A House Without Windows Read Free

meals. They stayed with an uncle and his family in their three-bedroom apartment until they were able to secure assistance and enough work to rent an apartment of their own. Yusuf and his sisters were enrolled in school; his father and Fazil started working at Kaka Rahim’s pizza shop.
    YUSUF’S ELDEST SISTER, SITARA, FELL IN LOVE JUST AFTER FINISH ING high school. She had met an Afghan boy who lived in the sameapartment building. Flirtatious looks in the dank elevator turned into stolen moments in the humidity of the basement laundry room. Yusuf’s parents warned their daughter to stay away from the boy, who worked part-time as a bank teller and whose parents were of a different ethnicity. Doors were slammed, phone calls were intercepted, and seething looks were exchanged. Predictably, the young lovers grew all the more desperate for each other and embraced on public buses, caring less and less that their parents would learn of their improprieties.
    To stave off rumors, the families agreed to have the two married, and after a modest ceremony, Sitara moved in with him and his family to start her new life just two floors above her parents and siblings in the apartment the boy’s family had occupied for years. Yusuf’s second sister, Sadaf, opted to stay in school and pursue accounting at a city community college. His brother, removed from books for too long, sharpened his English by repeating lines of dialogue from television sitcoms. He rose quickly through the restaurant ranks and became a bartender. Yusuf’s mother enrolled in ESL classes at the local library and began working as a clerk in a department store. Yusuf’s father, grateful to Kaka Rahim for getting them on their feet, decided it would be safest not to mix work and family and driving a taxi, resigning himself to a flightless future. Almost overnight, Yusuf became an adolescent who had mastered the nuances of the English language and the crowded subways. He excelled in school and impressed teachers who urged him to apply for scholarships and pursue college.
    He did well by day but woke in cold sweats at night at least once a week. He simply couldn’t go seven nights without fumbling in the dark to change his panic-soaked shirts and pillowcase without waking his siblings.
    The family lived modestly but comfortably. They had one, then two televisions. Their closets filled with new clothes. They replaced their lost possessions with new ones. Yusuf’s mother burst into tearful laughter when his father came home with a silver tray, almost identicalto the wedding tray they’d left behind. They watched television together, one person always with a ready finger on the remote should the actors and actresses fall into a love scene. Yusuf’s father followed Afghanistan in the newspapers and on the news. They all braced themselves after September eleventh and were shocked that strangers on the street would shout angrily at them in the disaster’s aftermath. Yusuf’s father cheered the U.S. decision to invade Afghanistan though he had no intention or hope of returning there.
    Only fools run into burning buildings, he would joke .
    When Yusuf was a freshman at NYU, news about Afghanistan was everywhere. It was tedious. Afghanistan was suicide attacks, battered women, and corruption. In his second year, Yusuf had enrolled in a course on human rights on a whim, thinking it would be an easy way to bring up his grade point average. By the second lecture, a fire was lit. In a flood of memories, Yusuf was back in Afghanistan. Death tolls. Small boys working as blacksmiths. A promising journalist murdered along with his wife and children. Dehumanizing refugee camps. A young girl sold to pay off a poppy crop debt. Untouchable warlords.
    How could he turn his back on all that?
    Others did not. Others were brave. Others championed the cause of the voiceless.
    Yusuf had lived and breathed the American belief that one person could make a