7-Eleven to 9/11

7-Eleven on 9/11

 

 

Ali Khan grew up watching America from behind a 7-Eleven counter. Though his family is from Pakistan, Ali never questioned his “American-ness,” until 9/11.

 

Drinking Gatorade and listening to Tupac, we zip down the Hempstead Turnpike in Long Island, New York toward his 7-Eleven.

 

As a teenager, Ali felt at home here, slushing slurpies while listening to customers’ stories. There was the corpulent banker hooked on beer, the rebel hooligans with nerdy aspirations, and the two married men who met at 2 a.m. on Wednesday nights for surreptitious sex. Ali kept their secrets safe.

Outside work, Ali worked out, raced cars and chased girls. He saved up to supe up an old Mustang, which he took out on the drag circuit. Italian American racers affectionately dubbed him “Guido Ali”. At night “Guido Ali” found lust, dating a “smoking” Puerto Rican waitress who worked at the local “Hooters .” She dubbed him her “Amor Ali.”

 

Then one morning the New York skyline sparked and filled with black smoke. A day of numbness followed before “fear, sadness and anger” settled in: Fear of more; sadness for friends who lost loves; and “anger that someone had done this" and his life might change because of it.

Ali with a suped up car.

 

Things started changing quietly. No one attacked Ali verbally or physically. “The regular customers knew me so well; they would never think badly of me,” he says. Anger just floated. Officer Cooksie took special care to protect Ali's 7-Eleven, but even the officer, who Ali had known for years, “seemed suspicious, on edge around me” unsure what to do with his emotions.

 

Nothing was overt. One Saturday afternoon in mid-October the hooligans came and conversation turned to tracking the Taliban. Having read some history, Ali joined the discussion and spoke about the difficulty of dislodging dispersed fighters in the Afghan hills. To this one boy replied, “Our pilots got itchy fingers and we’ll shoot at anything that moves. It doesn’t matter.” The group laughed and Ali joined in, tucking away his horror as he rang them up. He had never been to Pakistan or Afghanistan, but now more than ever he felt some connection.

 

Meanwhile Ali headed off to Baruch College in New York to study finance. There for the first time he started socializing with other Pakistani Americans his age. It was easy. No new nicknames; around them the pressure to fit in was off. Without realizing how or when it happened, Ali’s whole social network changed. His closest friends became exclusively Pakistani Americans. He has only dated South Asians since breaking up with the Puerto Rican in late 2001. In 2005 he went to Pakistan after the earthquake and shot an award-winning film about it called "7.6." Since coming back he’s picked up cricket, playing with other Pakistanis in Queens on Sundays; drag racing’s done.

 

“I felt defensive after it all,” explains Ali. “I felt like people expected me to apologize for something I didn’t even do.” Ali put up the American flag on his storefront and was careful with what he said, always trying to make clear he was with America, not the other guys. He carried his patriotism like a shield, but after awhile his arm got tired. Exposed, he was left wondering what it meant to be American after all.

Then Ali turns to cricket.

 

“I want to be a community leader one day,” Ali tells me, “but I’m afraid I can’t do that here, at least not in the short term.” “Is Canada or England better?” he asks.

 

It’s getting late and Ali’s mom is expecting us. An ice-cream truck drives by, its jingle fading. We arrive to find the elderly woman in a salwar kameez sitting on the white steps leading up to her house. She’s a rotund, soft-faced woman who only speaks English when she has to. Little grandchildren bounced on her.

 

She’s raised four kids on her own as a single mom, arriving in the U.S. with almost nothing two decades ago. We exit our car, and assume our seats on the step below hers. She offers us sweet chai as Ali introduces our discussion on being American.

 

“Why would you ever leave?” she asks us, sounding suspiciously like my own mother who hates the idea of me traveling outside of the country she worked so hard to get into. “You can make any future you want here.”

I noticed then another form of patriotism opening up before us, not a defensive one designed to deflect accusatory arrows but an aspirational one, filled with the hope that brought these immigrants to America decades ago.