The Submission - Amy Waldman [145]
“But this memorial was never created,” Mo wrote back. “The process doesn’t matter.”
She wouldn’t give up. Family members, jurors, journalists, activists, all had talked to her. Mo was the missing piece, and the most important. At last, to end her siege, he agreed. He planned to offer some generic remarks about the past being ancient history, then send her off into Mumbai to explore how memorializing had metastasized. As India continued to Westernize, it had become obsessed with naming its dead just as America did. The plaques were everywhere: at the train station, listing those who had fallen from overcrowded cars; at the airport, remembering those felled by ongoing terror attacks; in the slums, whose handwritten signs recorded those lost to sewage-born infections or police brutality.
He told himself he admired—recognized—her persistence, but this elided the truth. For nearly two decades now, he had been a global citizen, American only in name. K/K Architects had a New York office, but Thomas Kroll ran it. Mo could pretend only so much of the time that he wanted it this way.
Two years earlier, the Museum of New Architecture, in New York, had mounted a retrospective of his career. Mohammad Khan, American Architect was a tribute to his blaze of work, most of it in the Middle East, India, or China, over the past twenty years. It was unusual for an architect to complete so many projects so quickly, although Mo knew this was as much about his clients—rich patrons; undemocratic governments; Gatsby nations in a hurry to buy identities with their newfound wealth—as his own talents. But the exhibit also examined his influence. His style, widely copied, married a remarkable simplicity of form with geometric patterns of dazzling complexity. Indeed, he was known as much for what he had convinced his clients not to build—gaudy, gargantuan palaces and mosques—as for what he had built for them. Critics and historians credited him with helping to shift the aesthetic of the Middle East. “Even in a mosque you should feel yourself in a garden,” he had told one interviewer. “Nothing between you and God.”
Planning to attend the opening, Mo instead canceled at the last minute. It took him some time to puzzle out that the memorial was to blame. The Garden’s drawings and model were displayed in the “Unbuilt” section of the exhibit, along with a half dozen projects either in development or already abandoned. The caption read: “Khan’s design represented his first foray into melding modern minimalism with elements of Islamic design. He withdrew his submission in the face of heated political opposition, but the controversy brought his talent to the international stage.” It was a quintessentially American story—that you could profit even by losing—but not the accounting Mo was looking for.
The country had moved on, self-corrected, as it always did, that feverish time mostly forgotten. Only Mo was stuck in the past. He wanted acknowledgment of the wrong done to him, awaited credit for his refusal to agree that the attack justified America’s suspicion of its Muslims any more than it justified the state’s overreaching. Today most Americans thought as he had, but at the time his stand had been lonely. Hard.
More than his ego was at stake. American Muslims were now, if not embraced, accepted. Trusted. Their rights unquestioned. Mo wanted to embody this rapprochement through architecture, considered it incomplete otherwise. There wasn’t a single Mohammad Khan building in the United States, but it was his style as much as his name that he longed to imprint. He wanted to design structures that borrowed as freely from Islamic