Christian Nation (3 page)
Later that night, civilian Red Cross volunteers were allowed into the Battery with drinking water. A solidly built Chinese lady who looked about seventy years old squatted beside me and dipped a battered paper coffee cup into a large bucket of water. She gently lifted my head and gave me a drink and a sad smile. On the side of the blue coffee cup I saw the familiar white Greek key rim and the large gold letters “WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU.” This offbeat symbol of New York City’s cheesy, ironic culture reminded me of all that we had just lost; and bound and facedown on the ground, for the first time since the shooting started, I wept.
[S]incerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.
—Confucius,
Doctrine of the Mean, chapter XXIII
It is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow.
—Confucius,
Doctrine of the Mean
, chapter XXIV
“
T
HIS IS GOOD,”
A
DAM SAID
. The “but” was left unspoken. It has become clear that I am not to have the usual privacy enjoyed by a memoirist at work. Adam is careful not to interrupt when I am typing, but if I leave the desk he picks up the typed pages and reads them. If catharsis is what Adam is pushing, erupting memories and sudden insights should be just the thing. But he is insistent in his call for order.
“One thing leads to another,” he said. “Think dominoes.” Order is hard for me to find. The last twenty-five years sometimes seem to be a singular moment, the beginning not appreciably more distant than the end, like a single point of collapsed time. Like time suspended during an intense conversation, or immersion in a poem. That single point of collapsed time is dense and heavy, like a netsuke with tightly wound grains, turning and looping in three dimensions, its superficial features providing only subtle clues to its inner meaning. It is not, for me, a thing easily deconstructed. But deconstruction is what I must do.
Looking out the window, I see Adam standing on the shore of the small lake, which he tells me is named Indian Lake. He is casually skipping stones across its calm surface and then staring at the ripples as if they tell a riveting story accessible only to him. For the first time in over five years, I force myself to activate that part of my mind that sits apart, and observe the wisps of recollection as they arise and drift across the rest of my brain. And for the first time in a long while, I allow myself to think about my best friend, and the finest person I ever knew, Sanjay Sharma.
We met on my first day of college in 1998, moving into the freshmen dorm room we shared. I could tell that my parents had doubts. Not that they were prone to racial prejudice, but aristocratic Indians were simply outside the scope of their experience. Sanjay’s mother wore a beautiful purple sari. His father’s English tweeds seemed not very practical for hauling in boxes from the Land Rover parked outside. We quickly learned that this task was delegated to a darker-skinned Indian man introduced only as “our helper.” I think my dad, who was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, felt outclassed. But Sanjay himself—putting aside his Indian ethnicity and striking good looks—seemed to me like an ordinary eighteen-year-old American, his choice in brand of jeans, polo shirt, and sneakers the same as mine. As I soon discovered, there was nothing ordinary about him.
M
Y FINGERS HAVE
hovered over the keyboard now for a good five minutes. I am surprised at how much the Sanjay I met that day in Princeton was the same as the Sanjay who, fourteen years later, I worked with, fought with, and then did not die with. He was the same person at ages eighteen and thirty-two. I used to try to imagine him as a child—thinking he may have been one of those bizarre old-men children, a Little Father Time from
Jude the Obscure
, unnaturally wise, scarily seeming to know what children should not know. But he assured me he was not like that as a child, and I believed him. He was not that sort of saint.
Sanjay spent most of his childhood in the United States. His English was unaccented but slightly formal in the manner of his parents, including an aversion to contractions. He retained a ghostly trace of the Indian head wobble and a more pronounced shadow of the typical Indian mannerism in which the head is slightly cocked to one side when considering a question. Few people noticed these habits in Sanjay, but everyone noticed how he looked at you. He had an unusual gaze that was completely attentive. His eyes were a deep warm amniotic brown, and these soft liquid eyes stared out at you as if you were the focus of his world. And you were, at that moment. This is easy to misunderstand. Sometimes attentive people seem to skewer you with their eyes. It can feel aggressive and unnerving. Not so with Sanjay. Although his focus was complete, his attention was tender, neither judgmental nor threatening. I don’t know anyone who ever met him who was not affected by the way he looked at them.
I didn’t have the words when we first met, but I later realized that these qualities—of being present, focused, and “mindful”—were not natural attributes of his character but qualities carefully cultivated over his short lifetime. When he was a child, his immigrant parents urged him to shun all things Indian and become completely American. So with the typical contrarianism of precocious children, he insisted on taking up yoga at age ten. By thirteen he had mastered the full Ashtanga series of yoga poses.
One night early during freshman year, a female friend called and asked if Sanjay wanted to join her for a drink after an evening lecture. He demurred, and she asked why. I overheard his strange reply: “I hope you will forgive me, Patricia, but your conversation, although entertaining, I generally do not find
intellectually
stimulating. It may be selfish of me, but tonight I am looking to be intellectually stimulated, not simply entertained.”
“San, buddy, you can’t say things like that,” I admonished him after he hung up.
“Like what?”
“Like telling a friend that you don’t find her conversation stimulating and that’s the reason you won’t go have a drink with her.”
“But it is absolutely true.”
