Special Registration

Breathlessly hungover, I listened to the names of disappeared men. The women—sisters, spouses, cousins, friends—had purple triangles pinned to their clothes with the faces of their missing. The pictures were from family photos and passports, high school yearbooks and senior portraits. The event was a ceremony of naming, not the dead but the unheard. One after another the women took the mic. One added a memory to the name, another an anecdote, another a favorite food. After the event, there were refreshments, and the organizer, the woman with whom I’d spoken on the phone, made her way to me.
            “Faheem?” she said.
            “Yes.” I offered my hand.
            She didn’t shake it. “I’m Maryam. Thank you so much for coming.”
            “Thank you for calling me back. I’m sorry I didn’t know more when I called you.”
            “It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Would you like some lemonade? Coffee?”
           “I’m fine, thank you.”
            We took two chairs to a corner of the room. It was the basement of a church in Rogers Park.
            “We started our organization a month after 9/11,” Maryam began. “I have three brothers. We were all born here. You wouldn’t believe it, Faheem, but an hour after the attacks, all of them had shaved their beards. The youngest, Hamza, started going by Hank. Both the others played football in high school. Big guys, fearless, proud, and suddenly they’re walking around like fugitives, with their heads down and eyes on the ground. Our father yelled at them, told them to hold their heads up high. He kept his beard. My mother wears the hijab. I don’t as a personal choice. Thank God, my brothers aren’t among these missing men, but that doesn’t make them any less important to us.”
            “When you say missing, you mean like abducted, detained?” I tried to understand.
            “Detained. For months. No one knows where. No one knows in what condition. What kind of legal help they’re getting. Nothing. A week after the Special Registration was announced, one by one they started disappearing.”
            The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—conveniently acronym-able as the USA PATRIOT Act—and its accompanying National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) had put men from twenty-five Muslim-majority countries on edge when not all-out running. Unless they were US citizens or residents, they were required to submit to fingerprinting and an “interview.”
            Undocumented South Asian men, Arab and Muslim men on expired visas, bucked the system by either not appearing for registration or leaving the country of their own volition. The ones that didn’t stayed because their lives were here. They had children who were American by birth, and America was bombing their countries to rubble.
            The detained men were ones who had complied, obeyed the law, done the right thing, and were fucked.
           “This can’t be legal,” I said. “I mean, there are constitutional issues here.”
            “These men don’t know that. They don’t know their rights, they don’t know they have rights. Their one and only fault is that they overstayed their visas or stopped going to school so they could work.”
            “Well, they do,” I said.
            “You see, that’s another part of our mission. My friend is a lawyer. We want to raise funds for legal research and have been working with local immigration law offices to build a partnership.”
            Maryam waved her colleagues over. Their names were Nadira and Christine. Christine wore a hijab. She had large blue eyes and pale white skin. Nadira and Maryam could be sisters. Nadira was the lawyer.
            “But the problem is,” Maryam went on, as the others lined up chairs next to her and at a respectable distance from me, “the families of these men are terrified. They won’t talk to us, they won’t listen. They think they’ll make the situation worse. They don’t trust anyone, not even those who want to help. No one can blame them, but it is both frustrating and really sad.” Nadira and Christine agreed.
            “What’s the name of your paper again?” Nadira asked. I told her. She made a polite nod. I was embarrassed at how small my paper was, how nonexistent its influence. That it wasn’t the Chicago Tribune.
            It was the Tribune’s audience Maryam and her colleagues needed. The very people who refused to talk to them made up the bulk of my paper’s readership, the ones who even read English.
            “I wish there was more I could do,” I said.
           “You came,” said Maryam, “that’s what matters.”
            People were clearing out. Nadira and Christine excused themselves and went to see them off.
            “I don’t know how much I can offer, but please don’t hesitate to ask,” I said.
            Maryam walked me to the door. By now I was keeping it together by the skin of my teeth. I waved, let the door close, dashed around the corner, and sprayed the building’s side cabernet red.

