The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas Read Online Free

killing a teacher Rais knew, the other a fellow student. Or maybe the sense he suddenly had of whiling away his life cut off from the world—first in Sylhet, then in Jessore, now on base after base. “I was out of my house at age of eleven,” he said. “I missed all the good timesfrom my family—missed all the programs. Now I’m in the military last two and a half years: missed my sister’s wedding, my brother’s wedding, this and that. So now when I am going to have my personal time, some free time—what I wanted to do?” A military future would bring what he called a “tight life.” He asked himself: “Do I really want to lead a life like this?”
    As it happened, getting out of the Air Force was harder than getting in. His comrades tried to deter him. One senior officer warned that his likely career alternative was the venal life of a businessman: “If you do business, you have to be dishonest.” Rais would fall from the height of prestige—from the pride of defending Bangladesh, from those government cars and colonial club memberships and foreign educational courses, from that look people give an officer—to its depths. Nothing seemed to convince Rais. Shortly, as per procedure, the air secretary of the country contacted Rais to inquire about his request for a discharge. He asked the young man to come to headquarters and bring his father along.
    At the meeting, the official looked to the father: “Can you ask your son what we can do for him to stay?”
    Rais was impressed by his father that day. “You raised my son,” Rais remembered his father telling the air secretary. “You made my son an officer the last two and a half years through vigorous training. You made him a gentleman. And I think you also made him enough responsible to take his own decision. As a father, I think I did my part. And now you’re the guardian, and I think you trained him enough. So I leave it unto you and him.”
    The official looked to Rais for his final answer. He wanted to go. Within six months, he had his release papers. Rushing to fill the void, a new striving took over: “Next goal: come to U.S.A.”
    Before that bit of fortune could arrive, however, another would complicate it. Rais, now twenty-two, had known Abida for years, but only as an acquaintance from the neighborhood. Their relationship had consisted of passing in the galis and saying hello-hello-hi-hi atmost. On auspicious occasions, his family might call on hers, or vice versa. But Rais had been out of sight at boarding school for years. When he returned home, in the middle of 1996, thinking of higher studies, he bought a computer and became taken with programming. He was into dBase and FoxPro in particular and figured they might help him get to America. One day, in one of their passing encounters, he learned that his neighbor Abida was a computer junkie in her own right and had been dBasing and FoxProing for much longer than he. They exchanged programming books, which led to Abida troubleshooting for Rais over the phone, which led to her coming over from time to time to help him in person.
    “That computer brought us together,” Rais said. One day Abida, unprompted, told Rais that she used to have a crush on him back in childhood, but he was always gone, and she never had her chance. It would be an unusually forward move for a woman in that setting, but Rais insisted that this was how it happened. He asked her: “Do you still have the feeling, or is it already gone?” And he remembers that dazzling look on her face that made a man like him rush to seek his mother’s approval.
    Abida soon began telling her own mother that she had classes on days when she really didn’t. She and Rais would linger at an ice cream parlor or a snack bar, or at a waterfront place called the Harbour Inn, which was owned by a retired Air Force man and where Rais was thus confident of getting service that would impress Abida. Their courtship went on for more than a year in