I sat in California and listened to the imprecations and thought back to the driver who had got out in the middle of the night to buy me chocolate, the woman turning to the little girl in the airline office, my sad-eyed guide pointing to the graves of his mother; his sister, the Indian nuns, the British officers. Many of them, I suspected, had friends and loved ones of their own in New York (even in the World Trade Center), whom they must be worried about even now. In the streets the children would be playing tag in the dusk...while we sat in our mansions watching versions of their lives onscreen, and wishing destruction on them all.
This passage demonstrates Iyer's point that we can watch the headlines on the television and take them in as facts that have been "fact checked" by editors; however, to actually know the truth of these people is to see them as people and not the terrorist enemy. Iyer develops the characters in "The Karheef" to serve as examples of how the people who we view as the enemy have loved ones who have died, live through emotional human experiences, and do simple nice deeds (i.e. the driver who brings Iyer chocolate). Through each individual encounter, Iyer urges the reader to look past the "enemy" stereotype of the people in Yemen in order to see humanity and culture. Iyer attests to this in his interview when he says that in his account he tried to depict "a rounded and human understanding of Yemen as it exists somewhere deeper than the political sphere and in all that is left out from out headlines."
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