LOVE IN A TIME
OF
COMMUNICATION

Javed has three hours to kill before his appointment with the divisional engineer for phones. At eight this morning he arrived at the local telephone exchange, and for the first time in several visits succeeded in paying the registration clerk fifty rupees, after which he paid the peon at the front gate another twenty, which got him entrée into the main offices. Then he was able to pay the recording clerk fifty more rupees, and so on along the chain until at eleven he saw an assistant to the divisional engineer, who got him the coveted appointment with the divisional engineer himself.

It’s been three years since he applied for a phone line. For himself, he doesn’t mind so much not having a phone, but with elderly parents at home, he’d like them to be able to call him at work in case there’s an emergency. They suffer from nothing worse than arthritis and stomach disorders, but one can never be too careful.

It’s the last day of his one-week of vacation for the year. He’s lucky to get any time off; people who don’t work for multinational corporations can’t dream of such privileges. He gets insurance at little cost for his motorcycle, which he doesn’t mind driving the twenty miles to work. General Tires also offers insurance that lets him have his parents see doctors at private hospitals. Last year, when Javed needed a hundred thousand rupees to round out his only sister’s dowry, the company helped him get a loan. It’ll be a long time before he pays it off, but it saved him.

In the corridor outside the divisional engineer’s office is a row of potted plants, which he’s already seen watered twice. A maali goes around taking care of the flora inside the dark building, while the plants and trees in the courtyard and outside the building don’t seem worth his attention.

Javed sits on an uncomfortable wooden stool, with nothing to rest his arms on. A white ceiling fan whirls slowly, causing no air to stir. Unlike other government buildings where the din of small children is a constant backdrop driving him insane, here business is conducted quietly. He wonders if dressing well—he has his red tie on, and his new black shoes—will make the divisional engineer expect a bigger bribe to grant a phone connection.

Across from Javed sits an unremarkable-looking young woman, a string tightly tying her head covering. It’s not a burqa by any means, but a token veil of modesty for someone without a fanatical mind. Her sky blue kameez and white churidar pajama are cloaked in a loose black tunic, another concession to modesty. She has a long nose, what looks like a bruise on one cheek, and weepy eyes. In his constant state of sexual agitation, Javed would expect himself to give more than a cursory look to this woman, especially because she is alone, but recently he’s promised himself to suppress predatory thoughts.

A woman named Feroza, who used to be the personal secretary of his former supervisor at the company, has been the bane of his existence lately. Educated at convent school, she spoke flawless English. Her parents were disengaged from her life, and she had no flock of irresponsible siblings or manipulative relatives to worry about. She wasn’t a beauty by normal standards—the wart by her nose, and her unusually arched eyebrows, took care of that—but Javed found her most attractive.

They’d started congregating with the same group of people at the company cafeteria for lunch and tea, then progressed to visiting Clifton beach and the amusement parks on weekends. Feroza spoke of her desire to settle down with a respectable, educated man, one who would tolerate her own career interests, and Javed interpreted that as a strong signal of interest in him. But she was only testing—or teasing—him, because at the end of a long courtship, she announced flatly in the cafeteria, in front of other people, that she was going to be engaged to the physically handicapped son of a family friend. Javed hadn’t spoken to her since, and hadn’t flinched when news came through the grapevine that Feroza had resigned from the company.

Javed catches the woman across from him staring. He looks back. She seems about to begin a conversation with him when a fidgety older man, shrunk as a dried shrimp, shuffles up to her, and starts complaining in a high-pitched voice about how they’re being given the runaround again, and about the futility of waiting for the divisional engineer.

“Do you need a phone urgently?” Javed asks the newcomer, keeping his gaze focused on the woman.

The man isn’t sure for a moment if he should reply. Then animation floods his face. “Oh yes, a phone is of the utmost necessity in these times. Without it, no personal or commercial business can be transacted. It’s of the utmost necessity.”

He wanders into a rambling narration assessing dependence on modern technology, both praising and denigrating it. Javed looks from time to time at the girl, who seems bored by her companion’s disquisition. Is he her father? Perhaps an uncle.

“Manager sahib will see you now.” The imperious announcement comes from a pagree-wearing chowkidar, with rounds of ammunition and a rifle attached to his beige tunic.

The young woman’s chaperone stops speaking in mid-sentence and starts walking toward the open door of the office, but the chowkidar halts him with open palm, and points to Javed instead. “Him.”

Javed is cursing the malignant forces ruling the world as he rides at breakneck speed along Shahrah-e-Faisal to get to Gulshan-e-Iqbal. Twice he has barely avoided ramming into the rears of minibuses, as the drivers of the monstrous vehicles have slammed their brakes without warning.

