Amriika (39 page)

He wrote without much enthusiasm to the addresses he had been given, and was surprised when he received two replies to his queries, both of which required him to travel for interviews. The first of these was from an elderly woman, a former volunteer nurse in East Africa. Darcy spent a week at her farm in Virginia and nothing much came of the visit besides goodwill.

His second interview was in Houston, with an outfit called the Overland Foundation. He was sent an airline ticket, given a room for a night in a high-class downtown hotel. When he went for his interview he was met, much to his surprise, by a man who turned
out to be an educated and cultured Pakistani, and with whom he shared a love for Persian and Urdu poetry. By the end of the interview, Darcy had obtained a commitment for assistance if he took over Inqalab International and expanded it to include cultural publishing to benefit ethnic communities.

Darcy was a professional newsman and brought to the journal a vital credibility. It was a measure of its success that it reached far enough and was believed. But as subsequent events went on to prove, that success was ultimately its tragic failure.

O
n the night of January 20, 1995, a Friday, in the main street of the town of Ashfield, Michigan, a bookstore was bombed. The blast demolished the front end of the store and a portion of the residence above it, killing all the occupants, a family of three. In a picture that shocked the nation and provoked a presidential remark, the upper portion of a woman’s body was shown among the wreckage, the rest of her body presumably blown away by the explosion.

This was the climax of the letter-writing campaign that had become known as the Phantom Affair; or rather, in retrospect, this was the first of its two climaxes.

In the weeks following, Ramji would stare at that picture, close up, many times over; the shambles it depicted would seem to him a visitation from the past come to make a mockery of his new life, the second chance he had given himself. But he’d first caught that grisly scene on
TV
on Saturday night, the day following the bombing, after the president’s comment. The news depressed him. The tragedy of the dead family was real, and poignant enough, though in the scheme of things not an unusual news event for the
small screen. But he was bothered by the possible consequences of the incident. By its connection to the Phantom Author, it was bound to touch the lives of all Muslims on the continent, good and bad and apostate alike, from the mainstream to the heretical fringe. What possible end could the bombing achieve? Who could be responsible for the madness? Who
was
the Phantom?

Ramji had initially paid little attention to the Phantom phenomenon, but after he came to Los Angeles it seemed impossible to avoid keeping at least partly abreast of the Phantom’s activities through Zayd’s obsessive interest in them. No one else at the Company took the Phantom seriously, though Basu gave Zayd a sympathetic ear, and Darcy was mildly concerned that the magazine had not merited a Phantom letter.

Apparently inspired by the tactics of the notorious Unabomber, the writer — who signed himself simply “K. Ali” — had been targeting well-placed academics, newspaper editors, columnists, imams of mosques and church leaders, even chapters of B’nai B’rith, sending them his notorious communiqués, which always began with the words
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
. Each time, exactly fourteen copies of a single letter would arrive at different addresses in the United States and Canada. They were mailed from different cities. In one well-known letter, published in the
New York Times
and reprinted throughout the country, K. Ali had openly stated his mission, which was to disseminate arguments and protests against what he termed “the current Arabic-dominated practice, study, and interpretation of the Islamic faith.”

“My aim in these letters is to ring the knell of freedom, call upon thinking Muslims of diverse cultures to declare a Boston Tea Party and throw overboard the tea of imposed colonial
practices which are narrow-minded, backward, and opposed to new interpretations.”

What was offensive to many Muslims (and what got Zayd’s goat in particular) was the manner in which the author, in a bold expression of his freethinking, cited and pronounced extremely critical opinions on certain controversial incidents from the early history of their faith. These citations and opinions only reinforced the negative views of Islam currently in vogue in the Western world. The Phantom’s extreme pronouncements inevitably were quoted and requoted, only to increase their offence in the eyes of concerned Muslims and their sympathizers. Undoubtedly there was a malicious pleasure to be had in the knowledge of hot-headed clerics and orthodox priests being subjected to such a provocation. The Phantom by his elusiveness had acquired an aura of mystery, and the media came to call him, variously, and sometimes gleefully, the “Holy Pimpernel,” the “Unawriter,” and the “Blasphemer.” It was pointed out that the paranoid tone of the letters, the us-against-them mentality, was characteristic of terrorist thinking. But commentators also saw in the letters a
“cri de coeur
of a man or woman caught behind the prison bars of tradition and custom, too frightened to disagree in public.” This image was popularized in a caricature of the author that appeared in many newspapers.

In academic circles, it became a matter of prestige to belong to the select few who had received the Phantom’s attention. (The first letter, according to rumour, was sent to an eminent, but controversial, Islamic scholar at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton.) Inevitably, meetings were organized by university and college groups to discuss the contents of the letters. One such meeting, at nearby Tomonaga College, was addressed by both Basu
and Zayd. Ramji had not attended it, and consequently the gulf between him and Zayd was that much the wider. To Ramji it seemed wrong and dangerous to blow the issue out of proportion; and it was incomprehensible to him why Basu should involve himself, except out of typical left-wing sympathy. Ramji did think of asking his professor friend Sona to write a sober assessment of the Phantom phenomenon for
Inqalab
, but he recalled, with a startle, that some of Sona’s views were not dissimilar to the Phantom’s and thought better of it. Zayd would surely not take kindly to a serious consideration of the “cri de asshole,” as he put it, in a magazine of which he was one of the editors.

