The sad story of Joshua E. Green, the last Jew in Jamshed Quarters. A thread.

Ilyas Ahmed Ali was an Urdu teacher by day and small grocery shop owner by afternoon. It was the night time though when he came into his element. A direct descendant of Khwaja Mir Dard, he had a love for Urdu poetry and spent many evenings writing for the Urdu literary...

...journal known as "Subras". He didn't fancy himself as much of a poet but wrote a number of ghazals with the pen name "Sadbarg" which translates roughly to hundred-petalled, a mythical flower referenced often in Persian poetry.

He was known to regale visitors with snippets..

..of his poetry over a cup of tea or a paan. Loved by friends and family, respected deeply by members of the community, he lived and died in obscurity like hundreds of thousands have and continue to do every day in Karachi.

"Chacha Sadbarg", genial fellow though he was...

...is not the protagonist of this story.

Sadbarg had four children. Anees, Dabeer, Ismat and Josh. All named after literary giants from Urdu history. Anees, and the daughter, Ismat, tragically died young in a bus accident returning from a visit to their aunt in Hyderabad.

Dabeer and Josh, coincidentally the ones with more unusual first names, survived well into adulthood. Dabeer, always the most precocious of the family, did his master's in stats from KU and somehow managed to get a scholarship to McMaster University where he got a second...

Masters degree in mathematics. He enjoyed a respectable, if short, career as a teacher at a prestigious private school in New England before retiring early after making a small fortune trading on tech stocks in his idle time. I do not know where he is now or what he does.

Josh is the interesting one though. Josh got a rough hand early in life. He started school in the summer after his siblings died. His mother had semi-retired from family life and sought solace for her loss in spirituality and religiosity. His father was too busy...

... managing the finances and the household to give much attention to the young child and Dabeer, though more mature at 11, was obviously too young to be much of a stabilizing influence.

Josh developed a sense of resentment towards his father -

- a feeling which only grew worse when his name was entered in the school register as "Josh Sadberg" by an administrator who didn't realize the Sadbarg in Chacha Sadbarg's name was a penname. The misspelling only added insult to injury as time passed. But the name stuck.

By all accounts, Josh was an introverted child, prone to tantrums and violence if forced to participate in social activities. Eventually, people around him learned to leave him alone. Below average at most subjects except literature - at which he excelled - it seemed he was...

...headed for a career similar to his father's. He also looked exactly like the man he hated so much, standing shoulder to shoulder with him at 14, with the same fair skin and hooked nose and curly hair.

At that point most people would have described him as a...

...normal teen, if something of a loner. Everybody except Chacha Sadbarg and Dabeer.

Josh was a kleptomaniac.

This was a source of much shame for the family. The family being largely comprised of Chacha Sadbarg and Dabeer (the mother was practically a hermit who lived on her jaayenamaz). In fact the mother was such an absentee figure in Josh's life that he struggled to..

... remember her name when I interviewed him, alternating between Fauzia and Shazia several times.

Chacha Sadbarg was, if not as extreme as his wife, still a devout Muslim with rather typical opinions on what should be done with children who committed sins such as theft.

By the time Josh was in 9th grade he rarely wore white shirts to avoid the little blood stains that would appear every time the wounds from his dad's beatings would reopen.

Dabeer saw this. He realised his brother needed clinical help but a young student of no means himself..

...he was powerless to do anything except stop his father short of killing Josh every time some shiny watch or wallet or fancy calculator that was obviously not his was found in Josh's room.

Dabeer chose to lose himself in his studies instead.

But abandoned as he felt by his mother and brother, Josh was still very much in their hearts. Before Dabeer left for Canada, his mother extracted a promise from him to get Josh over, somehow, anyhow, and get him a new life free from the shadows of his parents..

..and the siblings whose spectres had never left the walls of the three bedroom portion in Jamshed Quarters.

Dabeer did what he could. In 1994, at the age of 17, Josh got a call from his brother telling him he'd arranged for his visa to the USA. He would go and live with his...

Khala and Khaloo in Brooklyn, New York. Neither Josh nor Chacha Sadbarg knew any of this was in the works but Dabeer and Fauzia/Shazia had done the paperwork needed to ensure the childless couple would receive their legally adopted son at JFK.

Josh had a room of his own in Brooklyn. A nice bed with a soft mattress, a cupboard for his clothes, a mirror, a TV and a desk. The first things he put on that desk were his dogeared copy of the complete works of Tennyson, the Kulliyaat e Mir and a hardback...

... version of John Grisham's The Firm which he had stolen from the guy next to him on the plane.