I’d been with the paper a little over a year. Mr. Dev, the editor and publisher, was more interested in ad revenues than reportage. My official title was “community section editor.” The community was the South Asian diaspora of Chicago. My editor being Indian and me being his first Bangladeshi South Asian, none of the paper’s previous coverage had gone beyond India, with a smattering of Pakistan, mostly when those countries conducted nuclear tests or battled it out on the cricket field.
            My maiden assignment was writing about a new Toyota dealership in Schaumburg because the owner was Mr. Dev’s longtime friend. My father read the story twice all the way through and said, “This is journalism?” The next week it was the CEO of a real estate company, also a friend of Mr. Dev. I wouldn’t do it.
            I wrote instead about an Indian-American singer who was the cousin of an actor friend in town. Mr. Dev gave the profile grudging appreciation, unable to argue that it was exactly what he’d hired me to do. The week after that I did a series of editorials about communal violence in Gujarat, Mr. Dev’s home state, for which I’d interviewed business owners up and down Devon. This time he was more encouraging. The office received dozens of calls, all but one lauding the pieces. The person who complained said my perspective was skewed because I was Muslim. Mr. Dev dismissed him for a right-wing Hindu nut.
            I’d not touched the 9/11 attacks, or the targeting of Muslims in their wake. I didn’t think I had the right. I had long ago distanced myself from Islam. More than a decade had passed since I’d stepped inside a mosque. It felt opportunistic to suddenly come out swinging in favor of a religion I no longer considered part of my life.
            Also, I was a pitiful representative of Bangladesh. I didn’t go to social functions, I had no Bangladeshi friends, and, in fact, as with my religion, had actively avoided any contact with my community.
            My parents’ association was nominal at best. After a bad experience with a family when I was in high school, my mother became wary. My father’s suspicion of the “kind of Bangladeshis” on offer remained steadfast, in that he never believed they were who they said they were, did what they said they did, and came to the US legally. It didn’t matter if they were professors or engineers (like him) or doctors—they had to have worked the system illegally somehow. Those who had married Americans got off only slightly easier.
            When Maryam’s press release showed up in my inbox, I was more intrigued than I would have been any other time. Two years ago, I would’ve ignored and trashed the email on sight. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, I would’ve gone on staying vocally divorced from the Muslim part of me.

We—Amir, Zeeshan, Malik, and I—got biryani for dinner from Ghareeb Nawaz restaurant on Devon. Zeeshan had been going there the longest and was friendly with the owner. They chatted while we waited for our food, and Amir, Malik, and I sat at a window table with steaming cups of masala tea, talking about nothing important, besides Teddy in the army, which we found endlessly unbelievable. Zeeshan joined us when our food came out, and we dug in as if it were the last meal of our lives. We said goodbye outside, got in our cars, and went our separate ways. It was a pleasant September night with clear skies and early hints of fall. Pulling out of my parking spot, I saw the restaurant’s name painted on its wall in large, colorful Urdu script. Less than twenty-four hours later, the writing would be gone, washed, scrubbed, erased, and that dinner would be a kind of marker, a line between a Before and an After.
            My phone woke me early the next morning.
            Amir said, “Turn on the TV.”
            “Amir? The TV? Why?”
           “Do it.”
            The call-waiting beeped.
            “Are you watching?” said Malik.
            “Watching what?”
            “You hungover shit, the TV.” I wasn’t hungover.
            “What is going on?” I said.
            “We’re fucked.”

I went back to the office and wrote up a draft of my article. It turned out quite disappointing. I had very little of substance, except for the names of Maryam and her colleagues, their organization, and, most dispiritingly, how they could be reached, doubting that they’d get any calls. I didn’t say much about the event itself except that it had taken place. Three more tries later, the draft wasn’t much better. I’d added too much padding that was my own righteous indignation. I went back to the original and took that one to Mr. Dev.
            “What you are thinking to do with this?” he asked.
            “I don’t understand,” I said. “Meaning what?”
            “These people being detained, they’re illegal. What you are talking about their rights? You think this is new? I’ve seen this twenty-five years. Long ago before Nine-Eleven. Ninety percent of the cooks and waiters on Devon is like this. Go to Pilsen, and there it’s the same with Mexicans. Stay at a five-star hotel downtown, illegals clean your room. You didn’t come to this country just yesterday, did you?”
            “These people did what the law told them to do,” I said. “And they’re being punished for it. It’s not the same thing.”
            Mr. Dev gave a half-shake of the head and handed back my article.
            “Okay, fine. But we can’t waste too much space with these stories.”
            I grumbled about the nonsense he had me writing.
            “Then you should go work at Chicago Tribune,” he said.
            Our one room office had two reporters, me and Mr. Mathew, a soft-spoken veteran of the Times of India,where he’d made his reputation covering the Emergency years of Indira Gandhi’s tenure in the seventies; Mr. Dev’s sister Piya in advertising, and Rajat in layout. We went to press on Monday afternoon, and Tuesday morning Rajat and I dropped off the papers at businesses on Devon. Distribution was not supposed to be among my duties, but I learned quickly that given half a chance, Mr. Dev would run a sweatshop without a qualm.
            Rajat didn’t just blindly do the layouts; he read everything closely, sometimes catching major things I’d missed.
            “Three people in my building, same thing happened.” He came around from his cubicle and pulled up a chair to mine.
            “When?” I asked.
            “Last month only.” Rajat’s English had what Americans would say “a heavy accent,” and to keep attention off it, he got his point across using just the essentials needed. “One by one. They went. Didn’t come back.”
            “And no one’s heard from them ever since?” I asked.
            “No,” he sighed.
            “Were they Muslim?”
            “Two only. One, Goanese Christian.” He read my mind on my face. “No, please. No story. I’m telling you just.”
            I didn’t know much about Rajat’s life outside work. We chatted during our drop-off runs, sharing bits and pieces. He had a wife and two children back in India. He’d been in the US five years and lived on a street off Devon with five other Indian roommates. Before this job, he freelanced and worked at a gas station. He was on the fence about settling in America. If he could bring his family over, he would, but he didn’t see that happening, especially not now. The US government was on a rampage of shit-listing Brown and Black countries with the tiniest drop of Muslims in their populace for terrorist hotspots. India had been left alone as it wasn’t seen as a Muslim country. I got the sense that Rajat didn’t put a lot of faith in that fact.
            Shortly after I’d started at the paper, a long fax arrived one morning from the Department of Homeland Security. It was a list of all the countries, broken down in groups in order of the level of threat they posed as terrorist havens. Bangladesh was part of Group 4, the lowest level. I mentioned it in passing to my father.
            “They should wipe that bloody country off the map.”
            Bangladesh was no longer the country he had fought for. Whatever his feelings were about Islam, he’d always been of the mind that Bangladesh had no business being an Islamic state.
            In Bangladesh, we were observant Muslims twice a year on the two Eids: the one following Ramadan and the second observing Abraham’s sacrifice. Our attempt to be good Friday Muslims in America had been short-lived and embarrassing. My father had forced us into going to Friday prayers, then argued with the imam, and then, after a few more Fridays, made us quit.
            When I called my mother on 9/11 after hanging up with Amir and Malik, she’d just gotten off the phone with my father at his work.
            He’d already seen the news and had said, “Took them long enough.”

