Mohammad was a twenty-three-year-old waiter serving tables to help pay for tuition at New York’s City College. He told me in a soft voice that employees at the restaurant had been receiving death threats and that people would come in to stare at the flag of Afghanistan teary-eyed and shake their heads. Two of Mohammad’s friends sold coffee from carts on the top floors of the twin towers and were missing, presumed dead. But unlike other New Yorkers who shared that intense kinship in grief, Mohammad felt alone and like an outsider for the first time since he left Pakistan.
Which was ironic, because Mohammad had always felt more at home in New York than he had growing up in Islamabad.
Mohammad’s father was an officer with Pakistan’s navy who told his two boys from a very young age that he didn’t want his sons to live with the corruption of Pakistan’s ruling elite. When they were old enough, he would find a way to send them abroad to study and work. Mohammad’s chance came in 1995 when he travelled to Switzerland, where he studied hotel management, while his older brother left for Ireland. Even though he was only a teenager, Mohammad had been planning all his life (“I’m addicted to work,” he liked to exclaim, throwing up his hands as if he had an undiagnosed medical condition that he had learned to live with). He hit his stride as soon as he arrived in Switzerland, quickly securing a hotel internship, freelancing with bartending and DJ gigs at night, and learning English and German to add to his list of languages that already included Punjabi, Farsi and passable Arabic. But while his living costs were taken care of through the internship, his jobs earned little, which meant he was unable to save for the career he sought. He wanted to be a doctor. He believed there was only one place where he could do that. “To me, it was always the land of opportunities,” he said of New York. In 1998, he applied for a U.S. student visa and was delighted when he was accepted. He arrived in Manhattan soon after and found himself at the doorstep of the Afghan Kebab House, where he met Shafi Rouzy.
Shafi, the founder of the Afghan Kebab House chain, had also come to the United States in search of a new life, after fleeing his home in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1979 during the Soviet invasion. He received political asylum in the United States and became an American citizen. Shafi’s first job was selling kebabs from a pushcart on the streets of Midtown during the 1980s. One night as he wearily parked his cart in the rundown garage on 9th Avenue, he imagined what could be. By the time he was able to sponsor his wife and children to get them out of Pakistan, to which they had fled, the wily businessman had established the Afghan Kebab House and already had a faithful clientele.
When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Shafi was in the Middle East trying to start a chain of restaurants and had left his 9th Avenue restaurant in the care of his son Yusuf. Yusuf had slept in the restaurant for a week following the 9/11 attacks, because travelling in and out of the city was too difficult with all the road restrictions, but Mohammad thought it was also to keep his family business safe. Mosques, stores, and Arab and South Asian homes were being vandalized. Within a week of the attacks, a Sikh owner of a gas station was shot dead in Arizona (reportedly because he “looked Middle Eastern”); a Pakistani store clerk was killed in Dallas; and Hassan Awdah of Gary, Indiana, a U.S. citizen born in Yemen, survived an attack at his gas station by a masked man wielding a high-powered rifle. Mourning was giving way to vengeance.
Shafi told employees in a conference call from Kuwait that he was considering dropping “Afghan” from the restaurant’s name. He even mused that he wanted to close his restaurants and open a fried chicken chain instead.
Business was certainly bad for a long time after that, but in the end, Shafi wasn’t forced to close his chain, and the Afghan Kebab House survived.
On an unusually warm spring night in 2010, I went back in search of Mohammad. Ready to use my best investigative skills to track him down, I went first to the restaurant hoping he had a friend still working there. Instead, I found Mohammad right where I had left him almost a decade earlier, waiting tables at 9th and 51st. Yusuf was there too, in the kitchen, slicing massive white pieces of cod into cubes.
The restaurant diners that night were the usual mix of the pre-theatre crowd, tourists with aching feet and bulging shopping bags, and women in pencil skirts, looking all business above the table, but underneath they had traded their spiky office heels for flip flops or running shoes. The restaurant didn’t serve alcohol, but diners were allowed to bring their own. “Some people don’t think it’s right to have hard liquor every night. What’s with that?” a twenty-something suit at the table beside me loudly exclaimed to his workmates as they clinked their corner store beer.
I had secured the only free table and spent a few minutes watching Mohammad before saying hello. He had lost a little hair and his black vest and dress pants seemed looser, I thought. He was busy, banging back and forth through the swinging kitchen doors, returning with fragrant trays of lamb, rice and fish, filling water glasses from wine decanters and returning with empty plates. There was no fried chicken on the menu.
“You’re still here?” I said to Mohammad as I explained that we had met days after 9/11, handing him my business card.
“You came back!” he exclaimed. “I remember.”
For Mohammad, a university degree was still the Holy Grail but his quest had ended a number of years ago when he could no longer afford rent for his 46th Avenue apartment near the restaurant and was forced to move to New Jersey. Trying to balance the commute, school and classes, with cost of tuition . . . “I’ll go back,” he said brightly.
A white-haired man came into the restaurant with a pack of smokes and handed them to Mohammad. “See? I didn’t forget you,” the man said before walking out with a smile. Mohammad later explained that he didn’t know the man’s name but knew his story. The eighty-six-year-old was a World War ii veteran whose wife had died about five years earlier and who was down on his luck. He wandered in often, usually without money, and Mohammad took it upon himself to bring him a steaming bowl of lamb stew. Sometimes the man would come back with a pack of cigarettes to thank him, and Mohammad didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t really a smoker.
Mohammad had other fans and a bunch of them were at a table at the front of the restaurant, wearing crisp suits and sitting with their backs to the wall in a defensive, erect posture that screamed police officers. “You write good things about him,” one told me, winking at Mohammad as he paid the bill.
“You working with NYPD on 9/11?” I asked the baby-faced officer.
“Negative,” he replied.
“They’re good guys,” Mohammad said once they were out of earshot. “Work for intelligence.”
Then he added seemingly more to himself than to me, “You know, New York is a good place for good people and it’s a bad place for bad people.
“I don’t have anybody here but I don’t feel lonely. This is my home. This is my place. This is my country.”
A FEW BLOCKS from the Afghan Kebab House was the Pride of Midtown, the nickname for New York’s busiest fire hall. Built more than one hundred years ago, it sits on the corner of 8th Avenue and 48th Street, close to Broadway and the theatres. The firefighters working in the red-brick building answer more than fourteen thousand emergency calls a year.
Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 lost fifteen men on duty on 9/11: the three Mikes—Haub (the Hobbinator), Lynch and Brennan; the house “probie” and youngest at 24, Chris Santora; the “artist” Paul Gill; the athlete Sam Oitice. Chief Ed Geraghty, Joe Angelini, Len Ragaglia, Carl Asaro, Captain Dave Wooley, Jose Guadalupe, Lieutenant Danny O’Callaghan, John Tipping, Alan Feinberg. They answered the call at 9:04 AM fourteen minutes after