Leavings

Every so often, a customer walked into the mini-mart at South

Buckner and Elam Road and ofered Raisuddin some reassurance.
Perhaps they noticed his olive T-shirt and bright sneakers, and inter-
preted them as he had hoped: as the dress of a rising man, not a typical
gas station worker. Or perhaps they heard in one of his newly crafted
conversation starters some unexpected air. In these moments, they
might speak to Raisuddin or simply smile in a way that pleased him.
They knew he was not of this place.
It was 2001. He had arrived in Texas at the start of the summer.
He came from Dhaka, in Bangladesh, by way of two years in New
York City. Here on the fringes of the Dallas metroplex, he began his
days at 5 a.m., dressing quickly at his bosss house, where he was
living, and rushing to get behind the counter before dawn. He sold
Country Time lemonade and Tahitian Treat punch, Coors Light and
ten-cent candies, Gillette razors and Copenhagen tobacco products
until midnight or 1 a.m., mining the Dallas Morning News for sports
2 a na nd gi ri dha r a da s
scores and other int for counter chatter, trying out on customers
the pleasantries he was still learning, squeezing in as many of the
ve prayers as he could manage. Then he returned home to shower,
eat, and catch his winks before the cycle resumed.
Selling Americans three tamales for a dollar was a strange land-
ing for a twenty-seven-year-old who had trained to command ghter
jets and qualied as a Microsoft Certied Systems Engineer. But so
it is with the many who leave their native soil and nd that to rise,
they must rst sink into the fresh earth below. Raisuddin was no
longer a Bangladesh Air Force man. He was a Buckner Food Mart
man.
J
The mini-mart watched over a barren corner of a luck-starved
neighborhood. It lingered in the badlands between the central Dallas
whose gentry regard the city as a second Los Angeles and the more
rustic neighborhoods to the east. Drive one way out of the store, and
it was easier to nd vegan and Ashtanga than barbecue and two-
step. Drive the other way, and within minutes the setting could be
more redolent of Mississippi: the RVs turned home extensions, the
Confederate-ag license-plate holders, the fenced-in horses, the
slouching wooden cottages, the outdoor exhibition of those posses-
sions that failed to t inside.
To an immigrant like Raisuddin, the economy around the mart
might have appeared rather desolate. It wasnt the economy of the
legendary rms where third-world boys like him fantasized about
working, of Boeing, IBM, Procter & Gamblenames whose appear-
ance on a business card one day might be enough to soothe the pain
of leaving home. The commerce in these parts was of consumption
more than production: a repeating chain of gas pumps like his, tire
shops, cheap eats, and nancial agencies ofering to move money
across gradients of space and timeturning $100 cash here into $83
the true a meri ca n 3
in Oaxaca or the $350 paycheck you were due on Friday into $300
right now.
Like much of the world, Raisuddin grew up with America on his
television screen, so that he felt he knew it before he set foot there.
As a young man, he thought of the place in exalted terms: Its like
one of the happiest, the richest, countries in the world, without any
problemsthat was the image. Its the land of opportunity. Whoever
goes there, you can be whatever you want to. The tools are there;
you use the tools. Its up to you. Not like Bangladesh, where there is
limited opportunity, and there are millions of people ghting for a
small opportunity.
His rst two years in the U.S., in New York, had grayed this black-
and-white schema. There was misfortune in America; there was
misfortune in Bangladesh. But to be poor together, as people were
back home, seemed to Raisuddin to be diferent from being poor
alone, as people often were here on the edge of Dallas.
He came from an often brutal country, no doubt: the electricity
that sizzled of whenever it wished, the rain that withheld itself until
it arrived with lethal gusto, the factories that imploded and buses
that soared of mountainsides and swollen barges that drowned.
But in these things, as in life generally, you were rarely aloneeven
when you wanted to be. People lived thickly in one anothers busi-
ness, their presence at once invasive and soothing. The constant din
of parents and siblings and in-laws staved of self-pity. The custom-
ary ways of eating and marrying and caring for elders held commu-
nities together and kept hurting people on the path. People threw
weddings that took a lifetime to pay of, because they knew they
would need a tribe even more than the money.
Of course, this connectedness hadnt been enough to keep Rais
the shortened name by which he introduced himself to Americans
in Bangladesh. Still, he was struck by how people in Dallas seemed
to lack for each other far more than for bread or bus passes or a roof
overhead. So much lonely, so much alone, even detached from their
4 a na nd gi ri dha r a da s
own family, he said of the lives around him. They drove up to the
food mart in their boat-cars, alone. They ate in their quickie restau-
rants, alone. They pinned what hopes they had of tranquil aging on
scratch-of lottery tickets, not ardent children.
