We were looking for a couch. After riding up-escalators and down-escalators, negotiating our way through thickets of women’s winter dresses and men’s semi-casuals, and working on insider tips from impossible-to-find store employees, we were finally at the furniture section.

There was a dizzying array of furniture and home furnishings. Rugs from Samarkand, ceramic urns from China, leather couches from Sweden, handicrafts from India. I could imagine myself walking through a bazaar in the heydays of the Holy Roman Empire. The similarities were inescapable. We had just been watching the gladiatorial sport of football on TV that morning, with impossibly huge men, mostly of African descent, trying to batter each other to death, and beautiful cheering women thronging the sides of the amphitheater, I mean, the stadium. And could one envisage the current President in the role of emperor Nero fiddling away while Rome burned? Maybe that was stretching it a bit.

We seemed to be the only people interested in buying or selling furniture in the store. The department looked deserted, as if the merchants had fled in advance of the rampaging hordes at the city gates. My wife was, as usual, oblivious of any kind of time constrains, happily flitting about among the semiprecious objects strewn around the place, oohing and aahing over impossibly-priced stuff that I was not even interested in looking at. I was about to call it a day when I heard a polite cough behind me. “Can I help you, sir”. The salesman had appeared, Jeeves-like, at my side.

He was a middle-aged gentleman, with features that bespake his origin from the Indian subcontinent. He had gray hair, and was dressed rather dapperly in an expensive looking suit with his name-tag pinned to the lapel: “Farooq Ahmed”. I wondered how much the suit had cost him, and how much money he made working there. He had a polite air about him, but detached at the same time, kind of like a top-drawer English butler. “So you are looking for a couch.”. He looked at me gravely as if he was sizing me up, almost like a doctor examining a difficult case. “Hmm..let’s see..please follow me”. We followed him single file through piles of carpets and furniture placed strategically like hurdles. He seemed quite knowledgeable about the furniture we passed by as he gave us a tour of the furniture in his dominion.

It turned out that he was from Afghanistan, and he understood Hindi quite well. “Oh I watch a lot of Indian movies” he said with a rare smile when my wife asked him. “My daughters get them all the time”. It seemed we had struck some common ground. Hindi movies are exclusively my wife’s domain, and soon she had Mr. Ahmed involved in an energized conversation about the merits and demerits of the latest Hindi blockbuster. It’s hard to tell a book by its cover, I thought. It was difficult to envisage Mr. Ahmed kicking back and enjoying some frivolous dance number or some cliché-ed romantic scene where some muscular love-hound would be cooing over his petite love-interest. With his grave manner and impeccable dress, one could imagine him to be, oh, a partner in a law firm, or maybe a funeral director. But he was a salesman, and a good salesman at that, for very soon he had my wife interested in a couple of antique-looking couches that I would never touch with a ten-foot pole.

From his excellent English diction Mr. Ahmed seemed very well-educated, and he had impeccable manners, so I wondered why he was working at that modestly-paid job. I asked him how long he had been working there. “Two years this spring” said Mr. Ahmed. I could tell he had been asked this question by someone like me before, for without any prompting he proceeded to explain to me patiently that he had been an engineer before, and yes, he had been laid off. He seemed quite stoical about the whole thing, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. After that fateful incident in New York on September 11th a couple of years ago, and the subsequent recession, I had seen a lot of people lose their jobs. You could find a disproportionately high number of small business entrepreneurs from the Indian subcontinent everywhere, and to my surprise, they’d mostly be Muslim. Was there some kind of profiling going on? It was hard to be sure. But if there was, Mr. Ahmed was surely part of the collateral damage – a highly educated, progressive representative of a part of the world that had fallen behind of late. I couldn’t help wonder about the injustice of it all.

