The Language of Secrets by Ausma Zehanat Khan Page A

and you fell for it.” His voice became a sneer. “You wanted it, I’m sure. A little plume in your cap, a sign of acceptance that even white skin doesn’t buy you. A chance to pass, to play at being angrez . Were it not for the fact of your rather difficult Pashtun name.”
    Khattak considered this. The Urdu word faltu meant “worthless,” or “extra.” It was borrowed from Portuguese, brought by the Portuguese colonization of Goa, India. As was angrez , a word that meant “Englishman,” a loanword derived from “inglés.”
    Khattak marveled at the irony of Dar’s choice of language, an irony that Dar little suspected, cultures bleeding into each other, leaving graceful, irretrievable traces of themselves.
    â€œYou’re not being fair, Baba.” Alia’s voice from the corner of the room was plain and unaccented. Like Khattak, she was Canadian-born. She brushed at the curls on her forehead, pulling her headscarf forward. “Mohsin knew Inspector Khattak. He would have been glad to know that someone he respected was working on his behalf.”
    â€œDid he mention me to you recently?”
    Both Khattak’s voice and glance at Alia were gentle. He considered the contrast between Andy Dar and his daughter-in-law, etched more sharply by Dar’s not-unexpected invective. There was much in Dar’s outburst to consider, not least its contradictions. It was Adnan Dar who had spent his life in pursuit of acceptance, and “Andy” Dar who had chosen the straightforward path of assimilation. Except that assimilation was never quite as straightforward as an immigrant expected or hoped for. The accent, the dark skin, the unfamiliar ways—the distinctive and oft-feared religious practices. Much of this, Andy Dar had discarded. What he could not discard was his sense of being uprooted from himself, in search of a new mooring place. No matter how loudly he disparaged his personal heritage, he wasn’t able to divorce himself from it—either in his own eyes, or in the eyes of others.
    Khattak with his difficult name and Alia with her headscarf were both more comfortable and familiar with themselves than Andy Dar could hope to be, shouting blindly into the void.
    Alia came away from the filing cabinet, leaning one hip against the desk.
    â€œYou don’t visit the Nur mosque, I think. The mosque in old Unionville.”
    â€œI haven’t yet. Did Mohsin spend time there?”
    Alia appeared uneasy. She reached for the mail that Andy Dar had been shuffling in his hands, and set it upon the desk. Khattak sensed that as with everything else, responsibility for Dar’s mail would ultimately fall to her.
    â€œA lot of time. He met—new people there. He was always at the mosque.”
    â€œWasting his time with idiots,” Andy Dar cut in. His voice was filled with outrage. And beneath the outrage, the pain that waited to encroach at his first quiet moment. “And one of those fanatics killed him. They took him to the woods and murdered him, God knows why.” He darted an angry glance at Khattak. “If you are not wholly incompetent yourself, perhaps you stand a chance of finding out what happened to my son.” He checked the time on his cell phone. “But I will make sure of it myself by asking for answers on my program.”
    And now Khattak felt the urgency of what Martine Killiam had shared with him, the need to curtail Dar before his behavior destroyed months of meticulous groundwork. The exigent need to find Dar another outlet for his pain, since Dar could not be thwarted, and had to be managed.
    â€œI wonder if there’s a way to make your intervention more effective.”
    The innocence of Esa’s suggestion masked a calculation.
    â€œI don’t see your broadcast as a onetime opportunity,” he continued. “Your program could play a critical role, if it’s handled with