If you have the time, this is an amazing read.
*The Washington Post
Sunday, December 9, 2001
The Geography of Grief
Before Sept. 11, Taimour Khan’s rise to the 92nd floor of the World Trade
Center was just another American success story.
By David Finkel http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58823-2001Dec5.html
There are thousands of them, red as blood drops on the white marble floor of
the shrine. Rose petals. They are for sale by the bagful at the entrance,
near the Osama bin Laden T-shirts, and they are brought in by people who
visit this sacred Islamic site, in the center of Lahore, Pakistan, to pray,
weep and make wishes.
“I wish for a job,” says a 19-year-old man who has yet to work a day in his
life.
“I wish for a boy,” says a 40-year-old man whose wife has yet to get
pregnant.
“I wish for more money to take care of my daughter,” says a woman who is
holding the hand of a 10-year-old girl.
Up go the petals and down they come, flying through the air, scattering
across the ground, a few of which are offered at the request of a grieving
woman in New York City named Tahira Khan.
December 15, 1971. That was the last time she was at the shrine. She was
nine months pregnant. Labor had been induced. Nothing was happening. She
slipped out of the hospital. Three hours later, she would give birth to a
son. A year after that, she would take him to America.
Twenty-eight years after that, he would be in the World Trade Center, at his
desk on the 92nd floor. “He must have worn his black suit,” she would say
after September 11, trying to imagine.
“He must have worn his red tie.”
“Do you think he jumped out the window?”
“He must have been so scared.”
In the beginning, though, among the rose petals, her thoughts were much
simpler. “A healthy baby,” is what she wished for that day.
His name was Taimour Khan, and if it’s possible three months after September
11 to understand the still-unfolding meanings of that day, one way is
through his story, which traces back to the very place where America went to
war, trying to avenge his death.
The tendency of September 11 is to look for meaning in numbers. The 4,000
dead. Or the 1,368 feet from the top of the World Trade Center down to the
ground. In Taimour Khan’s case, however, the journey is better measured from
the ground up to the top. His being on the 92nd floor wasn’t only a tragedy,
it was, to much of his family, an astonishing achievement, of which the
migration from Pakistan to America was only a part. Because before Pakistan
there was India, where his family survived one of the bloodiest episodes in
human history. And before India was the family’s starting point, in a place
that will always claim Taimour as one of its own: Afghanistan.
This is where Taimour descended from. In America, he was called Tai, but in
Afghanistan he would be Taimour Khan of Wardak province, and of the Vardag
tribe, and of the Nuri sub-tribe, and of a sub-sub-tribe in the village of
Hayat Khel, which was on the flight path of U.S. jets on bombing runs to
Kabul, a mere 20 miles away.
In Afghanistan, the intricacies of such an identification are essential; if
Taimour were to have shown up suddenly in Hayat Khel, even dressed in one of
the two tuxedos he owned and acting as frenetic as a successful investment
trader sometimes acts, he would have been welcomed as someone familiar, as
family. Whatever he had become would be less important than where he began.
For Americans, however, to whom the concept of tribal identification is less
explanatory than bewildering, the best way to begin Taimour’s story is from
the vantage point of an American who knew little about Wardak history –
Taimour himself.
Who was he on September 11?
He was, according to the Muslim and Christian and Jewish friends who spoke
at his funeral, “kind,” and “courageous,” and “peace-loving,” and
“nonconfrontational,” and “the best friend I will ever have.”
“The light has been taken out of our lives,” said his uncle, Arshad Khan, in
whose Long Island house Taimour grew up.
On Long Island he was captain of his high school football team. At the State
University of New York at Albany he was president of the economics society
and drove around in a sports car with an oversize fin on the back. In
Manhattan, he went to clubs, went to movies, played soccer in Central Park,
and lived on a cell phone that never seemed to stop ringing.
“He had no pain, and it happened instantly,” his sister, Zara, a year older
than Taimour, said at the funeral. But of course there was pain – if not
for Taimour then for his survivors, who suddenly had a new set of
associations with which to view his life.
There was Albany – no longer only the place he went to college, but also
the place where American Airlines Flight 11 began its turn toward Manhattan
and the tower that happened to be his. There was the wonderful view from his
desk out the windows on the north side of the tower, which is the side where
the first jet flew into, two floors above where he was sitting.
