It was in my eighth year of living in America that I began to call myself an immigrant. This had nothing to do with my visa status, which remained as tentative as ever, but something to do with time. Eight years was “my entire adult life” as I would emphasize to my friends and therapist, and that time, I explained, had molded me. I called myself a writer the same way I called myself an immigrant. All this self-anointing sounded theatrical, aspirational. “Immigrant” still conjured crumpled dollar bills slipping out of seat-worn trousers, plates of unseasoned mush, and homesick winter nights eased only by flashes of incredible luck, the unaccountable kindness of strangers, and by the promise of money and sex, or art and sex, or of having sex and fathering a future president of the United States.

Meanwhile: home itself flickered like that picture of a white country house stuck inside the autorefractor during an eye exam, forgotten, then remembered, fixed, then fuzzy, fuzzier, now suddenly clear. Over the course of sixteen biannual visits, Pakistan had blurred into a series of cousins’ weddings, periodic voyages to mountain towns and sprawling bazaars where my mother haggled over exquisite handicrafts on my behalf, a series of humanitarian and environmental crises, cyclical gossip about art and politics overheard in Lahore’s newest late-night cafe, the flesh of certain fruits I shuddered to name in my stories, and the recurrent question of loss. What I had misplaced in those eight years, how Pakistan had become a question to answer or a puzzle to solve, all that remained uncertain, but sometime along the way, I suspected I had suffered a loss of vision and was in dire need of prescription.

Once I became an immigrant + writer, I started to act like one—I could no longer tell when I was being ironic about it. I was tormented by who I was writing for, how ethical it was to write about Pakistan from such distance, how to bridge the gap between language and land, how to speak about America in way that felt authentic and pertinent, how not to slip into the traps of self-tortured and self-orientalizing second-gen writers, how to queer Pakistani boyhood, and so on. To extend my student visa, I ended up in Nashville, Tennessee, to enroll in yet another graduate program. In that first semester, I’d sometimes visit the mosque as a kind of cultural excursion. Other times, I spoke passionately to Uber drivers, many of them immigrants themselves, who asked me where I was from or wondered if I supported 9/11. The pandemic struck and curbed all Uber conversations, halted my travels home—and now that I think about it, those kind of offhand Islamophobic elevator jokes didn’t survive the lockdown. When I finally returned to Lahore, it was in the summer of ’22, nearly three years had passed in Nashville, and some arc of transformation had taken place in my absence. The world had changed—of course it had—I had changed, and Lahore had changed too. What had been long intimated by shopkeepers and distant relatives was now finally obvious to me: I had stayed away so long that I had become a visitor, if not an immigrant, for good.

I met Hasan Raza during this troublesome summer, a week after I got my Lasik surgery. His novel had been published in the US earlier that spring and he had flown a suitcase full of hardbacks to Lahore to organize a “launch” at Last Word Book’s new location in DHA; I think Hasan Raza disliked the idea of his home audience not having access to his book. Like me, he was an immigrant-writer who had spent a decade abroad, except that he had gone to better schools, had once lived in London and New York, and was now bound for San Francisco for a glamorous writing fellowship. His book was a novel-in-stories set in the year 2044, when the planet has been made largely unlivable due to the climate disaster and a cure for mortality has been discovered. I found his book witty, each story set in a different part of the world to offer multiple perspectives, some optimistic, some bleak. I’d later found out that based on this book and other successes, Hasan Raza was able to apply for a green card. In the story he read at the launch, a couple goes through a divorce because the wife, who has been suffering from cancer wants to opt in for the immortality treatment, and the husband is done taking care of her. The story then shifted to the perspective of their 19-year-old cat.

From the way he talked, from the way he milled about, and simply from how tall he was, Hasan Raza seemed to have the confidence conferred by wealth, good looks, a place in society, and a practice of frequently getting laid. That is, it appeared to me he had realized the immigrant dream of art, money, and sex. But before I could turn him into a symbol, I approached him and introduced myself. To my chagrin, I found him to be a perfectly warm human as well. When I told him where I was living, he said that in August he had a book event planned in what he referred to as my city. In Pakistani fashion, I insisted he stay with me when he visited Nashville, and without much back and forth, he accepted. We exchanged numbers. On the Uber motorbike back to my parent’s house, I shielded my face behind the driver’s back, smelled his sweat as hot air slapped my face. The Lasik had desiccated my corneas. On Canal Road, tormented by construction, pale dust of Lahore rose and blustered past rows of trees. Boys swam in the canal. A young family had stopped to buy sugarcane juice that they now slurped in the middle of traffic out of plastic bags. Overhead, crows and kites circled in a white evening sky, waiting to be fed scraps of meat. My city, I thought. My city. My city. At a traffic light, unable to withstand the dryness in my eyes, I rubbed them violently, despite the doctor’s warning. Eddies of color rippled under my eyelids, and I remembered how Hasan Raza had leaned over me and wavered a little while typing his name into my phone.

