The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas Page B

like that. Even the fellow immigrants and Muslims whom Rais had met before the incident lived on their own one-bedroom, two-bath islands, at once in the community and apart from it. “They had their own lives,” Rais said. They came to visit him occasionally, but it was not like it would have been back in Dhaka,where his wounds would be numbed, his mind stilled, by the sheer volume of people around him. It was not hard to picture it: He would lie in bed, and they would come—uncles with overwrought opinions about the war days and aunties with dishes he once claimed to enjoy and old schoolmates with evergreen dorm-room memories. All the while, he would be in the care of his parents and siblings—and, if she still would have him, his Abida.
    He was reminded of what he was missing out on again and again by his family, who could not understand what was keeping him in Texas. His parents, who had been heroically patient with Rais’s refresh-button dreaming, now regularly commanded him home. And Rais couldn’t deny that he needed what family alone can give.
    But he couldn’t and wouldn’t go home. Couldn’t because the doctor said so—at least for now. As Rais understood it, there was some kind of gas bubble in his eye, and it could expand and wreak havoc when gaining altitude. Flying risked the total loss of sight in his right eye. However, the truth was also that Rais didn’t want to go home, even after the doctor’s orders eventually lifted—and didn’t even want his family flying to America to care for him. This was a harder thing to explain over the phone.
    His mother might have been more important to him than the rest of the world, but in this moment it was even more vital to Rais that she not see him or his face. He had to be strong for them. His father was weak from the stroke. Neither parent spoke good English. How would they manage to get around, let alone tend to him? He had no home of his own, being at Salim’s still, and thus no place for his parents to stay. He didn’t want them standing in line repeatedly at the embassy, as he had. Abida couldn’t come because they weren’t yet married, and she couldn’t just hop on a plane and live with him in sin. If any of them did come, their welcome gift, Rais knew, would be vicarious despair: “They would have gone through the same suffering and pain—even worse than that.”
    It was especially difficult to tell Abida that he couldn’t come home. But he had gone to America with a mission. He had worked so single-mindedly for his goals; he couldn’t quit now.
    The more they pressed him, the more he stood his ground: “I said that, ‘No, I wanted to give it the fight, and maybe by the mercy of God things will change one day. I will make you proud. Let me stay there, and I will do my best.’ ” Rais was sure he would wither if he returned to Dhaka: “It will be haunting me for the rest of my life that I went to U.S.A. and I was shot and now I’m back home—and a loser. The background I had, that doesn’t allow me to be a loser. I was a fighter, and I was a soldier, and I learned how not to give up. And now if I go back with this medical condition, with this fear and phobia, it will be always there in my mind.”

    F OR THE LONGEST time after the attack, Rais felt terrified of strangers. Who knew what agendas lurked in the hearts of men? Rais confined himself to Salim’s house and made an exception only for regular visits to Dr. Spencer.
    When Rais went for his next eye checkup, he found that while God still wasn’t answering his prayers, He was at least receiving the messages. Wonderful news, at last: the petulant right eye could now detect and count fingers, could see Rais’s shadow on the ground, could perceive his image in the mirror. It was a huge improvement over merely sensing light. “We still have a chance to save some vision,” the doctor said triumphantly. That day, for the first time, Rais said, “I became very hopeful about getting