This morning, I choose a white skullcap, a starched white kurta. I’ll soon be in a peppered sea of funereal white and black. Soldiers will stand at the ready in their crisp uniforms, shiny shoes, brass-tack buttons, rifles on their shoulders. 

I go to the kitchen, set a pot of water to boil on the stove. Make tea that’ll go cold and untouched.

The sky has been swallowed up by a thick blanket of fog. The house is dim, shadows cast around the wall. I’ve kept the lights off. Pale grey morning light filters through the dusty curtains.

The rooms of this house are even emptier now than years ago when Laila died. The same starched white. The same platters of food sent from the masjid, the scent of ghee lingering in the air, thick and heavy. Then, the food spoiling.

Bichara, they’d all said. Wife gone so soon. Left their daughter behind. Only four years old. So young, hai Allah.

Laila used to pack lunches for Sarosha. Turkey sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, Lunchables, packets of chips and cookies, fresh fruit.

I was left with the responsibility. I found a woman at the masjid who sold weekly tiffins — keema roti, bhindi, saag — things that had heft, stuck to your ribs, got you through the day. Sarosha turned her nose up at them and asked for three dollars a day for school lunch. I signed her up for the shame of a free lunch. I never could do anything quite right.

Sarosha told me, “When the class helper was collecting money for lunch this morning, he saw that my card was punched in the upper left corner. He told everyone I get free school lunch.”

I wanted to go to the school and scold the teacher. Surely, she must have understood the coded system existed to avoid exactly this. But I didn’t; I would have only made it worse.

Maybe if my daughter still had her mother, then she’d never have felt the need to go so far that I can never reach her again.

I check the clock. Naveed will be here soon. I’m transported back in time — this very kitchen, a warm mug of tea pressed into my hands. My eyes looking past him, the same man who held me up when I wanted to collapse. His wife sent Tupperware containers nightly, picked Sarosha up from school on the days I couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Is this my fault? I shrunk into myself for years after Laila was gone. I missed my wife, but Sarosha, she lost a mother. As young as she was, I don’t think she ever knew the depth of her loss, that she ever fully understood what she was missing. Sarosha was everything to us, the glowing sun around which we both orbited.

I often returned from work to find them asleep on the couch, limbs tangled, Sarosha’s pillowy cheek pressed against Laila’s chest, her hair fanned out around her face.

Just outside the kitchen window, chicks are chirping insistently for their mother who’s left the nest. I’ve been watching this nest in the lone linden tree outside the window for weeks. First, there were a few eggs, a mother bird snugly settled on them, protecting them from the wild chill of the night. Then, the cracking, the chirping, the mother flying away but always returning with food for small, hungry mouths.

I bought this house with so much pride. The American dream. A man like me, I’d managed to achieve it. Sure, the neighborhood was rough, the school district wasn’t great. The house was dilapidated — drafty in the winter, simmering in the summer. But we didn’t care. Laila and I were so happy, and we made this little place ours. Nesting. Painting, stripping, sanding, choosing furniture and carpet.

Now I keep most of the doors closed.

Sarosha used to sit in Laila’s studio on weekends, mesmerized as Laila brushed scenes to life. A mother and a child holding hands on a dock, the setting sun illuminating their silhouettes. A dressmaker in a bazaar surrounded by fabric in shocking hues, holding out a saree, the magenta bandhini studded with gold rhinestones, mirroring the sparkle in his eye. 

And all the while, Sarosha sat with her own canvas before her. The three of us as crude stick figures, a big sweep of smile on each of our faces, holding hands in front of our house. A little strip of green at the bottom of the canvas, a little strip of blue at the top.

“Daddy!” She waved me over. “Come here, see what I made.”

When Sarosha turned four years old, she asked Laila if they could paint her room together as a birthday present. Laila and Sarosha started a mural spanning a whole wall — a peacock, teal and green and gold, tail fanned out regally.

Laila hadn’t finished the final brush strokes, and so it remained devoid of the texture I knew she would have given to each part. I thought about hiring someone to finish it. I felt a weight settle in my chest and dismissed the idea. One day, I noticed Sarosha had been adding her own touches — a splash of holographic stickers along one of the feathers, purple nail polish splotched in a heart around the peacock’s face. I shouted at her, told her that she was ruining the things her mother had lovingly made for her. I wanted to swallow the words as soon as they were out.

I should have dusted off Laila’s paints and brought them to Sarosha, told her we can finish it together. 

The rattling of Naveed’s old Honda announces his arrival. He comes through the unlocked door. The wrinkles around his eyes look deeper, like he’s aged in the night. I must look the same. Very few words are exchanged between us. There isn’t much to say.

I rise from my seat. Naveed pats my back as I walk past him, and together we climb into his car and make our way to the funeral home, passing houses with sagging roofs and weedy front yards, apartment buildings where people live four to a room, occasional window-box gardens with bright blooms. We pass Sarosha’s elementary school and high school. 

By the time Sarosha was in high school, we were inundated with news of drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Men in suits making decisions to level villages, to bomb children.

