Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

listening with interest to even her most banal observations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own in the manner of most of the men she knew.

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

“Twenty-something unemployed male from Muslim background exhibits rapidly altered pattern of behavior, cuts himself off from old friends, moves under the radar. Also, are we sure that’s an evening shadow rather than an incipient beard? I think we may need to alert the authorities.”

When your white friends make gross characterization or jokes about you

Don’t set yourself apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behavior you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties. Because if you do, you will be treated differently—not because of racism, though that does still exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multiethnic, multireligious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours. And look at all you miss out on because of it.”

Ew!

Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”

You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits.

jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.

Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief;

Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.