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After 30 years as an American citizen, a Pakistani man discovers that the final act of assimilation is being yourself.
By Made in USA
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 30, 2003
TAMPA -- Tasneem Mohammed Mirza was not the first person from Pakistan to settle in the Tampa Bay area.
According to the 1960 census, three Pakistanis were here, which means that in February 1961 when he stepped off the train in Winter Haven, Mirza was in all likelihood No. 4.
If he was looking for a network of support, a little taste of home, Florida in the early '60s was not the place to find it. There was no Disney World to remind people what a small world this really is. The most exotic immigrants a native Floridian was likely to encounter were probably the thousands of men and women fleeing an island 90 miles off Key West.
Mirza had come from a world away. He had left a Muslim nation where the call to prayer and the smell of fresh-baked nan mingle in the dry, dusty air. He came to a state where Baptists mop up barbecue sauce with slices of Wonder bread at church picnics.
He had given up a prestigious military career in exchange for nothing more tangible than a somewhat naive notion that in America he would enjoy limitless personal freedoms.
He made the most of the opportunity.
By the mid '90s, at what you might call the pinnacle of his Americanization, Mirza drove an Oldsmobile to sell diesel oil to Cracker cattle ranchers. He had a blond wife and a son who was a slugging centerfielder with big-league aspirations. And on the weekends he played tennis with some of Tampa's most influential men and beat them on the courts of their country clubs.
But it wasn't long after that, after he had divorced his wife, that he discovered that the American dream he had so carefully nurtured was not everything he had imagined. He could recite the Declaration of Independence in his delicately accented English and bring himself near to tears doing it, but even with the lakefront home, the cabin in north Georgia and the all-american son, something was missing in his life, had been for many years.
And when he figured out what it was, he realized that though he had been an American citizen for 30 years, he wasn't really an American until he could say that he didn't love absolutely everything about his country.
Mirza, 67, was a young boy in 1947 when India and Pakistan were partitioned to create homogenous religious states. The division left millions of Muslims and Hindus stranded on the wrong side of the new border. Mirza's family, which was Muslim, became a group of foreigners in India, where it had lived for generations.
"All of a sudden we were not safe," Mirza said.
The sectarian violence was horrific. In India, Hindus swept through Muslim neighborhoods killing families so they could seize their homes. One day the mob came for his father.
"An Indian soldier, a Hindu, saved my family. He had been a student of my father's in school," Mirza said. "The soldier led us to Pakistan with nothing but the clothes on our backs."
The Mirzas lived in a refugee camp until Mirza's father found a position as a headmaster in the city of Lahore. They moved into a home vacated by Hindus who had been forced to flee to India.
"My father was convinced he would one day return (to India) after all this rowdyism died down," Mirza said. "We never went home. We never saw our home again."
But the family prospered in Pakistan.
Mirza's future seemed as secure as it had been foretold when he graduated at the top of his class in the Royal Pakistan Air Force School. He was an officer in the English military tradition, pampered like minor royalty; servants made his bed and pressed his uniforms. In a country run by the military, to be an officer guaranteed a lifetime income.
In 1958, the new military government of Gen. Ayoub Khan was looking for alliances with the West. Mirza and three classmates became the first Pakistanis sent to train with the U.S. Air Force.
"What is America?" Mirza asked his father, the schoolteacher.
"I don't know," he replied, "but you will go and find out for us."
Over the next several years, Mirza moved from air base to air base -- Lackland in San Antonio, Luke in Phoenix, Bartow in Florida. He trained in T-37s and learned to fly the F-86 Sabre jet, one of the first U.S. fighters that could approach the speed of sound.
Mirza was more impressed by what he saw on the ground. Life in America was not a list of proscribed activities. It lacked some of the formality he had grown up with -- the officers' communal latrine was a shock -- but he didn't have to worry about sacred cows, either.
"I never had a steak before I came here," Mirza said. (He didn't stop eating steaks until his doctor told him his arteries were choked with American-grade cholesterol.)
He was amazed to discover that you could ask a woman to dance without first asking her family's permission. He even kissed a couple of women. No chaperones required.
