Adil Najam has a long an interesting piece on Barack Obama on his blog. Najam is a Boston academic with advanced degrees from MIT and specializes in the areas of international relations, environment and development policy. Judging from the comments on his blogpost, Najam’s piece on Obama can be seen as either flattering or darkly suggestive, depending on the reader’s point of view. One commenter reacted by writing “Obama gives you confidence in democracy again. He will be good for the world and good for America if he is elected.” But another commenter disagrees, saying that “by writing this you have opened the doors for al sorts of crazy Obama haters to take this and twist it into conspiracies about Obama and Muslims and Pakistan. He has enough problems already, lets not make his ‘Pakistan connections’ another one.”
Most of Najam’s piece focuses around the time he roomed with a Pakistani named Siddiqi (described as Sadik) during his days at Columbia. Obama describes his arrival in New York City vividly:
New York. Just like I pictured it. I checked my wallet-not enough money for a motel. I knew one person in New York, a guy named Sadik whom I’d met in L.A., but he’d told me that he worked all night at a bar somewhere. With nothing to do but wait, I carried my luggage back downstairs and sat on the stoop. After a while, I reached into my back pocket, pulling out the letter I’d been carrying since leaving L.A. …
It was well past midnight by the time I crawled through a fence that led to an alleyway. I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep, the sound of drums softly shaping my dreams. In the morning, I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet. Across the street, a homeless man was washing himself at an open hydrant and didn’t object when I joined him. There was still no one home at the apartment, but Sadik answered his phone when I called him and told me to catch a cab to his place on the Upper East Side.
He greeted me on the street, a short, well-built Pakistani who had come to New York from London two years earlier and found his caustic wit and unabashed desire to make money perfectly pitched to the city’s mood. He had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant workforce, waiting on tables. As we entered the apartment I saw a woman in her underwear sitting at the kitchen table, a mirror and a razor blade pushed off to one side.
“Sophie,” Sadik started to say, “this is Barry –”
“Barack,” I corrected, dropping my bags on the floor.
The scene is a masterful piece of writing which contrasts a man fired with idealism to the cynical, world-weary Siddiqi. The images of the white hen pecking at garbage, and the scratch ablutions conducted in company with a vagrant at a fire hydrant are juxtaposed with a sudden transition to a scene with woman in underwear seated beside a suspicious razor as disposable as Sadik’s relationship with her. Two worlds met on that doorstep. And in case the reader missed the point the whole is driven home by a conversational exchange as dramatic as the “Call me Mister” moment in the Virginian. When Sadik introduces the new arrival to the woman in underwear, saying “this is Barry” Obama retorts “‘Barack,’ I corrected, dropping my bags on the floor.” It conveys that a seachange had taken place between LA and NYC. But it doesn’t stop there. After Obama starts rooming with Sadik the forces that had taken root since their previous acquaintance continue to play themselves out. This communicated by Obama’s repeated rejections of Sadik’s (Siddiqi) attempts to interest Obama in the fleshpots of NYC. “Barack” is deaf to them; the young man is already listening to a higher call. Sadik says:
“Stop worrying about the rest of these bums out here and figure out how you’re going to make some money out of this fancy degree you’ll be getting.”
When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I’d beg off with some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash. One day, before leaving the apartment in search of better company, he turned to me and offered his most scathing indictment.
“You’re becoming a bore.”
I knew he was right, although I wasn’t sure myself what exactly had happened. In a way, I was confirming Sadik’s estimation of the city’s allure, I suppose; its consequent power to corrupt. With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was humming, new developments cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess, all of it dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire-a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high. Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will.
It is a fascinating self portrait; a likeness that simultaneously conveys less and yet more than the objective depiction itself. Good writing and painting always leave something to the imagination so that each visit allows the visitor to complete the work of art in a new way. Who does does the portrait truly represent? Light has been drawn into the figures in that New York apartment. But there is no light without shadow. Maybe Nat King Cole put the wonderment best:
Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, men have named you
You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile
Is it only ’cause you’re lonely, they have blamed you
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep
They just lie there and they die there
Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?
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