It’s a hot Sunday morning, and he’s headed to the home of Mr. Majeed, the man who turned out to be the uncle of the morose girl at the telephone exchange. Except he no longer thinks of her so dismissively. The fantasy has built up over the last two weeks of anticipation. In his mind, she’s now a failed romantic of the first order, someone who would easily drop out of her master’s program in English literature to take care of sick parents, someone who was once beautiful and sassy but now shows the cares of the world in the changes marking her face. Who was it that said you could tell a person’s biography by the face? Mr. Majeed, vocal and self-centered at the telephone exchange, now seems to Javed a benevolent older person doing his part for the happiness of the younger generation.

Javed’s parents say they’re delighted he was able to get the phone connection so easily, although he suspects they’re just saying that to make him feel good. The connection hasn’t been turned on yet, but a technician is supposed to visit any day now to start wiring. He’ll need a small bribe, but it’ll be nothing compared to what divisional engineers expect from customers. The divisional engineer Javed met had engaged in chitchat, telling Javed about his cousin who also worked at General Tires, letting him in on some scandals that Javed hadn’t been aware of in his own company. Then he signed Javed’s dog-eared original application from years ago and pronounced, “Show this to the clerk at the front desk. You’ll have your phone in a matter of days.” He stood up to shake Javed’s hand briskly.

As Javed went out of the office, so did the chowkidar, who’d been lurking in the background. The chowkidar told the waiting man and woman—Mr. Majeed and his niece Masooma—to come back another time, since the divisional engineer was through for the day. Mr. Majeed launched into a condemnation of government officers who were really the servants of the people, whose salaries came from hardworking folks like himself, but who acted as if they were lords and honest citizens serfs without rights. Javed could tell that Mr. Majeed was saying these things only because they were expected of him; to go away without uttering a complaint would have made him lose face. The lack of real anger in Mr. Majeed pleased Javed.

As they left the building, they fell into conversation, Masooma trailing politely behind. Before long Mr. Majeed was asking Javed to lunch at his home. Javed assumed this was about him and Masooma, and the girl would undoubtedly be present.

While Mr. Majeed was cranking up his old white Daihatsu, Javed probed Masooma’s face, but couldn’t read her reaction to the plans.

“How much did the divisional engineer want?” Mr. Majeed rolled down the window of his car to ask the final question.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

A flicker of a smile crossed Masooma’s lips as she nodded at him from the back of the car.

Since that triumphant moment, his days and nights have been full of speculation. His limbs feel strong as he maneuvers the motorcycle around potholes and fallen branches and burnt tires and donkey crap along the narrow streets of Gulshan that lead to Mr. Majeed’s house.

He’s greeted by Mr. Majeed’s wife, Sabira, an unexpectedly modern woman with a fashionable bob, no dupatta, and revealing yellow shalwar kameez. Javed dares to imagine she isn’t wearing a bra underneath, but is pinched by a feeling of disloyalty toward Mr. Majeed, his benefactor, and stops pursuing that line of thought.

Mr. Majeed turns out to have once been a prize-winning journalist for the leading Urdu newspaper, until clashes with his editors became too aggravating for both sides, and he quit in a blaze of glory. His colleagues from the paper recall him as one of the few who refused to fall into the trap of self-censorship, even when it came to news where the average person could easily distinguish the embellishments of the state. For the last fifteen years, Mr. Majeed has been an advertising freelancer, offering his services to foreign advertising agencies that need translators, valuing his mastery of local idioms and trends. Mr. Majeed complains about the dull life of an advertising “medium,” as he calls himself, but Javed detects no real tone of disenfranchisement.

Masooma is not in evidence. Yet the elaborate preparation—he can smell kebabs and biryani from the kitchen—must be to bring the two together. A young man like himself, with a decent job and education, shouldn’t have to be in this position. But General Tires is not the place to meet life partners. He’s never heard of a couple of his class and standing who’ve met at work, then married. At most, short-lived affairs ensue. The best women, women you expect to come through during crises and failures, are hidden away, out of sight except for the precious few who know them. Maybe Masooma is such a person.

Mr. Majeed is in no hurry to get lunch started. His inspiration for journalism, he tells Javed, was the war of 1965, when both parties told blatant lies. “War propaganda is only the extreme form of propaganda. Everything is propaganda.”

Mr. Majeed’s trendy, secular wife joins them in the living room. Sabira seems to be a woman who can rapidly dispose of cooking or other onerous chores. She scratches her knees, occasionally correcting Mr. Majeed’s recollection of figures and dates. No children are in evidence. It’s getting late. Lunch hour is long past.

It’s been difficult to get a day off, but Javed is able to swing it when his supervisor agrees to let him come in on Saturday to catch up. Javed is riding to the telephone exchange on another weekday morning.