A few weeks later, he appeared at my garden apartment in Nashville, swaying as he brandished a twelve-pack of a West Coast Hazy. It was past midnight. I offset my awkwardness around him by pushing a belligerent version of hospitality common to our people. As I went about this performance—fetching house slippers and forcing them on his feet, reheating chicken karahi and doling a generous portion onto his plate, insisting he squeeze the lemon wedges I was slicing for him—Hasan Raza resisted my advances, then conceded to my whims with much gratitude, all in the usual manner of a Pakistani guest, though I began to sense a subtle thread of sarcasm in his exaggerated responses. Instead of feeling sensitive, I leaned into this irony until it became a shared joke, an immigrant’s joke, perhaps, or a parental pantomime. Finally, when I offered him the only clean towel I had and urged him to take a shower, he said in Urdu, “Don’t tell me that you’ve conformed to such American rituals. In my house all my brothers shared one towel. We even shared the same underwear drawer!”

After that we proceeded in the American way of socializing: we settled down on the couch, put on the usual playlist of ghazals and Nineties pop songs, and proceeded to get drunk. That got rid of the awkwardness for good, until two hours later, once we had exhausted discussing books we loved and hated and had moved on to charting our immigrant writing journeys, I felt the gulf of intimacy widen between us and I offhandedly admitted to Hasan Raza that he looked rather handsome as he lay stretched across my sofa with his feet brushing my thigh. His face, so unguarded while he recounted his star-crossed romance with an Indian woman named Priya, broke into a smile. I shrugged and changed the subject by talking about the floods that were ravaging Pakistan, and then called a time-out by going out for a cigarette. But Hasan Raza slinked out to the backyard behind me and asked for a smoke. His tall body crumpled as it leaned toward me, and I lit the cigarette in his mouth. He had a coughing fit and confessed what I had already suspected, that Hasan Raza was the only male immigrant writer in America who didn’t smoke cigarettes. He laughed when I cracked this joke and was beset by another coughing attack.

“I have asthma, you asshole.” This was said in American English.

We returned to my apartment. Hasan Raza rifled through his suitcase to find his nebulizer. I stood and smelled the stucco rooms of my Nashville life exuding the stench of fried onion, fenugreek, and cumin. No matter how many glorious meals I made and served in those eleven years, the small apartments and dorm rooms of America always found a way to put me in my place.

“Let’s go to sleep,” I said. “You must be tired.”

“Thanks for having me, friend,” Hasan Raza said, still in English, though it felt like a translation. I told him to take my bed while I padded the couch with a blanket. Returning to our earlier act of Pakistani host and guest, he suggested we share the bed—it wasn’t unusual among Pakistani friends to do so—but now it was me who refused the cultural rigamarole. I had reached some limit, or the warm feeling of intimacy had reached its limit, and I feared I might bungle things if I wasn’t careful. I turned off the lights.

The couch groaned as I conformed to its shape. At one point in the night, waking in pain and still drunk, I thought I heard a vast river rushing through the trees.

• • •

When I woke up again, it was late in the morning. The rain had stopped and the sound of running water came from inside my shower. I could hear Hasan Raza singing. The towel I’d offered him the previous night lay untouched on the dining table, next to dirty plates of karahi and the cans of beer I had crushed and piled up while chatting. I had planned to make eggs but found a text from Hasan Raza insisting he would treat us to brunch, and I was too hungover and broke to refuse. Willing myself to escape the painful couch, I kept scrolling on my phone. I checked news of the flood, felt that pang of relief + guilt for being away from the troubles—then a returning wave of regret for having missed out on some call to duty or a grand narrative. Lahore was still in the clear, though, so I ignored my mother’s messages asking me to call her. Before the shower turned off, I got up, took the dirty plates to the kitchen sink, then opened the tap on them. My temples throbbed. Suspending my face over the rinsed plates, I sluiced my eyes with cold water, let it stream down my beard.

