Michael Gruber - The Good Son

So I took her out to dinner at Citronelle on my father’s plastic, using his name to get a reservation. Farid is a pretty modest guy, but he’s still a Punjabi mogul, and he’s known at the nice places around town. I’ve never taken a nickel off him but he wanted to do this and I agreed. He assumed I would be going out with a woman who would expect a luxurious dining experience rather than scarfing takeout from local taquerias in bed, as was the case. There are deep veins of misunderstanding in my family, and lately I have started to find them amusing, although it was not always so.

So we had a nice meal, not my favorite kind of food but she seemed to like it, and she spotted some celebrities eating there, and the celebrities looked at us and wondered who we were to be sitting there at one of the good tables in Citronelle. Then I took her back to Kalorama and showed her around the house.

She ooed a little. “I didn’t know you were rich,” she said.

“I’m not rich. My father’s rich.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not. I live on my E-Seven pay.”

“Why? Is he stingy?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Everything’s a long story with you,” she said. “If I knew you had this kind of money I would’ve hit you for some. You could keep me in style.”

We were in my bedroom at this point and she wandered around looking at things, opening closets, checking out the books and CDs.

“Where’s all your stuff?” she asked.

“This is it. I don’t have a lot of stuff.”

“I mean when you were a kid. I’ve got more shit than this in my room at home, and we were piss poor.”

“I didn’t live here very long. Until I was seventeen I lived in various places in South Asia.”

“Yeah? You said you were born in Pakistan but I figured you were raised here. I mean, you’re an American.”

“Am I? How can you tell?”

“He walks like a duck and talks like a duck, he’s a duck.”

“The duck would like a drink,” I said, and went downstairs and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet and two glasses. She was lying on my bed with her shoes off, paging through a high school yearbook. “You’re not in this,” she observed.

“No, I never graduated. I have a fourth-grade education.” She rolled her eyes the way people do when I say that but declined to comment further.

I poured out a couple of drinks. We drank and smooched a little. I said, “Do you really want this story? I mean, I can go on for quite a while about my sad life.”

“I’ll tell you when I get bored,” she said. “No, honestly, you have no idea how uninteresting most people I know are, especially men. They get poured into a mold in high school and they set up and that’s it for life. It’s TV shows, sports, and gossip, what they’re buying and what they’re planning to buy, and bitching about how everything’s not perfect in their lives. And meanwhile they’re working around dying, smashed up people. It drives me nuts. But you… I spotted something about you the minute I saw you getting worked over. I thought you might have something else going on, which is the real reason why I dragged you into this relationship. So spit it out, Buster! You were born in Pakistan. And then what?”

And then what? I can tell the story, but will she understand what it means? Like all Americans, her whole thing is about privacy, pulling away from the parents to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and I get it that’s the way things are here in the Great Satan; you reach age thirteen and suddenly your parents don’t know shit and you can’t wait to get out of the house and hang with the kids.

But that’s not the way it is where I come from. There, in Lahore, and later in Pashtunistan, boys still want to grow up to be like their fathers, their grandfathers. To be young is nothing. To be young is not to have a job, a wife, to be broke all the time; if you’re a Pashtun, it’s not having a gun. When I was a kid in Lahore, I thought my grandfather, B. B. Laghari, was God on earth, and I thought Gul Muhammed was, besides Baba, the greatest man in creation. And Farid, my father, and my uncles and my aunt thought the same about their father.

When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, they way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren’t sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: “Be home by ten, okay?”

A traditional society. We say the words but we-I mean Americans-don’t get what it stands for. Here’s an example. My grandfather considered himself a modern man, and in a lot of ways he was. He didn’t boot his son out when that son showed up with a strange American woman he wanted to marry. He installed flush toilets-that was a big deal in Lahore at the time-and he gave his daughter the same education he gave his sons. But he wouldn’t allow TV in the house and he was strict about movies. His wife, Noor, was a traditional Panjabi begum, stayed in the home, didn’t mix with his male guests, and so forth. The main point was that he was in control; he was living the life he thought a traditional Muslim Punjabi of the higher kind was supposed to lead, but he was like Timothy Leary compared to Gul Muhammed.

Grandfather used to have his high-class ghazal evenings, and after the children got sent away, before they sang the more erotic stuff, we would sneak out of bed and go to the servants’ quarters in the back of the yard, and there we would listen to Dost Yacub tell Pashtun stories for Gul Muhammed and his pals. In the winter they met around a fire pit and in hot weather they moved up to the roof of Gul Muhammed’s house, or under the barsati if it was raining.

Dost Yacub was probably over seventy at the time, and one of the last traditional Pashtun storytellers in Lahore. He’d been a warrior in his time and had probably taken shots at people Kipling had known. He told stories about the wars and feuds he’d been in, too, all about zar, zan, zamin-women, gold, and land-and in my child’s mind the stories of his adventures and the stories about princesses and jinns and man-eaters all blended together to make a picture of a different kind of world than my contemporaries in America were having pumped into them through the tube, none of that Sesame Street-Mister Rogers stuff there around the fire or under the hissing lantern. The fairy tales they tell American kids always end with “And they lived happily ever after,” but most Pashtun tales go out with heads rolling “And thus he had his revenge.” I mean, that’s the point of the stories.

So we would sit there and listen to Dost Yacub, me and Wazir, propping up our eyelids as it got late, and later on we’d play out the stories, the way American kids do with cowboys and Indians. We had tin swords and Pashtun clothes and sometimes we could talk or bribe one of the servants’ kids to play a princess or an evil man-eater. Wazir was four years older than I was, which is a lot when you’re a kid, so he was the master of the games. Technically, Gul Muhammed and Wazir were servants, but they weren’t treated as servants, more like members of the family. The story I heard was that Gul Muhammed had rescued Baba during a riot in Srinagar after the partition of India. He’d been cornered with his wife by a gang of Hindus and they were going to rape her and slaughter them both and Gul happened on the scene with a pistol and drove off the gang and so after that they were like brothers, and Baba brought Gul into his home and Gul became his sworn protector, because when you save a life you are responsible for it ever after.