We’d been in the US just over a decade, and it felt both short and long. The fifteen years before that that I’d spent in Bangladesh were clearer in many ways than the present. I remembered my grandparents’ houses in Dhaka in more detail than I recalled what my bedroom in our first American apartment looked like. I had posters of Superman and Spiderman in Dhaka. In Chicago, my walls were bare. We had servants in Dhaka who washed and folded my clothes. I thought about what a tedious task it was to do by hand, as I lugged a mountain of clothes in a laundry hamper down to our American basement to stuff into a washing machine and dryer. Television didn’t run around the clock. The state-run channel started at five in the afternoon and signed off at eleven with the late news in Bengali and English and the national anthem. Besides the imported American shows and cartoons and the American movie of the week on Thursday nights, nothing was watchable.
            Our move had been sudden. My father came home from work one day and announced at dinner that we were “done with Bangladesh.”
            “So, Anam will do it?” my mother asked. “He’ll sponsor us?”
            “Leave that to me,” my father replied gruffly.
            We left Bangladesh in early June. Our first month in Chicago we stayed with my father’s cousin who had sponsored us. His apartment was small and smelled of sweaty shoes. My parents and I slept on the living room floor. My father refused to work for a boss who wasn’t himself. But soon he had no choice and, instead of joining an engineering firm, for which he was qualified, went to work for his cousin at his convenience store. A boss who was family was better than a stranger. And even then, he and Anam treaded shaky ground.
            I, too, would work there for a time.
            I passed a lonely, miserable summer. We were always unhappy. My father griped and groused and bristled with immediate regret, and my mother pestered me constantly, getting nowhere bothering him.
            Around-the-clock TV quickly became old.
            Things got better when I started school. I met Amir, Malik, Zeeshan, and Teddy. My life began rebuilding.

Teddy joined the army after college. He’d signed up at a career fair at UIC. We thought he was kidding. It was just like Teddy. And then the recruiter walked up to us and asked if the rest of his buddies were interested in joining him.
            We left there chasing after Teddy, with him shouting at us to fuck off and leave him alone. Two weeks later, he was on a plane to Fort Benning.
            His first station was Fort Collins, Colorado. This was during “peacetime,” and his time passed uneventfully.
            He didn’t return our calls and replied to emails only weeks, and sometimes months, later. He ignored our banter. Mostly, he just wrote that he was fine. After Collins, ten days before 9/11, he arrived at his new station at Fort Knox.
            Now he was a six-hour drive away. We’d come down to see him, we told him excitedly. He didn’t share our enthusiasm. He discouraged us from visiting. He was busy, all the time. They were always training for something or other, and he volunteered for missions—everything was a mission—as often as he could.
            We didn’t care. It was Teddy, after all. As soon as we were together again, the old Teddy would be back. All he needed were familiar faces to get him out of army mode.
            We drove to Kentucky and got rooms at a motel in Louisville. Fort Knox was less than an hour away. We didn’t know Louisville any better than we’d know our way around Fort Knox but decided it was safer to be in a city than out in the sticks. It was bad enough to be as tense as we’d been during the drive. A carful of Brown Muslim men was not the best way to be for six hours through rural Indiana, we were acutely aware for every last second. Anytime a car stayed behind us too long, Zeeshan switched lanes. We stopped once, for gas. By the time we had our rooms our bladders were demented.
            “What the hell made you do that?” Teddy said when we called.
            “Fuck you, too,” said Malik.
            “I told you guys I don’t have time.”
            “It’s one night, man, don’t be a fucker,” we harangued him. “You’ll miss us when you’re deployed.”
            “What the fuck do you think I’m training for?”
            Hunched over the phone, we were speechless.
            “Fuckface, when were you going to tell us?” Malik broke the silence.
            “I can’t talk about it.” Teddy let out a breath of exasperation. “You assholes. Where are you staying?”
            He met us at the motel in the morning. Teddy, it was hard to believe, stood before us, buzzed-haired, toned, shaved to a shine, stripped of his signature smirk. Teddy, whom we counted on to never be serious and were never let down, scowled at us and said he couldn’t stay long.
            He was shipping out in two weeks, one month tops. We asked for details despite being told repeatedly he couldn’t divulge them, until he got mad and stood up to leave.
            “You’re going over there to kill Muslims, sisterfucker, don’t forget that part,” said Malik.
            The door clicked shut behind Teddy as he left and then rang in our ears like a blast.

