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

All the wiser for his previous visits, he downplayed the IT idea and added, “So I can return to fly for Biman.”
    “Well, good luck with your dream, Mr. Bhuiyan,” the officer said. Visa approved.
    Rais came out of the embassy into the syrupy Dhaka air and went to the home of relatives who lived close by. He asked for their prayer rug, dropped to the floor, and gave God his thanks. At home later that day, he realized that he would have to give his mother two pieces of news. The first was that he had continued pursuing a visa even after he ceased to tell her about it, since the rejections had pained her. The second was that he had gotten it. He bent and touched her feet. His father seemed skeptical at first, then incredulous at his son’s way of operating.
    Wonderful news—for everyone but Abida. Now she would join the trail of people, places, and things floating in Rais’s wake. Thefirst thing she said was “You did it!” But her feelings were “sweet and sour” at best, Rais admitted. “You’re leaving me,” she said, after behaving with due pride. She was afraid that her mother would exploit her loneliness and turn her away from Rais. He remembers her warning: “I’m not saying that I’m negative, but I’m just feeling that maybe I won’t be able to see you anymore. I’m having this feeling in the back of my mind that something’s going to happen and then we’ll never be able to be together.”
    To a man of Rais’s disposition, this fear could seem like just another hurdle to jump. The anxiety seemed normal to him, even necessary. “That’s a good concern,” he told her. “Because you love me so much, you don’t want to lose me. So that’s why it’s coming in your mind. But you know me: I’m not going to go there and just forget about you. I’m coming back.” He would return, inshallah, within half a year to visit, he pledged. When he finished studying, he would fly home, persuade her mother just as he had the air secretary, and marry Abida grandly for the community to witness, maybe at the Air Force mess, perhaps on New Year’s Eve, and in the particular way they’d discussed, with lots of food given to the poor and no gifts accepted. And there in Dhaka they would weave their nest.
    Then again the plan changed.
    The change began in a cramped apartment in New York, on the immigrant landing strip of Woodside, Queens. The area was thick with newcomers and with the longing for other places, the stores hawking phone cards and flags and nostalgic home-style sauces. Rais lived with a group of other men from Bangladesh, on one floor of a house near the corner of 59th Street and 37th Avenue. It was under the flight path into LaGuardia’s Runway 4-22, and Rais often found himself unable to sleep after 5 a.m. or thereabouts, thanks to the roaring, house-quaking engines above. He and his three flatmates, whom he’d met through Bengali circles in New York and two of whom he happened to know of back home, first rented the basementfor about $1,000 a month for all of them. Then they upgraded to the top floor for $1,500 or so.
    The guys teased Rais for his phone calls to Abida, seeking what Rais jokingly called “cook support.” When it was his turn to feed the house, he would sometimes dial her from in front of the stove, asking for help. Abida taught him how to curb the pungency of buffalo fish or tilapia using turmeric, lime, and water. She instructed him to hold his knife above the stove flame before cutting onions, in order not to cry.
    He had finally arrived in New York in 1999, twenty-five years old, with a vague interest in IT but firm plans to study commercial aviation, which was more in keeping with his background. At first, he worked a series of part-time jobs to make ends meet. His flat-mate who worked at a gas station told Rais about an opportunity doing the graveyard shift there: Rais could take daytime classes and study behind bulletproof glass at night. So Rais did that for a few