The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (46 page)

He was worried about their ability to adjust to America, where they planned to spend some months. They were acquainted only with Bengalis and only with their neighborhood back home. They weren’t used to these glassy towers and these wide highways. They weren’t used to the food, so bland, so thoughtlessly, hurriedly prepared. Rais could already hear his mother’s horror at the way he ate breakfast—only coffee and cereal, as though a war or famine had broken out. And why coffee to go? He didn’t have five minutes to sit with his mother and drink coffee?

Rais had floated by his parents the idea of moving to America for good, of following in his footsteps, but they had their own lives. They lacked his leaving impulse. They wanted simply to be around close friends and neighbors, to sit and talk the years away, to bask in that familiarity. “They have their own gossip, their own newspaper,” Rais said.

“What I want is to make them happy,” he said. “The feeling’s important that my son is in good shape and now he’s trying to do something good.”

The visit was equally important for Rais’s feelings. Of his many leavings, leaving his parents had been the most wrenching; and being unable—then unwilling—to return when he was shot, harder still. He needed them to know, as he now knew for himself, that his wandering odyssey had been worthwhile after all.

“After I was shot, they’d been asking me to go back, and I said that, ‘No, I wanted to give it the fight and maybe, by the mercy of God, things will change one day,’ ” Rais said, standing in the arrivals area.
“ ‘I will make you proud. Let me stay there, and I will do my best.’ Once I look back ten years and I see myself now, God really helped me, and I accomplished something. I think they will see that it was worth it to let me stay here.”

Then he saw them—or at least, at first, their luggage. A lanky porter emerged pushing a stack of four bags almost as high as Rais. Shuffling many steps behind was a small, veiled woman in a lime-green salwar kameez—and far behind her, and slower still, a man brightly hennaed on his head and beard. Their American boy, in jeans and a plaid shirt, hugged his mother. She clutched his neck with one hand and rubbed his back with the other. She looked at him, as though a little incredulous. Once again, she buried her head in his chest and held Rais, now with her husband awaiting his turn. Rais embraced his father, pulling him to his left, then his right, then his left again. Now Rais’s phone rang. He looked at the number—the office, in all likelihood—and put it back in his pocket. It could wait. He slipped the lanky porter a tip.

“Are you happy?” Rais’s father brokenly asked the porter, making sure it was enough. “Are you happy?” The father didn’t want his American adventure to begin inauspiciously. Reassured that it hadn’t, that the tip was ample, the father and mother followed Rais toward the electric doors and the searing summer light, and into their miracle boy’s American life.

I am thankful for many gifts of time and friendship that allowed the making of this book. I am particularly grateful to the people who let me tell their stories—above all, Rais Bhuiyan and the family of Mark Stroman. We would know so little about our communities, and ourselves, without those brave souls who answer the storyteller’s knock.

If publishing is a marriage, I’m blessed with my in-laws at W. W. Norton. John Glusman, a true writer’s editor, believed in this story from the start and possesses a judgment (and sense of humor) at once sharp and subtle. Thank you, too, to Tori Leventhal and Jonathan Baker, to India Cooper for careful and imaginative copyediting, and to the art, publicity, rights, sales, and marketing folk. Steve Wasserman, in a last hurrah as an agent, represented me on this book with his trademark fervor and curiosity. He has a gift for seeing what could be where little presently is.

I’m grateful to the
New York Times
for teaching me this trade and for supporting writers in a difficult era. Many thanks to Vera Titunik and Hugo Lindgren for their encouragement to tell the story that became this book. And to Jill Abramson, Alison Smale, Dave Smith, Richard Berry, Mary Jo Murphy, and Marc Charney, among others, for paving this path and making my writing better.

Many people, in Texas and beyond, went out of their way to help me report this story. Ilan Ziv, the filmmaker, was unfailingly gracious in sharing footage, contacts, and insight. In the book, most quotations from Mark Stroman come from his own prison writings,
but some are from interviews done by Ilan and generously shown to me. Beyond the principal characters already mentioned, I’m appreciative of everyone who aided my reporting—whether by sitting for interviews, guiding me to files, or sharing letters and photos. Many people’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.

A squadron of friends and family agreed to read the manuscript and comment. I have tried to live up to their high standards. Thank you, Nora Abousteit, John Blaxall, Marc Charney, Sam Dolnick, Nandini Giridharadas, Rukmini Giridharadas, Shyam Giridharadas, Andrea Harner, Kate Krontiris, Salma Merchant, Jeanne Moore, Deepa Narayan, Sue Parilla, Priya Parker, Brian Schechter, Baratunde Thurston, Emma Vaughn, Mariquel Waingarten, and Omar Wasow. Dr. Naresh Mandava helped me get my medical facts straight. Thanks, too, to Herman De Bode and family for the magical hillside where this book began to be written; to Beth Goff, for enlivening my Dallas reporting trips; and to my teachers and classmates in the Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute, for challenging me to think hard about the writer’s duty.

Vrinda Condillac was, once again, a master editor—careful, sympathetic, able to see past the words and into the characters’ hearts. She brings skills from literary fiction to my world of facts, and has pushed me to make the people and places in this book leap more vividly to life. Sara Stroo and Katherine Marrone, both of the University of Oregon, were tireless and cheerful research assistants. They worked hard, over long hours, to ensure that the characters could be heard in their own voices.

I’d be nothing without my family. My parents have always spurred me onward in the pursuit of a profession that more calculating people would urge their genetic legatees to avoid. It is they who taught me to observe, dwell on details, tell stories, and never stop asking why and how. My sister is smart as a whip, an editor with heart, and the most loyal friend you could have. But you can’t have her, because she’s mine.

Then there’s Priya. My wondrous wife told me, one sunny and confused morning, to write this book, and later that day I began. It’s like that with her. She knows me; her only agenda for me is that I become the fullest expression of myself. She edits with vigor and ingenuity, and yet somehow also with love. How do other people get things written without her? This book is for her. Without her, it might never have been. Without her, even if it had, the experience would have been no fun.

ALSO BY ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking

Copyright © 2014 by Anand Giridharadas

All rights reserved

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