The Reluctant Fundamentalist

  Our project at the cable company went on to end well—in the sense that we identified substantial cost savings and our client was pleased by the thoroughness of our valuation—but I was a nervous young man on the day of my December review. As it turned out, I need not have been so concerned. Two of the six analysts in my entering class—those ranked fifth and sixth—were indeed among the employees our firm let go. But I, Jim informed me, was once again ranked number one; I was, in fact, awarded a prorated bonus that, although not enormous by the standards of our profession, was still rather generous given the expectation of lean times ahead. It enabled me to pay off, in full, my outstanding student loans and put aside a few thousand as well. I should have been ecstatic, but earlier that week armed men had assaulted the Indian Parliament, and instead of celebrating my good fortune, I was confronting the possibility that soon my country could be at war.

  My mother told me not to come; my father said much the same. But with the help of a Seventh Avenue travel consolidator and my sudden ability to afford Business Plus class airfare on PIA, I found myself bound for Lahore at that time of year when New York shoppers busy themselves with the purchasing of last-minute presents and couples can be seen kissing on the streets as they drag beautiful little shrubs to their apartments for use as Christmas trees. I sat on the airplane next to a man who removed his shoes—much to my dismay—and who said, after praying in the aisle, that nuclear annihilation would not be avoided if it was God’s will, but God’s will in this matter was as yet unknown. He offered me a kindly smile, and I suspected that his purpose in making this remark was to reassure me.

  And with that, sir, the moment has come for us to eat! For Your own safety, I would suggest that you avoid this yoghurt and those chopped vegetables. What? No, no, I meant nothing sinister; your stomach might be upset by uncooked foods, that is all. If you insist, I will go as far as to sample each of the plates myself first, to reassure you that there is nothing to fear. Here. A piece of Warm bread, like so—ah, fresh from the clay oven—and I will begin.

  9.

  WILL THEY provide us with cutlery, you ask? I am certain, sir, that a fork can be found for you, but allow me to suggest that the time has now come for us to dirty our hands. We have, after all, spent some hours in each other’s company already; surely you can no longer feel the need to hold back. There is great satisfaction to be had in touching one’s prey; indeed, millennia of evolution ensure that manipulating our meals with our skin heightens our sense of taste—and our appetite, for that matter! I see you need no further convincing; your fingers are tearing the flesh of that kebab with considerable determination.

  There are adjustments one must make if one comes here from America; a different way of observing is required. I recall the Americanness of my own gaze when I returned to Lahore that winter when war was in the offing. I was struck at first by how shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its ceilings and dry bubbles of paint flaking off where dampness had entered its walls. The electricity had gone that afternoon, giving the place a gloomy air, but even in the dim light of the hissing gas heaters our furniture appeared dated and in urgent need of reupholstery and repair. I was saddened to find it in such a state—no, more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness.

  But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed; I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, and not just any foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country’s elite. This realization angered me; staring at my reflection in the speckled glass of my bathroom mirror I resolved to exorcise the unwelcome sensibility by which I had become possessed.

  It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm. Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda. It was far from impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. I wondered how I could ever have been so ungenerous—and so blind—to have thought otherwise, and I was disturbed by what this implied about myself: that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others.

  But far more significant than these inward-oriented musings of mine was the external reality of the threat facing my home. My brother had come to collect me from the airport; he embraced me with sufficient force to cause my rib cage to flex. As he drove he ruffled my hair with his hand. I felt suddenly very young—or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth. It had been some time since I had been touched so easily, so familiarly, and I smiled. “How are things?” I asked him. He shrugged. “There is an artillery battery dug in at the country house of a friend of mine, half an hour from here, and a colonel billeted in his spare bedroom,” he replied, “so things are not good.”

  My parents seemed well; they were more frail than when I had seen them last, but at their age that was to be expected with the passage of a year. My mother twirled a hundred-rupee note around my head to bless my return; later it would be given to charity. My father’s eyes glistened, moist and brown. “Contact lenses,” he said, dabbing them with a handkerchief, “quite smart, eh?” I said they suited him, and they did; his glasses had come late in life, and they had concealed the strength of his face. Neither he nor my mother wanted to discuss the possibility of war; they insisted on feeding me and hearing in detail about my life in New York and my progress at my new job. It was odd to speak of that world here, as it would be odd to sing in a mosque; what is natural in one place can seem unnatural in another, and some concepts travel rather poorly, if at all. I censored any mention of Erica, for example, and indeed of anything that I thought might disturb them.

