F We Meet
F We Meet
F We Meet
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much more than you can recollect at this moment. But there
are basic impressions: it is next to Afghanistan; it is next
to India; it’s Muslim; it has nuclear bombs, many nuclear
bombs; it’s the place where a man named Osama bin Laden
was finally found. Whatever specific details you can recall are
probably more or less accurate. So while I speak, you will be
thinking of that Pakistan. But I also am thinking, as I speak
to you, about the place that you picture in your mind—and
to me it looks like a caricature, a dark parody.
Later in the evening, we might find ourselves together
again, a group of common friends sitting around a cof-
fee table loaded with empty glasses and half-eaten hors
d’oeuvres. More comfortable and familiar, the conversa-
tion might flow more freely now and more honestly. Why is
Pakistan such a mess? It’s a fair question, but unless you have
a few days to talk about this, I will try to point to the kernel
of the problem. Pakistan is a unique country, and so it has
unique problems. In August 1947, months before the state
of Israel was created as a refuge for a nation of Jewish peo-
ple, Pakistan came on the map as a home for all the Muslims
scattered over South Asia. These Muslims were from doz-
ens of different races and ethnicities and they spoke dozens
of different languages and dialects. The one hundred mil-
lion Muslims living in South Asia in 1947 made up more
than a quarter of the world’s Muslim population. Millions
of Muslims packed up the stuff of their lives and migrated
to this new state that hot summer, and Pakistan became the
world’s largest Muslim country at the time.
It was a remarkable new state. Most other Muslim coun-
tries that had won independence from European colonial
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hoping to learn more about. You see, it all goes back much
further than six decades of history. In some ways the coun-
try’s story goes back more than fourteen hundred years, to
the birth of Islam, or even before that to the creation of
language, or maybe even to the rise of mountains and the
carving of rivers in the land millions of years ago. When I
told you that I speak Urdu, the national language of Paki-
stan, I could have also explained that the word “Urdu” was
used to describe a mélange of different ethnicities that set-
tled in military encampments in the shadows of the Hima-
layas centuries ago. “Pakistan” is actually an Urdu phrase,
I might have added, made of two words: pak which means
“pure,” and stan which, like the English word “stand,” de-
scribes a state of being. The country is literally called the
“Space of Pure.” Since you don’t speak Punjabi, you would
not have realized that when I said that my family is from
the Punjab region, I was actually saying that they are from
a “land of five rivers.” I never got to tell you that there
is a seven-hundred-year-old grave on the banks of one of
those rivers that, I am told, belongs to one of my ancestors.
I never got to explain that the city of Lahore is named after
Loh, the son of the mythical Hindu god Rama. There were
so many avenues we could have taken to travel to the heart
of the matter, but they mostly went unexplored.
It’s not your fault or mine. How could you even begin
to understand the story of a whole nation in one brief en-
counter? How could we even expect to understand each
other’s life stories in all their perfect contours? It would
be impossible even if we lived down the street from each
other. And stories of nations are convoluted and distinct,
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just like the stories of our own lives. Nations, like people,
use stories to construct a particular place for themselves in
this world. Nations have memories too—while you might
remember that pep talk on that long drive home, the na-
tion recalls the speech by the great leader atop the hill. You
have that especially painful schoolyard fight, and the na-
tion has that bad war on the border. You survived the ter-
rible accident, and the nation lived through the great civil
war. There was that move during middle school to a new
city, which changed you forever, and the nation recalls the
great migration, which changed everything.
Nations, like people, collect these stories as they grow.
They line up words and they cement them together to build
sentences, and these sentences join together to form con-
crete stories. These stories are stacked one upon the other
with each passing day. And then one day, the special place
in the world is built. From inside this palace of stories, we
look out at the sprawling space around us and at the other
palaces of stories built by other people and nations, some
near and others far in the distance. From inside this space,
we can explain to the world our existence and answer those
questions that seem so tough when asked by an outsider,
like “Where are you from?”
The words that make up a nation’s history are vivid and
colorful to that nation, because they choose those words
carefully. Your stories are familiar and stirring because they
are your special stories. And each story builds perfectly on
the last one, because it is nations, like people, who decide
the architecture of their existence in this world. When you
pick one story from this edifice and share it with a stranger,
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H e r e i s o n e of my stories. When the airplanes struck on
September 11, 2001, I was in a leafy college campus in rural
Vermont a few hours’ drive north of what would become
known as Ground Zero. The air was crisp. The trees had
not yet burst into the fiery yellow, orange, and red fall foli-
age that I had learned to anticipate eagerly. I was on my way
to my morning class when a classmate stopped me in my
path, and with cold concern beaming through her wide-
open blue eyes, she told me about the attack on America.
The towers were on the periphery of my consciousness. I
had seen them passing through New York City a handful
of times, but I had never really stood still to admire their
splendor. On the morning of September 11, they were
seared into my memory forever.
I changed course and turned toward the nearest televi-
sion set. The cafeteria lounge was overflowing with peo-
ple watching the events live. I saw the two towers billowing
smoke from gaping dark craters near the top floors. The
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camera did not move for a long time, and it seemed like
nothing was really happening. Then, with a most awesome
fluidity, one tower began to sink in on itself. I heard gasps
and a girl burst into tears, bawling and screaming loudly as
her friends tried to lead her away from it all. A few min-
utes later the second tower crumbled to the bottom of the
screen. I stood there watching. Where, a few moments ear-
lier, there had been two of the tallest structures built by
man, there was now only dreadful black smoke.
The next morning, the editorial in the New York Times
described the day before as “one of those moments in
which history splits, and we define the world as ‘before’
and ‘after.’” It was one of those days for me too. I woke up
that morning to a double ring of my phone: an off-campus
call. The serious-sounding man on the line introduced
himself as an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms. I don’t recall his name. I don’t remember
much of the conversation either, but I do remember two
things: he made no reference to the events of the day be-
fore, and he asked me whether I felt safe where I was. I was
in Vermont, one of the most serene places I had ever lived,
so naturally I said yes, I did feel perfectly safe. And as his
cold silence settled in, I felt more deeply imperiled than I
had ever felt before.
Before he hung up abruptly, the man had said that he
would call me back, and for many weeks my heart jumped
every time my phone would double-ring. But he never
called back. And I was left with only the eerie and bare
knowledge that someone had sought me out in my dorm
room in Vermont the day after the attack on America. As
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