Muneer stops the tape, clicks it out of the player, brings it up against the steering wheel, and stares at it. He flips it over and slips it back into the tape player. Another surah begins.

“Why did you change it?”

“Calm down, Mama.”

“I’m calm.” She stabs the dashboard with her fingers, but she doesn’t know what button to push. “Stop it, stop the tape.”

Muneer slides the cassette out and deposits it in Mama’s purse. She turns to the window. They have left the city, with its ful mudammas and rotisserie shops, its marble façade apartment buildings and neon lights, its grassy boulevard dividers that smell of the sewer water used for irrigation. When Muneer was a boy, the city smelled more like the sea. Here on the outskirts, he imagines he could smell the clean sand of the wilderness. The road seems to cut directly into the desert, barely making a dent in its vastness. Sand has crept onto the shoulders. Road signs provide the only color; cars are the color of dust.

The plain gives way to mountains, low and brown, like the desert has pulled itself up to the sky.

Soon Mama falls asleep, slumped against the window. Muneer drives. Baboons sit on the low stone wall along the roadway. The monkeys are lined up, the babies on their mother’s backs, watching.

The car comes into a valley, the next set of hills shades of brown and gray, hulking shadows against the sky. Muneer pulls over and gets out of the car before Mama can wake up and ask why he’s stopping. At the side of the road, a man in a turban is selling cucumbers, laid out on an overturned wooden crate. The man sits on a large green cooler. He has a face like a dried date. At his age, he should have his sons out in the sun, selling for him.

Muneer buys yogurt in a plastic bag.

“How are we going to keep that?” Mama says when he returns to the car and heads off again.

“We can eat it,” he says. But there’s no spoon, and by the time they reach the hotel, the yogurt will be drippy and warm and clotty. This is what makes her worry about Muneer, she says, his impracticality.

He’s regretting driving her. “You’re worried because I bought yogurt, Mama?”

There’s a sound like something is rattling up along the side of the car and inside where the wheel is, followed by a loud pop. The car lurches. Mama grabs the dashboard. Muneer veers onto the side of the road and gets out without a word. More monkeys appear. As Muneer prepares to change the tire, they watch, scratching their ears, sinking their sharp teeth into bananas someone must have tossed to them, and swallowing in a businesslike manner, picking at each other’s fuzzy heads.

Mama taps the window and waves at them.