The line at the Pomeranian Café stretched around the block. Hasan Raza was nearly a foot taller than I was and kept looking over the crowd to predict its movement. He had been animated on the walk over, bringing my attention to scenes and images of Nashville—your city, as he kept calling it. Nothing escaped his interest: trees, treehouses, varieties of people, their dogs, overheard conversation, garden sculptures, styles of windows and gables, models of cars, shop signs. When he asked contextual questions about these subjects, he expected an encyclopedic knowledge furnished with personal anecdotes that connected me to all of it, it being my neighborhood. This was his way, he claimed, of getting to know me in-person. Maybe this was how some writers connected, by talking about the birds and factoids and what not. I struggled to answer him, weighed down by his reckless pronouns and my hangover.

Perhaps Hasan Raza had grasped my debilitated condition once we reached the Pomeranian Café, because he stopped asking questions. He entered a mode of pure monologue. For his own amusement, or for my entertainment—I couldn’t tell—he began a bilingual report in an imitation of a cricket commentator. In front of us was a pair of proud Vietnam vets. Ahead of them, two blond boys in Tennessee Titans T-shirts tugged at their mother’s hands. A group of women in wrinkled leather boots and matching blowouts arrived on the scene and stood behind us. Hasan Raza leered at them, and switching to a Punjabi-inflected Urdu, began to speak about them in a pimply teenaged voice, “Dude, which chick do you think is the sexiest?” I shut it down by asking him what meds he was on—obviously the women could tell he was talking about them.

Still, I began to feel nostalgic for those horrible high school years as we kept waiting in line, and maybe Hasan Raza knew that. In his repertoire of voices, in the dialect of parody, he was making a claim for a shared history of boyhood. I wondered if he would ever make that claim earnestly. Did he know that for me, for someone who will not marry a woman, who could no longer imagine negotiating an honest life “back there,” Lahore sometimes felt like little more than the slender noose of boyhood years?

We made it inside the restaurant. The host wore fluffy dog ears.

“You can sit anywhere you like, then once you’re ready, order up front.”

Hasan Raza bantered with her. The walls of the café were covered in orange subway tiles and vintage aperitif posters altered to feature clownish Pomeranians. Hasan Raza declared the indoors too loud. We went out to the backyard. One side was overtaken by a large group of bachelorettes wearing matching pink sundresses and party sunglasses. Their mimosas were neon orange. Among the white women was a light-skin black guy in a pink suit, and a much darker South Asian girl, maybe a Sri Lankan or South Indian. I saw Hasan Raza glance at them.

Signaling me to follow him, he approached the group, smiled, and asked them if we could sidle into the corner of the patio to occupy the only available seating: a dirty bistro table in the full glare of the afternoon. The bachelorettes were cheerful and compliant, and Hasan Raza congratulated the bride-to-be. He cleared the plates crusting in sunlight and grabbed a used napkin to wipe away the crumbs. He told me to “hold down the fort” while he slipped inside to order.

Again I wondered: Who was this man I had invited to my house? From his exuberance, I sensed he was nervous around me, and this thrilled me secretly, even as I wished to put him at ease. Did this mean that I felt rivalry between us? Did I see him as a conquest? If that was it, I decided I didn’t want to succumb to my horniness. We were immigrant writers from the same city. There could be a different narrative here. I wanted to learn something more important than sex.

The bride was speaking to me. I blinked and said, “Pardon?”

She repeated herself in the slow voice people use with foreigners. “I was wondering if your friend is single?” The South Asian girl in the group shrieked in protest. “My friend thinks he is very cute.”

I looked at her. The group was still laughing. “Yes,” I said. “He just had a breakup.”

A round of commiserating sighs, then another round of laughter when someone said, “That’s ideal.”

“Is your friend,” the bride asked, “is he gay?”

“This is the South, goddamnit,” the guy in the group, who I could tell was gay, shouted in an exaggerated hillbilly sort of accent. “We’re all huntin’ dogs ‘round here.”

“There are gay people in Nashville,” I said, despite myself. I guess I didn’t find this parody so nostalgic or moving. The group ignored me and started talking about how expensive South Brooklyn had gotten now that the city had rebounded from the pandemic. I looked at my phone, wondering what Hasan Raza would do. Irked at myself, I wondered, why is he my prism?

“We should all buy a house in Nashville,” someone said. “It’s cute here.”

“These days there are little tricks for so many things,” said a voice.

“Ladies! No politics at brunch,” the bride said, stressing each word. Laughter.

“I’m talking about makeup for God’s sake!” More laughter. Tinkling glass.