General Tires has been abuzz with activity since it’s been announced that the military will be contracting with the company for its needs, rather than importing directly from abroad. Newly minted American MBAs have been prowling the company headquarters, in search of inefficiencies and vulnerabilities. Javed has talked to a couple of them, in the cafeteria, where they hang around and talk loudly to complete strangers, as though they’re at a party, not the workplace. They seem stupid and ignorant about local conditions.

A couple of months have gone by, and the technician who should have hooked up the phone line has never shown up. Javed’s parents have said they don’t care about the phone one way or the other, but it’s become a matter of pride with Javed. At work, everyone—even those far lower on the seniority scale than him—has a phone. Feroza had two phone lines.

Mr. Majeed calls him once a week at work. He got a phone line at home by asking the head of one of the advertising companies he works for to facilitate it. It took only a week that way.

From Mr. Majeed, Javed learns that Masooma had been invited to Mr. Majeed’s house for lunch that day, and she’d agreed, but backed out at the last minute. Masooma says she has to deal with an unresolved situation: a broken engagement, without the loose ends tied up. The match had been the idea of her mother, Mr. Majeed’s sister, a woman with a history of bad decisions. Masooma’s intended was once a versifier for the People’s Party. That told you all you needed to know about him. He’s been working on his doctorate in sociology at Karachi University for many years. After getting cold feet shortly before the wedding, he’s again making advances toward Masooma. To Mr. Majeed’s surprise, the jilted Masooma is listening. There’s no question about it, she should dismiss the dishonorable man at once.

In this way, Javed has assumed something of a similar role as that of Mr. Majeed in relation to Masooma: interested older observer, wishing the best for her, hoping and praying, but knowing deep down that the case is lost, because young women, headstrong and fed on Western ideas, will do what they want. But Mr. Majeed has dropped enough tantalizing hints about Masooma to keep Javed interested. She’s been a champion runner. She’s made the quickest recovery from a serious case of TB Mr. Majeed has ever heard of, through force of will. His wife Sabira has convinced him that Masooma is an essayist of the highest caliber, able to break down the nuances of Iqbal’s poetry like an accomplished metaphysician, although Mr. Majeed hasn’t been able to make Masooma show him her writings.

The promise is hanging in the air that there’ll be another attempt at a meeting soon. Javed imagines calling Masooma from home and talking to her for hours every night, once his parents have gone to sleep. They could recite poetry to each other. Tell one another their most secret dreams and fears. But then the visage of Masooma’s jilting lover looms up—Javed imagines him looking unsavory like a hippie but also handsome like a nineteenth-century North Indian prince—and destroys his vision.

The traffic on the city streets is worse than usual. There’s a new restlessness among the bus and cab and rickshaw drivers, as though they’re assured of imminent destruction—nuclear annihilation or something of that order—and don’t care if they kill pedestrians on their way to wherever they’re flying. Rude curses flow from the mouths of well-dressed men and women, even the elderly.

He imagines Masooma clutching his back with her small hands while he rides the motorcycle at exhilarating speed. She’s fearless behind him. Her beautiful red-hued hair flies in the wind, attracting passersby who envy the young couple. Her hair, when the odious covering is removed for good, as Javed will surely coax her into doing, turns out to be her most alluring feature. When they ride on the wide boulevards toward Clifton beach or Manora island, she sings mehndi songs in an affectionate voice, songs he vaguely knows because they saturate the air, but whose every word Masooma remembers.

In the middle of this sweet dream, Javed is nearly run over by a speeding minibus, whose driver shouts ethnic slurs at him, while the passengers in the bus appear happy at Javed’s humiliation, malicious grins on their faces.

When he arrives at the telephone exchange, he’s confronted by a line stretching to the end of the street. Flies buzz over garbage piles, and women in burqas with unruly children try to keep them away from the filth. The clerk at the registration desk, instead of the usual pleading by the customer, followed by bargaining for the bribe, says apathetically, “Hundred rupees to go inside.” Javed is so furious he shells out the cash without protest.

Inside the exchange, the rates for all the entry points have been doubled. He pays silently. When he makes it to the corridor outside the divisional engineer’s office, he realizes he’s left at home the slip of paper with instructions for the technician to hook up his connection. No matter, the divisional engineer will recall him.

He waits outside like before, almost expecting Masooma to appear with Mr. Majeed. The only other customers waiting are a pair of fat, bald brothers in their forties, who sing Punjabi wedding songs, challenging each other for exact memory of the words.

Javed plans on telling the divisional engineer about the goings-on at General Tires, how the foolish American technocrats are clueless about local business culture. Money is not always the greatest motivator for Pakistani businesspeople. But for the visitors, everything is quantifiable. Javed laughs, recalling the blank faces of the Americans, empty of any signs of wisdom or worry, and smoothes the knees of his pants. He hasn’t ironed carefully enough.

“You can’t see the divisional engineer.” The chowkidar from before seems to spit in his face.

