My Identity

About three months back one morning, as I cut through the traffic on Route 27 in Carrollton, a small town west of Atlanta, Georgia, and near Birmingham, Alabama, using unkind words for the locals for driving so slow, I spotted a parked police car ahead as if it were waiting for me. Sensing trouble, I slowed down and passed the police car like a mouse. But to no avail. The lights started flashing behind me soon after I passed it. I pulled over into a small parking lot nearby and waited for the police officer, trying to think of an excuse.

I see a bright-pink chubby face, young and uncomplicated, peeking through my driver’s side window.

“Our radar caught you doing 61 in a 40-mile zone,” he said with a deep southern accent.

I shrugged my shoulders. I thought I was doing faster. “I didn’t realize I was going that fast, officer.” I came up with the most ridiculous excuse.

“I don’t give tickets if anyone’s doing 18 miles over the speed limit, but I draw my line at that,” he said naively, almost apologetically. “Are you late or something?” he asked.

Cueing on his question, I said innocently as if I’d be in trouble if late, “Yes, officer, I was going fast because I’m late for work,” figuring he’s probably a nice guy and may give me a break. I’d another ticket just a few weeks ago in Pennsylvania.

“I’ll try not to hold you for long.” He took my driver’s license back to his car while I waited in my car cursing my bad luck. About ten minutes later, which seemed like an eternity to me, he came back.

“Are you visiting?” he asked, having noticed that my license was out of State.

“I’m a consultant. I’m at a client here, and will be leaving in two days.” I was to be in Carrollton for another two weeks, but I was still looking for a break

“How much do you weigh?” he asked tentatively as if this question was a prelude to another one.

“One hundred and fifty seven pounds,” I replied, suspicious of this very irrelevant question given the situation.

“What nationality are you?” Came the irrelevant Big Question next.

“I’m American.” Came my response.

With no further questions to ask, irrelevant or otherwise, he handed me the ticket and left after explaining to me the rules for paying or not paying it.

Long after he was gone, what lingered-on for me was not his question “What’s your nationality?” but, more precisely, “What’s your identity?”

So, what’s my identity?

Settled by the Aryans in about 1000 BC, the ancient city of Pataliputra, now known as Patna and a part of present-day India, lies by the bank of the Ganga river in northeastern India. Within the city is a tree under which, circa 600 BC, the wandering Shakyamuni, in search of Eternal Truth, had meditated and said to have attained nirvana, thus becoming Buddha, the Enlightened One. In the fifth century BC, Fa-hsien, the traveling Chinese Buddhist monk, “found Pataliputra a city of palaces and such widespread affluence that hospitals were provided free of charge to which the poor of all countries, the destitute, crippled, and diseased, may repair.” It was the capital city of the great Mauryan Empire to which belonged king Ashoka, perhaps the greatest ruler in the blood-stained annals of the subcontinent.

In the twentieth century AD, in the Year of the Fire Monkey, not very far from the Bodhi Tree, I was born in Patna to a father who traced his lineage to a Muslim fugitive wanted by the British for the 1857 rebellion, and to a mother who traced hers to a little boy, my mother’s maternal grandfather, who had migrated with his father from Kashmir and had settled in Patna.

The fugitive had disappeared after the British put a price on his head, leaving his wife and children behind. He did not return even after the general amnesty was granted by the British. No one knew what happened to him. That little boy from Kashmir had become wealthy. He was part of the delegation of “prominent Muslims,” led by the Agha Khan, that waited on Lord Minto, the British Viceroy, in 1906 to demand a separate electorate for the Muslims of India; to which Minto had agreed. For some South Asian historians, that was the event that sowed the seed of Pakistan.

In 1963, the seventh year of my birth, my parents, against the wishes and vehement opposition of their brothers (my neither parent had sisters), decided to move to Pakistan, leaving all their material possessions behind to their siblings. After spending some time in places like Sialkot and Thatta, they found refuge in Karachi.

Ten years later, my mother gone after having lived a painful life and leaving my father behind in Pakistan, on Saturday, February 2nd, 1974, at the age of 17, with eight dollars in my pocket, I landed at the Kennedy Airport in New York. Two days later, on Monday, February 4th, I found myself in 10th grade in a High School in Flushing, New York, barely knowing English and with as deep a knowledge about America as that 10-cent coin is known as a dime, and 5-cent, a nickel. Since then, barring four short visits to Pakistan and as many to Canada, I have lived in America, my adopted country, continuously.

Although my earliest memories are of Patna, my fondest ones are of Karachi, the city where I spent hardly ten years of my life. I guess that’s because those were my formative years. It’s hard to erase the time of innocence, of getting up very early for sehri during Ramzan and going to the mosque with my friends for the Fajir namaz, of playing cricket on the street, of flying kites on the roof of the small two-story house where we lived in the lower half, of trying to get a keri from a mango tree with the help of little rocks, of playing lattoo, gulli-danda and marbles with the boys even less privileged than me, of taking long walks in the morning to catch the #2 bus by the Nazimabad Hospital to get to Cantt Public School by the railway station, of wandering in Sadr, of spending endless hours with my best friend who lived in a house contiguous to ours, of getting fascinated by and lost in the magical world of fairy tales I read in Urdu as a little boy, of pretending I was Colonel Faridi of Ibn-e-Safi’s Jasoosi Dunya when I was little older, of browsing through books in my favorite bookstore in Nazimabad chowrangi, of being engrossed in stories by the writers like Saadut Hasan Minto and Ismat Chughtai, of being hysterical when reading Shafiq-ur-Rehman or Khakum Bud-e-hun, of being amused by Yaadon ki Barat.

So, what’s my identity?

For many years, the struggle with life in America blocked almost all thoughts of my past. For in America, left on my own, what mattered to me was survival. That struggle, and the self-imposed aloofness that came with it, had turned me into an island. A sea of change occurred in me when I took one year of History of Modern India and Pakistan as a graduate student at Columbia University. It was then that my thoughts started to crystallize. Both semesters were taught by a prominent American scholar and an expert on South Asia. The professor had been an American Attaché to India, and had met both Nehru and Gandhi, but not Jinnah. Jinnah, he once told me regretfully, had died by then.

The history of Muslim invasions in India, their loot and plunder, their ignorance and their adventures, their bravery and their brilliant soldierly skills, their eventual rule over and settlement in India, their benevolence and their ruthlessness, their conspiracies and betrayals, their beautiful art and their magnificent architects, their demand for a piece of the vast land they once ruled after the merciless currents of history have reduced them to a pile of rubble, all became penetratingly interesting stories for me. I began to identify with them. I began to see their stories as my history, my past. I began to see South Asian Muslims as my people. I saw Pakistan as the culmination of my history, my past. Pakistan became a symbol for me, a symbol of almost religious proportions, of an intense magnetic force.

In the meantime, however, I had become an American with a zeal akin to a convert to a new religion. To me America is not just a country. It is an idea, or perhaps more accurately, an ideal. It is an ideal of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; of individual freedom and tolerance. It lets you be what you are. Twentyfirst-century America is a liberal philosopher’s dream come true. It exists as much in mind as it does on a map. What I stand for, I couldn’t be anything but American. What I am today, both inside and out, I owe it to America. In terms of loyalties, then, I’m first, and foremost, an American.

So, what is my identity?

I’m a Pakistani.