Of course, I was critical of the US government. No, it doesn’t make me a terrorist, doesn’t make me a sympathizer. Am I not allowed to say anything, to express anything other than effusive praise and approval? Because I should be grateful to be granted entry into this country, this shining beacon on a hill? They are not infallible, you know. They meddle in things — how many countries destroyed? How many lives? How many civil wars? And let’s not forget, didn’t they support the Mujahideen, eventually giving rise to the Taliban?

I’d said as much. Sarosha looked at me, her gaze hawkish and piercing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said while scraping the last bits of her dinner into the garbage can, blue light illuminating the living room where we took most of our meals in front of the television.

“I do know. The US government has been doing this shit longer than you’ve been on this earth.”

Her plate clattered into the sink. She turned to me with her hands in fists at her side.

“You always do this. You can’t just be proud of being American. You live here. You’re better off than you were in Pakistan, and yet you pretend America is this big, bad bully.”

I held my tongue. Brushed it off. Wrote it off as normal father-daughter clashes, teenage rebellion. No different than her asking to go to prom with her friends, and me shutting her down firmly. No different than her skipping school, and me getting an automated phone call informing me she’d missed all her classes after lunch. The ensuing fight — the anger, the frustration, the stomping and shouting that I didn’t understand her, never would. 

She was probably right.

Maybe I should have taken her back home to Pakistan, helped her to see it wasn’t just all squalor and poverty. We weren’t all shitting in buckets, raising goats in the backyard, unable to read or write or count.

The high school had a robust military presence, a recruiter always standing by. The presence definitely didn’t exist a few miles up the road, in the newer schools with their circular drives, manicured lawns and fancy art and science programs, PTA moms in athleisure organizing fundraising galas. Only at schools like ours, with so many brown faces. So many foreign tongues. So many hand-me-downs, Adidas knockoffs from Wal-Mart, all our clothes eventually fading to various shades of beige and grey.

When Sarosha told me her decision, I couldn’t believe it. 

“They’ll pay for college,” she said.

“Screw that. I’ll pay for college.”

She didn’t say anything back. I absently crumpled the brochure in my hands.

“Is this because of what I said? About the government?”

“No, of course not, Abu. Look, I’m going to do this.” She jutted out her chin, planted her feet. Dared me to say something else.

Obviously, I did. I wanted to keep her from making this mistake, from paying for such folly with her mind, her life. Our conversation devolved into shouting. Slamming doors that shook the walls.

“You’ll be risking your life for a government that would bomb your cousins without a second thought.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

I spent so many restless nights thinking about the many active conflicts the US was involved in. So many they’d instigated, and so many they were involved in “to keep peace in the region.” Peacekeepers. Laughable.

When Naveed and I arrive at the cemetery, I open the door and step out of the car with leaden legs. The smell of freshly turned earth hangs in the air. A chill creeps up my sleeves and down my neck. Naveed places a hand on my shoulder, the reassuring weight of it propelling me forward to the rest of the mourners seated on folding chairs. 

Men clasp their hands over mine, whisper the words that ring hollow, yet again. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un — we belong to Allah, and to Him shall we return. For the second time in my life, I wonder about the mercy of a God that would call someone so young to return to Him.

The coffin in front of me holds my daughter’s body, washed by women from the masjid, prepared for the funeral, surahs recited over it, wrapped in a white kaffan. That’s what I need to think of it as, now. Her body. Her remains.

The imam begins to recite the janazah and my vision becomes hazy. We stand behind him in rows with our arms crossed in front of us. I go through the motions, raising my hands with every takbeer, hearing nothing but static.

Sarosha had returned from her first deployment transformed. Silence swelled to fill our small home. I knew this could happen: young, vibrant people leaving for a tour of duty and returning with all the shine stripped from them.

I hoped she’d make the decision to stay. Held my breath while we tip-toed around each other, an unspoken, unbridged chasm between us. If she stayed, we could have worked on this together. Tried to make her feel human again.

But then, she left for a second tour of duty, her last. Three weeks before she was supposed to return home from Afghanistan, her convoy encountered an IED.

I wish Laila were beside me right now. I remember those times Laila would slip her hand into mine and whisper, Ahmed, look what we made together. Sarosha doing cartwheels down the hall. Sarosha kicking a soccer ball. Sarosha reciting the alphabet, a poem, singing a song, dancing in a school recital, reciting Surah Al-Fatiha. Sarosha taking her first steps; uttering her first words; her first smile; the first time she clutched my finger in her tiny, ferocious fists. Look what we made together.

I remember all those things my wife didn’t see. Sarosha in the science fair, a second place ribbon pinned to her board. Sarosha winning the spelling bee. Sarosha in my wife’s studio, trying to paint the same things her mother made. Laila, look what we made together.

And those other times — Sarosha sneaking out of the house, coming back after midnight smelling of cigarettes and alcohol. Sarosha shouting because she wasn’t allowed to go to a birthday party. Sarosha slamming a door because she wasn’t allowed to sleep at her friend’s house, because her friend had brothers, because her friend was “American.”

I used that word when I said no to her. And it was stupid, because weren’t we American too?

A bugler begins to play, and the mournful notes hang in the air. Soldiers lined up around the casket stand at the ready, rifles on their shoulders. The commanding officer gives a signal, and they begin the three-round volley. Twenty-one crisp gunshots crack, and then, dead silence.

They fold up an American flag and hand it to me.