Every hopeful moment of his life now seemed freighted, going all the way
back to the day he arrived in the United States in 1972, descending toward a
New York skyline that included two new towers, nearly finished, which were
about to be dedicated as the tallest buildings in the world.
He was 9 months old, and he would, from that moment on, live an entirely
American life, returning to Pakistan only once.
“I remember a lot of poverty,” Zara says of that trip back to Pakistan. She
is crying. It is a day soon after the attacks. Her brother’s body has yet to
be found, and she has just come from dropping off his toothbrush so the
authorities will have a DNA sample on file. “I remember dirt roads, a lot of
dirt roads,” she says, “and walking along one of them at night and stepping
on frogs. Not because we were trying to but because they were everywhere.”
She was 6 at the time, and Taimour was 5, and home they came, never to go
back. Life was a development called the Gates of Woodbury. They were a close
family, so close that at the funeral a friend of Taimour’s would say, “His
love for his family was a model for all of us. He worshiped Tahira. He loved
her more than anything in the world.” The family went to museums. To the
zoo. To the beach. To the Statue of Liberty. To Central Park. To the Empire
State Building. To the World Trade Center. To anywhere at all. Then came
college. Then came the 92nd floor. Then came September 11, and Tahira’s
phone was ringing, and it was Zara.
“Mommy,” she said, crying. “I can’t reach Taimour.”
“Put on the TV!”
Shandana Habib, who is Taimour’s first cousin, said this to her mother,
shouting into a phone. In New York, it was 9:45 a.m., an hour into the
attack. In Pakistan, where Shandana lives, it was 6:45 p.m. and nearing
dinnertime. She turned on the television to Pakistani news and was surprised
to see Taimour’s building. She switched to CNN. There it was again. She
switched to the BBC. Again. She picked up the phone, called her mother, hung
up, and resumed watching, just in time to see the south tower collapse.
The phone rang – her mother, calling back.
“Where is Taimour working?”
“I think it’s the other building.”
Twenty-three minutes later, there went the other building, and with that,
Shandana, who was Taimour’s closest link to what life would have been like
if he’d stayed in Pakistan, realized that he had almost certainly died.
“Oh it was terrible,” she is saying a few weeks later, “just terrible,
because the moment I watched on the TV . . .” She cannot finish. She was
born in November 1971, and when Taimour was born a month later their
grandmother announced that they would one day be married, and she grew up
feeling like “his sister,” and she saw him every few years when she would
visit the United States, and one of the decorations in her apartment is a
photograph of her at the World Trade Center with the man she did marry.
The first degree of separation – that’s what Shandana Habib represents.
Because while she has been to America enough times to feel at least partly
Americanized, her life is lived in a place where there have been daily
demonstrations against the country that she views with sympathy and Taimour
called home. Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad and dozens of villages in
between – all have been sites of anti-American demonstrations that in the
weeks after September 11 fell into a kind of choreography of fiercely
passionate speeches and chants followed by government assurances that all
was under control.
But the government has also known that its fate won’t be determined by what
happens in the cities that border Afghanistan, such as Quetta and Peshawar,
as much as one city that borders India – Lahore. While Quetta and Peshawar
are dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, Lahore is part of the Punjab, which is the
region that is home to the majority of Pakistan’s soldiers. So far, the
demonstrations that have turned violent have pitted Punjabi soldiers against
Pashtun protesters. A riot in Lahore, however, would mean soldiers turning
their batons and rifles on their own kind, something they might not do,
which would mean a riot ultimately out of control, which could mean an end
to the government, which is why Lahore is being watched so closely by any
number of Pakistanis. This includes Shandana, whose interest is especially
personal because Lahore is where her grandfather – and Taimour’s
grandfather as well – brought his family on August 15, 1947, the day that
Pakistan was officially cleaved out of India and came into being.