"I'm 19 years old. I didn't even have a beard, maybe one hair on the bottom of my chin, but I'm high on this stuff," Mirza said.
He saw Christians and Jews eating at the same table in the officers mess hall. Given his experience of religious intolerance, he found it amazing that they weren't beating each other with sticks.
He remembered the question his father had asked him: "What disease has killed more people than any other?"
"Tuberculosis?" Mirza answered.
"No, religion."
America seemed disease-free.
Mirza finished his training and returned home to Pakistan with Shirley, a red-haired, headstrong woman he had met in Winter Haven. They were married at his father's insistence. But no sooner had he married Shirley than he divorced the military.
"My heart was not in the air force," he said. "It would have given me a very comfortable life. My father was very proud. But America was showing me a better way."
He resigned his officer's commission and took his new bride back to America.
"My father disowned me," he said. "I could not sell my father on the idea of why I wanted to be an American."
His family thought he was crazy.
"He had the chance one day to be the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan air force," said his older brother Shamim Mirza. "He broke our hearts."
He headed back to Polk County, where he had trained with the Air Force and was the only place he knew anybody. He and Shirley stayed with her mother in Winter Haven while Mirza looked for work. His goal was to get his commercial pilot's license and fly passenger planes.
His first job was dishwasher.
"I was hungry. I wouldn't tell anybody that. I was too proud," he said. "They paid me $24 a week, and I ate free."
Nobody could pronounce Tasneem, so he permitted them to shorten it to a more manageable Tas. Rolling off a Southerner's tongue, it sounded like it had a "z" on the end: Taz.
"I should have made it Tom," he said. "Down the road I kicked myself for that."
A friend got Mirza in the door at the Citrus Experiment Station in Lake Alfred, where he worked as a lab assistant. A series of government jobs followed -- eradicating mosquitoes, counting fire ant mounds -- and one brief, smelly venture into chicken farming.
His dream of becoming a pilot had stalled. Airlines weren't interested in hiring a Pakistani immigrant. And Shirley wasn't interested in being married to a former officer turned low-level government functionary. She divorced him and took their son and daughter.
In November 1968 he answered an ad for a sales job at Central Oil Co. in Tampa.
"We're not hiring any pilots today," they told him. "Have you ever sold anything?"
He didn't have any sales experience, but Central didn't have any other applicants, either.
Central hired him to sell a new petroleum-based herbicide. Mirza did so well that before long, he was selling everything from heating oil to molasses. His territory extended from Ocala to Fort Myers. Despite his hard work, sales were not always easy to come by.
"Doors were slammed shut in my face," Mirza said. "Because I looked different. Because I sounded different. I was not one of the boys."
Given that this was an era in which civil rights was far from a settled question, it is not hard to believe that Mirza was treated harshly by white businessmen, especially in the parts of Central Florida where the Ku Klux Klan was known to be active.
But he didn't feel a connection with the burgeoning civil rights movement. "I had heard about discrimination, Martin Luther King and stuff like that, but I didn't pay that much attention," he said. "I had my own problems."
Once, a citrus grove manager ordered him to show up at 7 a.m. if he wanted an appointment. The manager never looked at Mirza as he made his pitch. Frustrated, Mirza lashed back: "You saw some dumb Pakistani come in here, and you didn't listen to a word I said."
Back at the office, he told the story to John Guyton, the president of Central.
"Tas, you're never going to sell a drop of oil that way, and that's your job," Guyton told him.
"I had to convince myself that my differences didn't matter," Mirza said. "If I can't do that, I don't deserve to make a living. I chose to come to the USA. They don't owe me anything."
This epiphany began a series of sales conquests among a group of customers that one might think would be the least likely to embrace Mirza.
"He put on cowboy boots," Guyton said, "and went down to Arcadia."
"Him being Pakistani, people wouldn't accept him around here," said Phil Turner, 71, whose father, John Henry, owned the Turner Cattle Co., a 15,000-acre spread in DeSoto County. "But my daddy was kind of a peculiar man, a hard man, and my daddy liked Tas."
Mirza remembers when he first met the man everyone in Arcadia knew as "Papa John."
