This is true story of looking for a needle in a proverbial haystack and finding it.
I had known a Lebanese family in Toledo for decades. The father was a restaurateur and made a decent living. One son attended medical school and became an orthopaedic surgeon. The other son was in college in New York City. This young man, the second son, let us call him Saleh Beiruti, was polite, unintrusive and deeply religious.
We go back to the early 1980s, when the struggle against the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan was in full swing. During that period, hundreds and thousands of young Muslim men, infused with religious zeal, lined up to fight the Soviet infidels in Afghanistan. For them, it was the Jihad in the full meaning of the word.
At the time, Saleh Bieruti was a college student in New York City. He was deeply influenced by the efforts of the CIA and various groups in the Muslim world to recruit young men for the Afghan Jihad. Being an idealistic young man, Saleh eagerly volunteered to go to Afghanistan. In a brief phone call to his parents in Toledo, the young man informed them of his intentions, asked for their blessings, and said he would call them from Peshawar when he reached there.
During the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation, Pakistan became a frontline state by channelling US arms and ammunition to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan. All the resistance groups, the Mujahideen, had their headquarters in Peshawar, the provincial capital close to the Afghanistan border. Peshawar became the hub of the Afghan resistance, and, as a result, suffered considerably when Soviet agents carried out clandestine bombings of various parts of the city and its surroundings.
The young volunteers from Muslim countries and from the West were processed in Peshawar by Afghan handlers. They were all given noms de guerre (pseudonyms) and, thereafter, they were not known by their real names. So, if someone was looking for Saleh Beiruti, it would be impossible to find him.
They were trained in camps located along the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, that is, the Pak-Afghan border. They were allowed reprieve once a month to come to Peshawar, so as to purchase items of personal use and make phone calls. In the 1980s, there were no mobiles, and calls could only be made from landlines. In Peshawar, those young men would go to the telephone office in the cantonment to place long-distance calls to their dear ones in the US, Britain and other countries.
Saleh Bieruti was a college student in New York City. He was deeply influenced by the efforts of the CIA and various groups in the Muslim world to recruit young men for the Afghan Jihad. Being an idealistic young man, Saleh eagerly volunteered
The Beiruti family in Toledo heard from Saleh at regular monthly intervals for the first three months, and then the phone calls stopped. After three months of silence, the family was beside itself. His father Bassam (not his real name) came to see me in the hope that I will be able to help find his son. He also told me that he had a dream in which he was celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr with his son. At the time, we were more than halfway through the month of Ramzan. Bassam was adamant about going to Peshawar and finding his son. I promised to facilitate his stay in Peshawar and get him in touch with a few local people who were active in helping the Afghan war efforts.
Soon thereafter, on the 25th of Ramzan, the father left for Peshawar. My nephew Zubair received him and got him situated in a hotel. He told Bassam that Eid is going to be in a day or two and there was no way to start looking for his son at this time. After the Eid holidays, they would start inquiries and talk to people. Zubair promised to return the next day and take him to meet our family. He also told him that on reaching home, he would call me to let me know that Mr Beiruti has arrived safely in Peshawar and had checked into a hotel.
In those days, direct dialling was not available. From home phones, one would book a call to the US, and it would take hours if not days to connect. Halfway home from the cantonment to the old city, Zubair turned around to go to the government telephone office to make the call. It usually took lesser time, ie less than 30 minutes, to make a call from the telephone office to the US.
At the telephone office, one would give the phone number in the US to the clerk and then wait to be connected. As Zubair passed my phone number to the clerk, he noticed another slip of paper with the phone number bearing the area code 419 in the US. The 419 telephone code covered Toledo and surrounding areas. Curious, he asked the clerk as to who was making the call to area code 419. “There is a man outside who has booked the call to America.”
Zubair found a bearded young man sitting on a bench outside. “Are you Saleh Bieruti?” Zubair asked.
“Yes, I am,” was the answer.
Talk about finding a needle in a haystack.
Saleh had come with a few of Jihadis from the front in Afghanistan to Peshawar. He had tried to call his parents the day before, but was not able to connect. Now he was at the telephone office for one more try, before going back to the warzone in Afghanistan.
Zubair took the young man to the hotel and the father and son had a tearful reunion. Ever the obedient son, he asked his father’s permission to go back to Afghanistan. The father said that he would rather the son return home to console his grieving mother and siblings. The son agreed to accompany the father back to Toledo.
The duo spent Eid with my family and made a side trip to Islamabad and Murree with some members of my family, before returning home.
One could explain the whole phenomenon as sheer coincidence. But there were just too many moving parts to fit neatly into a coincidence. The father’s dream of celebrating Eid with his son, Saleh’s return to Peshawar and failing to connect with his family on first attempt and then trying once more for the last time. Zubair changing his plans to make phone call from the telephone office rather than from his home and noticing a familiar area code on a scrap of paper on clerk’s counter.
I guess there is another dimension to our existence that we poorly understand.