I called Maryam to let her know the story had been published. Our website was primitive, and the paper version was the only one. I’d saved a few for her. I offered to drop them off wherever it was convenient. She told me not to worry about it. She took my word for it. She was grateful that I’d attended the event, the only press that had responded to her release and bothered to show up. Not even the Arab, Middle Eastern, or Turkish papers sent so much as an acknowledgment. I wanted to make a snide remark that of course they didn’t. Most of them were in bed with the US, starting with the Saudis. The ill treatment of Muslims was the last thing they cared about. The camaraderie of the Umma, the whole of the Muslim world, the community of the believers, was a joke.
            “How long have you been a journalist?” Maryam asked.
            “Not long,” I said.
            “I’m sure you’re a good one, Faheem. You care. That’s important.”
            “I appreciate your vote of confidence.”
            I’d been reeling from a breakup for going on six months. Three months in, which was a lot longer than my patience would have allowed me to lend them ears, Malik said Enough. Either I get over “that lousy bitch” or find new friends. Amir and Zeeshan said nothing, though they clearly agreed. I stopped seeing them for a while. I went to work, came home, drank, passed out. I haunted holes-in-the-wall and pubs, and on the better nights went home with, or brought home, a woman. A few occasions got ugly. The women, or I, wrongly, in my case, wanted more. Rejection hurt egos; fireworks flew.
            I stopped going to bars. I went through a bottle of wine a night at home, sometimes two, and spent the days wrecked. The one thing I was proud of myself for not doing was giving in to my drunken impulse to call my ex and berate her. There were nights, though, that I gripped the phone and teetered on the brink.
            In my state of mind and the rampant rebound trail that I’d been blazing, any woman who offered a kind word put ideas in my head. Maryam was smart and pretty. Our politics seemed to be aligned. She was religious but not orthodox. If we became a couple, she’d let me be myself, accept my beliefs, as I would hers. Her family sounded nice. I could be good friends with her brothers, talk them out of living in fear, and they’d take to me as a confidante and another brother. Maryam and I would get serious. My parents, my mother most certainly, would be thrilled to see me involved with a Muslim girl. A girl that wasn’t white. I didn’t know Maryam’s heritage, but no matter, all in good time.
            “Please stay in touch,” I said to Maryam.
            “You too.”
            We didn’t.

Ursula, my ex, found me ambitionless. She said I was lackadaisical about the important things in life and serious about the wrong ones. My priorities were out of place. Not long after we started seeing each other, she asked in all seriousness what I wanted to be when I grew up.
            We were flawed from the start, mismatched in every way: worldviews, lifestyle, politics, definition of relationship. She was very impressed at first that I was a writer. That I worked two jobs netting eighteen thousand a year together didn’t bother her, not at first. I didn’t have the means to go on weekend getaways or overseas trips, as all my income went into my living, which she was considerate about, at first. Six months in, her attitude started shifting. She couldn’t be blamed. I shoved money as a barrier between me and doing things so often anyone would have grown frustrated.
            She started expressing her displeasure. She persisted in her inquiry about my plans toward a better future. If I was going to make something of writing or keep chipping at a living at jobs that weren’t a career. I reacted. We had fights. Days went by when we didn’t speak or see each other. During those times—and this is where I made my contribution in the category of Faults—I went to bars, hooked up, and slept with other women. In the last two months of our gasping relationship, I cheated on Ursula with three different women.
            The last time we saw each other was over coffee in Wicker Park, where she lived, two days after 9/11. We’d decided the least we could do was end things face to face.
            “Are you doing okay?” she asked me, with an expression of pitying seriousness.
            “I’m good. You?”
            “I’m—I can’t concentrate on anything. I don’t understand what’s going on. I mean, I do, but—how do you feel about all this?”
            “I’m not sure what you mean by how I feel about it,” I said.
            “You’re always so critical of this country, I’m just wondering.”
            “I don’t know that I can talk about that now.”
            We finished our drinks in silence. Then I was surprised to see her eyes fill with tears.
            “I did like you a lot,” she said. “I hope there was something you liked about me.”
            “Sure, I did. I liked many things.”
            “Thanks.” She dabbed at her eyes with a wadded up tissue, not believing me for a second.

