The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Nothing physical happened between Erica and me in Greece; we did not so much as hold hands. But she gave me her number in New York, to which we were both returning, and she offered to help me settle in. For my part, I was content: I had struck up an acquaintance with a woman with whom I was well and truly smitten, and my excitement about the adventures my new life held for me had never been more pronounced.

  But what is that? Ah, your mobile phone! I have not previously seen its like; it is, I suspect, one of those models capable of communicating via satellite when no ground coverage is available. Will you not answer it? I assure you, sir, I will do my utmost to avoid eavesdropping on your conversation. But you are opting to write a text message instead; very wise: often a few words are more than sufficient. As for myself, I am quite happy to wait as you navigate the keys. After all, those girls from the National College of Arts have only just finished their tea, and the pleasure of their presence on this street will persist for a few moments longer before they disappear—as inevitably they must—from view around that corner.

  3.

  WE LOCALS treasure these last days of what passes for spring here in Lahore; the sun, although hot, has such a soothing effect. Or, I should say, it has such a soothing effect on us, for you, sir, continue to appear ill at ease. I hope you will not mind my saying so, but the frequency and purposefulness with which you glance about—a steady tick-tick-tick seeming to beat in your head as you move your gaze from one point to the next—brings to mind the behavior of an animal that has ventured too far from its lair and is now, in unfamiliar surroundings, uncertain whether it is predator or prey!

  Come, relinquish your foreigner’s sense of being watched. Observe instead how the shadows have lengthened. Soon they will shut to traffic the gates at either end of this market, transforming Old Anarkali into a pedestrian-only piazza. In fact, they have begun. Will the police arrest those boys on their motor scooter? Only if they can catch them! And already they are streaking away, making good their escape. But they will be the last to do so. The gates are now being locked, as you can see, and those gaps that remain are too narrow for anything wider than a man.

  You will have noticed that the newer districts of Lahore are poorly suited to the needs of those who must walk. In their spaciousness—with their public parks and wide, tree-lined boulevards—they enforce an ancient hierarchy that comes to us from the countryside: the superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot. But here, where we sit, and in the even older districts that lie between us and the River Ravi—the congested, mazelike heart of this city—Lahore is more democratically urban. Indeed, in these places it is the man with four wheels who is forced to dismount and become part of the crowd.

  Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely! And that was one of the reasons why for me moving to New York felt—so unexpectedly—like coming home. But there were other reasons as well: the fact that Urdu was spoken by taxicab drivers; the presence, only two blocks from my East Village apartment, of a samosa- and channa-serving establishment called the Pak-Punjab Deli; the coincidence of crossing Fifth Avenue during a parade and hearing, from loudspeakers mounted on the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Association float, a song to which I had danced at my cousin’s wedding.

  In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker. What? My voice is rising? You are right; I tend to become sentimental when I think of that city. It still occupies a place of great fondness in my heart, which is quite something, I must say, given the circumstances under which, after only eight months of residence, I would later depart.

  Certainly, much of my early excitement about New York was wrapped up in my excitement about Underwood Samson. I remember my sense of wonder on the day I reported for duty. Their offices were perched on the forty-first and forty-second floors of a building in midtown—higher than any two structures here in Lahore would be if they were stacked one atop the other—and while I had previously flown in airplanes and visited the Himalayas, nothing had prepared me for the drama, the power of the view from their lobby. This, I realized, was another world from Pakistan; supporting my feet were the achievements of the most technologically advanced civilization our species had ever known.

  Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.

  But not on that day. On that day, I did not think of myself as a Pakistani, but as an Underwood Samson trainee, and my firm’s impressive offices made me proud. I wished I could show my parents and my brother! I stood still, taking in the vista, but not for long; soon after our arrival we entering analysts were marched into a conference room for our orientation presentation. There a vice president by the name of Sherman—his head gleaming from a recent shave—laid out the ethos of our new outfit.

  “We’re a meritocracy,” he said. “We believe in being the best. You were the best candidates at the best schools in the country. That’s what got you here. But meritocracy doesn’t stop with recruiting. We’ll rank you every six months. You’ll know your rankings. Your bonuses and staffing will depend on them. If you do well, you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t, you’ll be out the door. It’s that simple. You’ll have your first rankings at the end of this training program.”

  Simple indeed. I glanced about me to see how my fellow trainees were responding. There were five of them, in addition to myself, and four sat rigidly at attention; the fifth, a chap called Wainwright, was more relaxed. Twirling his pen between his fingers in a fashion reminiscent of Val Kilmer in Top Gun, he leaned towards me and whispered, “No points for second place, Maverick.” “You’re dangerous, Ice Man,” I replied—attempting to approximate a naval aviator’s drawl—and the two of us exchanged a grin.

