does it right!” He thrusts his hips forward suggestively and makes a move to search out the girl elsewhere on the stage, the audience erupts in laughter as the other actors restrain him.
All around me in the tea shop people laugh. I glance at the door, but the real policeman has not followed me here.
On the screen, the first man emerges from behind the curtain. “What kind of policeman are you? Such moral corruption! I should go get a mullah to teach you something.” The policeman shouts back, “No, the mullahs only offer us young boys,” stamping his foot in disgust. Again the audiences at the stage and in the shop roar. Then one of the actors breaks character and points out into the audience, “We have a bunch of mullahs here, they call themselves censors, but they watch the dancing girls very carefully!” Even the policeman on the stage can’t resist the spontaneous joke. I find myself laughing with him.
The teenage boy returns with my samosa and tamarind chutney. “What is this program?” I ask him.
“This?” He points at the screen. “It’s called Our Brother. We show it everyday. In fact, people come so much just to watch this that we changed the name of our shop to Our Brother Hotel.” He pronounces the last word in the local accent, throwing away the last syllable. Kathryn used to puzzle over the fact that restaurant did not exist in the Pakistani vocabulary, every establishment that served food became a hotel, regardless of whether or not it also offered rooms for travelers.
I ask for a sweet lassi, yogurt drink, to go with my samosa, aching to capture the mirth around me. I glance at the door again, angle my body so other customers will obscure me from the sidewalk. The jokes continue, simultaneously appealing to the universal base aspects of our humanity, while critiquing the absurdities of our culture. I laugh. I laugh with the men around me. I laugh to myself. I laugh nearly non-stop until another dancing girl appears. I sip the lassi again, taste the sweetness, the treat I begged from my father every time he brought my brothers and me to the hotel on the main road beyond our lane. Sweet and sour, he used to muse, just like life. Better to have them together than separately.
The program ends and the customers begin to leave their chairs, empty teacups littering the tables. “When will the show be broadcast again?” I ask the young waiter.
“Tomorrow, same time. These people can barely live without it.”
The man sits at his desk, runs his hand along a dark computer monitor. “The machine is not working today,” he says. From the dust coating the screen, I suspect the machine has not been working for months. He straightens the implements of business: pencils and pens, a stapler, paperclips, an inkpad, an ancient adding machine with a roll of white paper, yellowed at the edges. “But the telephone is in perfect working order.” He proudly caresses the handset of a phone, its rotary dial protected by a plastic doily.
“I have a standing transfer order that I set up through a hawala in Lahore,” I tell him, “and I need to change the location where it should be sent. And I also need to collect a sum here.”
“So you are needing two transactions, yes?”
I nod.
“So first tell me from where the money is coming.”
I give him the name of the hawala agent in Lahore. When I was in school, my father had called on the agent every month to transfer money to London. Like clockwork, I would visit the Pakistani grocer in Brighton two days later to collect the money from the back room. I knew some of my fellow students preferred to have their money transferred through their parents’ Western bank accounts, but my father always distrusted them. No one of us has met any of those bankers, he would say wagging his finger, it is much better to shake the hand of the man responsible for getting the money wherever it is going. If it doesn’t arrive it is not just a matter of his salary, but of his honor.
The man opens up a ledger book with a thick cardboard cover. He looks over a list of names written in careful Urdu script. He finds the name of the Lahore agent and nods his head. “And who will receive the funds?”
I pass him the piece of paper where I have written in English Kathryn’s name and the address at the San Diego Sentinel. He peers at the paper, adjusting his glasses, then scratches the edge of his bushy black mustache. “Amrika?” he asks. “So where do you want…” he pauses, reading the paper again, “Kat-he-rin Cay-pun and San Deego to collect the funds?”
“No, I want my agent in Los Angeles to take the transfers he receives from Lahore and mail them to this name at this address.”
The man scowls. “But there is no way to guarantee the money will arrive to these people. The recipients will have to go in person.”
