The engagement happened more because of God’s will—and Muneer’s mother’s—than his own. On a warm May night, a few months before he was to return to the States, he took his mother to Saeedah’s sister’s wedding. In Aunt Faizah’s courtyard, strands of lights were strung from the top of a pole to the edges of the wall. His mother went inside, complaining about the climb she would have to make to the roof where the women were sitting. In the courtyard, servants had unrolled threadbare woolen rugs from edge to edge and laid out cushions. Some of the men, the early arrivals, sat with their thawbs stretched like trays across their laps and the tops of their socks revealed. Shisha smoke hovered above their heads. Aunt Faizah’s husband, Fareed, jumped up when he saw Muneer. Of Uncle Fareed’s children, Saeedah looked most like him. Muneer could not look at this man without thinking of the daughter. The way their eyebrows were set high above their eyes, so they looked skeptical or like they were laughing at a joke no one else understood. The dark purple of their lips. The square set of their shoulders, like a doorframe or a gate. Like they stood between him and something mysterious. Were they protecting him from forces that threatened him? Or keeping him from something he wanted? He couldn’t be sure, and at the time, the uncertainty intrigued him.

Uncle Fareed kissed Muneer on both cheeks.

“’Uqbalak,” he said.

May you be next. Muneer never quite knew how to respond. The sentiment was especially awkward coming from Saeedah’s father.

“God willing, Uncle.” He hoped he didn’t sound eager. Then, an invisible thread drew Muneer’s chin upward, as though a fisherman had hooked him. Saeedah’s face popped out over the ledge of a second-floor window, and her hennaed hand waved. Perhaps someone was calling her, because she disappeared, thank God, as Uncle Fareed looked up to see what had caught Muneer’s attention.

Uncle Fareed seemed to guess it had been someone. “Young man, keep your gaze down, like the Prophet says.” He chucked Muneer under the chin, as though he were greeting a little boy, and noticed the folded-up newspaper Muneer carried under one arm.

“Is that my paper?” He grabbed it and pretended to read the headline. Uncle Fareed had studied in Cairo and apprenticed at its famous newspapers.

It was not his paper and Muneer felt a bit embarrassed by that.

Uncle Fareed tapped Muneer’s arm with the rolled-up newspaper and handed it back. “How are your studies?”

Muneer kept his eyes on his hands to avoid seeking a glimpse of Saeedah. He imagined himself inside the house, following her from duty to duty as she wrapped ribbons around the candles for the zaffah, curled her sisters’ hair, and brushed her face with powder.