Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [63]
I told Una that we should coordinate our college applications so that we could end up near one another. We kept our acquaintance secret for many months, hoping that no one would suspect anything between us. Slowly our applications were sorted out: Una would go to Cornell in central New York state and I would attend a private university in Manhattan. I would spend weekdays doing city things like reading Henry James and visiting museums, and during the weekends I would hang out with my all-American goddess.
Amir was very much ready for the next stage of his life. His American life.
BOOK III
The Fundamentalist—Abu Bakr Ramaq
In which the author, newly arrived at college in Manhattan, embraces the superiority of Islam over all things, culminating with a trip to Pakistan, where he intends to (1) find a pious Muslim wife who will protect him from secularism’s sexual temptation and (2) investigate his relationship with an ancient Caliph of Islam
1
Una didn’t go to Cornell in the end. She left me for Stanford—all the way on the other side of the country—and I arrived in New York all alone.
The city immediately crushed me. When it rained, no one stopped to appraise the weather—taxis just flipped on their lights and people magically sprouted hoods. When it became sunny and I went to the park, a homeless man turned down the fish filet I offered him. The only flowers were red ones spray I saw painted on the side of a train. Even the English was different: the letters H-o-u-s-t-o-n, for example, were pronounced “Howston” and not “Hewsten.”
I walked around the city endlessly during my first days there because I wanted to find a way to embrace it. I stood before the skyscrapers, trying to analogize them to something familiar, but I had never encountered things so massive. No other place compared to Manhattan, so I retreated into my imagination. I invoked a faraway place out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. A glittering Elven city, maybe. An eternal metropolis ruled by Aragon, perhaps. The towers of those imaginary kingdoms competed with the skyscrapers in Manhattan; the arabesques of that illusory sultanate challenged the beauty of the friezes at the library on Forty-second Street; the busy canals of that metaphysical capital teemed with boats as Broadway did with buses. Unfortunately, comprehending Manhattan as if it were nothing more than the beguiling doppelgänger of a city from my fantasies simply made me feel more estranged. I could say that I was in Manhattan’s bloodstream, but not that I was in any way essential to the city. The recognition of this partition—between subject and city—was both instantaneous and painful. It forced me to seek out anything that was familiar.
I went to the university’s residential services office because I heard of a dorm where you could ask for the specific kind of roommate you wanted—and I requested a Muslim.
My new roommate, Moosa Farid, had been looking for a Muslim to live with because the person he was initially assigned to turned out to be a “Luti.”
“Man, I walked in on that white boy sodomizing another one,” he said. “The room smelled like wet towels. Gross stuff. It was like I was back in the Prophet Lut’s time. We know how God punished them.”
In just a few days in the city, small-town Moosa Farid had become an expert in homosexuality. He hadn’t wanted for it to happen, of course. It had happened, he concluded, because the gays were after him. How else to explain the fact that when he was looking for a place to eat he got stuck with a bunch of queers in a gay pride parade in West Village? What else explained the fact that during class orientation, of all the tour guides possible, he had gotten the flaming gay one? Why else would he go into a cafe and see his