Ayub had wondered, more than once, why he’d been embedded so conspicuously in an alien family, where his inertia and lack of direction would be instantly noticed, where he was, in a sense, already under trial, being studied by Mansoor’s parents, not just as an individual but as a specimen of their son’s interests—it is through the osmotic medium of their children’s friends, after all, that parents accidentally learn the most about their own children. And now he’d been noticed to the point of awkwardness. Being offered a job was a kind of ultimatum. “No, no, uncle—you should get someone more qualified,” he sputtered.
When he looked at Mansoor for help across the table, Mansoor smiled back encouragingly, his eyes kind under the dense eyebrows.
“It’s this kind of attitude that’s preventing you from finding a job,” Sharif said, thumping him on his back and revealing his large hollow-looking teeth in a smile.
“Thank you, uncle,” he said. But hadn’t Mansoor told him the business was suffering?
“I have to leave,” he thought later, when he was back in the den. Tauqeer and co. have sent me here, tricked me into staying for weeks with the promise of an attack, and now I’m going to jeopardize my friend and his family’s position even further by becoming his father’s employee.
That night, from the cybercafe in South Extension, he wrote another e-mail to his comrades—aware, as he typed, of the strangeness of sneaking out to write e-mails (he had told Mansoor he was going out to buy cigarettes) when he could easily write them from his friend’s fancy Pentium, which Mansoor used mostly to surf Islamic message boards. “It’s funny,” Mansoor had said before he’d left. “It makes sense that Islam would benefit so much from the Internet. In a way, Islam was an early form of the Internet—egalitarian, allowing anyone of any class and race to connect to anyone else, breaking down traditional hierarchies.”
“But what about the role of pornography?” Ayub had asked, unable, as usual, to put the full force of his mind into the conversation.
Mansoor continued. “I know that that’s why the Internet was probably started and where all the technological leaps happened. I’ve read this book, Reefer Madness; it was written by the same chap who wrote Fast Food Nation—have you read it? I think you’d like it. Anyway, in this book, he talks about the porn industry, but the point is—” How the tables have turned! Mansoor thought. Just a few months ago I was being lectured by this confident, self-contained, self-possessed sandy-haired pink-lipped hero and now I’m lecturing him! Though he didn’t see it that way; he felt only that Ayub was one of those people in his life who brought out the best in him, a rock around which conversation could smoothly bend and flow—a sympathetic ear. So he went on about porn, Islam, and the battle between the two for the pneumatic soul of the Internet.
“I don’t feel right taking the job,” Ayub said at the end of this conversation. “I’ve put your father in an awkward position. And also I know you’re in financial duress.”
“He needs a person he can trust,” Mansoor said. “Actually he’s been asking me to work with him, but he’s too bad-tempered and I fight back. That’s the only thing I would warn you about. Consider it short term. You should look for another job. When you mix friendship and business, sometimes both can go sour.”
It was with these thoughts raging in his head that Ayub wrote Tauqeer an impassioned e-mail from the cybercafe.
Two more days passed. Nothing. No reply. Should I go to the police? Are they trying to frame me? he wondered. Finally, disobeying orders, refusing the job, he left the Ahmeds’ residence in South Extension and went to stay in a cheap hotel in Daryaganj.
“He’s a very nice boy, your friend Ayub, very well mannered, well brought up,” Afsheen finally said—as if his niceness was more apparent when he was gone.
“Yaah, very decent chap,” Sharif said.
“I told you, you shouldn’t have offered him a job,” Mansoor said. “He’s too self-respecting.”
“That’s why he doesn’t have a job,” Sharif said. “This, let me tell you, is a problem with so many young Muslims. There’s discrimination, yes; it’s a fact of life—but at the same time there’s a lot of arrogance. Sometimes it’s better to start from a low place and then win trust and work your way up. Instead someone like your friend Ayub, he rejects things preemptively—” That word! Mansoor thought. How it had entered the lexicon! “Then he complains about this country.” That was Sharif’s proud side emerging—he was proud of having made it in a hostile environment.
“But it is very difficult to be constantly rejected,” Mansoor said. “You build a wall around yourself. Sometimes it’s a wall of arrogance.”
“Maybe, maybe,” Sharif said, not listening.
“Razia!” Afsheen said, calling the servant. “Bring the food.”