  But that night a family banquet was held in my honor, and there the conflict with India dominated conversation. Opinion was divided as to whether the men who had attacked the Indian parliament had anything to do with Pakistan, but there was unanimity in the belief that India would do all it could to harm us, and that despite the assistance we had given America in Afghanistan, America would not fight at our side. Already, the Indian army was mobilizing, and Pakistan had begun to respond: convoys of trucks, I was told, were passing through the city, bearing supplies to our troops on the border; as we ate, we could hear the sounds of military helicopters flying low overhead; a rumor circulated that soon traffic would be halted on the motorway so that our fighter planes could practice landing on it, in case all of our airfields were destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

  It will perhaps be odd for you—coming, as you do, from a country that has not fought a war on its own soil in living memory, the rare sneak attack or terrorist outrage excepted—to imagine residing within commuting distance of a million or so hostile troops who could, at any moment, attempt a full-scale invasion. My brother cleaned his shotgun. One of my uncles stocked up on bottled water and canned food. Our part-time gardener was deployed with the reserves. But for the most part, people seemed to go about their lives normally; Lahore was the last major city in a contiguous swath of Muslim lands stretching west as far as Morocco and had therefore that quality of understated bravado characteristic of frontier towns.

  But I worried. I felt powerless; I was angry at our weakness, at our vulnerability to intimidation of this sort from our—admittedly much larger—neighbor to the east. Yes, we had nuclear weapons, and yes, our soldiers would not back down, but we were being threatened nonetheless, and there was nothing I could do about it but lie in my bed, unable to sleep. Indeed, I would soon be gone, leaving my family and my home behind, and this made me a kind of coward in my own eyes, a traitor. What sort of man abandon
s his people in such circumstances? And what was I abandoning them for? A well-paying job and a woman whom I longed for but who refused even to see me? I grappled with these questions again and again.

  When the time came for me to return to New York I told my parents I wanted to stay longer, but they would not hear of it. Perhaps they sensed that I was myself divided, that something called me back to America; perhaps they were simply protecting their son. “Do not forget to shave before you go,” my mother said to me. “Why?” I asked, indicating my father and brother. “They have beards.” “They,” she replied, “have them only because they wish to hide the fact that they are bald. Besides, you are still a boy.” She stroked my stubble with her fingers and added, “It makes you look like a mouse.”

  On the flight I noticed how many of my fellow passengers were similar to me in age: college students and young professionals, heading back after the holidays. I found it ironic; children and the elderly were meant to be sent away from impending battles, but in our case it was the fittest and brightest who were leaving, those who in the past would have been most expected to remain. I was filled with contempt for myself, such contempt that I could not bring myself to converse or to eat. I shut my eyes and waited, and the hours took from me the responsibility even to flee.

  You are not unfamiliar with the anxieties that precede armed conflict, you say? Aha! Then you have been in the service, sir, just as I suspected! Would you not agree that waiting for what is to come is the most difficult part? Yes, quite so, not as difficult as the time of carnage itself—said, sir, like a true soldier. But I see that you have paused in your eating; perhaps you are waiting for fresh bread. Here, have half of mine. No, I insist; our waiter will bring us more momentarily.

  Given your background, you will doubtless have experienced the peculiar phenomenon that is the return to an environment more or less at peace from one where the prospect of large-scale bloodshed is a distinct possibility. It is an odd transition. My colleagues greeted with considerable—although often partially suppressed—consternation my reappearance in our offices. For despite my mother’s request, and my knowledge of the difficulties it could well present me at immigration, I had not shaved my two-week-old beard. It was, perhaps, a form of protest on my part, a symbol of my identity, or perhaps I sought to remind myself of the reality I had just left behind; I do not now recall my precise motivations. I know only that I did not wish to blend in with the army of clean-shaven youngsters who were my coworkers, and that inside me, for multiple reasons, I was deeply angry.

  It is remarkable, given its physical insignificance—it is only a hairstyle, after all—the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen. More than once, traveling on the subway—where I had always had the feeling of seamlessly blending in—I was subjected to verbal abuse by complete strangers, and at Underwood Samson I seemed to become overnight a subject of whispers and stares. Wainwright tried to offer me some friendly advice. “Look, man,” he said, “I don’t know what’s up with the beard, but I don’t think it’s making you Mister Popular around here.” “They are common where I come from,” I told him. “Jerk chicken is common where I come from,” he replied, “but I don’t smear it all over my face. You need to be careful. This whole corporate collegiality veneer only goes so deep. Believe me.”

  I appreciated my friend’s concern, but I did not take his suggestion. Despite the layoffs, the utilization rate at our firm remained low in January, and I sat at my desk with little to do. I spent this time online, reading about the ongoing deterioration of affairs between India and Pakistan, the assessment by experts of the military balance in the region and likely scenarios for battle, and the negative impact the standoff was already beginning to have on the economies of both nations. I wondered how it was that America was able to wreak such havoc in the world—orchestrating an entire war in Afghanistan, say, and legitimizing through its actions the invasion of weaker states by more powerful ones, which India was now proposing to do to Pakistan—with so few apparent consequences at home.

  I also, after six weeks of attempting not to communicate with her, finally called Erica, and because her phone was constantly off, followed up by sending an email. I would like to claim my message was brief, a polite hello that was for the most part respectful of her request for silence, but in truth I spent many hours composing it and it was perhaps the lengthiest I have ever written. In it I told her of what had been happening in my life, both at work and at home, and the turmoil through which I was passing; I also told her how much I missed her and that I did not understand where or why she had gone. It was some days before she replied. “I’m at a sort of clinic,” she wrote, “an institution where people can recover themselves. I think of you, too.” She invited me to come and visit her; it would be easier for her to attempt to answer my questions face-to-face.