The family at that point had been in India for several generations. They
lived in the western Indian city of Amritsar, owned textile mills, were
wealthy and comfortably settled. Then came partition. A line was drawn. The
Muslim nation would be to the west of it, in Pakistan, and the nation for
Hindus and Sikhs would be to the east, in India. Simple – except so many
people died in the resulting chaos, in so many horrible ways, that there was
no way to keep count. Estimates range from 200,000 to a million, and the
methods, well chronicled, included guns, knives, swords, ice picks, hammers,
rocks, bricks, dogs and bare hands. Seven million Muslims headed toward
Pakistan, and 5.5 million Hindus and Sikhs headed toward India, and along
the way people were beheaded, people were set on fire, people were
dismembered, people were eviscerated, and meanwhile, squeezed into one car,
no longer wealthy, now refugees, running for their lives, were the Khans.
They settled in Lahore, in an abandoned house. The man who was Shandana’s
and Taimour’s grandfather never completely recovered, financially or
emotionally. Over time, as his four children grew up, they began gravitating
toward America, including Tahira, whose marriage was falling apart, even
though she had visited the shrine in her wedding dress. Only Shandana’s
mother remained, and so Shandana has spent her life in a country that has
been soaked in violence since the start.
This, then, is her identity. Taimour became an American, and she remained a
Pakistani. Taimour got the Gates of Woodbury, and what she has had is a
place where bombs are put on buses, killing dozens, and grenades are thrown
into bazaars, maiming dozens, and rockets are fired from surrounding hills
at various buildings, such as a library where her husband was studying one
day, leaving him unhurt but momentarily terrified.
So even before September 11 she understood terrorism, as well as the terror
that goes with it.
Since then, though, she has seesawed between two perspectives.
She is American enough to agree with her New York relatives, who agree with
George W. Bush, that it is reasonable to believe the terrorism of Osama bin
Laden caused the death of her cherished Taimour. But she is Pakistani enough
to understand that “there’s a lot of sympathy here for bin Laden,” and as
she sits in her apartment, a Pakistani woman holding a photograph of the
World Trade Center, she says, “I’m not sure he is the one, in my heart,
because we were always told in the newspapers that he is a true Muslim.” And
even if he is, “What can you do about it?” She cried for three weeks, she
says, every day, couldn’t stop. But then did.
“It is the will of Allah,” she says.
“I’m hopeful,” Tahira Khan, red-eyed, said in New York, a week after the
attacks.
“Wild. Crazy. Praying. Lost,” she said a few days after that, unable to eat,
unable to sleep.
“I can’t see him. I can’t feel him. I can’t hear him,” she said after that,
her voice dead now – and meanwhile, far away, in Pakistan, a relative named
Umer Khan Vardag is remembering the only time he met her.
“I didn’t know him, but I knew the mother. She stayed with us when she came
here. She was a very nice person. She was nice to talk to. We went on a
picnic, and she told us a lot of jokes.”
Umer, 30, who was born 10 months before Taimour and was his third cousin, is
saying this as he drives through a Pakistani landscape of dirt roads, of mud
houses, of mosque after mosque, of oxen tethered to trees, of more donkeys
than cars, of covered-up women and men in turbans and long beards. The
villages, midway between Islamabad and Peshawar, are small and cloistered,
and in nearly every house are people whose roots are in Wardak. (Wardak and
Vardag are both common transliterations of the Pashto word for the Afghan
province. Wardak is the most widely accepted name for the province; Vardag
is a common name for people who come from there.)
“I have been to Wardak,” Umer says and tells about a time before he went to
law school, before he got his undergraduate degree in history, when he was
17 and went into Afghanistan, on his own, to better understand the Soviet
occupation. It was fall 1988. Taimour, at that point, was at Syosset High
School on Long Island, playing football for the Syosset Braves, where he set
a record for the longest kick return in school history. Umer spent that fall
as a soldier, in Wardak, sleeping outside, moving from hilltop to hilltop, a
period from which he has one memory above all.
“Terrible cold,” he says. “You cannot imagine the cold.”
He pulls into a Pakistani village that consists of a few hundred families, a
fundamentalist religious school that most of the children attend because it
is free, and a long mud wall with a closed blue door, behind which are two
tribal relatives of Taimour’s. Neither has ever heard his name, but the
first mention of September 11 causes Bilal Khan Vardag, 21, to say, "When I
saw the buildings come down, I was thinking, ‘How many are dying? What are
they thinking? What are they feeling?’ "
“I don’t think Osama bin Laden did it,” says Abdul Basit Vardag, 19. “I’m
sure about it. We have been reading in newspapers that 4,000 Jewish workers
didn’t show up for work that day.”