“I can’t? Why can’t I? I’ve been here for hours.”

“Your original file has some problem. It was discarded. You’ll have to start the process over again. Go down to registration and get a new application. Twenty rupees.”

Javed isn’t sure if the twenty rupees is the amount he’s supposed to pay for the application downstairs, or if it’s payment for the chowkidar’s information.

“I must see the divisional engineer.” Javed names him, as if it were a talisman.

The chowkidar smiles. “He’s been transferred to the downtown exchange. A long-awaited promotion. We have a new divisional engineer now. He’s foreign-trained. You won’t be able to get anything past him. Fix your application.”

The chowkidar turns around to disappear into the office.

Javed doesn’t even get to his motorcycle, before deciding the phone isn’t worth it. Had he not been trained well by his uncomplaining parents, he would have pitied the idiots standing in line to get their phones, suffering the heat and flies.

THE ABSESS
OF

THE WORLD

“Tea?” Maulana Haroon asked David, and without waiting for an answer, commanded an unseen factotum in the adjoining room, “Bring some tea!” It would be David’s fifth or sixth cup of the day, but to say no to a host was unimaginable. He was glad he didn’t have to pick from a baffling menu as in America. It was plain old milky tea each time, though the more adventurous added cinnamon sticks or cardamom pods.

“So you come seeking—shall we say—information of a certain kind?” asked Maulana. “The type you can’t get from books?”

“That’s correct.”

Maulana had been prepped about David’s motive in wanting to see him this afternoon at the Baghpati Madrassa in Korangi, an industrial area of Karachi. David had gone through layers of deputies and administrators and secretaries, quite like making an appointment with a Princeton professor popular in Washington, D.C. or on the talk show circuit. Each layer, however, had been progressively easier to penetrate. They’d have a good bit of time between Zuhr and Asr prayers to go over David’s questions.

“Your Princeton professors have run out of things to tell you?”

Maulana cracked a laugh, and David smiled along, although it made him uncomfortable. He respected his teachers back home. It wasn’t that they’d exhausted their fund of knowledge. That was hardly the case. But he did hunger for immediacy, to be able to localize bits of knowledge in their authentic context. Words on paper were fine, but he wanted to experience first-hand the sweat and tears of people whose lives gave the words meaning. You had to be a believer first, to penetrate the reality of a text, or at least get close enough to true believers.

“There’s something to be said for the direct student-teacher relationship,” David clarified.

He’d made it sound as if Princeton didn’t have a distinguished tutoring system. What he’d meant was that he wanted a teacher to push him beyond the limits of his imagination—Maulana Haroon may not be the one, but someone had to do this before he turned twenty-two—unlike his Princeton professors who were gentle with him as though breaking in a homely virgin in the antebellum South.

“Indeed there is,” Maulana nodded.

A nattily attired boy, about ten, sporting a Michael Jackson T-shirt and baggy Calvin Klein jeans, matched with a Beatles moptop, walked in with the tea. He had a front tooth missing, which made him look all the more endearing. He smiled shyly at David.

“Hello there,” David said. “What’s your name?”

“Iqbal,” Maulana interjected. “My son. My only son. He wants to go to America as soon as he passes the A levels.”

“What’s your favorite subject?” This was a ritual question in Pakistan. Even adults were always being asked what their favorite subject was, as though everyone were an autodidact, pursuing botany or calculus after the kids were seen off to school or the day’s insurance sales quota was filled.

“Islamiyat,” Iqbal said, hesitating

“The study of Islam. He feels obliged to say this, because I’m his father, and a well-known ustad, but it’s not true. What’s really your favorite subject?”

“I want to be a musician.” Iqbal smiled goofily at David. “Have you ever met Michael Jackson?” Iqbal had only a soft accent. He probably watched a lot of American television on Star TV and other satellite channels. Perhaps he took private lessons from a tutor with the right accent, a much sought-after service in this country.

“Michael Jackson? No, but I did meet Madonna once. In a bookstore, signing her children’s book. I’m not sure if it was a book with pictures or just words.”

“Does everyone in America know how to sing and dance?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I’m really bad.”

“The young man is here on business,” Maulana said gently. “We shouldn’t keep him with this chitchat.”

“That’s all right, I don’t mind.”

Iqbal settled down next to Maulana, crossing his legs in the classic position, which David hadn’t mastered despite practicing in front of the mirror at his hosts’ house in Defense Housing Society. Maulana patted Iqbal’s head. Iqbal became silent, invisible, unlike an American boy his age. David’s theory professors talked up the androgynous ideal, but how would they react if they saw Pakistani middle-class girls rebuking servants in public and going toe-to-toe with men in political debate, or Pakistani boys holding hands and showing affection toward each other? In Pakistan, the gender-bending seemed unintentional, pervasive, integrated in normal behavior.

