A Muslim name, a South-Asian accent and Pakistan as the country of birth is the biggest downer today. Mailing 1,000 job applications with your impressive resume and cover letter are not even worth the piece of paper they are written on. Trashed? You guessed it right

Devil’s darkness, blooming night
Set stars at sky
Glittering moon capture spot eye
Golden moments cursed by devil’s deed
Spread darkness, show them evil succeeds
Disburse hate clouds here and there
Devil’s my name
Now truth be rare
Escape to darkness, hide ignorance dome
Shed light at wide, banish the truth
No one dare to cry
— Suicide note from
Masood Sabir

HE’S dead. Gone unwept and unnoticed. Flown home. His last rites performed by men merely doing a job. Washed and packed in a wooden coffin with the bloody scar around his neck, Masood Sabir, 28, is no more.

His Green Card imaging that sweet smile of success — as if the greatest prize was his alone; the 1987 Toyota Corolla car keys; the bank statement; the family’s phone number in Sahiwal; the former employer’s business card and a typed poem on a plain white paper is all that his trouser pockets opened out when Masood was found hanging by a rope, in the basement that was his home for the last nine months.

Who was this youth — friendless and forsaken in a foreign land, so far, far away from home? What drove him to suicide? How many people must he have touched for help before being frozen out, smothered, no one will ever know?

The young software computer engineer arrived in America three years ago with a work visa (H1-B) sponsored by Fisher Scientific Company at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He must have been valuable for his employers to file for his Green Card. It landed like manna from heaven on June 18, 2003, for the Quaid-i-Azam University computer science engineer.

Quixotic it is (for most Pakistanis) to parallel the attainment of a Green Card to hitting a lottery, of endless bonanza featuring bankrolled salaries, shiny, new cars and heavenly homes. In sum, the realization of the American dream, the acquisition of all things material.

Nemesis struck long before his Green Card came: Masood was handed the pink slip and told to leave within a year, downsizing being the infernal excuse of his employers. The ‘Legal Permanent Resident Alien’ became rudderless.

Gone was the rented apartment where he lived; gone was the money dutifully wired each month to his parents back home and gone, too, was his marketability as an IT specialist — a skill that only a few years ago had honed in unimaginable rewards.

Masood scoured the length and breadth for another job. He was spurned. Was it his name or the colour of his skin or his country of origin that played the devil’s advocate in depriving him a level playing field?

All of the above, of course!

A Muslim name, a South-Asian accent and Pakistan as a country of birth is the biggest downer today. You can be skilled, qualified and far better than your white American counterpart — but don’t even begin to go there — mailing 1,000 job applications with your impressive resume and cover letter are not even worth the piece of paper they are written on by prospective employers. Trashed? You guessed it right.

Masood moved into a dingy basement — that’s all he could pay for — and finally bought a rundown car, hoping to expand his job search to other states. Securing a driver’s license thus became a matter of life and death for him. And why? Let me tell you, in America, if you are outside the periphery of public transport, it’s simply suicidal to be without wheels. And even if you have wheels, as did Masood, without a driver’s license you just can’t drive. It’s dearer than life.

For an immigrant, getting a driver’s license is devilishly cumbersome. The Motor Vehicle Authority outlets all over the US get jammed early in the day with swelling immigrants sullenly lining up. They must first pass a written test. Oops, I mean they must learn by heart the whole book to satisfy their examiners that they are good parrots. If they clear the test, they can sit for a driving test but not before three months. And when D-day arrives, should you have a redneck testing out your driving, you are toast for sure. He’ll fail you on the slightest pretext of messing up your parallel parking or doodling with the K-turn, something the Americans take very seriously.

That Thursday morning, as snow fell and the weather turned hostile, Masood failed the driving test. And that ebbed out his life. He came home and hanged himself.

“I got a call from Edhi sahib in Pakistan on Saturday night to go collect Masood’s body from the hospital,” Shabbir Chaudhry tells me when I call him up at his office in Corona, Queens. He runs the sole Edhi Centre in America out of New York. On Sunday, Ms James, the coroner, called him, saying they were willing to release the body without an autopsy, “In respect of Islamic traditions.”

It was left to Shabbir to bathe the body (“neat and clean” was the corpse, I am clinically informed) and put it on a Lahore-bound PIA flight from where an Edhi ambulance carried it to Sahiwal. “It cost us around $4,000, but we never charged the bereaved family a cent,” he says, taking pride in running the centre solely on funds donated by Pakistanis in America. “We get millions from them each year and have enough left to send some across to our headquarters in Pakistan.”

The US-based NNI correspondent Zahid Ghani’s sensational headline American hatred against Muslims caused death of a computer engineer solicited an apple-pie order (as the Americans call it) from Kimberly Nisbet of the State Department, manning the New York Foreign Press Centre.

Promptly picking up the phone, the piqued director dialled Zahid’s number to persuade him not to stoke anti-American hysteria with such “negative” stories.

During her 45-minute tele-con with the Pakistani veteran journalist, Kim, as she’s called, attempted to shoehorn the kind of stuff he should write. The conversation sparked protestations from an English daily back home, dragging in the foreign office that sandblasted Kim for her arm-twisting tactics.

“Tremendously hurt” for being misquoted by Zahid, when I called Kim up, she segued into a gatekeeper of news for the foreign correspondents, wanting to micro manage the “unfounded” stories that required her vetting before being filed: “I am here to help them ... to make sure they report accurately.”

Now, isn’t that arrogance?

“I am here to promote better journalism and even if our (Bush administration’s) policies may not be so good and we look bad in some countries, I am here to give any help required.”

Such skewed response epitomizes the pomp and puffery of the State Department — men and women who sally forth abroad in vainglorious talk-downs to their host countries. I remember back in Islamabad, some years ago, being threatened by an outgoing deputy chief of mission in the American embassy who “despised” what I wrote once. When, by accident, our paths crossed at the airport, his departing words to me were: “If you don’t watch out, we will fix you!” Bet you the blowhard must still be at the State Department.

Zahid Ghani fears he, too, could be a target. Abi Wright of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told me when I asked her: “We are concerned about the situation with Zahid Ghani, and monitoring developments in his case. We will be watching to see if anything happens in the near future that might be seen as a retaliatory measure — if, for example, his US visa is not renewed.”

That said, Kim Nisbet is “still today deeply confused” why Zahid and ‘his colleague’ in the Pakistani newspaper wrote the “article in the manner it was written”, clarifying, “I am not a spokesperson, but I am here to offer assistance to all foreign journalists; this includes facilitating access to sources they would like to quote or use as background in their articles — the positive and the negative.”

As for the unfortunate Masood Sabir — his suicide cannot wholly be blamed on the 9/11 minutiae. Instead, the fault lies in a ruthlessly cruel capitalist system that throws out its own white Americans to employ Indians and Chinese IT people. The name of the game is outsourcing!

That’s how the cookie crumbles.