“America is so powerful, with so many resources, that no one can harm them
unless it comes from the inside,” Bilal says. “And Jews are on the inside.”
“It is because Israel wants to give Pakistan a bad name,” Abdul says. “This
is revenge because we didn’t recognize them when they became a state. We
have always opposed them. So this is their revenge. They want to use America
to destroy Islam.”
Back in the car:
“I would not go for the Jewish conspiracy theory,” Umer says. He pulls into
another village, this one 70 houses and another distant tribal relative,
Munawar Khan Vardag, 35, who is reading an Urdu-language newspaper with
photographs of Bush being burned in effigy, a bandaged child, and bin Laden.
“He’s a good leader,” Munawar says. “He follows Islam.”
Is he a terrorist?
“No.”
Was he involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center?
“No.”
Why does America think he was?
“America is mistaken.”
Who did it, then?
“I have heard that 4,000 or 5,000 Jews were not there that day . . .”
Another house:
“The proof is that, first, the Jewish workers didn’t come to work that day,”
says Mohammad Qasim Khan Vardag. “Second, films were made of the planes
striking the building, and how could they make such films unless they knew
it was going to happen and were prepared for it? And the third thing is –
even the American president said it – the pilots were trained in America
and lived in America during the training period. And that points out Osama
didn’t do it. America saw the Afghanistan emirate as a threat, as an Islamic
state enforcing Islamic values, and so they wanted to destroy it. Osama is
just an excuse.”
Qasim, 42, is a regional commander in a fundamentalist political party that
supports the Taliban. He wears a silver pin on his shirt whose design is the
flag of the political party and a Kalashnikov rifle. He collects money for
the Taliban at outdoor tables in several villages of Vardags, where
boomboxes play songs with lyrics like, “I’ll come to America as a
conqueror.” He knows nothing about Tahira, or the basis for his tribal
connection to her, but he has a message for her nonetheless:
“I am sorry for her son. I am sorry for everybody who died there. All I can
say is have patience. How he died was his fate. The death of an innocent is
martyrdom. God will be kind to him, and his family.”
Back in the car:
Umer is talking about a night he went camping. He was in the very northern
reaches of Pakistan, by a lake at an elevation of 11,000 feet. The day had
brought snow, but the night was clear, and he was outside his tent, looking
up at the evening’s first stars, at peace, he says, because “when you go to
a place like that, where you are the only human being, you leave the world
behind you. You think simpler things. Where I started from. Where I have
come to. How I can be a better person. More patient. More kind. More
forgiving.”
This was September 11.
In New York, the relative who’d told him jokes and made him laugh was saying
into her son’s answering machine, “My precious one, call me as soon as you
can.” But of course he had no idea, not until a few days later, and now he
is saying, “The American people have always felt safe. They are an isolated
country. But the world is a cold, hard place.”
What, exactly, was the World Trade Center? How big was it? What would
someone from Pakistan, whose family comes from Afghanistan, be doing in such
a place? This is what another of Taimour’s tribal relatives, 25-year-old Dur
Mohammad Vardag, can’t quite comprehend.
“The radio said they were big buildings,” he says, but he knows little more
than that, in part because on the day of the attacks he had his own survival
in mind.
Dur, his wife and their seven children became refugees in the summer of 2000
when the drought withering so much of Afghanistan came to Wardak. Before
then, their home had been “green gardens and apple trees,” as Dur describes
it, but the day came when they were almost out of food and water and had no
choice but to leave.
They left for Pakistan, crossing the border east of Jalalabad at the Torkham
gate. The year before, Tahira had visited that very place when she was in
Pakistan for a wedding and she and some relatives drove to the border to
look at Afghanistan.
“What are you holding those machine guns for?” she asked some Taliban guards
as she stood near the blue doors of the gate. It was a pleasant trip. The
Taliban guards yelled nothing back. The Pakistani border guards were polite.
By August 2000, though, everything was different because when Dur and his
family showed up, they had to bribe their way past guards who were slapping
refugees backward into Afghanistan with their hands, wooden batons and
pieces of plastic hosing.