He eventually learned that minor falsehood is a lubricant without which social life cannot run smoothly, and he mastered it to that minimum extent. But Sanjay remained a natural truth teller. This complete sincerity, more than anything else, was what later made him such an effective leader at Theocracy Watch. And, as it turned out, his enveloping focus and obvious sincerity survived the intermediation of the television camera. He was spectacular on TV.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that unless someone was the type who could never see beauty in a person of another race, people usually thought that Sanjay was one of the most handsome men they had ever seen. Over the years a great deal of airtime was devoted by the media to the subject of Sanjay’s extraordinary face, in which all elements were in perfect harmony—“super-symmetry,” joked one of our physicist friends at Princeton. His skin was the color of warm polished cinnamon except below the perfectly defined edge of his beard, where a fine pixilated black shadow was visible even though he was always clean shaven. His jaw and cheeks were strong and slightly wider than usual for a Brahmin. The resulting face straddled, or perhaps combined, the elegance that Indians celebrated in their aristocratic men and the more robust masculine qualities that were considered desirable in the West. His hair was a black so luminous that all other colors were visibly collected up in each strand.
For our fundamentalist opponents, this perfect face was evidence of dark forces at work. This was because the Antichrist, according to prophecy, would take the form of a handsome young man. Sanjay was the popular champion standing against the establishment of the Godly Kingdom. The fact that he was also Indian (which they always referred to as “pagan”), and gay, certainly seemed to them to complete the satanic profile.
Before the time that President Palin first cited Sanjay’s physical appearance as evidence of his demonic nature, it was a feature that he wore lightly, neither viewing it as a burden nor deliberately wielding it for effect. He never denied he was good-looking, but neither did he use his looks to charm or flirt or persuade. He was too honest and too confident of the power of his words for that. This unself-conscious innocence merely magnified his appeal to women and men alike.
Sanjay told me the first night we met that he was gay. It was news he delivered without drama as we got to know each other over a beer. I told him about my sister and my parents, my undistinguished career as a high school jock, and the casual high school girlfriend I had sensibly broken up with over the summer. He told me about his family’s life in India, why his parents emigrated, what it was like to be an only child, that he was gay, and that he did yoga. I confess that I worried for a few days that having a gay roommate might impair my own social life. To my shame, I felt compelled to have a very public fling with a cute girl in the next entryway to ensure there would be no room for speculation about my own sexual preference.
In a few days, I realized how stupid I had been. Sanjay was extraordinarily popular with men and women alike. He had an ease that allowed him to circulate among the different circles of college social life in a way few other students could. And from freshman year on, it was I who was carried along in the wave of friends and fans who gathered around my roommate.
I’ve often wondered why Sanjay chose me for his most intense and long-lasting friendship. After freshman year he could have switched to any number of accomplished and fascinating roommates. But he never waivered. By October we were best friends, and no one—neither the occasional boyfriend of his nor my girlfriend Emilie, with whom I lived for six painful years—changed that. Ultimately, that is. Emilie came close.
One thing about me that I know did interest Sanjay was this odd gift that I have. In another age, I might have thought of myself as some sort of seer or clairvoyant. But it really is just a knack for sudden, sometimes extreme situational awareness. It’s not a habit of mind that I can call up at will; it just happens.
“It feels like a kind of out-of-body experience,” I told Sanjay one night in the dorm after we had watched
Saturday Night Live
and had a few beers. Thinking about it today, I remember the sounds of the campus on a late Saturday night floating in through our open casement window.
“The first time it happened, at least that I can remember, was the day of my first middle school football game,” I told Sanjay. “We were in the locker room, dressed in brand-new uniforms. I was excited, but mostly just scared—not that we would lose, but scared that I would do something stupid or embarrassing, like run down the field in the wrong direction or fumble. You know how it is.” Sanjay looked empathetic, but he was too honest to signal that he did indeed have experience with that type of anxiety. It seemed clear that he didn’t. Anyway, I continued.
“Just before we ran onto the field, San, the coach told us to get down on our knees. We all knelt. Then he said a prayer.” I did a bad imitation of the coach’s flat midwestern accent:
“
Lord, as we prepare to join the field of battle, we ask you for strength, we ask you to lead us to victory. Victory in your name, and in the name of your son, Je-sus. Help us to vanquish our foe, to defeat our enemy, to …, you know, to defeat evil. Take the field with us, Je-sus. Well, you know. Screw the other bastards. Amen
.”
“And you know what happened then, San? Suddenly in my mind’s eye I was looking down at the locker room from somewhere up in the air, looking down on twenty scrawny teenagers, dressed ridiculously, on their knees, invoking the personal intervention of the deity—the deity responsible for the spinning galaxies and the quantum flux—to take their side in a pissant football game. I had absolute situational clarity. I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to articulate it, but I completely and profoundly understood what I was seeing. I felt—so strongly that I had trouble keeping my composure—the absurdity, futility, humanity, and pathos of the moment. I … Let’s say I didn’t play very well that day.”
“Fascinating,” Sanjay said, considering carefully what he had heard. “I do not think that any young person should have to carry that kind of baggage. I know, G, how hard it can be to know such things. Perhaps this burden is one of the things we have in common.”
Memory, I’m finding, is not very reliable. But I cannot remember any conversation, other than this one, where Sanjay or I ever alluded to the basis of our friendship. And by the way, although I thought I saw things clearly at the time, it was only much later that I finally understood that about half of those teenagers had earnestly adjusted their cosmology to accept that God was quite literally on their side.