The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (2 page)

From time to time, Rais’s mind darted back to the life he had left. What was he, man of burning promise, doing in a miserable gas station in Texas? But he never dwelled there long. “I know this is not my life,” he told himself. “It’s just temporary right now—for the time
being, just to survive. I’m working on a bigger goal.” It was not his first gas station, and he believed that in all work was dignity. If anything had stuck from those Thursdays in childhood, sitting on bedsheets stretched over the drawing room carpets, beneath the godly verses adorning the walls, swaying to his grandfather’s recitations of the Prophet’s sayings, it was that Muhammad was a shepherd whose day job obscured his destiny. Rais’s days at the mart were steps in a carefully laid plan. Before year’s end, inshallah, he would fly home and, with the gas station money, make good on a long-ago promise to Abida. After the wedding—to be held, if he could arrange it, in the Air Force mess in Dhaka—he would bring her to Dallas in proper style. He would enroll in a computer course at the University of Texas at Dallas or Richland Community College (he was still calculating the cost of each in dollars per credit). If things went according to plan, as surely they would, he would be a bona fide systems engineer at a prestigious company downtown.

Rais could suffer the Buckner Food Mart because he knew he’d be leaving it. His short life had already been full of leavings. Islam was his constant; other things he could renounce with an ease that eluded most beings. It was part of what made him a natural aspirant to America.

Not to mention his doggedness, his power to ignore voices not his own, and his focus on what he believed to be his God-given luck. What a casual visitor to the mini-mart could not see was that his presence there was the product of a great run of victories. Rais Bhuiyan’s arrival in Dallas was, by the grace of God, the most merciful and compassionate, the seventh triumph in that run.

T
HE FORTUNE REACHED
back half a generation, to the middle 1980s, in the years before the great cyclone. It fell on a young man from a household well prepared for it: an educated and devout
upper-middle-class family that pursued its this-world and next-world ends with comparable devotion.

Rais’s father was an engineer for Bangladesh Telephone and Telegraph. He rose steadily through its bureaucracy, where he performed various duties, including helping less capable countries build their communications infrastructure. The work gave his family a comfortable, gated life. His forebears came from Sylhet, to the northeast, and Assam, in what was now India. In Dhaka, he had been one of the early settlers of an area called Dania—a tranquil suburb of the teeming, honking, sweaty capital, just south of the Chittagong highway. The father had arrived in the neighborhood well before the ’71 war of independence, back when the area remained full of paddy. He was ever engaged in the community, and this commitment became important to Rais’s conception of his father: a man who was so much more than his day job, who was always asking what else could be done—whether working to set up a primary school in Dania, or aiding candidates for Parliament, or running the neighborhood welfare trust, which kept the streets clean and the drains swallowing.

Rais’s parents had married in the traditional, arranged way. At least compared to the father, Rais’s mother was of a more religious bent. Rais described her in the generic, uncontroversial way that women in her milieu were so often cast. She was soft-spoken, modest, deferential to others. If she had a flash of pride, it was about being unlike those housewives who went over to neighbors’ sofas at the merest impulse to gossip and judge. But her network stretched far into the city, where her family had been settled for generations. Her ever sweeping radar maintained hourly awareness of such facts as whose daughter was marrying and whose father had fallen and whose roof had caved in and brought unpayable bills. Rais idolized her, and perhaps the highest praise he could offer was that no one could detect that three of her eight children weren’t really hers: they belonged to her husband’s first wife, who had left prematurely for heaven.

Though the Bhuiyan family’s self-conception was of simplicity
and piety, they lived in relative privilege, in a walled house on a quiet street. Rais remembered only three-wheel rickshaws plying it, not the belching trucks and buses that polluted the capital’s less rarified streets. In the springtime, Dania offered that thrilling rarity in Dhaka: bird chirps you could actually hear. Mindful of their advantages, fearful of God, devoted to His way, the Bhuiyans sought to please Him and ward off envy through ceaseless charity to the world beyond the walls.

This charity was not of the United Way variety. Sometimes it took the shape of distant relatives—or “relatives”—showing up, sitting in the drawing room and, over snacks and juice, telling stories that inevitably landed in an explanation of, say, why they couldn’t afford the wedding that was nonetheless happening next week. A wad of cash might then be given, or a spare sari, or a table no longer in use. In the style of their part of the world, they said it was their honor. It was, of course, also a way of ensuring that, if God ever changed His mind about you, you too would have drawing rooms to sit in and people to tell your story to. When the family didn’t know the seekers, they would wait at the front gate. Rais or one of the other children would stand inside and listen to the visitors’ tale, vetting it, bringing it to the parents, and ferrying back any offerings.

Rais grew up on a Gregorian calendar heavily punctuated by special days from the lunar Islamic one. The dates of exams to study for and school applications to fill out mingled with the dates of rites and sacrifices and family get-togethers. Rais liked to emphasize that many of these days involved charity, and especially the giving of food. On the tenth day of Muharram, for instance, the family would cook a vat of khichdi in the front yard, enough for many dozens. Rais remembered the smell attracting a queue of the hungry, who, when it was ready, were admitted through the gate—and allowed, when they asked, to take some for their families as well. On Thursdays, Rais’s grandfather Hassan Ali led the household through a ritual of self-purification and prayer. It was important to do it on that day,
Rais believed, because Thursdays were when the angels whom God sent to check on us beamed their reports skyward. The family performed ablutions, then sat in a circle listening to the grandfather speak from the hadith. They would rinse their hearts, as Rais liked to think of it, through whispered repetition of the dictum that there were no gods but theirs.

