A Place for Us

In the first flashback, Layla is 26, her two girls are very young, and Rafiq is about to leave on a business trip. Layla is anxious about him leaving, and she is also nervous that she may be pregnant with their third child. The second string of memories is interconnected, occurring when Hadia is 13. We learn that Seema Aunty is the mother of Abbas and Amira, and that Hadia has a crush on Abbas—who is good friends with Amar. We also discover that Amar and Amira have maintained their philosophical conversations, leaving each other notes. The last in the string of memories involves Hadia and Huda putting up with Amar pestering their father for an expensive pair of tennis shoes; Rafiq, fed up, agrees to get the shoes for Amar if he gets a perfect score on his spelling test. Amar stays home sick the day of the test, has Hadia help him study, and then ends up cheating anyway.

In the first flashback, Layla readies food for her family to break the Ramadan fast post-sundown; Hadia is 14, Huda is 13, and Amar is 10. Layla is uncertain as to why Amar insists he wants to try to keep the fast even though he is too young; she suspects it may have something to do with Abbas declaring that he plans to do so. In the second flashback, Hadia prepares for her ninth birthday party, at which she must decide whether she intends to wear a hijab like many other girls choose to do at this age. An interaction alone with Abbas, who tells her she looks like the sun in her birthday dress, seems to influence her decision to wish to be virtuous and wear it. In the third flashback, Amar and Hadia are devastated by the news that Abbas has been killed in a car accident. They go to the Ali household to attend the funeral and pay their respects. Amar comforts Amira with kind words about her brother.

In the first flashback, Layla’s father in Hyderabad, India, has a heart attack, and she needs to go home to see him. At this stage, Amar is in seventh grade. On her first flight, Layla encounters Amar’s third-grade teacher and remembers how this teacher saw potential in Amar as a creative writer. He was one of the few teachers her son ever liked. In the second, Hadia has an argument with her father because he won’t let her attend her friend Dani’s Sweet 16 birthday party. She sneaks out into the driveway to cry, sulk, and contemplate running off to the party. Spotting her outside through an upstairs window, Amar comes out and chats with her, which seems to comfort her as they watch planes in the night sky together. In the third flashback, Amar is 18 years old and has just been given the good news by his high school guidance counselor that he won’t have trouble graduating as long as he applies himself. Abbas has been dead for many months, but Amar keenly feels his absence. Amar tells Amira the news before he tells anyone else; she is proud of him.

The flashbacks in this section all take place during summer 2001, in the months leading up to and the several days just following the 9/11 attacks. Amar and Amira have been secretly meeting each other in the deserted local library and similar places where they won’t be caught alone together. Every time Amira considers an arranged engagement proposal with her parents, she refuses it, and she reports each refusal to Amar. Amar is determined to propose to her properly once he has earned a college degree and made something of himself. Meanwhile, even as Hadia learns she has gotten into a medical program, she continues to have understated, longing-filled interactions with Abbas. Days after September 11, Amar is accosted by several boys in the school locker room, called a terrorist, and beaten up. The effects on his family are terrible; Amar’s sisters are upset when their father asks them and their mother not to wear their hijabs, and the children worry for him in kind because his beard makes him resemble the terrorists.

In the first flashback, Amar and his sisters visit an ice cream shop near school while they wait for their uncle to pick them up. They learn that their parents cannot come pick them up because Nana, their maternal grandmother, has died, and Rafiq stays at home to comfort Layla. Subsequent flashbacks interspersed with this scene show Layla telling Amar that she had a fourth baby, a stillborn boy, after him—and that his sisters do not know, and that she had not told Rafiq for months thereafter to avoid the evil eye/bad fortune (nazar).

Finally, the remaining flashback concerns the immediate effects of Abbas’s death on Hadia—how she went into mourning by refusing to eat or drink for several days before his funeral, and how she learned that only one young man involved in the crash had survived. This section ends with a happier memory between Hadia and Abbas, the two of them fondly watching Amar impatiently drink his lassi and crush the plastic cup afterward.

In the first flashback, Layla watches her children—10, nine, and five—read and play together in the local library while she asks the librarian for a book on children that might help her determine why Amar has so many more emotional difficulties than his sisters. The next flashback documents Amar’s last meeting with Amira, in which Amira tells him that her mother knows about their meetings. She breaks up with him, saying that he’s asking her to choose between her family and him, and that she cannot turn her back on her family.

The remaining memories are Hadia’s. They concern her interactions with her brother while she’s home from school for Muharram to commemorate Imam Hussain’s martyrdom. Her parents ask her to convince Amar to spend more time with them, but he will only speak to Hadia. She discovers he is struggling with depression and alcohol and substance addiction in the wake of losing Amira. Hadia finds pills in his pockets one night; instead of taking them to her parents, she flushes them down the toilet.

This flashback picks up where the previous one left off, with Hadia returning to school after Muharram. She is dining with Tariq, with whom she is now in a relationship, when Rafiq calls, begging her to come home and help Amar, whose addiction issues and absences from home have grown worse. While Hadia is home, the watch Rafiq gave her, which had belonged to his father, goes missing. It is strongly implied that Hadia knows Amar took it and used the proceeds to pay for drugs. Meanwhile, none of Hadia’s efforts to help Amar seem to make a difference, so she advises their father to speak gently with Amar. Tragically, the confrontation devolves into a shouting match in which Amar pushes Rafiq into a picture frame, which shatters. Hadia is the last person Amar speaks with before he leaves home; he tells her it is impossible for him to stay, that he makes life too hard for their parents. She makes him promise that he will contact her if he ever needs help.

The flashback in this section backs up slightly to show how Layla discovers Amar’s correspondence with Amira. Having discovered the box of letters and photographs from Amira that Amar keeps in his room, Layla tells Rafiq and then goes to Seema with the evidence. She tells herself that it is because she believes Amar cannot afford the distraction of a relationship while attending community college, but she also admits to feeling satisfaction at wounding Seema for making her feel inferior for so many years. Seema is shocked but sorrowful and agrees to speak with Amira about ending her relationship with Amar.

Meanwhile, Layla and Rafiq continue to have hard conversations about their son’s difficulties. The section ends with Layla’s happiest memory of her children’s young lives, a Sunday picnic that the whole family took near the river. This also happens to be one of Amar and Amira’s secret meeting places; Amar even tells Amira that he chose the spot because he has an especially happy childhood memory of it.