She knows when her son and his wife are secretly fighting. She knows when her grandchildren are constipated. Thanks to Bibi’s keen ear for even the most minute details, her calls are thorough and uncompromising. If his wife, code-named Habibi, is in the kitchen, and if she isn’t already chatting with one of her many friends, most of whom you know Hajji despises, he will request a cup of tea and ask about his mother’s health, which is never very good, but Hajji’s wife doesn’t tell him this, because his mother, code-named Bibi, is sitting just a few feet away, and though she doesn’t acknowledge her son’s presence, Bibi is always listening.įrom early dawn, when she wakes to pray, until late at night, before she falls into a fitful sleep, Bibi nests in a corner of the living room, on the farthest edge of the second couch, and listens to the television at an incredibly low volume, listens to her son and his wife in the kitchen, to her grandchildren on their phones, to the Quran on an old radio that she smuggled out of Afghanistan forty years ago, to the flushing of the toilets in the house, to the wind in the trees that her son planted near her window, to the gentle burbling of her oxygen tank, and to the constant thrumming of the house, and she reports back all that she hears to her only living brother, in Afghanistan. When Hajji has exhausted himself, he often retires to the living room, where he watches murder mysteries or foreign coverage of conflicts in Islamic countries. He spends hours at a time wandering around his house or his yard, searching for things to repair-rotted planks of wood, missing shingles, burned-out bulbs, broken mowers, shattered windows, unhinged doors-until his old injuries act up, and he is forced to lie down wherever he is working, and if he happens to be in the attic or the basement, or in some other secluded area of the house, away from his wife and his mother and his four children, sometimes he will allow himself to quietly mutter verses from the Quran, invocations to Allah, until his ache seems to ebb and he returns to work. In fact, Hajji hardly leaves home at all. Nonetheless, after a few days, you begin to speculate that the suspect at the heart of your assignment is the father, code-named Hajji, even though you have no reason to believe that he has ever actually completed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

You don’t know why, exactly, you’ve been assigned to this particular family, in this particular home, in West Sacramento, California.

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