I tell the taxi driver I am going to the airport. He simply nods and shifts the car into gear. For him this routine trip means nothing more than a large fare and perhaps a good tip. He does not know that the airport will launch me into a world of unknowns as dangerous as the dragons cartographers used to draw beyond the contours of the charted world. The car merges onto the street that leads to the ring road, ascending the overpass, swerving quickly to avoid a man leading a bullock cart loaded with his family and their ragged bundles of belongings. Perhaps he is in exile, perhaps he has left his home and garden, his trees and goats on the other side of the Khyber pass. For a moment I envy him the warmth of his wife and children.
Last week Sheikh Omar had called me on my assistant’s phone. “Everything is arranged,” he had told me. “But you will only come to know the details of each leg of the journey when you need to. Have faith,” he commanded me, “and do not fear. Your fear will only arouse the suspicion of others.” I close my eyes and recall a familiar melodic phrase plucked from the rubab. I hum the phrase over and over, as others would repeat a mantra.
In the airport, I struggle to understand the bewildering maze of ticketing and security. Two decades out of practice, I ask other travelers which way to go, where to stand, what documents to present. I may have spent countless hours sitting in luxury cars, but I am less worldly than the illiterate laborers who leave this place, dreams of consumer goods and education for their children fuelling their flight.
And then I am on a plane, rising into the air. Pakistan falls away below. The air host previews the Chinese action film, the complimentary feature which will be screened on the seatback screens. And suddenly the ease of my release stuns me. Without any physical exertion, without any contrived interchanges, I am hurtling toward America. Three and a half hours ago I closed the door on my small rooms for the last time. I could have made these same actions last year or the year before, or many years before. Noor’s question haunts me. Kathryn will ask why I waited so long.
The taxi turns into a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid where storefront signs are lettered in both Spanish and Arabic, two languages I can read but cannot decode. The driver stops in front of a small hotel, turns and speaks to me. I shake my head. He points to the piece of paper where I had written an address. Still unsure, I pay the fare and step out into the smell of fried fish and garlic, diesel and potted rose bushes.
I look for numbers on the building that would match the address in my hand. A Moroccan man, dressed in an ochre-colored jalabeyah walks past, answering a tinny recording of the call to prayer. Suitcase in hand, I follow him into a narrow doorway, opening into a small courtyard leading to a mosque, covered in brilliant North African mosaics. I crave the coolness of the mosque, the familiarity of the prayer. I leave my shoes in the antechamber and roll my suitcase up next to them. I wash my hands and face in the communal faucet and pray on foreign soil. Only when another man eyes me on the way out do I remember that my turban marks me as a Sikh, not a Muslim.
I check into the small hotel room and fall into a coma-like sleep. The morning brings a breeze and a new set of fears. I don’t know where or when or how I will get to the next place I am going, the next increment closer to America. I sip strong coffee in the hotel café and notice a changing of the guard at the front desk. A dour old man takes over from a young man, perhaps he is the grandfather, for the day shift. Clutching my cup for some kind of false safety, I approach the old man.
“Excuse me,” I ask in English, remembering the question Sheikh Omar had instructed me to ask, “do you know where I can exchange Pakistani rupees for dollars?”
The old man laughs, his face suddenly opening like a vision of Santa Claus. “No one wants the Pakistani money,” he squeaks. “But maybe I have a friend who can help you with the transaction. Wait here, he will come this afternoon for his tea.”
“Thank you,” I say discerning a knowing twinkle in his eyes. “Shukria,” I say in Punjabi, expressing not just polite thanks, but profound gratitude.
I wander a few blocks from the hotel taking in the strangeness of the place. The people dressed in such modern clothes, the women revealing shoulders, hair, cleavage so nonchalantly. I stare at these provocative curves as if they were magnets, the local men hardly seem to notice. Advertisements display shiny cars, sleek mobile computers, clean and beautiful people consuming all manner of alcohol. In all my memories and fantasies of America, I had omitted the brazen sexuality and consumerism of the West. Like a mole deprived of light, I have developed other senses to compensate. I have fallen in love with music, with sounds that reach the most intimate recesses of my heart. I follow the curves of the sublime, understand the seduction of memory and hope, know that riches and lusting after material things are merely strategies for crowding out loneliness. I return to my hotel bed, close my eyes, try to calm my jangled nerves.
In the afternoon a young Palestinian arrives at the hotel, dressed in athletic clothes I find ugly and cheap looking, but suspect reflect the latest fashions. The old concierge directs the young man to my table. He does not sit, or want to linger over tea. He glances every few seconds at his mobile computer sliding his thumb across its screen. “Tell me who you know,” he enquires bluntly.
Stunned at his impatience, I say quietly, “Sheikh Omar.”
The young man scowls, he reminds me of Ali, a restless misdirected energy brewing beneath his skin. “You cause me a lot of work. But follow me. We’ll start with the hawala and the funds.”
I avoid thinking too much. I allow myself to be led, directed. I sit on the back of his scooter, close enough to smell his cologne. He pulls up to a small shop selling mobile phones, prepaid calling cards, and a rainbow of frivolous phone accessories.
He speaks to the man behind the counter in a pastiche of Arabic, Spanish, and English. At some point, he looks around the shop, confirming we are the only customers and then opens his palm, motioning for me to hand him something.
