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

this manner.
    He found Abida “beautiful, friendly, romantic, talented, and religious-minded.” As with his mother, he struggled to describe her with richer specificity; in his corner of the world, women were often characterized in this way, judged by their skills at blending and smoothing, not by how they stood out. He did say that she was ever “in a jolly mood” and that she could “make any situation easy.” Even without talking, each knew what was running through the other’s head. “We had that kind of mental adjustment,” Rais said. The courtship wasof the hybrid traditional-modern kind now gaining acceptance in Dhaka—a few droplets of allowable romance, fast merged into the rapids of arranged matrimony. It was unlike what Rais would later observe in America: “There was no checking out whether the chemistry works or not. The chemistry already worked. We are in love. It’s not that, OK, check out ten girls and find one girl. It’s not like that. We were already in love, and love is respect.”
    Rais did what he believed an upstanding man in his place must do: solicit his mother’s view. “My mother is on one side of the scale and the entire world is other side of the scale, but still my mother’s side is heavier,” Rais liked to tell people. His mother was fond of Abida from what she’d seen of her growing up and from her more recent tech-support visits. Early in 1999, Rais arranged a small get-together at a restaurant for him and Abida, his brother, and his mother. The couple wanted Rais’s mother’s blessing for their relationship, and at the restaurant she formally gave it. While Abida’s mother was known to feel differently about the match, thinking Rais unworthy of her godly daughter for reasons unsaid, the young couple decided to proceed. They promised their lives and hands to each other. They would coax, outwit, and bypass dissenting elders as needed.
    The fifth victory concerned a visa. Even as his relationship with Abida blossomed, Rais had been consumed by that recurring need of his: to leave. It wouldn’t be enough to fly fighter jets all his life, and wouldn’t be enough to be some plump, routinized salaryman. He wanted more—to study in America, learn computers, get in on this IT boom that had the world vibrating in the late 1990s. Or at least he could study commercial aviation over there and return home to be a pilot for Biman Airlines. He had heard, from schoolmates who emigrated and came home to tell about it, tales of abundance and greatness in places with names like St. Cloud, Minnesota.
    Morning after morning, sometimes at 4 a.m., Rais joined the visa line outside the American embassy compound. Sometimes, three or four hours in, with the line finally slithering forward, he would learnthat he was too far back. On other occasions, he got into the building, only to have his interviewer scoff at the notion that any young, unmarried Bangladeshi would actually study and come back to his country. To work for Biman? Yeah, sure. Visa rejected. Then again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
    In the meanwhile, Rais took advantage of his early adoption of technology, writing a pleading e-mail to a U.S. State Department official whose name he found on the Internet—one Cynthia Haley. His bureaucrat uncle helped him draft the message in the government-sounding language that such people use, and it elicited an encouraging but noncommittal reply: something circular and elusive along the lines of “We encourage you to go again if you feel you still have enough reason to go and apply for a visa.” Still, the fact of a reply did impress him. And when he returned to the embassy for his eighth visa interview, he found that the man of seven rejections was gone, replaced by a new officer who seemed impressed by Rais’s military background and his score on the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language. He asked about the young man’s dream. To study aviation, Rais said.