Today, at yet another function hosted by a family friend, he walks into the backyard and leans against the rough wall. Young women have found seats at the garden table. One glance informs him: Amira is sitting with them, in the center, dressed in a midnight blue shalwar kameez, sipping Coke from an orange-and-white-striped straw, her hair cut shorter than he recalls. She is one of the few young women who does not wear hijab, does not even pretend to during gatherings. The young women are all laughing, as if trying to get his attention in obvious ways. He sees only her. The girls whisper among themselves and she looks up at him. She blushes. Looks away. He turns to the thin telephone wires cutting across the sky, focuses on the little birds perched on them to avoid looking at her, and puts his headphones on and begins to play a song. His father had been engaged in a conversation with boring Samir Uncle—meaning he would be occupied for a while—but he still looks once to the sliding door to make sure no one is coming. Headphones alone are enough to ignite his father’s anger, an anger that will fester during the party, escalate to a fight in the car, and become a disaster by the time they reach home. He attempts to appear as though he wishes he were anywhere but here. He knows it is a lie. This moment. That one glance. The color that rose to her cheeks, the way it suited her—it is the best thing that has happened to him this week.
When he thinks that his luck at being in her presence unnoticed is sure to run out soon, she stands. The folds of her clothes fall and straighten. She walks toward him. He tries not to look. Birds on a wire, one flapping its wings, rising into the sky. The girls she left, still seated at the table, have stopped giggling to watch her walk; they meet each other’s eyes, some turn to one another to whisper. Others would consider her steps indecent. He thinks her bold. Bold to stand, bold to leave the flock of women, bold to be beside him, at a gathering full of community members, all with a penchant for exaggerated, condemning gossip. Bolder, he thinks, than he could ever be.
He lowers the volume of his song with every step she takes, just in case she speaks when she reaches him. And when she does speak, when she asks a question so simple—what are you listening to?—he realizes that though he may not have known it until that very moment, he has been waiting his whole life for her to walk through the crowd of whisperers and speak to him. Amira with her laugh louder than the others beyond the partition, Amira running in a game of tag in the mosque parking lot, so fast that neither he nor the other children playing could ever catch her.
He removes a single earbud, keeping the other in, an attempt to appear nonchalant. He has been listening to a song he did not think anyone knew, had chosen it because it reminded him of her. He tells her its title. Her face lights up and she tells him that she knows it, her voice quickening. This must be how she is when she is excited, and sure enough she tells him she loves it, with such generosity of expression that it takes him by surprise, that someone could be capable of being moved, in that way, by something so small.
He almost smiles. She asks him if he wants to know her favorite line. At the realization that there could be nothing about her he would not want to know, he suddenly feels shy, a word he has never used to describe himself before. He raises an eyebrow and waits. Unbothered by his reticence, she shares the line. He looks at her then and says, Mine too.
It turns into a game. One question leads to another. Back and forth they try to find things that connect them. They have the same first initial, Amar offers this one—even the fact that his sisters shared the same initial had felt to him, as a child, like an exclusion. Do you like waking up before the rest of the world? Do you wake up in the middle of the night after a bad dream and find that you cannot remember it, but you can taste having had it? When you stand in prayer, with everyone, all in a line, does your mind wander? Do you try to break those thoughts, stop them, but can’t, and everything you’ve ever wanted to think about comes spilling out? Do you feel, then, like you are pretending, like you are the weakest link in the chain of worshipers? When you were little and you caught sight of the moon from the car window, did you feel like it was following you? And what do you see when you stare at the moon? Do you see a face, or Imam Ali’s name in Arabic? Does your father’s voice shake the walls? Would you run away if it weren’t for your siblings? Do you like to catch glimpses into strangers’ living room windows? Wonder what their life is like? Do streetlights make you sad too?
At that she confesses, so unguardedly that he hopes he will remember it, “Sometimes I sit on my bed and focus on the closest streetlight when I don’t want to cry, when the day has been long, when I feel the stillness, that feeling of being awake when no one else is.”
In this new game they do not respond to their responses, so he moves on to the next question. “What is one thing you’re afraid to lose?”
Her mother’s sharp voice from the open sliding door startles them both before Amira can answer. Seema Aunty looks at the two of them and frowns. Amira rushes inside, aware that she has stayed too long. She does not dare turn back to look at him.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, HE stares out his window, at the quiet street and magnolia tree, at the streetlight a few houses down, and tries to picture her looking at one just like it. The moonlight illuminates the white-painted wood that frames his window. With the thin tip of a pushpin he carves out her initial, A, then realizes again that his is the same as he carves another beside it, and he feels as though he is committing his affection to the world, that a decision has just been made.
He hopes that tonight is not a night that she has sat up in her bed and focused on her streetlight, hopes that the look her mother gave them when she saw them talking hasn’t led to trouble. And if she is awake, on the other side of the city, he hopes she can sense that he is awake too. He looks down at the initials, as if for the first time, as if he had not realized what he was doing until it was done, and he takes comfort in how thin the strokes are, how almost indistinguishable, how no one but he would ever notice them there, carved so close together that they appear not like two letters but an M with a line cutting through it, or two mountains with snow that has fallen on a straight line.
2.