When I shrug, he whispers impatiently, “Passport.”
I remove the small book from my pants pocket, clutch it for a moment before allowing him to take it.
Once again on the back of his scooter, darting through cars and small lanes, he says over his shoulder, “I’ll come back to the hotel in a couple of days, you’ll have an Indian passport.”
I return to my hotel room and resume my painfully familiar occupation—waiting.
And then I am on a plane to Buenos Aires. Another hotel, another couple of contacts, I don’t bother to ask if they are Palestinian, or Algerian, Egyptian, or Lebanese. What do I care about their jihad, their revolution, the illicit ways they move people and money and weapons around the world? I have faith in their abilities.
More waiting.
Then a flight to Mexico City. I take a bus to Tijuana. Woozy with the smell of stale beer and fried corn, I am weary from the waiting. I ask my way to the hotel. As I sit on the bed watching a cockroach wander unafraid along the floorboard, the phone rings. I pick up the earpiece, hold it gingerly next to my head, as if it might hurt me. “Hello?”
“Buy a business suit, you’ll travel by Mercedes and need to look like a businessman.”
“When?”
“Two days.” The line goes silent.
I lie back on the bed and smile, amused. I may not be comfortable with a Western suit, but a Mercedes, any Mercedes, will be like an old friend.
I check the corners of the ceiling, but no arrow points toward Mecca. What do I care? The only direction I want to know is north.
When the car arrives at my hotel two days later, my intestines are in turmoil from the water, but I am pleased to see the car bears California license plates. The driver looks me over as I sit in the passenger seat, he does not linger in the driveway. “Not the most stylish suit, but I guess it’ll do.” I figure he is Lebanese, maybe Syrian. “And the shoes?” he asks. I lift my foot to show him.
“White socks?”
I am silent. They are new, I bought them at the same time I bought the shoes.
“Don’t you have any dark socks?”
I just shake my head. Why does he care about my socks?
“God dammit. We’ll have to stop and get you some dark socks. Better be quick, it’s nerve wracking enough to cross the border, but sitting here in Tijuana in a Mercedes is just asking for trouble.” He swerves to pull into a small parking space. “Wait, I think I have a pair in my bag.” He jumps out of the car and I see the trunk open through the rear window. He returns with a crumpled pair of black socks.
“If we’re lucky they’ll just wave us through at the border, but sometimes they look in and if they see something that strikes them as odd, they’ll pull us over for extra scrutiny.”
I cringe as I pull on his dirty socks.
He pulls the car back into the street. “You can call me Abe, short for Abdul. Show me your passport.”
I pull it from my breast pocket. He holds it in his lap, glancing back and forth from the stamped pages to the cars around us. He nods, pulls a small plastic card from his own breast pocket, slides it into the passport and returns it to me. As I examine the forged green card in the passport, he talks quickly.
“We are with Calexico Equity, meeting with investors in Mexico. We have an interest in beach front real estate, and manufacturing capabilities along the border.”
I hope I won’t need to repeat any of this.
And before I can think about where I will go in America, we are in the queue of cars, making slow but steady progress toward the border. Abe rolls down the window and hands our documents to a fat woman with bleached blonde hair in a khaki uniform and military style boots. She runs a scanner over our documents, glances at her hand held screen and then at a monitor mounted on the gate above us. She leans in toward the car and looks at us—though not as far down as my feet in dark socks and shoes—and then into the empty back seat. Then she looks up in response to one of her colleagues. “What?” She holds up her hand, signaling for us to wait. Abe keeps his foot on the brake, his index finger taps out an almost imperceptible rhythm on the steering wheel. My breath seizes up in my lungs.
She looks back inside the car and then turns back to her colleague, “Yeah, I brought my lunch, but ice cream, that’d be good.” And she hands back our documents and waves us through.
We are in.
I can only look straight ahead. America rolls out along a six-lane freeway. And so simply, I have returned to a country both familiar and foreign. I expect I should feel something, but numbness overwhelms me. I have accomplished the long journey, the series of forgeries and deceits. But just as when I returned to Pakistan after the bombing, no one will be ready to greet me, no one will open their arms with relief that I have arrived safely. As the adrenaline subsides, I realize the most difficult actions of this path are yet to come.
After a few miles, Abe exhales loudly. “So where do you want to go in San Diego?”
I look at him, surprised. “You don’t have directions about where to go?”
“What do I look like? A tour guide? My instructions were to bring you into the U.S. Here we are.”
“Could you just bring me to a hotel?”
“Which one?”
I shrug my shoulders.
He looks at his watch. “I have to go downtown to drop this car, I’ll drop you someplace near downtown. It’ll be easier for you to walk places since you don’t have a car.”
A sudden nostalgia for the car grips me. I don’t want to leave my seat, don’t want to be separated from the familiar smell of the leather and the dependable hum of the engine. Anxiety tightens my stomach just as when my parents dropped me off at a hill station boarding school for 10th standard, thinking the structure and discipline of the place would curb my problematic success winning girls’ affections. My parents did not relent, even when they saw me choking back tears on the drive into the mountains. The driver does not care for my emotional state either. Unceremoniously, he leaves me standing before the automatic glass doors of a Best Western.