David could see the chirping sparrows lined up on the ancient trees in the courtyard. All day, the different species of birds kept up a competitive medley. The sputter of the rickshaw, the pleading of the vegetable seller, and the wail of the muezzin meant that there was never a moment of silence.

Maulana, also sitting cross-legged on his soft white cushion spread, had the comfortable bearing of someone used to authority from an early age. The books lining the shelves of his visiting room were the usual suspects: Tabari and Ibn Katheer and Maududi’s tafseers of the Qur’an, the Sahih Bukhari and Muslim collections of hadith, and the well-known compilations of fiqh, particularly from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s time. The madrassas followed the Dars-e-Nizami, established in India in the eighteenth century, and closely adhering to the medieval curriculum. Instead of modern astronomy and chemistry, they studied the musings of ninth- and tenth-century Arab scholars, as though Baghdad were still the intellectual capital of the world.

The only unexpected items on the shelves were commentaries by Ibn Taymiyah, the thirteenth-century Wahhabi scholar, the puritan whose thought had set off wave after wave of fanatic repression on the Arabian peninsula. In South Asia, two schools of thought competed for dominance. The Barvelvis, closer to pantheism, were laid-back, mystical, personalized, concrete, emotional, indulgent, agnostic, and eclectic. The Deobandis, closer to Wahhabism, were doctrinaire, rational, abstract, intellectual, censorious, literalist, and jurisprudential. Maulana Haroon belonged to the more accommodating Barelvi school, which was why David wanted to see him. Barelvis didn’t care as much about propagating theology as winning hearts and minds through communal ecstasy. The Taliban, the jihadis, the Islamic political parties, on the other hand, drew inspiration from the Deobandis.

Maulana’s cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said, holding up his pudgy finger, snapping open his Motorola, and engaging in a gentle conversation with his wife. “On to business then,” Maulana said upon concluding.

David decided not to consult his notes for this interview. They distracted both him and the interviewee. “As I wrote in my letter a few months ago, I’m writing a senior thesis on the evolution of modern Islamic law. The Hanafi branch, and its stance on modern commercial technologies and financial instruments. Is Islam compatible with capitalism?”

“You should read Maxime Rodinson on that.”

“Rodinson! If I wanted to read Rodinson, I’d have stayed at Princeton. What do you think I could get from him?”

“He speaks in a language you can easily understand. The Prophet of Islam was a merchant by profession. Early Islam was entrepreneurial. The later accretions, some of the rigid prohibitions of interest—these are not central to the dogma.”

“I know, it’s the issue of interest I want to get away from. It’s been overdone. I’m more interested in economic development.”

“If you talk to anyone in Pakistan about Islam and economics, they’ll push you into the dilemma of riba,” Maulana warned.

Riba was Islam’s term for interest. Most scholars believed that interest in any form was prohibited. Classical scholars had maneuvered around the ban with any number of legal stratagems. Today’s scholars were less forgiving. Reformists wondered how you could have a modern civilization without interest. These debates got repetitive. David’s whole point in visiting Pakistan was to acquire a sense of what was at stake in Islam becoming more compatible with economic modernization.

“Rodinson, Watt, Gellner, Gibb—wherever you find a nugget of truth, you must seize it,” Maulana continued.

“But what about this!” David indicated the thick gold-spined books lining the shelves, in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.

“This too, this too. Whatever form of argument appeals to you, stay with it and pursue it till the end.” Maulana whispered into Iqbal’s ear to get something to eat. “You can explore things from a native point of view, but there must be a context, a purpose. You can write fifty books, as scholars do, but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing. I admire your courage. I’m impressed you’re interested in Islam, an exotic religion, although I’m sure at Princeton there are people from all over the world. Still, how many Pakistanis would give up a summer to study Christianity in some obscure part of the world?”

“Pakistan is not obscure. It’s the fifth or sixth largest country in the world.”

“Also a dangerous spot. Very dangerous. You must be careful, not take any unnecessary risks. Look, read as much as you want, but pick a specific topic. Narrow down your thesis. Come to me if you have questions. Maulana Zakaria’s urs is on the first Monday of next month. Try to come.”

This was exactly as his Princeton professors advised him. The urs, or anniversary, was typical of the Barelvi tradition’s emphasis on saints venerated almost as much as the Prophet himself. There was danger in Karachi, but he could handle it. The party of the Muhajirs, refugees who’d resettled from India after partition in 1947, was constantly clashing with the local Sindhis, who felt outcompeted in education and jobs by the more sophisticated Muhajirs. Several people got shot on the streets every day, acts of terrorism the Urdu tabloid press inflamed and glorified.

