“I know that,” you said in your matter-of-fact voice, “but they don’t.”
One horse trotted to approach us. You stretched out your hand. I did not ask who “they” were.
“Amar. Those boys you fought, did they say anything about the bad guys?”
“No.”
You pushed your tongue against your cheek. You were lying. We turned to go back. My hands were in my pockets and your hands were in your pockets.
“So will you?” you asked me.
“I can trim it,” I said.
That was one of the first times I thought about it in that way—that there was a “they,” people who assumed something about me, my family. There were enough troubling interactions in the years to come to know that they were there, but back then I thought of it as isolated incident after isolated incident, and not a force that tied each one, brewing with each year that passed. They stared at my wife a little too long in the park and I could not help but wonder if it was because of her hijab, or if there was a darker reason, and so I locked eyes right back, and I nodded, and I did my best to smile, hello I might say to anyone we came across in passing—just in case they felt it—fear, or anger, each emotion feeding the other like a loop. I wanted to dispel even a tiny bit of it. I wanted to say, before the thought even formed: Peace be upon you. I am here. You are here. We are only passing one another in the street. Sometimes, my daughters would look down on me, if, after an upsetting interaction, they insisted we had been wronged, and they would turn on me instead, tell me that I had given in, I had been weak, I had not fought to be respected. But I did fight. I tried to leave every human I have interacted with better than or the same as when I encountered them. I have gone out of my way to apologize to a stranger I might brush against in passing, or have held the door open for a family entering the restaurant after mine. These are small things, I know. Sometimes, even I frustrated myself—why should I always have to put forth this demeanor, why could I not be bumped by the man in the café and not be the one who apologized first and always? Sometimes men bumped me and they said nothing, even as I turned my head to call after them. But on most days it was not like this. It was the way I wanted to move through the world. I had a beard, a modest one. I had my face. I had my name with the hard ending. That was my fight: to continue to do little things for people around me, so no one would find fault in my demeanor and misattribute it to my religion.
* * *
ONE EVENING I returned home from another business trip and parked my car in the driveway. My house, the magnolia tree, the patch of grass and the basketball hoop above the garage door—all of it was familiar to me and yet I felt like a stranger. The key to the front door was in my hand, but I hesitated before announcing my arrival. I had gone away for work trips for so long and so often that I feared my absence was as unnoticed as my presence, or worse. All this work done to provide for a family that could go on effortlessly without me. I walked to the wooden gate at the side of the house. If I stood on tiptoe and felt around the other side, I could unlock the hook and allow myself into the backyard. The green hose was curled in one corner and looked blue in the dark. There were fresh footsteps, and a cigarette butt in the dirt beside it. You had not thought to press it down, or flick it over the fence. By then, you were sixteen, and there was little you cared to do for our sake.
My next trip would not be for months but I wondered if I should request another sooner. I imagined that you were relieved whenever I left, because there would be no one to reprimand you or interrogate you about how your studies were going or to ask the reason for your departure. Whose home are you going to? What for? The wind blew. I shivered. It had rained hours before. The air was still misty. Little drops gathered on the waxy surface of dark leaves, reflecting light. I walked until I reached our plum tree and leaned against it. My home was framed in my view. On the second floor, the light of my bedroom was off, but Huda’s adjacent to it was on, her curtains were partly drawn—lace, she wanted then, a cream lace and pale mint walls, and I had gone to the store wondering how I could have one child that wanted curtains with lace accents, and another child who had punched holes into our walls and tried to cover them with posters, had kicked his lamp so that it was permanently bent and imbalanced, had begun to smoke and did not even have the decency to step away from our premises to do so.
Your mother’s face appeared in the kitchen window, she turned on the tap and began to wash something in the sink. Surely she could not see me. The window she looked out from would only show her own face, the glass a sheet of black. She turned around and then back to the window, a slight smile on her lips. She began talking, her face moving from expression to expression, and I saw it was you behind her. You were wearing that hat of yours I despised, worn backward and askew in a way that frustrated me, how even your dressing evoked attitude and arrogance. You began washing whatever it was that had been in her hands. You were good in that way. You always offered to help her. Even I did not do that then. Layla disappeared and then reappeared in the dining room area, her whole body visible through the sliding glass door, and she walked almost on tiptoe, the base of her ankle a fraction above the tile, and she turned the light above the table as bright as it could go, so that it splayed onto the concrete just outside. I am still in darkness, I thought. So far back that she would have to really be looking, would have to press her face against the glass and block out the world around her with her palms. And even then, she might miss me.
Something shifted in my sight. I glanced up to the second floor and saw Huda’s light had been turned off. So the whole of upstairs was dark and I thought, well, good, they turn the lights off when I am not home, as I tell them to.