The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (19 page)

Rais had come from where the self was given too little, and now
he lived where at times it seemed to take too much. “Here we think freedom means whatever I wanna do, whatever I wanna say—that is freedom,” he said. “But that’s the wrong definition. That’s why people end up making more mistakes. Freedom is not whatever you want to do, whatever you want to say.” Freedom, by Rais’s lights, was “nothing but a responsibility.”

He compared these observations he made about America to how, years ago at the cadet college, his nose had almost burned off at the extraordinary stench of his classmates’ dorm room, while they, who had grown accustomed to it, no longer detected it. “There is something good here, something bad here; something good over in our place, something bad there,” he said. “We can see these kind of things, like how I used to feel the smell in those rooms. As an immigrant, we see what these people are missing here. But if they live here, they got used to it.”

He did, though, share one burden with the Americans: debt. By the middle of 2003, he still had $60,000 in unpaid medical bills. The surgeries were complete and had failed to restore anything near a quarter of his vision, as once hoped; he was resigning himself to a life with one good eye. The good eye—a superb eye, in fact, with 20/10 vision—would have to compensate for the bad one, which could perceive only the barest hints of light. He had to give up whatever hope he had of seeing three-dimensionally, or of being aware of what was coming at him from the right side. He had to accept not being good at things he was good at before. There would be headaches, surely, and a need to focus fiercely where others cruised. All of that he could handle. He had even, at last, found an affordable clinic called Pathways to treat his depression. He went for a series of therapy sessions and was prescribed some mood-enhancing medications.

But the debt hounds still haunted Rais. Above and beyond the problems he observed with sex, alcohol, and drugs, Rais was jarred by the American relationship to money. “Is everything all about
business and money?” he would ask the collectors—for whom, understandably, it was.

A
S RAIS STRUGGLED
through the rebuilding of a life, the Hasan family had their own troubles. It was Waqar Hasan, in the midst of grilling a burger, who had been the first victim of Stroman’s war. Not long afterward, his widow, Durreshahwar, learned that his death was only the beginning.

She and her four daughters had been in the country since 1994 on temporary visas. In 1996, Waqar applied for a green card, which would allow the family to stay indefinitely. His petition approved, he filed for Durreshahwar and his daughters to be converted to permanent residency, too. Their applications were pending when Stroman went out Arab-hunting.

Durreshahwar now learned that because her husband was the sponsor of the application, and because he no longer existed, she and her four adolescent daughters could not remain in the country. Her brother, Nadeem Akhtar, said the family understood that they had just weeks or months before having to leave.

They hadn’t come to the United States for the obvious reason and in the obvious way; their story didn’t fit what a visitor might have imagined seeing Waqar working the grill where he would one day die.

Waqar was, as his brother-in-law tells it, a quiet man—a slogger at work, a Muslim who tried to get in his five prayers but was not very religious, the kind of guy who receded and listened when the conversation turned to knotty subjects like God or politics. When working at the store, he would phone his mother—who lived with his wife and daughters back in New Jersey—and linger on the line with her for two or three hours each day.

A few years earlier, Waqar had been a successful businessman in
Karachi, the dense and maddening port metropolis on Pakistan’s western coast. Nadeem described the family as living in a house with more bedrooms than they had use for; they employed a chauffeur, a gardener, domestic servants. The money came from rent on properties they owned, some gas stations, and a business importing infant chicks from Holland and growing them into curry-bound chickens.

It was a good life, but it was also a lawless period in Karachi and in Pakistan generally, and the Hasans found themselves a target. Nadeem said Waqar’s father was kidnapped and held for ransom twice: they got him back for around $100,000 on one occasion and double that on another. Waqar’s office had apparently been plundered by armed men. The family’s home had been robbed of much of its gold. It was not entirely clear if their money alone, or also some political connection, was responsible for these incidents. Waqar and Durreshahwar began to wonder every time they sent the girls to school whether they’d get them back. It was time to go.

Waqar Hasan ended up in New Jersey, where his brother was running a business of his own—an Exxon station. Within a year or so, his wife and daughters joined him from Pakistan.

Like Rais, Waqar eventually found himself talked into Texas. He hated the cold in New Jersey, hated shoveling all that snow. Nadeem, his brother-in-law, was already in Dallas and spoke reverently of it. The weather was like Pakistan’s. It was easy to start a business. Houses were cheap. Once again, Waqar left his family behind and flew away to establish a suitable life. Once it was ready, he would bring them to Texas. He started working at a mini-mart called Mom’s Grocery and soon bought it out. He worked at the store himself, along with a few employees, sometimes putting in more than twelve-hour days. He could see the horizon drawing closer: this new peaceful life with his mother, wife, and daughters around him, his brother-in-law close by, a fine house in a neighborhood with good schools.

Then the bullet entered his right cheek and swam through his jaw and halted in the muscles of his neck.

That was mid-September. Durreshahwar and the kids had planned to leave New Jersey and join him in December or January. Now she would have to leave America.