I looked at the group and caught eyes with the South Asian girl. “Do you want me to introduce my friend to you?” She made a face and turned away abruptly.

Why had I spoken? How desperately I wished Hasan Raza was here right now, so I wouldn’t feel like a creep glomming onto a group of women and their gay friend. Somehow, I believed Hasan Raza was immune to the vapidity of life. He knew how to handle himself around people even if he also leered at them. Meanwhile, people, real people, tired me. Only in fiction did they make sense. Unlike Hasan Raza, who filtered everything through his outsized voice, in life as well as in his writing, I wanted fiction to negate my existence and assert its own reality. For this I created characters that felt more real than myself, who reeked of vitality and dominated the narrative, who compelled and performed and took charge, who were acute in their observations but never bogged down by their intelligence, even if they made flawed decisions. Characters like Hasan Raza himself, or the version of him I was writing in my head. Perhaps this was why I was attracted to him, and then at times repelled, as I realized how any attempt to write him would be motivated by my desire to use him to write of my own incapacities, even my injuries.

Hasan Raza put the tray on the table: a carafe of mimosa, a plate of fat pancakes, and a pitcher of maple syrup. The pancakes were stamped with the face of a cartoonish dog.

Hasan had said, “Mimosas for le petit prince?” When I made a face, “You don’t believe in the hair of the dog?”

“Sometimes we sound so American. I can’t tell if we picked it up from being here, or from watching TV and reading books all our lives. Not that Le Petit Prince is American.”

Hasan Raza laughed. His forehead was constellated with five tiny zits and his nostrils were exciting. Dry-eyed in sunlight, I could even say Hasan Raza wasn’t so much good-looking as he was large and well-proportioned in a way that conjured the word “man.” I grabbed a fork and examined its tine. A concession: he had beautiful eyes.

“I want to go to Jumma,” Hasan Raza said after a while. “It’s Friday. Is there a mosque close by?”

“I wouldn’t have figured out from last night that you were the praying kind?”

“I am not usually. I am the kind who claims to be an atheist but then starts praying when exams come around.”

“You don’t have exams anymore.”

“Exams don’t end just because you’ve finished school,” he said. “I saw a bunch of guys dressed up for prayers inside the café and thought it might calm my nerves.”

He was nervous, or at least he was pretending to be nervous, about the book event later that night. He waved off my pep talk. “I won’t take it personally if the reading is a bust. This has nothing to do with the book. No one has read the book yet so there are no fans who want to see me read from it. Plus, people have Friday night plans and I know no one in this city who I can emotionally blackmail into coming. Even in San Francisco. If you’re a stranger to the city, you’re lucky to get three or four attendees.”

I tried to take us back to our earlier nonchalance. I said, “I didn’t think you were the kind that gets nervous.”

“Well, you don’t really know me, do you?” He drained his mimosa and poured himself some more. The carafe was nearly empty.

The bachelorettes suddenly rose and realized with great delight that they were all drunk. Hasan Raza gave me a conciliatory smile and turned around for a look. The women declared their love for the bride, who in turn declared her love for all of them. Their male friend gathered them in for a selfie behind a mural of a Pomeranian resembling Dolly Parton.

“They were asking about you,” I told Hasan Raza in Urdu. “I think they wanted me to set you up with one of them.”

“I bet you would suck as a matchmaker,” he said. But he immediately got up and approached the guy taking the selfie, and I saw his face change, become charming, acquiescent and a little less handsome for it, as he asked if they’d like him to take a picture for them. I could imagine him as a child, put on a stage by his parents to perform for guests. No wonder an unsuccessful reading was unbearable to him.

When he returned, I said, “Any luck?”

“Oh, the women are all taken,” he sighed. “But the guy is into you. That’s why they were talking to you. You didn’t figure that out?”

I wanted nothing to do with them. I told Hasan Raza, “I think I’ll go to the mosque with you. But we’ll need to go home to change right now. I’m in shorts and prayers start in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks, man,” Hasan Raza said. “I will call the Uber right now.” We split the rest of the mimosa, swallowed the last of the pancake.