Next they went to Jalozai, an encampment of 80,000 refugees in northwest
Pakistan that aid officials described as “a death camp” and “a hellhole.” In
America, Taimour was planning a business trip to Brazil, which would go so
well that he would be promoted and moved to a trading desk near the north
windows. In Jalozai, Dur and his family spent most of the winter living
under a sheet of pink plastic draped over a frame of wooden branches.
Then, in February, they got permission to transfer to another refugee camp,
this one called New Shamshatoo, where they’ve been since. Their day-to-day
world now consists of five donated dishes, five donated bowls, five donated
spoons, two donated pots, one donated lantern and several donated blankets
and quilts. Summer was unremittingly hot. Then came rains, which turned the
dirt into mud, which Dur began forming into walls so his family would have
more permanent shelter. It was a thick mud, not so different in consistency
from the soaked ash that cakes everything at the site of the World Trade
Center every time it rains. But of course Dur knows nothing about that mud,
or that place, because the World Trade Center is nothing more specific to
him than a scratchy report he heard on a neighbor’s donated transistor
radio.
“I only heard from the radio there was an attack,” he says. “I don’t know
anything else about it.”
He says he was “sad” when he heard the news because “those were people
also.” He says he had no idea that one of those people might be a distant
relative of his. He says he has no idea how high the 92nd floor of something
might be. He says he has no idea how tall the buildings were, or what they
looked like, or how many people worked there, and when he hears that the
number was about 50,000, or about the same number of people who live in New
Shamshatoo, he is surprised that the World Trade Center was as large as a
refugee camp.
“Fifty thousand?” he says.
His eyes sweep over the treeless landscape that is now his home. Summer is
gone. Fall is here. Winter is coming. “Very bad,” he says of what life has
become. He eats donated food. He drinks donated water. Little hope and
endless monotony – that’s what life was on September 11, which he says is
why the news of the attacks was so bad to hear. It wasn’t because of what
happened to someone named Taimour, but what is going to happen to him.
“People said that aid for us came from the people who worked in the
buildings,” he says. That’s what he knows about the World Trade Center. It
was filled with people who sent aid. “The food and the money,” he says, “and
our shoes.”
One more relative: Fazal Karim Najimi, who, like Taimour, is a Vardag, and a
member of the Nuri sub-tribe, and 29 years old, and devoted to his mother –
so much so that when the United States began bombing, he left his home in
Islamabad and headed toward Afghanistan.
“I was so worried,” he says. “So I decided – I have to go. Some way. Even
though there is bombardment, I had to see my mother.”
He tries to describe her:
“She’s from the generation that they don’t know their age, but she is
probably 65,” he says. A widow, she is the mother of eight, four of whom
died when they were babies. Her hair, forever brown, has started to go gray.
Her face, from which “you can feel kindness,” has long been decorated with
traditional markings – a series of lines inked into her forehead and a
triangular pattern of dots on her chin. “It’s a good face, of course,” he
says.
He tries to describe why he decided to go:
“I am the son.”
He left on October 9, on the third day of airstrikes, and headed toward
Kabul, where his mother had been living in a small house, whose furnishings
included an old dial telephone, which he had been calling for days and
getting no answer. It is also where U.S. planes had just dropped bombs by
mistake on the office of a de-mining organization, killing four guards. As
he reached the Torkham gate, though, it wasn’t the bombs he was worried
about as much as his short beard.
Sure enough, moments after he crossed into Afghanistan, Taliban guards
surrounded him. They asked who he was. An Afghan, he said to them in Pashto.
They asked him if he was Arab. I’m an Afghan, he said again. They asked why
he seemed to be trying to hide from them when he came through the gate,
opened his suitcase and saw that on top of his clothing was a copy of the
Koran. “And then they became soft,” he says. “Do you have any cassettes?”
they asked. “Do you think I’m stupid?” he wanted to answer. “No,” he said,
and a few hours later he was in Kabul, knocking on the door of his mother’s
house, trying the locked door and realizing that if she wasn’t there, there
was only one other place she could be.
10 p.m.: He had gone by car as far as he could. Now he was walking through
the hills of Wardak, toward his tribal village. In Pakistan, he lives in a
house with a TV, a stereo, a refrigerator and an iron. In this place, there
has never been any of that because there has never been electricity. It was
dark, but he knew the paths from having grown up here, and after 20 minutes
he was passing the first barking dogs near the cemetery, and after half an
hour he was passing the first houses lit by oil lanterns, and then he was at
the entrance to his own house, knocking not on the main gate but to the side
of it, at a spot the family has always used as a kind of code.