I take the paper back and write down the name of the agent in Los Angeles. “I know you can’t guarantee it,” I hand the paper to him again, “I trust the agent there, he only needs to put the cash in an envelope with this address and send it.”
The man sticks out his lower lip and shakes his head in disapproval. “Not possible.”
“Saheb,” I resort to extra politeness, “I appreciate your concern. I only need you to convey this address to my agent in Los Angeles. He has already delivered the funds twice to different locations. He understands the transfer, this is just a change of address.”
He looks up the name of the Los Angeles agent in his book, turns through several pages before pointing a finger at a name written in Urdu, next to the words New York, written in English. “I don’t know of your agent, in Amrika, I only have contact in New York.” He looks up and then closes his book. “I can’t do it, can’t be sure.”
“I can give you the agent’s telephone number, you can call him.”
The man crosses his arms across his plump belly. “No. How will I know who he is? You’ll need to find another hawala.”
I had not anticipated any kind of refusal. With a sinking feeling I realize I have connected myself with Kathryn, he could easily alert the authorities about my request. I quickly reach out for the paper I showed him and conceal it within my pocket. “Can you tell me again the name of the recipient?”
He shakes his head gravely. “I cannot remember the names of any of my transfers, never.”
I stand up to leave, ask him if he can refer me to another agent.
He describes a DVD shop about a mile away. “But remember,” he warns me, “do not trust the postal system to deliver cash. A man you can trust, even a family, a clan, you can trust. But an organization, a government or a business, never, always you will find them corrupt.”
At the back of the DVD store, I face no resistance. The hawala agent, a young man who swaggers with a contrived sophistication in his tiny office, composes a telephone text message, his fingers flying over the tiny plastic keys, and sends it to a Los Angeles number. Within ten minutes he receives a reply that satisfies him about the feasibility of changing my standing transfer instructions. Kathryn will now receive the payments through the mail at the San Diego Sentinel.
The sound of a film-y love song seeps through the grey-colored wall from the front of the store. A young man croons a dozen variations of why? Why did she allow him to fall in love with her? Why did she not resist her parents’ wishes that she marry another? Why does she still look at him from beneath the red of her wedding veil? Why does he still love her? Why wasn’t he born into the right family to have been a suitable boy? The theme of the suffering that arranged marriage brings to the dream of romantic marriage burns like an eternal flame in South Asia, flickering in almost every film, every song, every tale we learned in school. Somehow, I knew this story did not apply to me. I was not destined to suffer with a woman not of my choosing. I would not be so passive, allowing my parents to choose my wife.
The agent picks up a different mobile phone and makes a call to Lahore. He speaks quickly a few simple words and a string of numbers, before putting the phone in his pocket. “No problem,” he says with an oily smile. “Come back in two days, I will have your money for you.”
I nod in appreciation and leave the little office. I will have enough to see me through a couple more weeks. Rows of DVDs and CDs are crammed on the shelves. Cheaply reproduced images of musicians and actors stare out at me. I cannot bear the syrupy images of the love stories, the weddings.
Another image catches me. A man, seen from behind, walks down a dusty village street, an elongated stringed instrument resting on his shoulder. The starkness of the image, the sense of longing, the presence of the instrument as his only companion, speak to me. Without thinking, I purchase the disc and leave the store, only to realize I have no way to listen to the recording. I walk back toward my shabby hostel room and read of the musician, Hamyouk Hussain. The liner notes explain he had grown up in a family of rubab players, on a Kabul street full of musicians. But his music had to wait. “Music requires an atmosphere of quiet,” the notes quote him, “and that quiet disappeared with the war.” So the family moved to Pakistan, he reunited with his instrument in Peshawar, playing with musicians both local and exiled from Afghanistan. Even before I hear the music, I feel an affinity for it, for the rebirth of his love on a foreign soil, for a successful transplanting of life. Such miracles are possible.