  But aside from light-hearted banter of this kind, there would be little in the way of fun and games at the workplace. For the next four weeks, our days followed a consistent routine. In the mornings we had a three-hour seminar: one of a series of modules that attempted to abridge an entire year of business school. We were taught by professors from the most prestigious institutions—a Wharton woman, for example, instructed us in finance—and the results of the tests we were administered were carefully recorded.

  Lunch was taken in the cafeteria; over chicken-pesto-in-sun-dried-tomato wraps we observed the assured urgency with which our seniors conducted themselves. Afterwards we attended a workshop intended to familiarize us with computer programs such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Access. We spent this class sitting in a semicircle around a soft-spoken instructor who looked like a librarian; Wainwright dubbed it our “Microsoft Family Time.”

  And finally, in the late afternoon we were divided into two teams of three for what Sherman referred to as “soft skills training.” These sessions involved role-playing real-life situations, such as dealing with an irate client or an uncooperative chief financial officer. We were taught to recognize another person’s style of thought, harness their agenda, and redirect it to achieve our desired outcome; indeed one might describe it as a form of mental judo for business.

  I see you are impressed by the thoroughness of our training. I was as well. It was a testament to the systematic pragmatism—call it professionalism—that underpins your country’s success in so many fields. At Princeton, learning was imbued with an aura of creativity; at Underwood Samson, creativity was not excised—it was still present and valued—but it ceded its primacy to efficiency. Maximum return was the
maxim to which we returned, time and again. We learned to prioritize—to determine the axis on which advancement would be most beneficial—and then to apply ourselves single-mindedly to the achievement of that objective.

  But these musings of mine are perhaps rather dry! I do not mean to imply that I did not enjoy my initiation to the realm of high finance. On the contrary, I did. I felt empowered, and besides, all manner of new possibilities were opening up to me. I will give you an example: expense accounts. Do you know how exhilarating it is to be issued a credit card and told that your company will pick up the tab for any ostensibly work-related meal or entertainment? Forgive me: of course you do; you are here, after all, on business. But for me, at the age of twenty-two, this experience was a revelation. I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink—an activity classified as “new hire cultivation”—and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day!

  As you can imagine, we new hires availed ourselves of the opportunity to cultivate one another on a regular basis. I remember the first night we did so; we went to the bar at the Royalton, on Forty-Fourth Street. Sherman came with us on this occasion and ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate our induction. I looked around as we raised our glasses in a toast to ourselves. Two of my five colleagues were women; Wainwright and I were non-white. We were marvelously diverse…and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.

  It struck me then—no, I must be honest, it strikes me now—that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable. Perhaps something similar had occurred to Wainwright, for he winked and said to me, rather presciently as it would turn out, “Beware the dark side, young Sky-walker.” He had a penchant for quoting lines from popular cinema, much as my mother quoted the poems of Faiz and Ghalib. But I suspect Wainwright made this particular allusion to Star Wars mostly in jest, for immediately afterwards he, like I—like all of us, for that matter—drank heartily.

  Sherman left when the champagne was done, but he told us to continue to our hearts’ content and to charge our bill to Underwood Samson. We did so, staggering out into the street around midnight. Wainwright and I shared a cab downtown. “Hey man,” he said, “do you get cricket?” I asked him what he meant. “My dad’s nuts about it,” he said. “He’s from Barbados. West Indies versus Pakistan”—and here he slipped into a Caribbean lilt—“best damn test match I ever saw.” I laughed. “That must have been in the eighties,” I said. “Neither team is quite so good now.”

  We were both hungry, and I suggested we stop at the Pak-Punjab Deli. The man behind the counter recognized me; he had given me a free meal that morning when I mentioned it was my first day of work. “My friend,” he said, spreading his arms in welcome. “Jenaab,” I replied, bowing my head, “do you never go home?” “Not enough,” he said. “This time I insist on paying,” I told him, unsheathing my credit card and leaning forward—both conspiratorially and drunkenly—to add, “I have an expense account.” He shook his head and informed me, to the visible amusement of the exhausted cabdrivers present, that he was sorry, and I could always pay later if I did not have the money, but he did not accept American Express.

  Although we were speaking in Urdu, Wainwright seemed to understand. “I have cash,” he said. “This stuff looks delicious.” I was pleased he thought so; our food, as you have surely gathered in your time here, is something we Lahoris take great pride in. Moreover, it is a mark of friendship when someone treats you to a meal—ushering you thereby into a relationship of mutual generosity—and by the time fifteen minutes later that I saw Wainwright licking his fingers, having dispatched the last crumb on his plate, I knew I had found a kindred spirit at the office.

  But why do you recoil? Ah yes, this beggar is a particularly unfortunate fellow. One can only wonder what series of accidents could have left him so thoroughly disfigured. He draws close to you because you are a foreigner. Will you give him something? No? Very wise; one ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom. What am I doing? I am handing him a few rupees—misguidedly, of course, and out of habit. There, he offers us his prayers for our well-being; now he is on his way.