"You don't look like you're from here," Papa John said to him. "You don't talk like you're from here. Where you from anyway?"
Having heard the story about flying jets and resigning the commission, Turner asked: "What made you want to do that?"
" 'I found something better. I wanted to be an American,' " Mirza said. "He liked that."
For years Mirza sold the Turners molasses that the ranch used as an appetite stimulant for the cattle. During winter, when the pasture had been grazed off, the molasses made even frost-bitten grass appealing.
Papa John was so fond of Mirza, he would call other ranchers he wanted him to meet. "His name's Taz," Papa John would say in a voice that sounded like a well-oiled band saw. "He's a down-home boy with sand in his shoes."
"What this means, I do not know," Mirza recalled thinking as he heard Turner on the phone. "But it worked. Papa John would tell them to give me five minutes. Those accounts I had for 25 years."
During the oil crisis in the mid 1970s, Phil Turner said, the ranch expanded rapidly, clearing pasture and planting citrus groves. The ranch's regular fuel supplier couldn't meet the extra demand for diesel needed to power the ranch's tractors. Turner called Mirza.
"Tas, I need diesel bad," he said.
"I'll have it for you in the morning," he said.
"I never forgot that," Turner said. "I'd always buy from him, even if his price was a little higher sometimes."
Mirza realized that his background was an effective calling card. He liked to tell customers: "Central Oil has a bunch of chiefs, but I'm the only Indian." He schmoozed at cattlemen's conventions.
" 'No' is not in his language," said Bob Guyton, who ran Central Oil with his brother John. "It's just a question of when you're going to say yes."
And Mirza never got into his car for a trip to Arcadia without first stopping at the Silver Ring Cafe in Ybor City for a sack of Cuban sandwiches. He'd make his round of the farmers, sipping their iced tea as they devoured the imported food from the big city.
How quintessentially American: a Pakistani taking a Cuban pork sandwich to a Cracker rancher as a way to curry favor with a customer.
A decade had passed since Mirza had left Pakistan, and though he had become a citizen in 1966, he was beginning to feel the effects of so long a separation.
"I was very lonely here," he said. "I told John Guyton that if I couldn't convince my family to come here, one day I would have to go back."
Guyton tried to convince him to stay. "That country's not going anywhere," he told Mirza. But in the end, he gave him $1,000 in traveling money. Guyton told him to have a good time but to come back. Guyton promised to help bring his family to the United States.
The reunion with his family in Lahore was emotional. He spent four weeks there, and he campaigned hard with his oldest brother, a well-positioned lawyer with the Pakistani government, to return to the United States with him.
"I knew if I could get him to come, the rest would follow," Mirza said.
Shamim balked at first. Tas brought him over for a trip to Disney World. Before long, Shamim was enrolled at the University of Florida law school. True to his word, John Guyton worked his legal connections in Tampa to lobby the Florida Supreme Court to let Shamim take the Florida Bar exam even though he wasn't a U.S. citizen. He passed and has been practicing law in South Florida for more than a quarter of a century.
After Shamim came Shamima, his sister, and her husband.
In 1977, Tas' younger brother Shaista, an engineer, made the move. "Now I know better," Mirza said. "I called him Sam right away."
That year, Arshad, the fourth brother, arrived.
Then came Mirza's mother. She told her husband that she was going to visit her children, but when she hadn't returned after two years, her husband came to Florida to bring her back.
"This is not your country," Mirza's father said to his wife.
"My country is where my children are," she said. She was so proud of her children that she made a sari with the colors of the American flag.
Naseem, a sister, came in 1980, followed by Saleem, a brother who was a helicopter pilot for Libyan president Moammar Gadhafi. Saleem quit his job just before the United States bombed Ghadafi's home in Tripoli. Furzana, a sister, came and left in the early '90s.
The last sibling, Rehanna, whose four children had come to the United States and Canada, followed in 2002. She was denied a U.S. visa and settled in Canada.
It doesn't matter that Mirza's brothers have become productive members of society -- engineers, business owners and professionals -- or that they have raised four engineers and three physicians. "And a lot more coming up in the same direction," Mirza said. In post-9/11 America, immigrants from some countries are less desirable than others.
