Things began to change immediately on the pristine campus with its clear fountains like lucid dreams of the earth. People discussed the hijackers, who were all Muslims (the hijackers had made no effort to hide their identities, which had been radioed back by the flight attendants, who knew their seat numbers); and talked about Islam and its connection to violence. Mansoor felt uncomfortable, felt he was being looked at in a new way, but also felt he ought to stay clear of the debate. When he said hello to acquaintances as they marched past in the dorm, they didn’t wave back.
“Are you OK my laad? My son?” his mother asked on the phone.
“I’m in California, Mama, nothing’s happening here.”
“They’re saying al-Qaeda wants to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Don’t go there.”
“No one walks on the bridge. It’s very far from my campus. People drive on it.” Like many immigrants, he too had felt let down by the bridge.
Still, back in the dorm, the little confidence he’d gained was gone—the wit wilted away from sentences and he was entrapped by his own thickening accent, which people suddenly found impossible to understand. He wanted to tell them about his own experiences with terror, but in those days after 9/11, when panic ruled the campus, and administrators warned students not to even accidentally drink water from a public faucet, since al-Qaeda was planning chemical warfare next, he did not get the opportunity.
Then one day, he was sitting in the dining hall with Alex, a polymathic Jewish boy from Boston who was interested in all the international students and also liked flooring them with his intimate knowledge of their countries, when he began speaking. Alex had been quizzing Mansoor about Sikh separatism. “It’s strange for me to hear all this talk about terrorism,” Mansoor said. “I was actually in a car bombing when I was young.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop. The story poured out. Telling it to a foreigner, in another language, having to put it in context—this made it small, exotic, alien, and terrifying. “The shop fronts had mirrors on them,” he said, realizing how odd it had been. “It was a fashion. And the mirrors blew up and the shards cut up people’s faces. I was very lucky. The worst thing that could have happened long term, apart from losing a limb, was damaging my ears. Your eardrums get blown out and you develop tinnitus, where you can hear a buzzing sound constantly. That didn’t happen. But I did get a similar kind of pain in my wrist and arm. It was like a buzzing.”
“Shit, Mansoor-mian,” Alex said, spooning his hot pea soup. “Do you still have it?”
“No, thank God, though it took years to heal.”
After that, Mansoor thought things would change for him, but nothing did. People did not care about a small bomb in a foreign country that had injured a Muslim, and why should they? They were grieving. Three thousand of their countrymen had perished. Why would they look outward? Mansoor stopped talking about it and concentrated on his work.
One night in the computer cluster in the basement of the dorm—a rank space that had clearly once been a boiler room; one wall was a jungle gym of gurgling pipes—a girl sitting next to him, a thin black-haired girl in an alluring tank top and shorts that had SANTA CLARA U stenciled on the buttocks (he had seen it when she got up to adjust the shorts), turned to him. She asked if he knew how to retrieve e-mails from the trash in Pine. Her manner was neutral and friendly and Mansoor was overjoyed. “Of course,” he said, and leaned over the desk. “Just click here.” She held back from the screen, blinking liquidly.
“Thank you so much,” she said when he was done.
“Of course.”
But when Mansoor went back to typing at his terminal, he heard her stirring again.
“Hi, I’m Emma,” she was saying to the curly-haired white boy on the other side of her—a boy also in a tank top, playing Quake on the screen.
“Daniel.”
That was all. The next day Mansoor complained to his friend Irfan at the campus Starbucks. “To them I’m either a computer programmer or a terrorist.”
Irfan was a stocky boy with a limp that made him look oddly rakish and wise for his age. “American women are like that,” Irfan said, twirling a wet Frappuccino bottle. “You have to fuck them first before they talk.”
Irfan had a particular way of making his disaffection cool, and Mansoor hung out with him for a few weeks, before tiring of his misogyny and his habit of wanting to borrow Mansoor’s problem sets. Soon after, Mansoor returned to programming with a vengeance.
He worked steadily for the next year. He had decided to become an exceptional programmer on par with Bill Joy and Steve Wozniak. Keeping a copy of The Fountainhead by his side, he rapped away at the keyboard into the night.