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The only men she had left in this world to love and neither of them knew how to be with one another.
we don’t have to see past the fog to know there are stars.
Before, Sara was just a little girl with whom she had the unfortunate fate of sharing a cramped bedroom. One she had to make sure wasn’t listening with her ear pressed to their door when Layla’s friends visited. Now she is the sister Layla whispers to late at night before they fall asleep. The one she goes to with her complaints about her strict teacher or if she wakes from her dreams alarmed.
She wakes as soon as Layla calls her name and is eager to be included, to be regarded by her as a young woman, as a friend.
Bad news is always delivered in a hurry.
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.
What was it about an apology that was so difficult? It always felt like it cost something personal and precious. Only now that she was a mother was she so aware of this: the stubbornness and pride that came with being human, the desire to be loyal and generous that came too, each impulse at odds with the other.
She was always making good stories boring by asking them questions like that after, questions that made the stories feel less like magic and more like lessons.
She might be the bravest person he has ever met, saying what she thinks and feels without fear or hesitation.
Amar describing Amira
“What is it about these tragic accidents, a group of people touch death and God chooses one to come back and tell us about it.”
She is as beautiful in the mirror as she is in real life.
Even Baba doubted her ability to make decisions for herself by stating: you are our responsibility until you are your husband’s. Or: no, you cannot do so unless you are married, and then it is up to your husband to decide with you. Which she knew meant for you.
When God first began to brainstorm the world did He think to make branches a dark brown and flowers either white or soft pink, and only like that in the spring, so that you are always startled by their bloom? Or were God’s decisions scattered and sudden, beautiful by chance?
“One day the joke will not be funny. If you always leave him out, if you always tease him and hurt his feelings, soon you will not know how to be any other way with him, and it will affect his personality. Your relationship. For his whole life, and the rest of yours.
Life will go on normally, and this seems like the most impossible fact of all.
After the sudden passing of Abbas Ali
The last time she saw Abbas she had spoken to him. Each time she returns to the conversation the memory loses some of its certainty. He is already becoming a long time ago.
What she wanted was for someone to know. For her sadness to not go unnoticed anymore.
Hadia thinking about her love for Abbas
Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will. The realization that, in her own small and sustained way, she had loved someone for years that she had only looked at in glimpses, only spoken to in passing, only thought of in secret, only ever touched when they passed a cup of lassi or a stick of gum between them.
Even the word son felt like something shiny and golden to her, like the actual sun that reigned over their days.
Everyone important was a boy.
Sibling rivalry when Hadia feels they love Amar more and she's thinking of the religion how every top idol is male.
She is not sure what to name her feeling, but she knows she does not like it—the way it shrinks her heart. That there could be a limit to the happiness she could feel for Amar.
Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?
How unlucky that one person has the power to determine the shape of another’s life.
But there is nothing he can think to say, and it occurs to him that it is the one who loves less who has the privilege of being able to express their feelings easily and at all.
Maybe what she loved in him was never him, but who she hoped she would inspire him to be.
Amar's own self-consciousness
Amar loved Amira Ali. And she could not help but admire how he had done something about it: he had lifted a camera and focused it on her face, he had written her letters, sat by her in a sunny place. Hadia had loved Abbas Ali and had done nothing; the love story that existed between their families was not, as she had imagined as a girl, between her and Abbas Ali, but a story that now belonged to her brother.
Hadia
“I’m not saying don’t do this. I am only saying don’t go so far that you don’t know how to come back home again.”
😭😭😭😭
“Hadia,” he says softly, in a tone that says she is the one who is failing to understand. “I have never felt at home here.”
It should be a joke, he thinks, but it isn’t—how different it is for you if you stay in line, keep your head down, do as you’re told. It is as though to be loved at all you must be obedient. To be respected you must tame yourself.
How were they to know the moments that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault will it be then?
What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?
But if a decent guy follows an idiot, what does that make him?”
About how important it was for one to choose the right friends, that it was one’s friends who were the truest reflection of the self.
What was the heartache one felt in youth? Nothing but a dream. By the time he was an adult he would hardly remember it. And what was heartache when compared with public humiliation? Heartache was the quick touch of a flame. But for one’s inner life to be gossiped about and judged by the entire community—it was like holding one’s hand above fire until it left a scar.
Layla underestimating how much Amar's heartbreak would shape him
“Every day this continues it is worse for him. Every day that he has hope—it will only make the fall harder.”
💔💔💔
She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.
He thought: if the fires exist and I am to burn, let me burn for my own actions rather than force me to behave another way and be saved by a lie.
after the sting of the words subsided he could see a future in which he forgave his father and maybe his father forgave him. They had been reckless with their words before. Like water they could return to any shape asked of them.
He had never expressed to her that her independent happiness was tied to his.
Listening to this man praise his father, Amar felt as if a balloon were growing in his chest and he was afraid if it popped he would cry. He had been cheated out of knowing the best of his father; his father had reserved his kindness for others.
our sadness might have looked different, but I was affected too.
Amira to Amar
I’d hate her again like I hated her the first time she said I had brought shame to our family, and how that shame was worse than grief because I had chosen to bring it upon them.”
Because you don't choose grief 😭
“Once, Mumma told me you were my ‘open vein.’ You were the wound that, no matter how many years passed by, how much healing had been done, if prodded would open and bleed fresh again.
Amira to Amar
I wanted that peace. And I thought that maybe they would never feel for their husbands the way I felt for you, but theirs wouldn’t be a false life either, just different, and easier in many ways, and that is what Mumma had wanted me to understand.”
Amira to Amar
And I loved her, Mumma. I loved her.”
This broke me.
“Don’t you know—that’s the thing—everyone is not just good. Everyone is trying to be good. And everyone feels this way sometimes, that they are not good, and not good at trying either.”
But maybe her heart would never be satisfied; maybe it was ever-enlarging in its want for more. Because she knew that if she were granted one more moment, then another one was what she would ask for.
Layla missing Amar
And it is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound.
Rafiq to Amar
You were stubborn with your sadness. You would enter it and not leave.
Years later, I wander down a different hospital hallway with a different cause for the heaviness of my heart, and it is as though we live until we become other people entirely, keeping only that same need for hope, for comfort. And how miraculous it is to me that we receive in this world the very things we need from it, how tonight it is another stranger who has stepped forward to play that same part, help me get through this night until morning.