“Who is it?”
“It is Karim.”
The gate opened. There, safe, was his mother. “Why did you come?” she said,
and his answer was to take her hand.
Ten days later:
“She was fine,” he is saying, back in Islamabad.
He was there for eight days, he says, and at the beginning his mother said,
“I’m not happy with what America is doing,” and by the end of his time with
her he understood why.
They would listen, every night, to reports on the transistor radio about
more bombing runs, more destruction, more deaths.
They would have other villagers over, who would talk about what it is to be
an Afghan: “We’ve been dying for 20 years,” Karim remembers one neighbor
saying. “When one person in America dies, they speak about it a lot, and
when thousands of Afghans die, no one says anything at all.”
They would extinguish the oil lanterns, lie down to sleep and listen to the
sounds of missiles flying overhead on their way to Kabul – “I don’t know
how to explain it,” Karim says of the sound, “but it’s like more than a
wind” – and of jets, which also would start out as something more than a
wind, and then become a much louder sound that would shiver down the
surrounding hills on a direct path into their home.
“America is violence,” Karim’s mother said one morning, and Karim, who knows
better, realized: What else could she think?
Her concept of America isn’t the World Trade Center, it’s jets.
Jets, whose only purpose is to drop bombs. Bombs, whose only purpose is to
kill the one person she holds dearest, her son.
“God bless you,” she said to Karim when he was leaving to go back to
Pakistan, and then came her last words to him, the most loving of all:
“Don’t come back soon.”
“I have to go,” Taimour said.
“You don’t want to spend time with me?” said Tahira.
“I have a party to go to,” he said.
Those were his last words to her.
And hers to him:
“You always have a party to go to,” she said, laughing. “Where is my time?”
He blew a kiss to her. It was Sunday, September 9.
“Mommy, I can’t reach Taimour,” Zara said two days later, and three months
after that so much has happened.
A war began. Tahira started holding outdoor candlelight vigils, praying that
Taimour was still alive. Jets flew from aircraft carriers into Afghanistan.
Tahira tried to get to sleep at night by playing tape recordings of someone
reading the Koran. The United States brought in flying gunships that began
pulverizing Kandahar. A fortuneteller told Tahira that Taimour would be home
in three days. The Taliban renewed its promise of a jihad that would leave
American destroyed. Four days passed, and Tahira asked a relative in Lahore
to visit the shrine. The United States brought in B-52s and began
carpet-bombing north of Kabul. Tahira wondered if there was any way to
retrieve the 70 messages on Taimour’s cell phone. The Northern Alliance
massed for an attack. Tahira got word that Taimour’s body had been
identified. The Northern Alliance moved closer to Mazar-e Sharif. Tahira
said at Taimour’s funeral, “As for Osama bin Laden, I can tell him that
beyond what’s right and wrong, there is a field. Will you meet me there?”
Zara was the last to touch the coffin. Tahira, watching, buckled. Down went
Mazar-e Sharif. Down went Herat. Down went Kabul, and away went the Taliban,
southwest toward Kandahar, on the highway that runs through Wardak.
Three months:
The world, reordered, has moved on.
So why, Tahira wonders, does every day feel like the World Trade Center is
collapsing all over again?
Why is she thinking not of the war but, of all things, the freezer in
Taimour’s apartment, which she once filled with bags of homemade food?
Where, she wonders, was he when he died?
What was he thinking? What was he doing?
How, she wonders, will she ever forgive herself for being asleep?
He died quickly, Zara told her after talking to a medical examiner. He was
hit on the back of the head. The building collapse took eight seconds at the
most.
When, she wonders, will she stop counting to eight?
The meanings, then, of a particular death:
Like Shandana, Tahira now understands terror.
Like Dur, Tahira now thinks that life can be very bad.
Like Umer, Tahira now looks at the stars for answers.
Like Karim’s mother, Tahira now wishes that God will bless her son.
“I brought my children up very tenderly,” she says, explaining why God, who
granted her first wish, should grant this one, too. “He was a flower.”
[This message has been edited by Girl from Quraysh (edited December 11, 2001).]