The Good Son (17 page)

The gape of shock on his face as she closes the door on it gives her a good deal of satisfaction.

T
he next day, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and watching the news on TV when the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from the
Washington Post
. For the past couple of days we’d had some press interest, reporters wanting to know how we
felt
that our wife and mother was in the hands of murderous fanatics, but we didn’t talk to any of them. I guess this particular woman was more hard up for a human-interest story than the others. I spoke to her in the doorway, long enough to brush her off, but she gave me her card anyway in case I changed my mind and decided to bask in the glow of public sympathy. I was going to toss it away, but then I had a thought.

I needed some time off and the army wasn’t about to give it to me because our unit was due to start our rotation downrange and there was no leave, so when I looked at the reporter’s card and had that thought I got my Washington Military District directory and looked up Major Lepinski. I typed out a friendly note and clipped the reporter’s card to it and called a courier service and had it sent over to his office. The note said I’d just had a visit from a reporter who was doing a story on the blue-on-blue incident we’d both been involved in out in Waziristan, where we weren’t supposed to be in the first place. I said the reporter didn’t know it had gone down across the Pak border but she had a lot of details. She’d heard that a certain Special Forces captain had called down a big bomb on his own side and one guy had been killed and one ruined and one (me) wounded and would I confirm that such was indeed the case and did I know the captain’s name? She’d heard that this officer had not only not been reprimanded for the blunder but had been promoted to major.

I said I hadn’t told her anything; I’d said I’d call her back, because I wanted to talk to you first, sir. And later that day my phone rang and it was Major Lepinski and we had a nice chat. He explained that the whole mission had been secret, national security at stake, and the army had held a full (secret) investigation and cleared him of all wrongdoing; it was just the fog of war; and I said I understood, sir, and I would keep it tight for the good of the service. And now that I was his very favorite trooper in the whole army, I thought I could impose on him for a little favor, because I didn’t want to go along with my unit on this current rotation; I had a few weeks of urgent personal business I needed leave for and could he help me out? And he could, he would take care of it, he would cut orders for a couple of weeks of temporary duty at the Special Operations Command HQ (that is, a no-show assignment); I could rejoin my unit whenever. I thanked him and assured him, Sir, I would definitely shine my reporter the fuck on. I told him I might be going out of the country for a while starting tomorrow, and he said, Go, he’d be happy to cover for me, and I could hear the relief in his voice.

Gloria had called me when the news of the kidnap broke and she was pretty good about it, being a trauma nurse and used to dealing with people on the edges of catastrophe. She asked if I wanted her to come over, and I said no and told her I was going away for an indefinite time. There was a pause on the line. I could tell she was waiting for some kind of good-bye, and I thought about my mother just taking off on me without a word and found I couldn’t do that, even though we’d agreed to no commitments and all.

So I took her out to dinner at Citronelle on my father’s plastic, using his name to get a reservation. Farid is a pretty modest guy, but he’s still a Punjabi mogul, and he’s known at the nice places around town. I’ve never taken a nickel off him but he wanted to do this and I agreed. He assumed I would be going out with a woman who would expect a luxurious dining experience rather than scarfing takeout from local taquerias in bed, as was the case. There are deep veins of misunderstanding in my family, and lately I have started to find them amusing, although it was not always so.

So we had a nice meal, not my favorite kind of food but she seemed to like it, and she spotted some celebrities eating there, and the celebrities looked at us and wondered who we were to be sitting there at one of
the good tables in Citronelle. Then I took her back to Kalorama and showed her around the house.

She ooed a little. “I didn’t know you were rich,” she said.

“I’m not rich. My father’s rich.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not. I live on my E-Seven pay.”

“Why? Is he stingy?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Everything’s a long story with you,” she said. “If I knew you had this kind of money I would’ve hit you for some. You could keep me in style.”

We were in my bedroom at this point and she wandered around looking at things, opening closets, checking out the books and CDs.

“Where’s all your stuff?” she asked.

“This is it. I don’t have a lot of stuff.”

“I mean when you were a kid. I’ve got more shit than this in my room at home, and we were piss poor.”

“I didn’t live here very long. Until I was seventeen I lived in various places in South Asia.”

“Yeah? You said you were born in Pakistan but I figured you were raised here. I mean, you’re an American.”

“Am I? How can you tell?”

“He walks like a duck and talks like a duck, he’s a duck.”

“The duck would like a drink,” I said, and went downstairs and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet and two glasses. She was lying on my bed with her shoes off, paging through a high school yearbook. “You’re not in this,” she observed.

“No, I never graduated. I have a fourth-grade education.” She rolled her eyes the way people do when I say that but declined to comment further.

I poured out a couple of drinks. We drank and smooched a little. I said, “Do you really want this story? I mean, I can go on for quite a while about my sad life.”

“I’ll tell you when I get bored,” she said. “No, honestly, you have no idea how uninteresting most people I know are, especially men. They get poured into a mold in high school and they set up and that’s it for life. It’s TV shows, sports, and gossip, what they’re buying and what they’re planning to buy, and bitching about how everything’s not perfect
in their lives. And meanwhile they’re working around dying, smashed up people. It drives me nuts. But you . . . I spotted something about you the minute I saw you getting worked over. I thought you might have something else going on, which is the real reason why I dragged you into this relationship. So spit it out, Buster! You were born in Pakistan. And then what?”

