The Reluctant Fundamentalist (10 page)

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

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

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

She gave me a hug and afterwards she stood there, looking at me. But he is
dead,
I wanted to shout! It was all I could do not to kiss her then; perhaps I should have. I had to choose whether to continue to try to win her over or to accept her wishes and leave, and in the end I chose the latter. Maybe, I told myself as I drove away, it was a test and I failed; maybe I should have risked it. I almost turned around and went back, but in the end I did not do so. Things might have worked out rather differently if I had turned around; then again, things might have worked out exactly the same.

I cut a desolate figure in the office after that, angry and preoccupied with thoughts of Erica and of home. I was negligent at my administrative duties, and did absolutely nothing to seek out a new assignment for myself. I half expected someone to come to my desk with a pink slip to put me out of my misery. Instead, Jim summoned me to issue a surprising stamp of approval. “Listen, kid,” he said, “some people around here think you’re looking kind of shabby. The beard and all. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. Your performance is what counts, as far as I’m concerned, and you’re the best analyst in your class by a long way. Besides, I know it must be tough for you with what’s going on in Pakistan. What you need is to get yourself busy, which I’ll admit isn’t easy when we have as dry a pipeline as we do right now. But I’ve got a new project, valuing a book publisher in Valparaiso, Chile. It’s going to have to be a small team, just a vice president and an analyst. Normally, I’d offer it to someone with more experience. But I’m offering it to you. What do you think?” “Thank you, sir,” I muttered. He laughed. A bit of enthusiasm, please,” he said, adding, “It’s a lot of responsibility. There won’t be any backup for you.” “You can rely on me,” I said, this time with what I hoped was greater apparent sincerity. I do not know if I succeeded, however, because although Jim smiled in response, his expression was one of puzzlement.

But I observe that you, sir, have stopped eating. Can it be that you are full? Very well, I will not insist; I will, however, order us some dessert, a little rice pudding with sliced almonds and cardamom, the perfect sweetener for an evening such as ours, which is taking a turn towards the grimmer side. Such dishes may not normally be to your taste, but I would encourage you to have, at the very least, a tiny bite. After all, one reads that the soldiers of your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you.

W
HEN YOU SIT
in that fashion, sir, with your arm curved around the back of the empty chair beside you, a bulge manifests itself through the lightweight fabric of your suit, precisely at that point parallel to the sternum where the undercover security agents of our country—and indeed, one assumes, of all countries—tend to favor wearing an armpit holster for their sidearm. No, no, please do not adjust your position on my account! I did not mean to imply that you were so equipped; I am certain that in your case it is merely the outline of one of those travel wallets in which the prudent secrete their possessions so that they are less likely to be discovered by thieves.

I myself employed no such precautions on my trip to Chile. We again flew in the relative comfort of first class, but I was no longer excited by the luxuries of our cabin; unlike Jim, who was as usual accompanying us for the commencement of the project, and the vice president who would be my immediate commanding officer for the full duration of this tour, I turned down our flight attendant’s many offers of champagne. For all the hours that we were airborne, I neither ate nor slept; my thoughts were caught up in the affairs of continents other than the one below us, and more than once I regretted coming at all.

I wondered what I could do to help Erica. Seeing her as I had seen her last—emaciated, detached, and so lacking in
life
—pained me; I recalled the dog we had had in my childhood and his passivity and desire for solitude in those last days before he succumbed to the leukemia induced in him by that brand of tick powder a veterinarian would subsequently tell us never to use. But Erica was not suffering from leukemia; there was no physical reason for her malaise beyond, perhaps, a biochemical disposition towards mental disorders of this kind. No, hers was an illness of the spirit, and I had been raised in an environment too thoroughly permeated with a tradition of shared rituals of mysticism to accept that conditions of the spirit could not be influenced by the care, affection, and desire of others. What was essential was that I seek to understand why I had failed to penetrate the membrane with which she guarded her psyche; my more direct approaches had been rejected, but with sufficient insight I might yet be welcomed through a process of osmosis. I could imagine no alternative but to try; my longing for her was undiminished despite our months of near-complete separation.

It was in such a frame of mind that I arrived in Santiago. We traveled from there by road—making good progress except for a brief blockage where the mechanical shovels of repair crews tore out great bites of the red earth that characterizes Chile’s central valley—and we smelled our destination before we saw it; Valparaiso lay on the briny Pacific and was hidden from view by a crest of hills.