A fearsome wildness could thrive amid this isolation. The people
around Rais seemed to him to live largely unobliged to their parents,
their teachers, even in many cases their God. They had no one to
answer to. Every man for himself, they sometimes called it. Four
months at the Buckner Food Mart was plenty of time to discover
what a terrifying idea that was. He was coming to see how the pov-
erty of a place that is breaking can difer from the poverty of a place
still being made.
Just since May, on more than one occasion, Rais had been behind
the counter, waiting, when the front door would open and a cus-
tomer appear. He would hand Rais a credit card for gas, then go out-
side to ll up. As the man pumped, Rais would be inside swiping the
card over and over, wondering what he was doing wronguntil he
realized that it was a dead card, that the man had no intention of
paying and had already ed with $40 worth of liquid loot. This in
the richest country in the world. Or there were the boys, still young
enough to sit on their mothers laps, who sauntered into the Buckner
Food Mart and stole candy and gum. Or the recurringand, on one
occasion, strangely fastidiouscondom thieves.
One night, after the time of the Isha prayer, around nine or ten,
Rais saw two young men huddled in the corner. He came out from
behind the counter to check on them, which made them scamper for
the exit. He ran to where they had been hiding and there saw a three-
pack of condoms ripped open, with two of the rubbers missing. At
least they had the grace to steal only what they needed that night.
Rais followed them out of the store and insisted that they pay for
what theyd taken. They told him to back of. He promised to do so
once they paid. After all, things cost money, and Rais was answer-
able to his bossdidnt they see? Then one of the boys ashed what
the true a meri ca n 5
looked like a gun and reiterated his advice to back of. Rais recon-
sidered his stance: After thatwhoa, I dont wanna lose my life for
a pack of condomsI said, OK, you dont have to pay.
One afternoon near summers peak, a man walked into the mart,
fetched a soda from the cooler, and gave Rais a dollar bill. When
the register opened, the man pulled out a gun. Rais, who took pride
in the evenness of his keel, knew there was nothing to be alarmed
about: Many a times in the gas station, people used to come and
sell their personal belongingscomputer monitor, TV, this kind of
thingall the poor people in the neighborhood. So I thought this
guy wants to sell that gun as well. Because hes a customer; its two
o clock. In my mind, robbery happens in the dark. Robbery hap-
pens at nightin a less crowded place, but not in a gas station at
two o clock in the afternoon. And, plus, he bought a drink, so hes
a customer.
Rais began the negotiation: You wanna sell? How much?
No, amigo, give me the money, came the puzzled reply.
Yes, I will give, Rais said. How much you asking for?
No, no, amigo, give me the money, the man repeated, growing
agitated.
Rais tried again: Yes, I will give, but how much you want for the
gun?
The man cocked the pistol and pressed it into Raiss forehead,
which roused the dormant soldier within him: From my military
experience, I knew hes about to shoot, because he cocked the gun.
And I said, OK, OK, dont shoot me. Heres the money. Rais removed
some modest green stacks from the register and handed them over.
The incident left him irritated with himself, because Bangladeshi
military training specically covered one-on-one gunghts.
From time to time, Raiss mind darted back to the life he had left.
What was he, man of burning promise, doing in a miserable gas sta-
tion in Texas? But he never dwelled there long. I know this is not
my life, he told himself. Its just temporary right nowfor the time
6 a na nd gi ri dha r a da s
being, just to survive. Im working on a bigger goal. It was not his
rst gas station, and he believed that in all work was dignity. If any-
thing had stuck from those Thursdays in childhood, sitting on bed-
sheets stretched over the drawing room carpets, beneath the godly
verses adorning the walls, swaying to his grandfathers recitations of
the Prophets sayings, it was that Muhammad was a shepherd whose
day job obscured his destiny. Raiss days at the mart were steps in a
carefully laid plan. Before years end, inshallah, he would y home
and, with the gas station money, make good on a long-ago promise to
Abida. After the weddingto be held, if he could arrange it, in the Air
Force mess in Dhakahe would bring her to Dallas in proper style.
He would enroll in a computer course at the University of Texas at
Dallas or Richland Community College (he was still calculating the
cost of each in dollars per credit). If things went according to plan,
as surely they would, he would be a bona de systems engineer at a
prestigious company downtown.
Rais could sufer the Buckner Food Mart because he knew hed
be leaving it. His short life had already been full of leavings. Islam
was his constant; other things he could renounce with an ease that
eluded most beings. It was part of what made him a natural aspirant
to America.
Not to mention his doggedness, his power to ignore voices not
his own, and his focus on what he believed to be his God-given luck.
What a casual visitor to the mini-mart could not see was that his
presence there was the product of a great run of victories. Rais Bhu-
iyans arrival in Dallas was, by the grace of God, the most merciful
and compassionate, the seventh triumph in that run.
J
The fortune reached back half a generation, to the middle
1980s, in the years before the great cyclone. It fell on a young man
from a household well prepared for it: an educated and devout