Watched: Chapters 13–17

I collapse into a universe of cyber identities, avatars, following strands of conversations.

I’ve changed: I’ve kept my hair trimmed, my beard shaped into the careful line of a neat goatee like the other devout guys do.

Then a slow softening. Like Amma, flicking her wrist, slowly working the little balls of dough into supple paratas.

By four, five o’clock, their eyes are glazed discs. Their heads wobble a little. Everyone listless, limp puddles of waiting.

His eyebrows, bushy, unkempt, are raised.

That will wipe it all away, the shame of Amma squeezing every last drop of detergent from the bottle, or scraping the last of the mutton curry out of the microwave container.

I will be like that guy blowing on his Starbucks coffee, nice scarf cowled around his neck.

I can feel his heat and breathe his father-smell, pungent, angry, familiar.

After Mrs. Khan I stopped off and helped one of the old guys fold up his table and put away his wares.

Just over the concrete edge we can see the slender spires of Manhattan.

He lifts his face to me, eyes shining. My nerves go taut. Has he been watching me?

I take the train to Thirtieth Avenue, zigzagging past the houses with their tiny front gardens and flourishing pots of sunflowers.

Gossip lingers in the evening air: who’s got a bad back, who reneged on a loan and is in trouble.

And then they gather themselves and walk slowly back to the masjid, kurtas fluttering like pennants in the evening’s ruddy light.

And then they gather themselves and walk slowly back to the masjid, kurtas fluttering like pennants in the evening’s ruddy light.

“Maybe,” Abba assents.

Taylor stops in front of an arbor dripping with plump bunches of glistening grapes.

All of us pressed up against each other, working so hard: the remittances wired to family back home, the weekly calls on the phone card, the nylon bags stuffed with clothes and hair dryers and lotions, zippers bursting, dragged across the floor at JFK airport.

“What hair these days? Seriously. We’re supposed to run some youth leadership programs with the mosque this summer. Ishrat thinks you can connect with the kids. You can be a liaison. She’s your female equivalent.”

She’s festooned them with ribbons and small prayer cards and tucked in snacks inside tissue.

She’s thin, looks about fifteen, and is skittish, as if she’s not sure she wants to be here.

Poor Ishrat—she reminds me of my stepmother, with her round face, working so earnestly at everything.

Noor looks dubious. “That’s okay. I’ll just watch.”

All that week, I’m at it with new zeal, fastening myself to a schedule.

Mostly it’s a hodgepodge of feel-good conversations about identity and politics and community service.

Then they settle down and the stories slowly leak out: The people on the bus who stare at your mother because she’s wearing a hijab. The kid who changed his name from Mohammed to Mo.

“Maybe it is. But what is your job? Is it to hunker down and be furious? Or to explain yourself? Every outsider, every immigrant has had to do this.”

I drop a few more provocative comments, but they don’t go anywhere.

A little warmth creeps up my nape.

“Why don’t you go hang with the other kids? Don’t let them monopolize all the good viewers.”

The neighborhood is turning loud and blaring and gaudy.

We bend and kneel. I touch my forehead to the ground. When I sit back on my haunches, I feel as if I’m floating, not fully here.

What do I see and hear? The rustle of feet as we hear the call, move and bend again in unison. Men all around me: some hunched and fervent, others distracted.

I feel a dry exasperation rising up in me.

I remember suddenly how the two of us used to save up coins we’d scoop from our parents’ bureaus and buy plastic water guns.