The days and weeks following the attacks, we didn’t know what to do besides be angry all the time. We couldn’t get ahold of Teddy. We desperately wanted to know if he was safe. If he was getting a hard time as a Muslim in the army. He was impossible to reach. No calls returned, emails left untouched.
            Amir, Malik, and Zeeshan devoted all their time when they weren’t working to their mosque. I couldn’t offer to help because I wasn’t allowed inside. They were Aga Khani, Ismaili, a branch of Shi’a Islam I was ignorant of before meeting them. My family were Sunni. I’d grown up with the impression that ours was the “good” way of being Muslim. My mother had had Ismaili friends in Bangladesh, but I was too young to understand or care back then. I’d had a hard time accepting that my friends’ mosque forbid other Muslims from entering, and in the beginning was relentless about getting a proper answer. Many years later, they’d tell me it was just the prayer hall that was off-limits.
            Malik showed his anger the most. He stared people down when they gave him dirty looks. Once on the El he nearly came to blows with a biker-looking white guy. What the fuck was he looking at, Malik yelled. Did he have a problem. Something on his mind. The guy came forward. Other passengers pretended all was well, just another day, another ride on the CTA. Malik, half the man’s size and about fifty pounds lighter, met him in the middle. We, led by Zeeshan, intervened. The other guy never spoke, just glowered. And not only at Malik. He inventoried us one by one, up and down, several times, considering ways he’d crush our raghead skulls.
            Coming out of the train, Malik lambasted us for pussies and cowards. If we were Black or Hispanic, that racist fuck would have been left in a heap of blood. I was ashamed to admit that he had a point. Our model immigrant alarm had kicked in with blaring urgency.

My father refused to fly a flag. Theirs was the sole house on the block without one. My mother added a flag pin to her attire, not to show her patriotism but in honor of the victims. “When was the last time you wore something for the victims of Seventy-One,” was the line my father used to goad her, referring to the Bangladesh Liberation War, during which the occupying army of Pakistan murdered in the neighborhood of 3 million Bengalis.
            I, too, didn’t care to be a walking, driving spectacle. The chest-beating love of country, the nonstop performance of patriotic zeal, the attention to America that was nowhere in sight on September 10, 2001, was nauseating. Once the wars were under way, Support Our Troops yellow ribbons were thrown into the mix. Nothing I owned or wore was touched by ribbons or flags.
            Anam, my father’s second cousin, who owned five convenience stores, had decked each one out like a Fourth of July float. He started selling knickknacks like a tourist shop: Statue of Liberty fridge magnets, God Bless America bumper stickers, postcards of national landmarks. Police and firefighters weren’t charged for anything. He forbid his employees to speak anything other than English. He shaved his beard and started going by Andy. For more than a year he stopped going to mosque on Fridays. He tried hard to subvert his accent and dropped idioms and slang at every chance. He’d always been somewhat of a charlatan in that regard, but now he sounded outright dumb. Later in the week of the attacks, he paid my parents his weekly dinner visit. I was there, too.
            “I’ve seen bad times in this country, but this will be like nothing before,” he brooded over his food. “Did you see what happened to that man in New Mexico?”
            “I think it was Arizona,” I said.
            “Yeah, right,” he affected one of his Americanized responses. “Whatever.” Another. “He wasn’t even Muslim.”
            The man was Sikh. He was shot while planting a garden in front of the gas station he owned in Mesa. His killer was out to shoot some towelheads, he’d told his friends. A Brown man with a turban and beard gave him his target.
            “It’s not his job to know a Muslim from a Sikh,” my father said.
            “What?” said my mother. “Are you defending a murderer?”
            “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not defending anyone.”
            “Then what?” I said.
            “He’s American. How does he know the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh? How do we expect him to know that? Just because we do? We think the whole bloody world has to know who we are the moment we show up anywhere.”
            “Dad, it’s 2001,” I said. “This country has had a long time to know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim.”
            “It’s still America.”
            “You’re right,” Anam sighed. “It’s our job to blend in.”
            “No, it’s not,” I said. “Assimilation is just another way of saying we have to be white.”
            “Whose country do you think this is,” said my father. “Even the red Indians know that, and the blacks, they learned it, too.”
            “Native American,” I said.
            “Keep giving names, see what difference it makes.”
            “So then why don’t you fly a flag, Dad?” I asked.
            My father chomped and slurped his food, mumbling under his breath.