Little Rais was known to his family as Ripon. He was born in September 1973 and was the seventh of eight children, easily lost in the family bazaar. But he often behaved, even as a boy, as though in possession of a secret understanding that he was special, somehow marked—much as he came across in a story he told about his brother and the cadet college.

As Rais recounted it, one of his elder brothers had dreamed of studying at a prestigious military boarding school. But the Cadet College of Sylhet saw thousands of applications each year, and just a tiny fraction passed through the filters of the written, oral, and medical tests. Rais’s dada applied and failed. Rais remembered watching his mother dim with despair. The brother was a very good student, and if he couldn’t make it, the prospects of her whole flock became questionable.

“I don’t see who can do it,” she snapped one day.

Rais was too ambitious and too dutiful not to recognize an opportunity. “Mom, don’t give up,” he said. “I think I can do it.” He vowed to calm her by avenging his brother’s rejection. And this vow, as he narrated it, spoke of Rais’s emerging character: on one level, the sacrifice and self-denial, the willingness to shelve any plan and scale any mountain for the family; and, on another, his early intuition that the strings tying down others need not bind him. He was in the fourth grade.

Two years later, it was time to act on that old promise. Rais studied for the exams for as many as sixteen hours a day in searing heat, with two of the family’s fans deployed to cooling him. He attended a coaching class in the winter and stuffed himself full of
the lessons found in textbooks custom-made for aspiring cadets. He took the exam early in the new year. When at last the verdict came, it offered admission. Rais hoped the news would restore the family’s confidence.

“I remember the day I was selected, I told my mom, ‘Never give up. That my brother couldn’t do, that doesn’t mean that no one can do. You should not give up. You should try. I tried, and God helped me.’ ” These were Rais’s lessons from the incident: to try and try; and, no less, never to confuse the fate of others with his special own.

When he got into Sylhet, the first victory in his streak, his mother could have filled a teacup with her tears. They were of joy, but also of anxiety about her Ripon’s moving a full day’s train journey away. “You are happy; I am happy, too,” she said. “But I’m going to lose you.”

A
MONG THE COMPLICATIONS
of Rais’s approach to life was this: chasing a thing with such fervor could distract you from considering what the thing, once captured, would be like. On joining day at the Cadet College of Sylhet, in the spring of 1986, little twelve-year-old Rais sobbed. A seventh-grader and brand-new cadet was beginning to realize what he had committed to in trying to please his mother. Like a stack of old family letters, precious but without use, he would be lock-and-keyed away in this cupboard for six whole years. Rais’s dada, the rejected one, must have had his own complicated feelings about having to accompany Rais on the Surma Mail train to Sylhet, 150 miles to the northeast.

The cadet college was a universe unto itself, insulated from the larger country, with its own cinema, mosque, hospital, and dormitories—not to mention courts and fields for basketball, soccer, hockey, tennis, and volleyball. Its rituals were designed to harden boys and, equally, to apprise them of their mutual dependence. They awoke before six every
morning, starting out with calisthenics and a run on some days and mock military parades on others. After the younger boys went to class, their dorm rooms underwent inspection by the seniors, who made sure that bedsheets were tucked tightly-tightly under mattresses and shoes lined up heel to heel to heel. Failure on this score or various others brought swift and bracing punishment: perhaps frog jumps while holding your ankles, or push-ups in the hallway, or rolling yourself across an open soccer field. For the crime of speaking out of turn in the classroom, the penalty might be a tugged ear or thwacked buttock.

“Military school taught me lot of things: discipline, team-building, leadership, patience,” Rais said. He remembered everything being very precise. After classes and athletics, the boys had two hours, and only two, for homework. Then came dinnertime, to which they had to walk in formation, as Rais recalled it: “Not just walk on the street, holding hands or gossiping, chatting loudly—not like that. You go in a nice formation on the side of the street, where you walk in a line, and the leader”—typically, one of the seniors—“he makes sure the discipline is maintained and nobody makes any kind of chaos.”

In general, the cadets left the campus only on Thursday mornings, for a race of about three miles up Airport Road, past the small airfield, into some tame hills and back. Guards stood along the route to protect the future soldiers of a newly independent republic and to ensure that they weren’t making too much mischief.

Rais sought to be guarded in his self-admiration, but he made an exception for his prowess as a runner at Sylhet. “From grade seven, I used to always come at the beginning of the race,” he said. He still remembered the seniors taking wary note of a boy many years their junior finishing within a few feet of them: “It was amazing thing. They said, ‘Wow, this kid is something.’ ” Rais grew slightly embarrassed by his retelling: “I should not be talking more on this, but I got attention by that. From seventh grade to twelfth grade, I was always on the first row.”

He recalled with special fondness the day when he was in seventh grade and an eighth-grader injured himself and had to pull out of the 600-meter run. Somebody suggested Rais as a substitute, despite his relative youth. The cadets belonged to rival “houses,” which competed to accumulate points through the school year. Rais’s Shahjalal House needed him to come in fourth, fifth, or sixth to secure enough points to win the day. Rais convinced an eighth-grader in the race to take a junior under his wing and help him achieve that goal. The eighth-grader agreed, and so Rais followed him around the track for most of the race. On the homestretch, with the finish line drawing within sight, Rais decided to sprint, even as his eighth-grade buddy languished, “completely out of his stamina.”