Calculate This

It was heartwarming, the anti-war protest in New York City on Saturday. I am glad because standing in the cold, many degrees below freezing, we all needed all the warmth we could get.

I had a feeling that by going to the protest I was going to be part of the largest assembly of people in my experience.

The protest centered around the United Nations Headquarters building, which lies on 1st Avenue and 41st street. The closest I could get to it was 68th street. People flooded all of 3rd avenue, 2nd avenue and 1st avenue, between 41st and 68th streets. When a cheer would rise it would travel 20 blocks and lift you up.

After the protest I went to my sister’s home in Brooklyn where she and her husband are packing to leave for Lahore. As I surfed channels I noted CBS News reported 5,00,000 people, and CNN’s grudging admission of “several hundred thousand” people at the protest. My sister, Saniya was filling kitchen utensils into boxes and talking about her work in New York. She was a host for a television show produced for Zee about NRIs, and currently worked in advertising. She said she is thinking about the move to Lahore as a “sabbatical” from work.

Baber, walked into the apartment with beer. Baber came to the US at 17, attending Philadelphia College of Textiles; upon graduation working with Nike in Portland (Oregon) and then landing a job with Dyersburg, a garment-manufacturing corporation in New York.
Dyersburg went bankrupt last year. He went into business for himself, which he found to be a wonderful change in his life.
However, with the new Registration law the authorities are no longer tolerating out of status Muslims in America. His H-1 visa has lapsed when his corporate job ended; he can only stay in the United States with short-term business visas. So its goodbye to living in New York. He can only come here for business.

Friends began to trickle in, as this was Baber and Saniya’s last night in their Bergen Street apartment, the scene of many parties over the last four years. Their place is not large, it’s a one-bedroom, but they do have a rooftop deck, and their hearts are large.

Asohan Amarasingham, ‘Han’ to everybody, walked in, Saniya looked up and said, “Calculate something for me, Han.”
Whenever she meets Asohan, a math PhD at Brown University, she greets him by saying something randomly math-sounding.

Han was at the protest as well. We started talking about posters and signs that we liked, recalling the following:
“Drop Bush not the bomb; Baby, I am the bomb; Axis of assholes; Reelect Carter; Screw interns not the economy; Fight plaque not Iraq; Smoke Iraqi weed not Iraqis; Bake cookies not Iraqis; Take the War Heads out of Washington; Jews for Burning Bush; Colin Powell you are from the Bronx — Shame on you!”

Han asked Baber why he didn’t go to the protest. Baber responded: “They gave me a business visa, not a protest visa.”

I asked Baber about his experience of getting the visa and the registration process. Baber said, “It took a long time, the fingerprinting and everything else. I did get a sympathetic officer who began by saying that everything has changed. The worst part was when she asked me if I had any relationship with New York City: if I ever lived here, if I had any friends. I said, “No, no, and No!”