The chief of the publishing company was an old man by the name of Juan-Bautista, given to smoking unfiltered cigarettes and sporting glasses thick enough to burn through paper on a sunny day. He reminded me of my maternal grandfather; I liked him at once. “What do you know of books?” he asked us. “I specialize in the media industry,” Jim replied. “I’ve valued a dozen publishers over two decades.” “That is finance,” Juan-Bautista retorted. “I asked what you knew of books.” “My father’s uncle was a poet,” I found myself saying. “He was well-known in the Punjab. Books are loved in my family.” Juan-Bautista looked at me as though becoming aware of the presence of this youngster before him for the first time; I did not speak in that meeting again.

Jim explained to us afterwards that Juan-Bautista was not pleased to have us there. Although he had run the company for many years, he did not own it; the owners wanted to sell, and the prospective buyer—our client was unlikely to continue to subsidize the loss-making trade division with income from the profitable educational and professional publishing arms. Trade, with its stable of literary—defined for all practical purposes as commercially unviable—authors was a drag on the rest of the enterprise; our task was to determine the value of the asset if that drag were shut down.

We set ourselves up in a handsome, if aging, conference room with a large oval table and bookshelves lining the walls. When a strong breeze blew, I could hear outside our windows the clicking of wooden storm shutters against their restraints. It was hot during the afternoons—we had come during the southern summer—but sometimes we would wake to fog and a morning chill, and in those moments I was glad for the wool of my suit. Jim left after two days, remarking in my presence to the vice president that he could expect impressive things of me. But although my laptop was open, my Internet connection enabled, and my pen and notebook positioned by my side—I found myself unable to concentrate on our work.

Instead I perused news websites which informed me that Pakistan and India were conducting tit-for-tat tests of their ballistic missiles and that a stream of foreign dignitaries was visiting the capitals of both countries, urging Delhi to desist from its warlike rhetoric and Islamabad to make concessions that would enable a retreat from the brink of catastrophe. I wondered, sir, about your country’s role in all this: surely, with American bases already established in Pakistan for the conduct of the Afghanistan campaign, all America would have to do would be to inform India that an attack on Pakistan would be treated as an attack on any American ally and would be responded to by the overwhelming force of America’s military. Yet your country was signally failing to do this; indeed, America was maintaining a strict neutrality between the two potential combatants, a position that favored, of course, the larger and—at that moment in history—the more belligerent of them.

These thoughts preoccupied me when I should have been gathering data and building my financial model. Moreover, Valparaiso was itself a distraction: the city was powerfully atmospheric; a sense of melancholy pervaded its boulevards and hillsides. I read online about its history and discovered that it had been in decline for over a century; once a great port fought over by rivals because of its status as the last stop for vessels making their way from the Pacific to the Atlantic, it had been bypassed and rendered peripheral by the Panama Canal. In this—Valparaiso’s former aspirations to grandeur—I was reminded of Lahore and of that saying, so evocative in our language:
the ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

I sensed the vice president was growing increasingly irritated with me; I could hardly blame him: he was working from morning until midnight, poor fellow, with little support from his only teammate. I pretended to be keeping myself busy, but as the days passed and my deadlines began to slip, he lost patience. “Look, man,” he said, “what’s the problem? You’re not getting anything done. I know you’re supposed to be good, but from my perspective, you aren’t delivering squat. Tell me what you need. You want help with your model, more direction? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, but for God’s sake pull it together.” He was a manager of excellent repute, and I might have considered revealing to him the turmoil taking place inside me, but at the level of human beings our connection was nil. So I apologized, saying that his feedback had hit the mark, but that he need not worry because I would redouble my efforts. “Everything,” I said, mustering a tone of maximum reassurance, “is under control.”

For a time this appeared to satisfy him, although it was patently untrue. Yet I knew he had begun to resent me—and rightly so, after all: by not performing to plan I was making him look bad—and for my part I was beginning to resent him as well. I could not respect how he functioned so completely immersed in the structures of his professional micro-universe. Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm’s exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one’s emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the sudden broadening of my arc of vision.

I noticed Juan-Bautista watching me as I shuffled about half-heartedly from one meeting to another. He kept his door open and his desk was positioned in such a way that it was possible for him to gaze down the corridor. Once, as I was passing by, he called me to him. “I have,” he said, “looked into this matter of the contemporary poets of the Punjab. Tell me, what was the name of your father’s uncle?” I told him and he nodded; he had indeed seen him mentioned in an anthology available in Spanish translation. I was surprised and pleased to hear that this was the case, but before I could respond he went on to say, “You seem very unlike your colleagues. You appear somewhat lost.” “Not at all,” I replied, taken aback. Then I added, “Although I must say I am quite moved by Valparaiso.” He suggested that I visit the house of Pablo Neruda, but to go during the day as it was shut in the evening, and with that our brief conversation concluded.