There had been a public event to which the Phantom Author apparently made a visitation and turned the proceedings into a farce. The event was the annual meeting of the American Religion Society in New Orleans, at which, Ramji thought, Sona might well also have been present, because of his specialty. Late at night, copies of the Phantom’s Letter Number 19 were slipped under the hotel-room doors of many of the conference participants (thus deviating for the first time from the usual method of dissemination). One of the recipients claimed to have seen an intruder in the hotel corridor at 2 a.m., whom he scuffled with and briefly apprehended, later describing the person as “a dark-skinned, though not entirely black, female.” This description cast suspicion on the sole Indian and Bangladeshi participants, who in an emotional press conference vehemently denied association with the Phantom and condemned him. It dawned on the learned academics that in their excitement they had turned into hunters; they also realized that anyone could have walked into the hotel from the still-swinging Bourbon Street and delivered the letter.

As time went on, it seemed to Ramji that the mysterious messenger had became more important than the substance of the messages. After the learned commentaries and the liberal pronouncements of sympathy had been superseded by other matters in the press, there remained the contest between the Phantom and those determined to hunt him down. The hounds were out and panting, nostrils flared.

Although the federal authorities refused to consider the case as one of disseminating hate literature and to act accordingly, a profile culled from various sources, including crime experts, was in circulation for the benefit of the amateur sleuth. There were studies of the typefaces, the paper, the postmarks, even the fingerprints, not to mention the quirks of language and punctuation. Simulation studies from several universities were reported, all of them inconclusive though promising, with the arrival of more missives, more definite locations of “focal points” where the Phantom might be found. The Phantom was believed to be a man. His signature, “K. Ali,” was a pseudonym. He was thought to be a mischievous, frustrated, and frightened academic versed in Islamic study. Evidently he had been to an American university. His knowledge of the sceptical, secular, and Western interpretations of Islam seemed thorough, greater even than his knowledge of the traditional ones. The contents of many of the letters — for example, a short piece on the compilation of the holy book after the prophet’s death — were academically sound though less known even to the Muslim public. His knowledge of Islamic Studies departments and their staff seemed detailed and up-to-date. It seemed obvious from the way he berated the predominance of the Arabic language and tradition that the Phantom did not come from the Middle East. There had
been suggestions that a divorced man without children or close family ties was behind the letters.

Perhaps the author had at last become wary of the hounds hotly on his scent. In his now famous manifesto, first published in the
Times
, he had promised a total of ninety-nine letters. But soon after the delivery of his Letter 33 there appeared a book,
A Personal Handbook of Dissent: 101 Letters
, reproducing the already published letters and adding new ones. This seemed to be the conclusion of K. Ali’s campaign.

A publisher in Canada addressing an annual writers’ gathering had protested passionately against book censorship. A few months later, she received at her office in Toronto three thousand books and a letter from K. Ali expressing admiration for her fine speech and requesting assistance in distributing the books. The proceeds from their sale were to be used in aid of children who had been orphaned as a result of the ongoing conflict in Bosnia. Simultaneously, letters were mailed from Seattle, Washington, to bookstores, with instructions on how the book could be ordered. The publisher, in a press release, said she did not believe that books should be suppressed for their contents, or out of fear of intimidation, and so she had distributed
101 letters
as quickly as possible. She wished she had not been selected for the purpose, and she had expressed no opinions on the book’s message. It sold out in North America within a few weeks.

Within days after the book first appeared on its shelves, a store called Book and Video Haven in Ashfield, Michigan, was bombed. There seemed no doubt that the explosion was related to a provocative window display of K. Ali’s work. There had been protests and a large demonstration in the town regarding the
display, and the store owner had received threats. A media expert concluded that, judging from the size of the explosion, it was another example of an ongoing terror campaign by “Mideast nationals” in the United States. The
FBI
promised speedy arrests.

And so the self-styled liberator of Muslims from orthodoxy and Middle Eastern domination had set off something he had obviously not intended. But the cycle of events had to go on, reach its conclusion, and, in the process, would strike like a bolt of lightning a conspicuous and sympathetic target in its path.

I
t was the following Monday.

Noon break began quietly at the Company offices, as always in an atmosphere of serene calmness, with a lull in the daily exertions, close attention paid to the simple needs of a packed lunch, and restrained chat in the large, bright common work room at the back. Ramji was on a high stool before a
PC
, contemplating the pages of a forthcoming catalogue of Company publications, Sajjad and John sat together munching sandwiches over sections of the
L.A. Week
, careful to curb the rustle of paper. Halfway through the hour Mohan arrived from the travel agency next door to tell the young men, whose mentor and hero he was, about his latest sexual exploit. The quiet was broken, but not shattered entirely, for he had a matter-of-fact, low-key manner of narrating even the most risqué of his adventures. This time he had met the perfect-looking chick, he said, a beauty with real class, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike (which did not mean much to his two young admirers, but they trusted his taste) in the Torrance public library, checking out tomes of Hegel and Kant. He had walked her to her bike outside.
He described for his rapt audience the natural unvarnished beauty of this woman, her quiet charm and grace, her long limbs and lovely blonde hair. After much difficulty (she would not return his phone calls at first) he managed to date her, and then he accompanied her to her apartment.