Josh Sadberg spent 16 months in that house in Brooklyn, graduating from high school with decent grades, very quickly developing a Brooklyn accent and learning...

..how to hotwire a car.

He was arrested for petty larceny for the first time in 1996. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail of which he served 3 before he had his sentence reduced to time served on appeal.

Obviously he was no longer welcome..

...at his foster parents' house but he managed to get a job as a super at a small block of flats owned by a man named Aaron Rosenthal. Perhaps Aaron took pity on Josh's situation, perhaps he was fit for the job and perhaps it was the wierdly Jewishesque name -

Josh Sadberg - that did it. We will never know.

The job would have been an unremarkable one in the lives of far more unremarkable people than Josh but for Josh it marked the beginning of an era.

Because in flat 813 lived a young woman called Hannah.

Hannah was 22 when Josh was 20. She was a hostess at a kosher food joint. A devout practicing Jew. Active volunteer at every democratic party event she could make it to. There was perpetually a mention of "planning to go to law school" with her but the specifics were vague.

Josh didn't know any of this. Josh didn't care. Josh only knew that this was the woman he was made to strive for. Josh only knew he would fly to the sun if that's what it would take to win her. Josh was in love.

Josh was arrested for breaking in and entering in January 1997.

The previous couple of months had been a whirlwind. Josh, the introvert, had developed the confidence to introduce himself to Hannah. He'd find excuses to knock on her door to fix a leak or sheepish mention a neighbor was complaining about the loud TV...

..or offer some of the "Pakistani triangle things" (samosas) that Hannah seemed to love.

Hannah thought Josh was a harmless kid with an obvious crush and felt flattered. She took an interest in the case, appearing as a character witness in court as well but to no avail...

..Josh got sentenced to three years in jail. He'd stolen a cutlery set.

Hannah visited him every weekend. She gave up politics, went to night school to get a degree in behavioural psychology and whenever she could, she'd go to Jackson Heights to get Josh's...

.. favourite samosas for him.

Josh was released on parole in 1999. He enrolled in trade school the first day after his release. He didn't do it the same day because he and Hannah had to get married.

Hannah supported him while Josh got certified as a welder. She got him to finally seek some medical help for his kleptomania. Josh met his probation officer every week on time, got a job once he got certified - helped once again by Aaron Rosenthal - and joined a...

...support group for kleptomaniacs. Hannah and Josh lived clean, ate kosher and worshipped the god of Abraham in their own ways until one fateful day in the September of 2001.

*I'm going to have to put a pin in it for now, phone's ringing with birthday messages. More on Josh Sadberg tomorrow*

*ab itni raat gaye shayad hee koi call karay. will continue till sleep claims me for her own*

On September 10, 2001, Hannah Green was shot and killed by two antisemitic white supremacists on her way back from the synagogue in what was later defined by police as a hate crime.

14 hours later the first plane crashed into WTC.

Dabeer got a call from a distraught and hysterical Josh in the early hours of September 11 but couldn't make it to an airport before the flights were grounded.

In the days that followed, Josh buried his wife alone at the Maimonides Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Her mother was in Israel and her brother, an ensign in the US Navy, was on a ship somewhere at sea. Dabeer couldn't make it immediately and came in two weeks after the funeral.

He found Josh sitting in his flat staring at a coffee table...

.. which had a coffee mug with Hannah's lipstick smear still on it and the same dogeared Tennyson and Kuliyaat e Mir that Josh had brought from Karachi.

Josh was holding on to the sides of his armchair so tightly that his knuckles were white.

Josh told me that he doesn't remember much of what happened from the time he got the news of Hannah's killing until many days after. He only knew what Dabeer told him.

And Dabeer told him that he had to pry Josh's fingers lose from the armchair...

Which he'd been holding on to so hard to resist the urge to go out and steal something, anything.

Dabeer stayed for a few days with Josh. He cooked for him, fed him, took him to his doctor, reported the incident to Josh's parole officer and did everything a brother could..

.. under the circumstances. A worthy epitaph, one which many a man can envy - Here Lies Dabeer. He Did What He Could.

But there were things Dabeer couldn't do. Dabeer couldn't stay forever and Dabeer couldn't take a convicted felon back with him to..

... small town Maine where he'd built a reputation for himself as a pillar of society. So after a few days, like everyone who ever entered Josh's life, he left.

Josh was left to deal with tragedy alone again, like he had been when his siblings died...

... in the accident he survived unscathed.

But the world Josh was left in was not the one he'd lived in with Hannah. It wasn't even the same one he'd lived in before Hannah had made it right.