  The clinic was an afternoon’s drive from the city, a converted villa set in fifty acres of secluded countryside overlooking the Hudson River. I was greeted by a nurse in the reception area. “You must be Changez,” she said. “Erica has told me a lot about you.” “I am,” I said. “How did you know?” “Eyelashes like a Maybelline ad,” she replied, “that’s what she said.” As I considered this unlikely description, the nurse explained that Erica had been waiting for me but became a little nervous and went for a walk, asking the nurse to explain a few things on her behalf. “So she will not see me?” I asked. The nurse smiled. “Sure she will, honey,” she said, “but people get embarrassed sometimes when they’re in a place like this. She thinks it won’t be as awkward for you both if I talk to you first.” She patted my hand. Then she added, “I’m like the shower you take before you jump into a swimming pool.”

  What I had to understand about Erica, the nurse told me, was that she was in love with someone else. She knew it would be tough for me to hear, but I had to hear it regardless. It did not matter that the person Erica was in love with was what the nurse or I might call deceased; for Erica he was alive enough, and that was the problem: it was difficult for Erica to be out in the world, living the way the nurse or I might, when in her mind she was experiencing things that were stronger and more meaningful than the things she could experience with the rest of us. So Erica felt better in a place like this, separated from the rest of us, where people could live in their minds without feeling bad about it. “But eventually she will have to leave here,” I said. “Perhaps she will want to be with me then.” The nurse shook her head. “Maybe,” she said, “but right now you’re the hardest person for her to see. You’re the one who upsets her most. Because you’re the most real, and you make her lose her balance.”

  The nurse suggested I was likely to find Erica at the end of a path that wound through the wooded grounds, in a small copse on a hilltop. She was indeed there, sitting on a bench of rough-hewn timber. She wore a heavy jacket and turned at my approach; she was gaunt, her flesh seeming almost bruised where it passed over the bones of her face, and she glowed with something not unlike the fervor of the devout. She extended her hand, but instead of shaking it I kissed it, my lips touching the synthetic polymers of her winter glove. She smiled. “You look cute,” she said. “Your beard brings out your eyes.” I thought she looked like someone who was about to complete the month of fasting and had been too consumed by prayer and reading of the holy book to give sufficient thought to the nightly meal, but I did not say so.

  She offered me her arm and we strolled together, speaking softly; the mist of our breathing preceded us. “This is a good place for me right now,” she said. “I feel calm here.” “You seem calm,” I said, resisting the urge to add, too calm. “I’m sorry I’ve been hiding,” she said. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to see you. It’s just that I could see I was pulling you in, and I didn’t want you to get hurt. I thought it would be better for you like this.” “Why would I get hurt?” I asked. “It hurts when you care about someone and they go away,” she replied. “But where are you going?” I as
ked. She shrugged and did not answer.

  We walked on in silence but for the sound of snow crunching under our feet; my ears began to ache from the cold. “Do you write here?” I asked. “No,” she said, “not in the sense of putting stuff down. But I think a lot. I imagine.” “And do I sometimes figure in your imaginings?” I asked. “Sometimes,” she said, smiling. “Any fantasies of kinky sex,” I said, “with an exotic foreigner given to role-playing?” She laughed and squeezed my arm; for the first time her face seemed to soften, to become almost vulnerable. But then she again receded inside herself. “You helped me,” she said. “You were kind and true, and I’m grateful.”

  It was the certainty with which she placed me in the past tense that struck me most about her statement. I felt hope being quenched within me, and although I said, “Do not be grateful, be lustful—come back to New York with me,” I said it without that core of conviction that gives words their power; she leaned her head momentarily against my shoulder, but she was not compelled to respond. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as we made our way to the main building together, wondering how much of her detached and seemingly ascetic state was a consequence of the medication she was consuming. For a moment, I was seized by the wild notion of abducting her and taking her away with me in my rental car; surely my ministrations would be more productive in restoring her to reality than the chemicals she was subjecting herself to here. But the absurdity—and disrespect to her—of such an act was immediately obvious to me, and I did nothing of the sort.

  “Do you know how to ski?” she asked me. “No,” I said, “I have never been.” “Chris and I,” she said, “used to go every winter—Colorado, usually, or once in a while Vermont. We even did a little cross-country together in Central Park, when we were kids. We each got a pair as a present and we snuck out with them without telling anyone. We got into trouble. Our parents called the police. It was fun, though. Anyway, this place reminds me of that. Especially the snow on that slope. It’s so gentle and it seems so soft. You should go sometime.” We had reached the gravel of the driveway. “You should take me,” I said. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said, “but you should still go. Try to be happy, okay? I’m sorry about everything. Please take care of yourself.”