Standing up, I could feel the booze swirling inside me, and I went inside to pee, telling him I’d meet him out front. I think I giggled as I said it. It was easy to give in to him. There was some vivacity in Hasan Raza that had pulled out my own. Alone I could not have created it no matter how much I drank. Here we were, two immigrant writers from Lahore, holding court among the Pomeranians of Nashville, becoming a unit. I could never capture this in scene because to write anything was to give it importance. In life, we forget almost all of what we say. Whatever odd detail announces itself in memory, whatever feeling remains after these Jumma prayers, won’t matter. It was in the moment that I could feel us becoming closer. My competitiveness, my insecurities and shame were all still present, but they felt transformed into a vehicle for goodness, by which I mean, in real time our friendship was deepening. Such moments I gather in life and not in art. I felt ravished, fused with another body through fleeting conversation. For this feeling alone, for its ephemerality, I felt happy to be alive.

• • •

Outside the café, I found Hasan Raza still chatting with the bachelorettes, who were waiting for their own Uber, to take them to the honky-tonks. Hasan Raza was telling them about neighborhoods he’d lived in in New York, then invited them to his reading. The South Asian woman—Hasan Raza had learnt that her name was Gundeep—took out her phone and asked him to put in his number. Was that leaning, swaying, contact-sharing, all part of his bit? When he saw me staring from the porch, he gave me a wink and jerked his chin in the direction of the man in the pink suit. I shook my head to indicate I wanted no part of the action, stood awkwardly scrolling through Instagram. More fundraisers for the flood, more videos of people stranded on rooftops. Hasan Raza was speaking to Gundeep in atrocious Punjabi and she was laughing. I put in my earphones and rewatched a video that had gone viral in Pakistan the previous week. Midway through, the Uber came for the bachelorettes and Hasan Raza waved them goodbye. I refused to take out my earphones until our ride had arrived.

In the video, five men stand on a rock in the middle of the river waiting for rescue. The water keeps rising, the rock keeps shrinking. One by one, then men slip and drown. All around the men are mountains—the video was recorded in the north somewhere, in those valleys of cutting, glacial rapids, stunning beauty, and impoverished villages. A crowd was gathered watching the scene, but the camera doesn’t show them; it is steadfast in witnessing the water consume the men on the rock. But you can hear the invisible onlookers. They keep repeating Allah-hu-Akbar, Allah-hu-Akbar—as a concession of defeat in the face of God’s greatness, or perhaps a plea for His salvation. Some of the incanting men—all the voices belonged to men—must themselves have attempted rescue, then given up. From the very start of the video, it’s clear there’s no hope of survival for the stranded five. But I keep watching them. Another man is swept away by the current. Before they die, the three remaining men begin to pray on the rock. 

When our Uber finally arrived, Hasan Raza told me we had no time to head home.

“I’ll find you one of those sarong-type things to cover your legs. We’ll be standing in the back anyway.”

“Just make sure you invite a bunch of Muslims to come to your reading. I am sure many of them don’t have Friday night plans.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, no one is taking your atheist card away if you pray with me.”

I told him I used to go to the mosque when I first got to the city, hoping I might make a friend there.

“What happened?”

“The pandemic, I guess.”

“Do you think there’s still time,” Hasan Raza said five minutes later, checking the route on the Uber app. I nodded. We jumped out of the car on a residential street a block away from the mosque to bypass the traffic on foot. The parking lot was full, and men were rushing out of their cars. In America’s mosques, you remember how diverse the body of Muslims is and all those ideas about the ummah told in the homogenous classrooms of Lahore become true. It had shocked me when I discovered that the pair of giant blond cops that usually stood guard by the mosque, smoking cigarettes and diverting traffic during Friday prayers, were Kurdish Muslims. Hasan Raza and I passed them in silence and crossed the threshold.

Standing in the foyer among a battalion of shoes, we peered through the double doors that led to the prayer hall. The muezzin had recited the iqamat and the men began lining up, squeezing together so no gaps were left between the rows. Shoulder touching shoulder, foot touching foot.

In unison, Hasan Raza and I took off our shoes. All need for conversation had ended. Hasan Raza left his shoes in the pile on the floor. I held mine in one hand, sole to sole, and placed them in an empty pigeonhole. We headed to a small side-room where taps lined a deep trough. Sitting next to each other on terrazzo stools, we opened the faucets. Thrice we washed our hands. Thrice we scooped water in our mouths and spat it into the trough. Thrice we raised water into our noses. Thrice we splashed our faces and ran hands through our beards. Thrice we washed our arms up to the elbow. I wasn’t looking at him, but I felt the movement of our bodies enter the dance of ritual in union: both of us, boys, bringing palms up and running them over our hair, down our nape, then turning our hands over to rub them down our necks.