We didn’t know when Teddy deployed. After Louisville, there was nothing from him again for more than a year. We didn’t speak our worst fear out loud. An IED, an ambush, a firefight.
            Still, no news was good news.
            Then one day we received an email.
            “Got back. Will be in Chicago soon.”
            He was noticeably better than that time in Louisville. He wasn’t uptight, and glimpses of his former self began showing, the Teddy we’d always known. He chimed in about the old days, laughed, talked shit, bragged about his own shenanigans. We’d agreed not to ask him about deployment, but Teddy brought the topic up himself. He had done his tour in Iraq. By then, the WMD fiasco had been sold to the American people, the focus shifted from Osama to Saddam, and the country that had nothing to do with 9/11 was illegally bombed and occupied.
            His unit was ready for Afghanistan and then received last-minute orders for Iraq. He spoke in imprecise, evasive terms about “downrange.” Mostly they were stories of soldiers being gung ho before they left and falling apart as soon as they touched Iraqi soil. Young country boys who had never stepped foot outside rural Georgia or Ohio, never seen a Black or Brown person until they enlisted, and didn’t know how to be so far away from home. There were officers who bristled with righteous rage and NCOs who casually talked of shooting hajjis like in video games.
            We couldn’t believe Teddy said nothing, just took the abuse and didn’t put his ignorant brothers in uniform in their place. He said nothing about being harassed himself and spoke rather highly of his superiors. His platoon sergeant was the same age as he, a white guy from Oklahoma, and had taken a liking to Teddy. The sergeant was married to a Mexican woman and tossed around clichés about race and everyone being one and the same in the eyes of God.
            Racism—or what’s called “casual racism”—was rampant. White soldiers and Black soldiers knocked slurs and stereotypes back and forth. Hispanic soldiers joined in the banter, too. Most of them had known each other for years. They’d joined together, fought together, lost people together.
            Teddy never left the Forward Operating Base (FOB) and consequently gained the name of Fobbit.
            “So there, shitbag,” he said to Malik, “I don’t have Muslim blood on my hands.”
            Malik didn’t speak his mind in front of Teddy. He expressed it later to us: “Fuck him, just because he didn’t pull the trigger.”
            For a time after he got back and transitioned out of the army, Teddy worked as a recruiter at an Armed Forces Career Center out in the suburbs. Deployment pay was good. Tax-free and nothing to spend it on in a ravaged zone of war. He bought a car, helped his family, and stayed home all the time. Eventually, he used the GI Bill to go back to school for graphic design and then moved on to building websites for a living. With Teddy it was always hard to tell. Websites. We had no idea. He’d never shown interest or aptitude in anything. He was a middling student with a decent head for numbers and graduated from high school and college without distinction. Teddy didn’t care to stand out or excel. We all quietly wished we had his courage.

Anam’s chachas stores were vandalized multiple times. TERRORIST, FUCK ALLAH, OSAMA’S COUSIN, HIJACKER. Each instance left him shaken anew. He couldn’t believe Chicago could hate so hard. We had conversations. I gave him articles about race riots in Chicago that were ten times worse than in the Jim Crow South. The history of housing discrimination, born and raised in this town and embraced as the standard practice across the land. He read everything closely, but how much effect it had was hard to gauge. The shock had turned to denial and denial to disbelief. Forsaking God had been easier.
            He had sponsored us to come to the US, but in the beginning my mother and I didn’t like him. He treated my father like indentured help for the history that had happened between their fathers. Anam’s grudge was against my grandfather, which he transferred to my father, for cheating Anam’s father of his inheritance. Age-old disputes and lifelong rifts split generations apart. My father, and I, worked at the first store he owned. I quit after high school. My father, who had been his own boss in Bangladesh and couldn’t imagine taking orders from a stranger, eventually cracked. He told off Anam, refused to be cowed by him for life, dusted off his engineering degree, and got a job with a midsize firm from which he would retire a decade and a half later, dispirited and sick with regrets. By then, my mother and I had put our feelings about Anam behind us, but we were proud of my father for making a stand.
            Anam made police reports. When the cops came around, he treated them like royalty, free coffee, snacks, anything. They paid lip service. Said they’d keep a lookout. Probably kids being kids. Harmless fun. Anam couldn’t bring himself to call the incidents what they were: hate crimes.
            I wrote a slew of op-eds, one more fuming and enraged than the other. Mr. Dev gave me the space. My mother wondered if I was being too vocal for my own safety. I got mad at her. My father, according to her, read them but made no comments.

