I am sure that every man who left Nawara was sure that he would go, work for some years, and then have enough money that he could come home and farm his land and live in peace until he died.

You are very wise, my girl, maybe wiser than even your old grandmother. Very few men came back at all, or if they did they couldn’t stay, as I’m sure you know by the number of cousins you have who don’t live here. Most of the young men from Nawara who went abroad went to America, some to study but most to work in any kind of job they could find.

I know they missed the smell of coffee brewing, missed the clean air of their land, longed for the gentle touch of their mothers. Then, after a few years, they would buy a fancy suit and return to their villages—not just Nawara, because this was happening all over the country, but I can only tell you the stories I know—and they came back to visit, or marry, or stay.

The problem was that the minute they got here with their eyes that had been trained to see glitter, they criticized their old houses, and they grumbled about the old ways of the village that seemed to come from the time of Muhammad himself, God bless him and grant him salvation. To make a long story short, they couldn’t stand it.

Exactly, just like your Uncle Hamdi, who can’t sit still after he’s been back a week’s time, though he is more extreme since he chose an American woman to be his wife. These men were the same way. Unlike my oldest son, your uncle Hamdi, most would compromise and come back to marry and take their brides with them as permanent keepsakes of the village they were leaving behind, if not forever at least for a fair part of their lives.

And just like Hamdi, they got bored after a few weeks home and would go running back to their busy lives.

Karim Sulayman was bored even before he left. He came from an old family who had always been wealthy, tilling that same fertile plot of land and living in the same old house, which thanks to the money he made, we now call a villa, for generations and generations. And surely there are no roses lovelier than the ones Nadia Sulayman grows.

Karim was no smarter than any of the Sulaymans of your generation and never finished high school. We always said they were a family of much business sense but no other sense. At nineteen, he left for America, where a cousin on his mother’s side of the family had gone two years earlier.