A House Without Windows Read Free Page A

difference. Flyers in the student union and the optimistic rhetoric of professors swelled in him. He attended his first protest and liked the way it felt to chant with the crowd. He raised his voice. He developed a taste for the fight, the fury it brought out of him. Feeling angry was better than feeling afraid.
    Two semesters passed, and Yusuf realized it had been weeks since he last woke in a cold sweat.
    Yusuf chose law because it was the difference between right and wrong—because the law was the only way to protect the weak and punish the aggressors. He studied for weeks and burned through books of practice LSAT exams until he sat for the test and scored surprisingly well. He filled out a dozen applications but kept his fingers crossed that he would get accepted into a program in New York. With nervous excitement, Yusuf tore open a thick packet from Columbia. It was good news, but his parents shook their heads in disappointment.
    Are you sure you don’t want to be a doctor? Doctors save lives every day, they reminded him.
    I don’t want to save one life at a time, Yusuf declared. There are better ways.
    His parents shrugged their shoulders and hoped for the best. At least he would be a professional, more accomplished than his siblings who had little interest in graduate school. They would have done more to stop him had they known what he would go on to do.
    Yusuf took courses on human rights law and immigration law. He volunteered as an interpreter and sharpened his native Dari. He had professors make phone calls on his behalf to land internships with human rights organizations. He was thankful his family had settled in New York where opportunities abounded. He kept his nose buried in books.
    You’ll be blind before you’re thirty, his mother had lamented. She was proud of her son but worried about him, too. Some weeks it seemed he barely slept at all.
    Yusuf graduated from law school and was hired by the advocacy organization where he’d interned for two years. They’d been impressed by his drive and created a position for him. He wasn’t making as much as his classmates who had gone the corporate route, but it was more than he or anyone in his family had ever made and he was thrilled to have purpose. He worked hard and turned no project away.
    Yusuf did carve out time to socialize, though he felt compelled to tell himself he was networking so he would not feel as though he was wasting time.
    IT STARTED WITH HAPPY HOUR, A CHEERFUL EXCUSE TO DRINK upon exiting an air-conditioned office building. Over time, Yusufacquired a taste for dark lagers. A cold beer in his hands made him feel like he was bonding with his colleagues. He kept this part of his life private from his parents and siblings. Though they’d shared tight living spaces all their lives, he still felt compelled to keep his sins to himself. It was not a matter of deceit, as he saw it, but a show of respect for his parents’ ideals.
    Happy hour was where Yusuf had started dating. It had taken him that many years to feel like the girls around him wouldn’t see him as foreign or inferior. When an Asian girl named Lin leaned across a bar table and rested her hand on his forearm flirtatiously, Yusuf felt his confidence soar. He went out with a few girls but never let anything go further than five or six dates. If he sensed they were interested in more, he would slip away, letting a few phone calls go unanswered or confessing his reluctance to commit to any one person.
    It was immature, he realized, but he had decided, after listening to his parents rant about his older brother’s diverse parade of girlfriends, that he would find someone his parents would adore. He wanted someone who could speak Dari with them, who would raise bilingual children with him, who would understand both American and Afghan culture. It was the practical and respectable thing to do.
    Then he’d met Elena—beautiful and irresistible Elena