Manil Suri - The City of Devi

He hesitated, but not enough to give me hope. “I’m sorry, Jaz. I can’t do it. Not to Sarita, I can’t. Thanks to you, I know exactly how it feels to be in her place.”

“But why would she ever know?”

“No, Jaz, that’s the way you think, not I.”

“Really? And I suppose you’ve been completely honest with her, have you? Told her everything about us?”

“That whole part of my life is done for—I left it behind when I met her. Marriage is about the future, not the past—I didn’t ask her about herself either.”

“How perfectly convenient. I didn’t know it worked that way. You complain I’m still the same, but in my eyes, you’ve grown immeasurably, Karun—as a hypocrite. My great shining example. At least back then you only lied to yourself, instead of trying to delude your wife as well. Is that why you came here without her today—to work on your marriage?”

“You’re right. It was a mistake.” He shot up from the couch and headed to the door. This time, I’d left the key in the lock, and he was able to open it.

“Be sure to give Sarita my best,” I yelled, as he slammed the door behind himself.

THE ZURICH DIRTY BOMB attacks occurred on September 11, four days before my family’s departure to Switzerland. Explosions along the Bahnhofstrasse and at the university hospital left large swathes of the city uninhabitable. Similar strikes followed later that day in New York, London, Rome, Toronto, and Frankfurt. As if the choice of date weren’t incriminating enough, jihadi literature turned up near two of the bomb sites, and a video claiming responsibility, by a new Al Qaeda-like group, appeared on the internet.

Those anticipating the next big terrorist incident for the past several years may have sighed with relief that it had finally occurred. They might have pointed out that despite widespread panic and disruption, the damage didn’t approach that caused by a single thermonuclear explosion. But the real destruction in this case, illustrating just how much this September 11 heir had evolved over its parent, came with the ensuing cyber attacks. The dirty bombs were merely the gunshot starting the race, signaling hackers with fingers poised over keyboards to launch their malware.

Five weeks later, the Jazter still marvels at how quick and easy it was to unravel the order of the entire world. First came the news hoaxes, saturating the internet, whipping up the panic already frothing in place. A fake suicide truck attack on the hastily called NATO summit in Brussels was so convincingly reported that even CNN listed the names of heads of state supposedly felled. Warnings of an imminent electromagnetic pulse over the U.S. touched off hysterical runs on banks all the way down to Mexico and Belize. Meanwhile, the armies of cyber bugs on the loose found crevices to crawl through even the most impregnable firewalls. They invaded enough strategic nodes and sources to wrest control of the entire global news network.

Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable?—people needed their daily fix. They would gladly swallow the most improbable rumors, the most outlandish fabrications, to quell the ravenousness within. Even the Jazter, always a voracious consumer of news, succumbed to this junk food urge.

Not that some of these inconceivable scenarios didn’t turn out to be true. The viruses had gained cunning by now, learned to down bigger game. They sabotaged power stations and exploded gas lines, bewitched airliners over the Atlantic into executing suicide dives. People could no longer separate reality from fabrication, trust the ground they walked on, the world they lived in. Did Morocco actually invade Spain? Did a string of reactors really blow up in France? The actual answers mattered less and less, as panic (and despondency) increased.

But harking back to the early days right after September 11, the one irrefutable fact was that Switzerland immediately rescinded my family’s visas. Their government pushed through an emergency law overnight, banning all Muslim visitors. My father scrambled to find another country that would accept us, but similar bills popped all over, effectively shuttering the West. The only options that remained were Islamic states, particularly those in the Gulf.

My parents already had tourist visas for Dubai, so that seemed the most promising choice. Unfortunately, well-heeled Muslims trying to escape India mobbed every consulate in Bombay (even the one for Pakistan, essentially manned only by the watchman ever since the ambassador fled). My father pulled every string he could to get my passport stamped, but the Dubai embassy informed him there would be a six-month wait.

With time of the essence, and Dubai only a temporary destination, we realized the only practical solution was for my parents to go ahead without me. From there, they could more effectively lobby other Arab states for a permanent haven, and get me a visa directly to that country. The UAE itself seemed promising, since my parents had lectured in several of the emirates after the democracy rumblings generated by the Tunisian revolution. The Saudis might also be interested, having recently offered them both university positions. (Akbar’s underlying tenet of a divine right to power had appeared particularly attractive ever since the Arab Spring.)

All of this looked quite bleak for the Jazter. Beggars can’t be choosers, but surely some alternative to the rampant repression against his ilk practiced in these places had to exist? Even if shikar was popular among Arabs as reports claimed, Riyadh or Sharjah weren’t exactly high on my list. I tried to find consolation in the reports that, compared to Iran, the Saudis had probably beheaded fewer gays.

Since I would be staying behind, I needed a safer place. Fortunately, we managed to exchange apartments just two days before my parents left. The new residence was located in the Muslim quarter behind Crawford Market—a shabby flat, old and crumbling, with a shared pair of toilets at the end of the outside corridor. But the place was secure—or at least relatively so, compared to our previous address.

The day before I accompanied them to Ballard Pier to catch their ship, I found my father sitting on the floor of one of the musty rooms, his books and prayer scroll collection spread out around him. I recognized the well-worn Koran by Nafi that he still pored over for hours. “See this?” he asked, holding up a copy of An Emperor’s Bequest to Islam . “It’s from the first edition—they only published five hundred of them—that’s all they expected to sell. Your mother and I worked on it for eight years—this is the original copy the publisher sent us in the mail from New York.” He opened it to the dedication page, to the inscription I’d read many times before—“May the light always shine on our son, Ijaz.” “The only thing more thrilling to hold in my hands for the first time was your tiny body, just after you were born.”

He closed the book and laid it down on the floor. “We always hoped you’d accept our gift to you, Ijaz. When you spurned it, when you showed such disdain for religion, we understood, of course. What child hasn’t experienced the need to rebel? But we felt so sad. Not because we’d lost a follower, but because you’d never see the beauty we had. All the wisdom contained in these texts, the answers to so many problems ripping us apart now.” He caressed the cover of an old textbook on comparative religions, then ran his fingers over the ornate Urdu letters on one of the scrolls. The dusty light shone around his head like rays from God.