“There’s so much junk out there,” David complained. “Junk information, I mean. Schacht and the rest.” Orientalist scholarship treated Islam as a deviant cult, an imitation of Judaism on the part of the wily Muhammad, not a respectable religion in itself. A lot of Orientalist effort over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had gone into proving the fabricated nature of the Qur’an, the hadith, and other sources of Islamic authority.

“You must study even Schacht and Goldziher with a fine-toothed comb, to see the flaws in their logic. If this is truly what interests you.”

What did interest him? His parents were both physicians. Before landing at Princeton, he could never have predicted the academic path he’d follow. He’d taken Arabic for three years, and had a good feel for it. He probably spoke it better than Maulana, because South Asians spoke Arabic with an appalling accent. He and his girlfriend Sandra planned to work for the State Department; the importance of the Islamic world would only grow for America. There was something beautiful and pristine about Islamic civilization, apparent as soon as one stood before a mural in Cordoba or a tomb in Isfahan. Islam was the purest of religions, with the fewest intermediaries. Just one God, and the believer. Very Kierkegaardian. There was pleasure in pursuing this ultimately democratic concept to see where it led.

A quiet new boy brought the food—vegetarian snacks any Princeton health freak would have appreciated.

David and Maulana agreed on the flexibility of Islamic law, the opportunity to exercise ijtihad, or free thought, based on principles of analogy and precedent, rather than adhering to blind and slavish imitation, taqlid.

Iqbal didn’t appear for the rest of the conversation, but when David slipped on his sandals outside the doorway and set off on the dusty path toward his borrowed Volkswagen, he saw Iqbal waiting next to the car.

The idea to visit Pakistan for first-hand research had been Agha’s. His roommate was an economics major headed for Wall Street, but he had sympathy for David’s abstract pursuits. “It can’t hurt to tell the world the truth about Pakistan,” Agha proposed. “We’re not all a bunch of radicals burning effigies of American presidents.” David objected, “I’m not interested in Pakistan, only in Islam.” Agha countered, “The truth will reveal itself this way.” From lending David his suits and ties, to accompanying him at conferences in New Haven and Cambridge, Agha acted as David’s concerned older brother. Sandra never liked Agha’s “materialism,” but David didn’t agree that Agha cared only about money. Agha’s family was rolling in wealth; getting richer couldn’t mean much. Agha was really drawn to the excitement of high finance, the glamour of New York, the new Rome; it wasn’t for David, but he could understand its attraction.

Agha’s family were iron and steel magnates, beneficiaries of the privatization instigated by the dictator Zia in the eighties. Agha had two older sisters, Masooma and Bilquis, both married, and two younger sisters, Jahan and Saima. Agha claimed that being the only male child had taught him all he needed to know about the irrational female psyche before he ever embarked on his first relationship. A member of the Ivy, Princeton’s most elite eating club, Agha loved to flirt, but didn’t accept women as intellectual equals. He recently brought to their suite the newest target of his faintly disguised abuse, Marie, a French girl who was a sophomore in comparative literature. Marie seemed to get off on Agha’s treatment. David wanted to live and let live, but whenever he felt himself taking charge of women, the spectacle of Marie accepting Agha’s domination unsettled him. Agha justified, “It’s no big deal, buddy, it’s what women want,” but everything in David’s education pushed him to reject that attitude.

Among Agha’s relatives and friends, David has seen none of the eccentric characters—both patriarchal and matriarchal, and sexual in-betweens—that populated Latin American and South Asian magical realist novels and supposedly haunted the faculties of youngsters torn between modernity and tradition. Rather, Agha’s people were upscale versions of Iqbal, Maulana Haroon’s son, with that same enchanting and annoying habit of wanting to be something other than what they were. There was no room to develop eccentricity if one wanted to live an existence known only from afar—although among Agha’s circle everyone had traveled to the West since they were young, some even being delivered in hospitals in America and Britain for the coveted citizenship.

Saima was the cutest. The youngest of Agha’s sisters, she said she was eighteen, although David felt she couldn’t be a day older than sixteen. Agha showed more respect for Saima than any other female. Saima wasn’t the most intellectual of his sisters, only the fieriest. David arrived a week after Agha had made it back to get an early start on the heat and the mangoes, and a Citibank internship. Agha and Saima came to the airport to pick him up. She started pestering him with questions right away. Why was America biased toward Israel? Wasn’t it true the Jews controlled the media in America? Why didn’t Westerners drive smaller cars, so they wouldn’t have to dominate the Middle East for oil? How come India had such a good image in America, but not Pakistan, when Pakistan had always been an ally? How could America be taken seriously on human rights when its own black male population was in prison? If Pakistan and India and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka could have female heads of state, why not America? David never figured out if Saima was serious. Was she parodying the yellow press? Or was this the extent of her understanding? David responded: “I’m a scholar, I need to be impartial, these are loaded questions requiring me to take sides.” To which Saima retaliated: “I’m not asking you to take sides, I’m asking you to give up sides.”