That is difficult to accept for a man who has spent a lifetime adhering to one of the fundamental principles of American society, that a man will be rewarded in direct proportion to how hard he works, and offering himself as proof that that principle is not a hollow cliche.
"Right now it's worse for Pakistanis than when I came," he said.
And it's not just noncitizens who feel the tension. Few people have assimilated as successfully as Mirza, but he remembers with mild distaste what happened when he showed up for his regular tennis match not long after the terrorist attacks.
"One fellow asked me: Who let you in? Didn't the guards stop you?" Mirza said. "He was joking, I know. But there's something about it that didn't sit well."
Mirza's daily life has always been a mixture of East and West. He'll play tennis in South Tampa in the morning and then drive 30 minutes from his home in Carrollwood to have a lamb curry lunch at a halal restaurant near Temple Terrace.
"He's not Pakistani, but he treats my people good," Mirza says.
If he's throwing a party at his house, he likes to serve a ham for his guests. A Muslim prayer is written in his dining room, but he is not inclined to recite it before meals.
So in the mid '90s, when his fourth divorce became final -- this one to the mother of his son Erik -- Mirza realized that something about him and the American way of marriage did not mix.
"A friend from the Pakistan air force told me I was not going to be happy marrying in this country and a woman here is not going to be happy marrying a man from over there," Mirza said. "Marriages that work over here, it is a puzzle to me how they are a success."
What he has difficulty understanding is what he calls the "issue of subservience." In his ideal marriage, the husband is the unquestioned authority. If he wants dinner made for some friends coming over on short notice, the only questions are how many plates and what time to have them on the table.
"I don't think of it as subservience, but that is the way it looks to women over here," he said. "You show me more than one president of the country. You show me more than one governor of the state. Same with the household."
So, at 58, he returned to Pakistan to find himself a bride the old-fashioned way: by arrangement.
First, an eligible woman was located. Her name was Talat Nasreen. She was 35 and an obstetrician with a clinic in Lahore. She was petite, with a bright smile and the quiet confidence of someone who had brought hundreds of babies into the world.
Mirza's sister and her husband visited Talat's family. Next, Talat's parents visited Mirza at his sister's house.
"Then," a week before he was due back in the United States, "they agreed for an interview with me and Talat at their home," Mirza said.
"I go in there. One of her brothers, a smart guy, says, 'Mr. Mirza, we have learned that you have been married several times. Can you explain this?' "
" 'Yes,' I said. 'I have been married several times, but I have never found a wife.' They busted out laughing," he said. "They neglected to ask the next question: How many times? Guaranteed if they had known the exact number, this wedding would never have taken place."
Mirza and Talat's first and only date was a cup of hot tea with her mother and father sitting next to them. They were married two days later.
Now Talat prepares fresh nan at every meal. The thin disks puff like pillows on the stove top. "That means somebody is hungry," Mirza said. Freshly ground cumin, coriander and cloves sweeten the heat from the oven.
"I have never felt more at ease and more comfortable with my soul," Mirza said.
As he has gotten older, Mirza has discovered that America is not perfect. He does not support President Bush's stand on Iraq; he thinks the war is an excuse to seize oil. But he has also learned that his country is remarkably well-suited to accommodate the individual needs of its citizens. In his case, that meant he could cherish the philosophy of the self-made man but discard the notion of the equality of the sexes. It didn't make him any less American.
When Talat arrived in the United States, she underwent her own cultural education. She was alarmed and confused, she said, at the way women behaved toward their husbands. "Here women are almost like wild things. Women, they just want to have their fun. They tell their husbands they have to earn money and they have the right to spend it," she said.
Talat, 43, has no interest in redefining the roles in her marriage, but she yearns for a chance to practice medicine again. When she first proposed the idea of taking classes toward her certification, Mirza said no.
"I don't need a doctor," he said. "I need a wife. I don't need her to be married to the hospital."
People such as John Guyton have gently lobbied him to relax his stand.
"My friends made me feel ashamed of my decision," he said. "Finally, I agreed to let her do it."
Forty-five years after he first came here, Tasneem Mohammed Mirza is still becoming an American.
Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.