And then what? I can tell the story, but will she understand what it means? Like all Americans, her whole thing is about privacy, pulling away from the parents to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and I get it that’s the way things are here in the Great Satan; you reach age thirteen and suddenly your parents don’t know shit and you can’t wait to get out of the house and hang with the kids.

But that’s not the way it is where I come from. There, in Lahore, and later in Pashtunistan, boys still want to grow up to be like their fathers, their grandfathers. To be young is nothing. To be young is not to have a job, a wife, to be broke all the time; if you’re a Pashtun, it’s not having a gun. When I was a kid in Lahore, I thought my grandfather, B. B. Laghari, was God on earth, and I thought Gul Muhammed was, besides Baba, the greatest man in creation. And Farid, my father, and my uncles and my aunt thought the same about their father.

When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, they way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren’t sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: “Be home by ten,
okay
?”

A traditional society. We say the words but we—I mean Americans—don’t get what it stands for. Here’s an example. My grandfather considered himself a modern man, and in a lot of ways he was. He didn’t boot his son out when that son showed up with a strange American woman he wanted to marry. He installed flush toilets—that was a big deal in Lahore at the time—and he gave his daughter the same education he gave his sons. But he wouldn’t allow TV in the house and he was strict about movies. His wife, Noor, was a traditional Panjabi begum, stayed in
the home, didn’t mix with his male guests, and so forth. The main point was that he was in control; he was living the life he thought a traditional Muslim Punjabi of the higher kind was supposed to lead, but he was like Timothy Leary compared to Gul Muhammed.

Grandfather used to have his high-class ghazal evenings, and after the children got sent away, before they sang the more erotic stuff, we would sneak out of bed and go to the servants’ quarters in the back of the yard, and there we would listen to Dost Yacub tell Pashtun stories for Gul Muhammed and his pals. In the winter they met around a fire pit and in hot weather they moved up to the roof of Gul Muhammed’s house, or under the
barsati
if it was raining.

Dost Yacub was probably over seventy at the time, and one of the last traditional Pashtun storytellers in Lahore. He’d been a warrior in his time and had probably taken shots at people Kipling had known. He told stories about the wars and feuds he’d been in, too, all about
zar, zan, zamin
—women, gold, and land—and in my child’s mind the stories of his adventures and the stories about princesses and jinns and man-eaters all blended together to make a picture of a different kind of world than my contemporaries in America were having pumped into them through the tube, none of that
Sesame Street–Mister Rogers
stuff there around the fire or under the hissing lantern. The fairy tales they tell American kids always end with “And they lived happily ever after,” but most Pashtun tales go out with heads rolling “And thus he had his revenge.” I mean, that’s the
point
of the stories.

So we would sit there and listen to Dost Yacub, me and Wazir, propping up our eyelids as it got late, and later on we’d play out the stories, the way American kids do with cowboys and Indians. We had tin swords and Pashtun clothes and sometimes we could talk or bribe one of the servants’ kids to play a princess or an evil man-eater. Wazir was four years older than I was, which is a lot when you’re a kid, so he was the master of the games. Technically, Gul Muhammed and Wazir were servants, but they weren’t treated as servants, more like members of the family. The story I heard was that Gul Muhammed had rescued Baba during a riot in Srinagar after the partition of India. He’d been cornered with his wife by a gang of Hindus and they were going to rape her and slaughter them both and Gul happened on the scene with a pistol
and drove off the gang and so after that they were like brothers, and Baba brought Gul into his home and Gul became his sworn protector, because when you save a life you are responsible for it ever after.

We played that out too, in our games, Wazir haughty and brave as his own father, and my sister Aisha, two years younger than me, was our grandmother, Noor, and I was Laghari Sahib. The marauding mob of Hindus came out of Wazir’s imagination, and he was good, lots of violent threats, screams of rage, twisted face, clutching hands, and I would fight the Hindus with my tin knife while Aisha cowered behind me, until I was borne down by all the fiends Wazir was impersonating, and then switching back to his father again, a fine Pashtun speech here, elaborate threats and boasts, and then he would draw his pistol, an angled piece of pipe that contained as many shots as an Armalite, and slaughter the bestial Hindus. These sessions often left little Aisha in tears, which Wazir considered proof of their authenticity. When we wanted to play again, she always refused, and it was Wazir who had to cajole her to enter the game once again. This always worked: no one could resist Wazir, beautiful, masterful Wazir, the prince of our yard and, when we got older, of the neighborhood beyond.

In the afternoons, when I was eight and he was twelve, we would throw off our school uniforms and put on shalwar kameez and embroidered caps and walk through the Urdu Bazaar. Wazir, who seemed to know everyone, would flatter and joke and insult our way into free candies and hot fried dumplings and sticks of sugarcane, which always tasted sweeter than the ones bought for us. I followed him around like a dog.

That was my Pashtun life but I had another, or maybe it was two other lives. I was the grandson of B. B. Laghari Sahib, and I was being raised as a Punjabi gentleman and a citizen of Pakistan, a Lahori. As soon as I could read well enough, I was required to stand before him and recite Urdu poetry and also Wordsworth and Tennyson, because the heritage of the Raj was not to be despised. And Yeats. The Sahib was a little nuts about Yeats, I have to say; I think he identified with the old lunatic genius, the fact that he mastered the English language better than anyone else of his era yet was not himself English, that he was a statesman as well as a poet, that he had a view of the decline of the ordered world similar to Baba’s own. In any case, I was made to memorize huge chunks
of Yeats’s poetry, which I did with a good will because I revered my grandfather and wanted his approval more than anything else in life except maybe the attention of my mother.