In Washington, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey heard about the Hasans’ situation from a staffer. Rush Holt’s district had a sizable immigrant population, and he considered himself a special friend of South Asians; at election time, he hoped they would consider themselves special friends of his. Because of the demographics of the 12th District—which spread across four counties and included Princeton as well as various towns containing the word “Brunswick”—constituents’ visa problems were nothing unusual. Still, something about the Hasan matter stood out to Holt when it came to his attention. Somehow the thought of those young daughters, their father recently murdered, being booted out of the country seemed so manifestly unjust. Holt was among those politicians who in the aftermath of 9/11 were vocal not only about thwarting further attacks but also about preventing an American turn toward intolerance.

“All across the country America reacted in dismay when they heard in September 2001 the news of the hate crime that took the life of Pakistan-born Waqar Hasan,” Holt later wrote. “When they learned that the murderer committed his brutality as a perverse retaliation for the attacks of September 11, as an act of twisted patriotism, they knew this was a blot on our country. And all Americans felt the pangs even more deeply when they learned that Waqar Hasan left behind a struggling widow and four little girls. For most Americans that was the end of the story, as they went back to their busy lives. The wheels of justice will turn and take care of this, they thought. What they did not think about was that the United States had already incurred an obligation to the Hasan family.”

Holt visited the Hasans in New Jersey. He paid his condolences and offered to help. He promised to take on the deportation issue as a personal challenge. His devotion was not easily explained. For
more than a year, his staff called around to the relevant agencies to ask what might be done. The answer came back again and again: nothing. Waqar’s application wasn’t transferable. “When he died, their right to stay in the United States ended,” the congressman said.

The silver lining, for now, was that the flurry of inquiries from a congressman’s office froze the Hasans’ situation and kept them from having to leave immediately.

Their conventional options exhausted, Holt and his staff began to ask what else they might do to create an exception for the Hasans. Someone on the staff had a wild idea. “It required a new law to create a place for this family,” as Holt later put it.

The idea involved something called a private bill. It was a rarely used tool in Congress: pieces of legislation, approved by both House and Senate and signed by the president, that named a person or group and specified a change in the law that applied just to them. Among the reasons private bills were uncommon was the obvious possibility of corruption. “If you’re making a law for one person,” Congressman Holt said, “the committee has to ask—everyone should ask—‘Is this a quid pro quo for special interests or special favors? Is this blatantly unfair to the people who are not covered by the private bill?’ ”

Undeterred by all this, on February 13, 2003, Holt introduced his private bill, HR 867, in Congress. The proposed legislation was titled: “For the relief of Durreshahwar Durreshahwar, Nida Hasan, Asna Hasan, Anum Hasan, and Iqra Hasan.” (Whatever happened with the legislation, it once again protected the Hasans from deportation for the time being, pending the bill’s fate.)

Holt, still junior in his second term, called, wrote letters, and sent packets of clippings to his colleagues, trying to overcome the inevitable skepticism and inertia. He lobbied influential members, including Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from the Milwaukee suburbs and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Houston also on that committee and the ranking member on its Subcommittee on Immigration,
Border Security, and Claims—which had oversight over private bills of this kind.

At last, fifteen months after introducing it, Holt got the bill through the Judiciary Committee. It took another two months to pass the House, and another four for the Senate. Finally, on October 30, 2004, as a group of U.S. Marines died in an attack by Muslim extremists in a far-off place called Fallujah, President George W. Bush signed HR 867 into law and gave five bereft Muslim immigrants a renewed chance at an American life.

“The people of the United States and our government have an odd attitude toward immigration and immigrants,” Holt said later. “Often forgetting our own origins, and even our own best interests, we resist diversity and even lash out against others like ourselves, because we mistakenly think they are not like ourselves.”

America, he said, “strives to give hope, fairness, and compassion. But these are not automatic. Cruel fate or happenstance often threatens to crush hope and opportunity. Irrational human passions and prejudices can thwart justice and fairness. The demands of life in a busy, complicated society and the exigencies of a complicated legal code can crowd out compassion.”

Yet sometimes, Holt said, “we see hope coming out of tragedy, a fair result out of an insane injustice, and compassionate concern out of impersonal laws and regulations.”

R
AIS’S FORTUNES WERE
also turning. Not long after returning from Bangladesh, he had gone for Friday prayers to the mosque in Richardson. It was one of those strip-mall suburbs of Dallas where far more acreage is dedicated to parking than to doing the things you parked to do. Richardson was full of immigrants, including a fair number of Muslims. Its halal restaurants offered stacks of a publication called the Muslim Yellow Pages (A to Z Printing & Promotion:
“We Welcome the Islamic Community”; A Plus Automotive Repair: “Ask for Hasan”; Texas King, a meat purveyor: “Eat of the things which Allah hath provided for you, Lawfull and good”). At the Richardson mosque that evening, Rais saw a man he thought he recognized. He walked over, apologized for interrupting, and asked if he was a Bangladeshi and a graduate of the Sylhet Cadet College.

The man was a little stunned. Well, yes, he was.

It was an old schoolmate who now lived in Dallas and worked in technology, for Texas Instruments. He invited Rais to his home to catch up properly. When he heard Rais’s story, he felt an urge to assist him. Though Rais was happy working as a restaurant server for now, his dream remained to get into IT. His schoolmate offered to help. Come to think of it, he knew the perfect guy for Rais to meet.