“Allah-hu-Akbar” came the voice of the imam from the prayer hall, and I saw in my mind the men in the prayer hall, bring up their arms—brushing against each neighbor’s arm—so that their thumbs touched their earlobes and fingers fanned out in an elephantine gesture. Thrice, Hasan Raza and I washed our feet in the trough. Meanwhile the men, I knew, had brought down their arms. Some had left them hanging by their sides, some had folded them over their navels in slight variations, as taught to them by their parents and their sect.

I did not imagine the women who must have made the same gestures in their screened-off section at the back of the hall. But when Hasan Raza and I entered the prayer hall, we passed the divider, and our gaze briefly caught the colorful abayas behind it. We found our places among the men—there was no time to look for a sarong. By then the imam had almost finished reciting the Fatihah. I translated in my head: Guide us along the right path/ the path of those you have blessed. We, too, touched our ears, belatedly, and joined the prayer. Not of those who are astray.

Some men, like Hasan Raza, who had been taught to do it that way, chanted: Ameen! Others, like me, remained quiet.

When the imam said, Allah-hu-Akbar, we bent down and touched our knees. I pulled down the hem of my shorts to cover them.

He said, Allah-hu-Akbar, and we stood up erect.

Allah-hu-Akbar, and this time we fell prostrate, our foreheads and noses pressed against the floor. I could hear Hasan Raza thrice whispering into the rug.

I preferred to say the words in my head. I knew the meaning of these repeated words from school, that prayer can best be understood this way, that for centuries we had gone astray as Muslims because we lacked critical knowledge of our text. Our school dedicated half an hour each day to teach us Quranic Arabic. When I was still devout but beginning to lose faith, feeling guilty for speeding through prayer at home, I would try to focus on the meaning of words, translating them painstakingly, as if that would unlock a deeper connection. Sometimes it did, when words and movement, body and voice, worked in tandem to become something like a conversation with God. The limited space for improvisation in the incessant repetition of the words and symmetry of movement became a theatre of my self-expression, while also honoring the legacy of the prophets and people I came from. To recreate the wilderness of foreign words, to control it by imposing their meaning, to then hope to lose myself in their pleas, I emptied them into that ball of light that I had been told was the body of God.

Now we were on our feet again, our hands tied for the second rakat. After reciting the Fatihah again, the imam read one of those short chapters from the Quran’s end that sound most like poems. From the few phrases I picked up—“ashab-il-fil” and “tayyaran ababil—” and from the rhyming cadence of the sentences, I knew this chapter recounted the story of the elephant (fil) army which came to destroy the Ka’aba but was stoned to pulp by a flock of birds (tayyar). In the Arabic, one of the verses ended with “ababil” which means “flock.” In Urdu, however, “ababil” is the name for “swallows.” All my life, until I read the English translation of the Quran, I believed that the birds who had pelted the elephants were swallows, the contrast between the grandeur of elephant army and the drabness of swallows often highlighted whenever the story was recounted. For thousands of years, Muslims in South Asia have prayed in Arabic without knowing the meaning of the words, changing their pronunciation without even knowing it, and improvising their own poetic meanings of foreign religious rituals. For us imposters, how much value was in the literal meaning of words if they were supplemented by, or even overtaken by, another long-standing tradition of mistranslation?

Mistranslation: Despite knowing better, as the imam recited the chapter of the elephant army, I still imagined the sky darkening with swallows.

It would have been better to remain subsumed in body than in thought. But by now, I was distracted. I had drifted away when the “Allah-hu-Akbar” signalled us to bow down again and touch our knees. I stumbled behind Hasan Raza and caught up with him when the next “Allah-hu-Akbar” brought us upright again. Then we went back to the floor. The feeling of unison had vanished for me. We entered the final part of the prayer and sat on our knees. A silence fell upon the room.

This was the part where after saying the shahada and durood in our minds, we had been encouraged by our school to tack on our personal pleas to Allah. We could even ask Him in Urdu, our instructor had said. God obviously understood not only all languages but also our deepest unvoiced desires. Still, he required us to ask Him, to move Him with our expression of supplication and seeking. Since I lost faith, the rituals and prescribed prayers could still lull me, even if temporarily, to feel connected to a larger body of believers. It was this part, which once had brought me the greatest comfort, the greatest freedom of self-expression and communion, that now unnerved me. What to ask in my words, even when I could imagine that nebula of light so clearly in my mind?

Connection, I thought. I asked God for connection without deceit or shame. Clarity despite mistranslations. Words without self-betrayal.

Traitor, returned the voice in my head. Say it plainly, then. Say: Allah, I want him to like me.