Older people are traditionally highly respected in our part of the world. But in America, age is a disadvantage. At Mr. Ahmed’s age it would be difficult to pick up the pieces and put everything back together. And it would be almost impossible for him to get back to exactly where he was before. We learned that he had been brought up in privileged circumstances in his native country, educated in the best schools in Kabul and the U.S. He came from the intelligentsia of a country that badly needed more enlightened representatives like him. If educated, highly rational individuals like Mr. Ahmed could not be protected and nurtured, what hope was there of a better tomorrow in Afghanistan and that part of the world in general? It was very depressing.

Me and my wife used to discuss the Iraq war quite often. We never could quite buy the rationale given for the Iraq war. As far as we could see, Iraq was the lowest hanging fruit that was begging to be picked. But after the war happened anyway, we felt that the side-effects could be very beneficial for the people of Iraq, and for the middle-east in general. People like Mr. Ahmed could seize the day and lead their country towards a brighter tomorrow. We were quite optimistic about the prospects. But then you came across cases like this, and it made your heart sink. I suddenly felt a lot closer to Mr. Ahmed. I wanted to reach out and tell him, look, your situation is an unintended consequence. Please don’t lose hope, the world needs more people like you. Because sane, rational individuals like you are the desperate need of the hour.

We finally found a couch we liked. Mr. Ahmed went off to fetch some forms. “Let’s invite him and his family over one day” I whispered to my wife . “Yes, good idea,” she whispered back, “how about next weekend?”. “I’ll ask him”, I said. After filling up the forms and finishing all the transactions, I shook hands with Mr. Ahmed. We were standing before a pile of carpets that looked too large for any normal-sized room. Mr. Ahmed sat down on the huge pile. He had relaxed a lot since had we met him. “I like Indians very much,” he said, “after all, we’re from the same part of the world.”. “Oh yes”, I said, “we are all related.”, I was glad to have found a kindred spirit, “Why, there was a time when all Afghanistanis were Hindu. Do you know the story of Gandhari?” Mr. Ahmed looked up at me with a surprised look on his face. You could tell he was completely taken aback. “Oh no” he smiled, “we were always Muslim. Always Muslim”. He looked at my wife and smiled in a conciliatory fashion. As if he knew he had caused some controversy, but hadn’t really meant to. I was a little surprised by his ignorance. Surely he knew that Muhammad was born only about 1400 years ago? “You know that Muhammad was born in 570 AD, right?” I said. Mr. Ahmed looked at me strangely. His manner had suddenly reverted to that of a psychiatrist dealing with a particularly difficult case. He smiled at me in an avuncular manner. “Let me show you something”. He grabbed my hand and spread my palm. “Look here”, he said excitedly, running a stubby index finger over the lines on my palm. He traced the outline of an inverted “V”, and an “I” on my hand. “See, that’s the number 81 in Arabic”. He grabbed my other hand. This time, he traced an “I” and another inverted “V”. “That’s 18”, he said. “What do you get when you add 18 to 81?” he peered at me expectantly. “Ninety-nine”, I said. “Exactly!”, he said delightedly, “You know what that means?”. He had the air of a magician about to whisk off a magic cape. “No”, I shook my head in dumbfoundment. “That’s the number of names for God in the holy Quran” he said triumphantly. “The holy number ninety-nine”, he added for emphasis. “Everyone has that number on their palm. Everybody in the world. See?”, he beamed at us like a magician who had just produced a particularly large rabbit out of a hat. “Everyone is really a Muslim” he said, sealing off the point. I was at a loss as to what to say. It was very evident that Mr. Ahmed was trying to be patient with my obvious stupidity in the face of overwhelming logic. Through the corner of my eye, I could see my wife signalling me to change the topic. With all the subtlety I could muster, I veered the conversation back to the couch at hand.

We were silent on our drive back. The night sky was clear, with a full moon. The radio had the news on, and the news anchor was quoting the President’s sanguine assertions about the inevitable explosion of democracy in the middle-east. My wife switched off the radio. “He has no idea what he’s dealing with” she said absently. “No idea”, I thought gloomily, “he has absolutely no clue”.