The night Iraq was invaded, I got wasted at a bar in Rogers Park. It had nothing to with Iraq. The last thing on my mind was 9/11. Fresh from my breakup, I was out prowling. There was a poetry reading that night. Lots of Fuck Bush and Fuck His Fuckin’ War and whoops and cheers and boos.
            I talked for a while with one of the poets, bought her rounds. She spoke with bug-eyed conviction about everything. Veins popped out on her forehead and her neck. I’d missed her reading and she showed me the pieces in her notebook in appalling handwriting. Being as drunk as I was helped with faking that I liked them.
            She ordered shots and we raised them to the downfall of imperialist capitalist pigs. I remember laughing a lot, and her smooth-skinned, apple-cheeked face close to mine, eyes pinched, and smiling, immaculate teeth reflecting the ceiling lights.
            At some point another young woman came up to her. We were introduced, but by then the room was tilting. The bartender cut me off. I shouted, “Suck my dick” and crashed out the door.
            The cool air hit me like a vicious slap. Heaving and retching, I stumbled into the alley behind the bar. Nothing came out.
            I needed to do something. Anything. I was furious, and the anger demanded release. So I quit both my jobs. I called and left messages for the managers. Unnecessarily vicious, I ranted about how toxic they personally made the workplace. I told one he had a lawsuit coming his way because of his grabby hands and the other that it was time to crawl out of the big boss’s ass.
            I woke up some hours later and briefly panicked but then basked in the relief that I wouldn’t have to slog through another day giving a damn about musicals I never liked and rich asshole subscribers bitching about their seats.

I’d been driving by the sign for as long as I’d been going back and forth between the city and my parents’ house in the suburbs, and one day, a week after my drunken resignations, I faxed my résumé and two short stories. They weren’t writing samples relevant to journalism, but they would have to do. An hour later I received a call from Mr. Dev.
            At my interview, he told me he wanted to build a robust community focus and how I made that happen was entirely up to me. In my excitement I rattled off ideas: a column in the tradition of Mike Royko; investigative reporting; political punditry; gritty stories of real people; exposés; scandals; blowing whistles à la Woodward and Bernstein—my head so far in the clouds I lost sight of how lacking I was in the knowledge, resources, and experience to implement even one of them.
            None of my ideas became reality. I knew nothing about working at a paper. I wrote short stories. I’d written two novels in as many years, both of which lay interred in their Kinko’s boxes under my bed. I was more comfortable taking orders than initiative. Mr. Dev had to have seen that right away. Maybe that was why he threw me something easy to get warmed up with, the Toyota profile. For what it was worth, it worked. It roused a sense of pride in me. That could be why when I protested doing the real estate profile, he didn’t insist. I’d gotten the push I didn’t know I needed or to ask for.

The sole Bangladeshi story that came my way was thanks to my coverage of Maryam’s event, and I didn’t write it.
            “Is this Mr. Faheem?”
            “It is, who is this?”
            A deep, heavy, tired sigh came over the line. Some shuffling, like ears were switched.
            “Salam walaikum, Mr. Faheem.”
            “Walaikum salam.
            “May I speak with you?” The man sounded anywhere between my father’s age and twenty years older.
            “Sure, go ahead.”
            “May we meet?” His cadence grew formal the more he spoke.
            “What is this about?” I asked.
            “Your article from two weeks ago. I’m looking at it right now. The one about Special Registration and the detained men.”
            “Go ahead, please. What’s your name?”
            “Might we meet? I live close to Devon. Today when you are finished at work?”
            Behind me, through the open door of his office, I could hear Mr. Dev, also on the phone, speaking loudly in Gujarati. Rajat was humming in his cubicle. Mr. Mathew was at the printer with the forlorn fatigue he always brought to pick up a print job. Mr. Dev’s sister was also on the phone, trying to collect payments.
            “I can meet you in fifteen minutes,” I said.
            “I’m currently one hour away from the city. Will six be acceptable?”
            “Six is fine.”
            “Thank you, Mr. Faheem. I’m Hamid. I’m from Bangladesh, by the way. I know your paper is Indian.”
            “So am I. Pleasure hearing from you.”
           “Oh, how nice,” he said. “Very good, very good.”