  I was telling you about Wainwright. Over the following weeks, it became clear that he was in strong contention for the top position in our rankings. All of us analyst trainees were competitive by nature—we had to have been for us to have acquired the grades necessary for consideration by Underwood Samson—but Wainwright was less overtly so; he was genial and irreverent, and was as a consequence almost universally well-liked. But there was no doubt in my mind that my friend was also extremely talented: his presentations were remarkably clear; he excelled in our interpersonal exercises; and he had an instinct for identifying what mattered most in a business case.

  I hope you will not think me immodest when I say that I, too, stood out from the pack. I retained from my soccer-playing days a sort of controlled aggression—not belligerence, mind you, but determination—and I harnessed this to my desire to succeed. How so? Well, I worked hard—harder, I suspect, than any of the others: subsisting on only a few hours of sleep a night—and I approached every class with utter concentration. My tenacity was frequently commented upon, with approval, by our instructors. Moreover, my natural politeness and sense of formality, which had sometimes been a barrier in my dealings with my peers, proved perfectly suited to the work context in which I now found myself.

  I have subsequently wondered why my mannerisms so appealed to my senior colleagues. Perhaps it was my speech: like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony, and it stands to reason, therefore, that an Anglicized accent may in your country continue to be associated with wealth and power, just as it is in mine. Or perhaps it was my ability to function both respectfully and with self-respect in a hierarchical environment, something American youngsters—unlike their Pakistani counterparts—rarely seem trained to do. Whatever the reason, I was aware of an advantage conferred upon me by my foreignness, and I tried to utilize it as much as I could.

  My high estimation of Wainwright’s and my performance was confirmed when we trainees were divided into two groups of three for our drive to the annual summer party. One group, including Wainwright and me, rode in a limousine with Jim, the managing director who had hired us; the other group rode with Sherman, who, as a vice president, was more junior in the Underwood Samson pantheon. Since nothing at our firm happened by chance, we all knew this was a sign.

  With us in the limousine were some associates and a vice president from one of Jim’s teams. Everyone began to chat—everyone, that is, except Jim and myself. Jim observed the conversation in silence. Then he glanced in my direction, and I had to avert my eyes so he did not catch me observing him. But he continued to look at me in his steady, penetrating manner until eventually he said, “You’re a watchful guy. You know where that comes from?” I shook my head. “It comes from feeling out of place,” he said. “Believe me. I know.”

  The party was being held at Jim’s house in the Hamptons, a magnificent property that made me think of The Great Gatsby. It was beside the beach—on a rise behind a protective ridge of sand dunes—and it had a swimming pool, a tennis court, and an open-sided white pavilion erected at one end of the lawn for drinking and dancing. A swing band struck up as we arrived, and I could smell steak and lobster being thrown on a grill. Wainwright seemed very much in his element: he took one of the associates by the arm and soon they were twirling to the beat of the music. The rest of us watched from the sidelines, cocktails in hand.

  After a while, I stepped outside the pavilion for some air. The sun had set, and I could see the lights of other houses twinkling in the dista
nce along the curve of the shore. The waves were whispering as they came in, causing me to recall being in Greece not long ago. The sea had always seemed far away to me, luxurious and full of adventure; now it was becoming almost a regular part of my life. How much had changed in the four years since I had left Lahore!

  “I remember my first Underwood Samson summer party,” a voice said behind me. I turned; it was Jim. He contined, “It was a gorgeous evening, like this one. Barbecue going, music playing. Reminded me of Princeton for some reason, of how I felt when I got there. I figured, I wouldn’t mind having a place out in the Hamptons myself one day.” I smiled; Jim made one feel he could hear one’s thoughts. “I know what you mean,” I said. Jim let his gaze wander out over the water, and for a time we stood together in silence. Then he said, “You hungry?” “Yes,” I replied. “Good,” he said approvingly, and with that he tapped me on either shoulder with the blade of his hand—an odd, deliberate gesture—and led me back inside.

  I found myself wishing during the course of the evening that Erica were there. You wondered what had become of her? No, I had not forgotten; she was very much a part of my life in New York, and I shall return to her shortly. For the moment, though, I wanted only to mention in passing that Jim’s house was so splendid, I thought even she might be impressed. And that, as you will come to understand, is saying a great deal.

  A week later, when the analyst training program came to an end, Jim called us one by one to his office. “So,” he asked me, “how do you think you did?” “Fairly well,” I replied. He laughed. “You did better than fairly well,” he said. “You’re number one in your class. Your instructors say you’ve got a bit of the warrior in you. Don’t be ashamed of that. Nurture it. It can take you a long way.” I was enormously pleased, but I did not know what to say. “I’ve got a project coming up,” Jim went on. “Music business. Philippines. Want to be on it?” “I certainly do,” I said. “Thank you.”