I never came to know why Juan-Bautista singled me out. Perhaps he was gifted with remarkable powers of empathy and had observed in me a dilemma that out of compassion he thought he could help me resolve; perhaps he saw among his enemies one who was weak and could easily be brought down; perhaps it was mere coincidence. Sentimentally, I would like to believe in the first of these possibilities. But regardless, Juan-Bautista added considerable momentum to my inflective journey, a journey that continues to this day…

But I am getting ahead of myself, and in any case our dessert has arrived. He has brought only a single bowl; I sensed that you were not keen on having more than a taste, and the same is true of myself, as I am now quite full. What do you think, sir? Ah, that puckering of your lips is an inauspicious sign. Too sweet, you say? An interesting observation, given that I have always felt your country to be rather similar to mine in the intensity of its national desire for sweetness. But perhaps you are atypical; your travels have taken you far from the ubiquitous soda fountains and ice-cream bars of your motherland.

I too had traveled far that January, but the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically, of course, it was perhaps as remote a place as could be found on the planet, but in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city, or a sail by night down the Ravi and Indus. I told the vice president that I was going out to inspect a distribution center and with this excuse made my way up into the hills, climbing higher and higher, until when I turned to look at the ocean I saw gulls soaring at the same altitude as myself. The neighborhood was a poor one, with colorful murals like graffiti on the walls and children racing by on wooden carts that appeared to be shipping crates to which wheels had been attached. The house itself was compact and beautiful, reminiscent of a boat jutting out over the bay; a garden cascaded below it, and behind the bar was a convex mirror, which Neruda had employed to convince his guests that they were drunk. I lingered on the terrace and watched the sun dip lower in the sky. In the distance, someone was playing the guitar; it was a delicate melody, a song with no words.

I thought of Erica. It occurred to me that my attempts to communicate with her might have failed in part because I did not know where I stood on so many issues of consequence; I lacked a stable
core.
I was not certain where I belonged—in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither—and for this reason, when she reached out to me for help, I had nothing of substance to give her. Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile. But in so doing—and by being unable to offer her an alternative to the chronic nostalgia inside her—I might have pushed Erica deeper into her own confusion. I resolved to write this to her in an email, as a sort of apology, perhaps, and as an invitation to resume the contact between us that she had all but severed, and I recall pressing send without rereading even once what I had written.

But days passed without any response, and I began to lose hope that one would come. I telephoned my parents and they told me that the situation in Pakistan continued to be precarious; it was rumored that India was acting with America’s connivance, both countries seeking through the threat of force to coerce our government into changing its policies. Moreover, our house’s main water connection had ruptured—the pipes were long overdue for replacement—and the pressure was now so low that it had become impossible to take a shower; they were making do with buckets and ladles instead. This caused me to reflect again on the absurdity of my situation, being two hemispheres—if such a thing is possible—from home at a time when my family was in need.

The only manner in which I could be of aid to them at that moment was to provide money, and this I did, wiring what little savings I possessed to my brother because my father refused to accept it. The act of calling my bank to arrange the transfer ought to have impressed upon me the importance of my job: after all, I had no other source of income to fall back on. But instead my indifference to my work continued unabated. There was no longer any possibility of deceiving the vice president; my lapses had become obvious, and his reprimands grew increasingly blunt. I wonder in retrospect why he did not reach out to Jim at that stage to have me replaced, but then again, this was not entirely surprising: the task of a vice president at our firm—the word vice in the title notwithstanding—was to be as close to autonomous as possible. A good vice president was one who
got things done,
no matter what, and to appeal for assistance prematurely would be to undermine one’s superior’s confidence in one’s abilities.

As for myself, I was clearly on the threshold of great change; only the final catalyst was now required, and in my case that catalyst took the form of lunch. Juan-Bautista’s invitation caught me off guard; he simply mentioned, as I was passing his office one day, that it would be a shame to have visited Valparaiso without having tasted sea bass cooked in salt, and as he intended to go to his favorite restaurant that afternoon, I really ought—if I were free—to accompany him. I said—out of politeness and curiosity, and also because I was eager to seize any pretext to avoid returning to the poisonous atmosphere of our team room—that it would be an honor, and the next thing I knew, I found myself making my way through the streets of the city with a man who desired more than any other to see our client’s acquisition fail to proceed.