Chapter 5

VASILLA JOURNEYS TO NEW YORK

18th of Sha’baan 1417

(December 29, 1996)

The bavasaab’s bodyguards drove Vasilla to the departures terminal and equipped him with a small book of conversational English. Vasilla had grown accustomed to eating airplane food. He was so hungry that the flight attendant served him two additional trays. The flight lasted ten hours, and he had little urge to sleep. Instead he stared out the small window as the pink sun hovered over scattered clouds. The drone of the plane’s engines eventually put him to sleep for a few hours, and by the time he awoke he was approaching New York City. He filled out several forms, basic information, passport and visa numbers, where he would be staying, and whether he carried any perishable items. The plane soon descended upon the Manhattan skyline. He took out his English phrase book and practiced hailing a taxi and finding a hotel room. As the plane’s wings sliced through the clouds he remembered how he stole the baby Imam from the Lahorian home. The act was simple. He crept out the door and carried him in a blanket. He had done it silently and quickly. He performed the service in the name of Allah and His representative. Yet the act saddened him all the same. The visage of Fatima recurred in his mind, turning and turning over like a dreary vision during the spell of a nervous sleep. His conscience bothered him. He was reminded of what he promised her. But he never questioned Tariq. And the plane plunged. It dipped and ascended at intervals. The plane touched the tarmac moments later.

At the customs counter Vasilla was asked a series of questions in English.

“In Arabic, please,” said Vasilla, thumbing through his phrase book.

“Just go ahead,” replied the customs clerk.

“Excuse?”

“Just go, andelle, move.”

And the customs clerk waved him through.

New York would be unlike any other city. Already he had seen the diversity, many different faces: brown, black, yellow, and white, some in perpetual motion, some waiting impatiently, like a busy Meccan intersection. Indians, Japanese, Africans, and Swedes roamed in distinct packs, waiting for loved ones by a barrier of shabby metal gates. He wondered how so much plurality could exist. These strangers acknowledged their mutual existence under one liberating system whereby packs of Swedes were near to the Africans clad in orange and black garments. These packs moved with speed, darting between baggage carts and crying children. They lived in a tense equality and controlled chaos: acknowledging their equality, smiling upon each other, but underneath that thin surface, beneath the thin disguise, a palpable hatred, the law of the jungle coexisting with laws of conscience and good will.

In Mecca, the will of Allah determined the rules of a society set in place by a single message through a single man who brandished his saber and fought through ancient tribes and marble statues. As new situations arose, so the line of bavasaabs reinterpreted Quranic law, and things evolved slowly. The rule of the Qur’ran, however, remained intact, as did the rule by those few bavasaabs who took orders from Imams in hiding. Vasilla knew nothing of Tariq’s plans but knew he was in New York for one purpose: to keep a vigilant eye over this baby Imam, the same infant he stole, and to watch over The Imam’s parents who may stumble at any moment.

Vasilla had never seen snow before. He glanced through the tinted terminal windows and saw heaps of it on the ground. After wandering directionless and mute through the airport, feeling the cold revolver wedged against his rib cage, confident now that he would survive this dangerous liberation, he left the frenzy of the airport. He had been in New York scarcely a moment, and already he missed his home. Although Vasilla had his dense and error-prone moments, he realized, as the wind seeped through his coat that a man alone in an unknown universe bleeds not from loneliness or sorrow but from the betrayal of his own conscience. As the taxi cab headed into the maelstrom of Manhattan, his mind wandered neither to the cityscape nor to his new assignment, but to Fatima’s face and the tears which must have tumbled from her eyes.