In this new world a practicing Muslim like Josh was a suspect. A practicing Muslim with a criminal records was a pariah.

But Josh had hit the motherlode. Josh was a practicing Muslim with a criminal record known to frequent places where Zionists often gathered...

... their restaurants, their synagogues, their cemeteries...

The cemetery.

Josh also had a Jewish wife who was killed in a hate crime hours before 9/11.

Josh was called in for questioning several times by various agencies in the months that followed 9/11.

Dabeer couldn't travel to Pakistan for Shazia/Fauzia's funeral in January 2002 or for Chacha Sadbarg's funeral in June the same year as he had been placed on..

.. a no-fly list. And Dabeer hadn't ever been one to do more than he felt he could anyway. In September 2002, Dabeer finally made it to Karachi to visit his parents' graves and to sort out their estate.

He found only his father's, in the Sakhi Hasan graveyard in North Nazimabad but nobody could tell him where Shazia/Fauzia was buried. When he went to process the legal formalities of his parents' modest estate he found out that in the days before he passed...

Chacha Sadbarg had transferred the title of the small house in Jamshed Quarters and the grocery shop down the road under a Hiba Bila Aiwaz arrangement to his youngest son, Josh Ahmed Ali Sadberg.

For Dabeer, he left only a letter that was given to him by a neighbor.

What was written in that letter, we will never know. Whether it was an apology for not leaving him anything or a trademark Ilyas Sadbarg ghazal or a last request to do right by his brother one more time. Only Dabeer can tell us. And I don't know where Dabeer is.

The neighbor who had been entrusted with the letter told me only that the envelope was heavy, as if it had a letter and several other folded documents and that when Dabeer got it, he flew back the next day, never to return.

Josh Sadberg was formally arrested by the NYPD on November 7, 2002 in connection with the murder of Hannah Green.

For reasons unclear, Dabeer didn't attend the trial.

Josh was devastated. Ensign Saul Green of the US Navy, brother of the deceased, testified that his sister had often shared her fears about Josh's "extremist" religious beliefs. Aaron Rosenthal testified that he'd helped out Josh on Hannah's request against his better judgement.

Josh had a criminal record, a short temper and professed to have beliefs that were in conflict with American sensibilities.

Josh would have, in all likelihood, been found guilty of murder if the case had proceeded to its conclusion.

One day before the defence was to present its case Josh had a stroke of luck. His lawyer, a court appointed public defender, told him the state was dropping all charges against him. Apparently the two white supremacists had been caught in an unrelated drug bust...

.. and linked to the murder weapon.

Josh walked out of the courtroom a free man. He went first to the Maimonides Cemetery to see Hannah and then to the airport. He had to see Dabeer.

Mrs Dabeer, whose name I don't know, met Josh for the first time in Maine. She met him alone. Dabeer didn't want to meet Josh. For the first time, Josh found out about his parents' passing. In the space of 48 hours Josh was devastated again.

There is a gap in Josh's narrative here that spans almost 7 years. The only thing I could find out was that he seemed to have rebuilt some sort of contact with Rosa Green, Hannah's mother.

She passed away in New Jersey in 2009. Among her pallbearers was one Joshua Elias (Ilyas?) Green, her son in law. If the website for the Maimonides Cemetery can be trusted, she's buried next to her daughter.

Josh seems to have legally changed his name in 2006.

Why he chose to adopt his wife's maiden name is easy to understand. The Elias bit was a mystery to me until my last discussion with him. When he formally converted to the Jewish faith is not something he touches upon.

He showed up unexpectedly in Karachi in 2011.

He's never left.

He's quite young for an Alzheimer's patient but his hard life probably has something to do with it.

He lives in the same house in Jamshed Quarters and visits the same paan shop his father used to. The 6"x6" nameplate by the gate..

.. reads جوش الیاس گرین.

But the neighborhood kids call him Chacha Josh.

Josh Sadberg didn't attend his father's funeral. He wasn't even in the same city for nearly a decade after his death. But he buried Sadbarg/Sadberg.

Now only Ilyas Ahmed Ali lives on, as a fading footnote in the life of an ailing Joshua Elias Green, the last Jew in Jamshed Quarters.

**the end**

When I first pitched this story as a 13 part serial to someone I can't name as they're still active in the industry, I was told it will never work because a) the story is shit, b) subhani bayunus is too old to play Josh and he couldn't ever do a Brooklyn accent and c)...

...no way in hell will Rachel Weisz ever play Hannah. (Ok I admit I'm not a good casting director)

So I thought BC kyun na aap logon ko suna ker khwar keroon.