The heat of Saima’s questions, and her casual sizzling glances, burnt David to the core. He wanted to believe that Saima was a special case, but knew she wasn’t. Everyone in Pakistan had an aptitude for politics, and not just Pakistani politics, but Indian politics, Chinese politics, African politics, European politics, and above all, American politics. Guiding Light and The Bold and the Beautiful could never compete with American presidential shenanigans for Pakistanis. At Princeton, not even members of the Republican and Democratic clubs got so worked up over politics, as did tiny Saima with her black hair and black eyes, and black looks at David’s ignorance. If he were impassioned like this at the State Department, he would burn out in no time. A sixteen-year-old girl, who’d probably never had a boyfriend, was causing such a reaction in him! He’d imagined that once he started having regular sex with Sandra, his fantasies about random girls would evaporate, but that never happened.

Saima gave him pointed instructions: Meet girls his own age, travel inland, always carry plenty of cash on himself, make friends with the cops, and accept the state of utilities. Agha countered with his own set of instructions, namely, Don’t give money to beggars, don’t ever ride in a rickshaw, don’t talk religion with strangers, don’t drop the Princeton name, and don’t tell them you’re a Jew. It was easy to see why Agha adored Saima. She might be more positive, but she was an adventurer in the dark like David and Agha. Agha’s list was filled with Don’ts, but he had an expansive vision. No incident involving Agha and Saima’s Do’s and Don’ts was likely to happen. At night, after conversation and eating ceased, it was hard to imagine he wasn’t in an exclusive Princeton suburb. Agha’s house seemed not only soundproof but event-proof.

Agha’s oldest sister Masooma invited David to weddings all the time, but Agha would say that “David doesn’t have time for that crap” and Saima would say that “those girls are beneath David’s standard.” David had no voice in these decisions. Agha wasn’t personally interested in David’s Islamic studies, and he couldn’t bring himself to read the copious notes David took during visits with his favorite scholars. Agha’s parents returned from Switzerland a couple of weeks after David arrived, but they were both so little in evidence that they might as well be vacationing in Europe still. David couldn’t imagine his own oversolicitous physician parents leaving him and his sister so unsupervised even as adults. David’s mother still called him every day, asking about classes and extracurricular activities and Sandra. Agha’s parents could never be so dogged.

“Are you done with your project? Are you halfway there?” Saima bugged David one evening, after his grueling interview with a reformist scholar who put him on the defensive for being a Jew. Messy politics was interfering with pure legal theory, making adaptation, cross-cultural fertilization, tolerance, and universal civilization more complicated.

“Not yet.”

“Hurry up, because I want you to meet my friends. Maybe you can set them straight about things I can’t get through their heads.”

He was sure he could hold his own. He wasn’t doing too badly for his first extended visit to a third world country. He hadn’t collapsed with guilt at the sight of grinning beggars with chopped off limbs. The noise level was frightening, but he was adapting. The old city, with its labyrinths of impassable streets where shrunken vendors peddled contraband Rolexes and Penguin classics, spoke of a common past. He maneuvered the Volkswagen amidst oblivious burqa-clad women and runaway infants, honking donkey carts and garish minibuses, and bicyclists with stacks of tiffin boxes winding their way like New York messenger boys. Looking at the grand municipal buildings from the Raj, it felt as though the British had only left yesterday, for all the excitement about the approaching fiftieth anniversary of independence. Was it so wrong of him to wonder if Agha and Saima were strangers in their own country?

“Wake up, Bible Boy!” Saima had called him that ever since he launched into an exposition of exile in the Old Testament and the Qur’an. He’d stopped correcting her with, “That’s Torah Boy.”

“I’m here.”

“I hope you don’t daydream in your Princeton classes.”

“Which is where you’ll be following in Agha’s footsteps.”

“I have no desire to be at Princeton or any American university.”

David didn’t quibble. But where else would she study? Locally? She’d be a pariah in her family. Education abroad was a given. At the very least, she’d study art or music at some provincial British or American university.

“The friends you want me to meet, are they from Grammar School?” This was the Phillips Exeter and Andover of Karachi rolled into one, the main feeder school for the Ivies.

“I don’t associate with those snooty kids.”

Was Agha snooty? No, he wasn’t. Agha thought The Simpsons was as good as Great Expectations. David felt confident Agha’s sexual hijinks wouldn’t persist long. After a couple of years on Wall Street, he’d hook up with some decent Maine girl, a vegetarian and lifelong subscriber to Mother Jones, and the couple would spend weekends at soup kitchens.

Masooma came with her chauffeur and servant in tow, carrying ghararas and shararas from Empress Boutique, wanting Saima’s opinion on what to wear for their cousin Arora’s wedding festivities, which would last about a month.