Mr. Hamid’s full name was Hamidunnabi Sarwar. He was in his early seventies, which, in a very Bangladeshi way he phrased as “seventy-plus,” and had been in the US many years. He walked with a slight limp but otherwise looked in good health. He wore a beard without mustache, touched with a shade of henna. He’d done the pilgrimage to Mecca four times. He preferred to walk while we talked instead of sitting in a restaurant where he could be overheard.
            He made small talk, asked about my father, which village we were from, how long we’d been in America, where my family lived. I didn’t like intrusive Bangladeshi questioning and respectfully made vague answers.
            “Our people are not very useful,” he said, changing the subject. “Look at you. One of our own and working for an Indian paper. Why don’t we have our own? Because we don’t respect ourselves. Look at these Gujaratis, look at how they own all of Devon, and most of them are families. We would ruin each other before we offered a helping hand.”
            He saw my confusion-mixed-with-impatience.
            “I have nothing to lose,” he said. We were on one of the side streets in front of an apartment building out of which a mother speaking Hindi or Urdu to her small daughter was hurriedly coming, shoving and pulling the child. “I came to this country a few years after the war. I was trained as an engineer in Lahore. Here, I did some work with a small company for a while and then—changed course.” He didn’t elaborate. “I never needed money. My father left me and my brothers a big inheritance. We all went our separate ways with our shares. The one thing I never did was straighten out my papers. Yes, I don’t have legal documents. My Bangladesh passport has probably turned to dust inside a trunk. I own my apartment, I don’t work, so I don’t pay taxes, and I can live the rest of my life without going to a job. At my age, it’s not an option anymore. But I will not subject myself to the humiliation of being fingerprinted by a country that has declared a war on Islam. If anyone bothers to come for me at this age, they can waste their time throwing me out of the country all they want.”
            “Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked.
            He had to think about it, or maybe he had a response that he was turning over. He was not a tentative man and spoke deliberately, choosing every word, never splicing thoughts with ums and ahs.
            “Not one single paper, not even the Pakistani ones, is addressing this problem. For all the talk of being Muslim, we are horrible when it comes to sticking together. And then I find out that you’re Bangladeshi. My heart is so full right now.”
            The only thing I could think to say was, “This is all off the record. You don’t need to worry.”
            “Worry, at my age,” he laughed softly. “The only worry I have now is to receive His forgiveness up there.”
            We walked to what I assumed was his building, but he didn’t bring out keys or start inside.
            “You said your father fought in the war,” he said.
            “Yes. He volunteered right at the beginning.”
            “I’m glad he never came for me.” He clapped my back and offered me his hand. “Thank you, young man. God bless you. This was quite fortuitous. You’ve given me reason to be proud and have hope.”

My father said, “He was probably Jamaat. Probably Al-Badr.”
            The Bengali Jamaat-i-Islami hardliners had collaborated with the Pakistan army during the war against the creation of Bangladesh, and Al-Badr, and Al-Shams, were the name they’d given themselves as the runners of the army’s death squads. In retaliation, at the end of the war, many of them were publicly executed by the Bengali freedom fighters. My father, for all his loathing of the collaborators, refused to participate in such bloody retribution. His suggestion that Mr. Hamid could potentially be a war criminal gave me shivers. At the same time, what a story it would be. A Bangladeshi one at that.
            “He came here right after the war,” I said.
            “Just like all the rest of them,” said my father. “They came here or to England to hide. And they were handed everything on a silver platter. Asylum, refugee status, the things people who actually need it don’t get.”
            I hadn’t made a note of Mr. Hamid’s number. Our office phones were too ancient to have caller ID. I went to the building where we’d said goodbye but didn’t see his name on any buzzer. A check of every other building on the block turned up nothing.

I quit the paper at the end of the year. Mr. Dev wasn’t surprised. He seemed relieved. He told me, without my asking, that he was talking to people in India to outsource the bulk of the layout and design to companies there at a fraction of the cost. If there was any desire left in me to stay, that took care of it.

We met with up Teddy for drinks that weekend. Since the army, he’d abandoned what faith he had left in him and broke one of the governing covenants of Islam. He’d recently started seeing a woman and wanted us to meet her. I got to the bar early to loosen up with a round or two, and Teddy was already there. His woman was running late at work and was on her way.
            It was December, a week before the holidays. A light flurry started as we settled in. The bar was quiet. The bartender was keeping herself busy washing glasses and wiping down the bar top. She even asked if we wanted the channel changed.
            Teddy chuckled wisely and gave a headshake when I told him I quit the paper.
            “You need a patron. Or a rich wife.”
            “I doubt that would work either.”
            “So? What is it that you want to do?”
            “Don’t know.”
            “One thing you got a lot of downrange was time, and that meant you thought about everything under the sun to death.”
            “What did you think about?”
            “Nothing, really. I was never much of a thinker, was I. You guys have been wondering this whole time what the hell made me join, I know. It’s not that complicated. I got tired of being different. I wanted to belong to something. That’s it.”
            “Did it work?” I asked.
            He shrugged. “Who knows.”

Bleary-eyed and dejected the morning after the 2004 presidential election, I turned on the radio in the car to hear more depressing analysis of flip-flopping Democrats and America’s War on Terror going strong. I’d been temping at a medical billing company in Evanston, and most of the staff there were older, white, and conservative, though they’d never own up to what their real politics were. In fairness, I never got to know them either. They were respectful, polite, courteous. There wasn’t much else to be in a job as sedate and free of character as medical billing. It kept my mind from raging all the time over things I couldn’t change.
            The broadcast moved on to a new segment. The host introduced her next guest: Maryam Elnaggar of Rights Now Legal Aid, thanking her for being there that morning. Maryam thanked her for having her on.