Under threatening rain clouds—the monsoons hadn’t come yet—Saima took David to the suburb called P.E.C.H.S. This was a housing development built after partition for the civil service, but it had been taken over by the commercial elite. In Block Six of P.E.C.H.S., the commercial area was a major center for furniture and appliances. Saima’s cousin Arora must already have visited here with her fiancé, picking out refrigerators and air conditioners and couches and beds. The smell of furniture varnish saturated the Volkswagen, even with the windows rolled up. He was tempted by peanuts, roasted on portable burners on carts and dispensed in paper funnels for a few rupees. But he had to leave plenty of room for the snacks surely awaiting them.

He’d compiled his notes for the week, making up for lost time with Saima’s friends. She wouldn’t tell him who they were visiting, saying only that she didn’t want him to go back to America thinking that Pakistanis were all alike. He told Saima the trip to Pakistan had already paid off. His thesis was coming together. He would argue that specific political formations in each Islamic country determined the contours of Islamic commercial law; it was true in the Middle Ages and the early modern era, and it was true today. He realized he was skating over the stickiest problems of Islamic jurisprudence. The political context only explained irregularities in a particular systems of law; there was always a consistent worldview that was decisive. But his argument was also valid, as far as it went. The wide range of local interpretations contradicted any simplistic category as “Islamic commercial law.” This still wasn’t a manageable essay: it was a book, or many books. He would have to pick on a small angle—the workings of mudarabas and musharakas, forms of Islamic partnership—to illustrate his point.

He remained uncomfortable with the feeling of permanent lethargy, the drowsy sense that things had always been this way and would always be this way. In his unguarded moments it hit him hard. It came across in the way the chowkidar at Agha’s house looked at David in the morning when he left, ready to take on the world. It was a stoicism born of weariness. The maalis, the dhobis, the cops, the clerks, the dukanwalas, the waderas, the mill-owners all looked at him as if nothing in his language, his style of perception, could alter their beliefs one iota. Even the dogs and cats were immovable in their haughty solitude. It was always four in the afternoon in Karachi, the temperature a hundred degrees in the shade, the sherbet seller or gola-gandawala broken by the heat—too many people, not enough jobs, too much mismanagement. The sparrows chanted their lament in the mornings, and the crows followed suit in the evenings. The footfalls of the British could still be heard, the Mughals were recent news, America was the omnipresent master, and it would all end in nuclear holocaust with India anyway.

There was no chowkidar to greet them at the house where Saima made him stop. The bougainvillea were uncared for, and the car a seventies Toyota with a flat tire.

“Khala, it’s me,” Saima yelled.

They went in when there was no answer. The front door opened into a room full of Oriental carpets in various states of display—rolled, unrolled, stacked high against the wall, spread over chairs and couches. Khala didn’t necessarily mean Saima’s aunt—it was a term of respect for any older woman. An antique hookah stood in a corner of the room, purely for ornamental reasons.

“Your Princeton education won’t help here,” Saima said.

“Thanks for warning me.”

The problem with Asians was that they were inscrutable. David had read Edward Said’s Orientalism, and was aware of being politically incorrect but he couldn’t help it. No American teenage girl could be such a successful enigma.

Saima led him to a musty library. The Western canon was alphabetically arranged on the shelves covering the walls. Shakespeare’s plays were duly followed by Smollett, Sterne, and Swift. A smaller Islamic canon was here as well, in Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. The books looked like they hadn’t been used in years. Their comprehensiveness and order were a reproach to the idle visitor.

They settled into squeaking wicker chairs, arranged in front of a massive empty desk.

A servant of indeterminate age, demure in dark clothes, brought them tea and pastries. “Khala is out.”

“So who are we here to see?” David was still scanning the book titles. “A well-read person, obviously.”

“Uncle Salam. My great-uncle, from my father’s side. There was a falling-out between the branches of the family long ago. My father’s father and Uncle Salam came to blows at a procession honoring Jinnah. Uncle Salam wanted India to remain undivided. It’s been a bad fifty years for him. He’s ninety, so be gentle.”

“Is the old man going to say something to make me second guess my success in Pakistan?”

“Ha, funny American.”

David felt like a child ignorant of what the adults were planning.

“Children, children,” a muffled voice came from the doorway. Uncle Salam looked like a tweedy professor from England, who had returned to Pakistan to live out his last years without the indignity of nursing homes, and who was still able to arrange the messed-up lives of brainy grandchildren with explosive bons mots. He had mottled pink skin, his head was bald and freckly, he wore reading glasses at the tip of his nose, and he had hair coming out of his ears, which his general handsomeness prevented from looking repulsive.

Saima helped him into a chair. David imagined his back creaked. He had joint problems, but little flab.