Habibi Baba by Rasha Shaath

After my father died, I stopped watching television. It was the beginning of the summer in Riyadh, notoriously hot and dry—a suffocating heat that commingled with grief to create a force field of loss and longing. For months after he was gone, I stuffed my nose into the headrest of his navy La-Z-Boy and smelled him—Lagerfeld cologne and that intoxicating human scalp odor of sweat and grease and pillows. Baba would prop his thin, athletic legs onto the large footrest and often called out to one or all of his daughters to sit across from him so he could simultaneously watch the screen and talk to us. Whether in Amman—where I spent most of my childhood and teen years—or later in Jeddah and then Riyadh, where my family now lives, the living room was where we congregated. Like all families, we have our own rituals and habits, and nothing was more classic Shaath household than spending an evening together with the television on in the background while we ate, talked, argued, laughed, and ate some more.

For as far back as I can remember, the soundtrack to my life has always been Baba’s television, with the volume increasing as the years went by, announcing both the worldly and the mundane. His television consumption could be grouped into three distinct themes with accompanying emotional valences: Arab politics instigating spiraling despair, Hollywood action films inciting a boyish excitement, and football—his true and lasting passion—eliciting the purest joy. I could have opposing thoughts on everything with little resistance from him, which gave me a wide berth to form my own views. Still, he had his red lines, never to be crossed: Palestine and football. These were sacrosanct. There was only one point of view, and it was his.

When I moved to New York City in September of 2022, awash in fresh grief after Baba’s too-quick death seven months before, I was relieved I didn’t have a television in my apartment. Football, or soccer as Americans call it, was far from the national psyche. It was a global obsession that had not caught on in the U.S. as much as that other sport they call football. I naively thought that avoiding certain stimuli would make the grief contract. I wanted to believe that the respite of New York City could help eradicate my all-encompassing sadness. But alas, Baba was everywhere.

In November of that year, the FIFA World Cup kicked off, bringing the football fanatics out from the woodwork with their special brand of feverish fandom. Mired with the controversy of the tournament being held in Qatar, the analysis in the media took on a noticeably prejudiced bent. I opted not to tune in. Racist coverage of Qatar’s winning bid to host the World Cup reached a fever pitch in the weeks leading up to the opening, and being so far away from home only fueled my disdain for how western media was portraying the game. Football, coupled with that exhausting narrative of the Arab world, was far too much Baba-territory to traverse alone.

On the day of the opening ceremony in Doha, alone in my tiny apartment in the West Village, eight time zones away from home and 254 days since Baba left us, I hid under a wooly blanket and flung my phone away. I would, I said to myself, I could avoid the addictive sound of football fans in a packed stadium for the next month. I didn’t want to hear that most ubiquitous, most uproarious, most jubilant of wails—“goooooooaaaaaaaaaaaal.” Why watch if Baba’s joy wasn’t on display? Why watch without his witty commentary? Why watch without his animated presence? Why watch and pretend to care without him there?

That sense of listlessness—what felt like an entrenching disenchantment—was new to me. I had made the decision to move to New York, energized by a sense of possibility; a burning, itching, twisting desire to live the dream version of my life as a writer in the only city that mattered. I chose an apartment on Carmine Street in the heart of the Village, perched atop Joe’s Pizza and overlooking Father Demo Square, a tiny park and garden that operated like an Italian piazza, gathering people of the neighborhood, tourists in search of the city’s perfect slice and the homeless in search of a bench. In the dream version, this was supposed to locate me in the heart of the city’s creative life with friends and books and ideas. The reality, however, was a hollow and emptied out facsimile, like a vacant Hollywood set waiting for a scene to begin.

Those first couple of months in the neighborhood, as New York gloriously turned into shades of red, orange and copper, I mostly spent sitting in the park staring at the pigeons drinking out of its fountain or else finding refuge in the nearby Our Lady of Pompei church—just a Muslim girl in a Catholic church, lighting candles and crying over the dead.

After his family fled their home in Gaza during the ongoing Nakba in 1949, Baba first landed in Alexandria, Egypt where members of the larger Shaath clan had relocated. My grandfather, Tawfiq, who at the time of leaving Gaza thought it would be a temporary move and a return to Palestine was inevitable, heard of an opportunity for work in the rapidly developing Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and decided to take his family there. At the time, Jeddah was a small port town with only the beginnings of the infrastructure demanded by cities. Baba, then only seven years old, found his footing, so to speak, in the streets, playing football with neighborhood kids. One of twelve children, Baba was in the middle of the order and had the personality to match. He assumed responsibility at a young age, helping keep the family in balance and, later in life, becoming the fulcrum that maintained its stability. The family relied on his moral sturdiness and street-smart charisma he showed from childhood up until his last days, a seductive combination of responsibility and mischief.

He would spend his days walking the streets of Jeddah in western style shorts which contrasted the conservative, long, white robes worn by Saudi kids.  Learning how to make his own way, he struck up friendships with older men who taught him the ways of the world, both good—how to negotiate—and not so good—low-stakes poker. I think it was those shorts that marked Baba’s slow assimilation into and embrace of both a Palestinian and Saudi identity, finding a delicate balance he would maintain for the rest of his life. While my grandfather left Gaza as a temporary measure, the creation of the state of Israel changed that relocation to a permanent one, one that ushered in a new identity, that of refugee. My grandfather, because of his access, was able to request an audience with King Abdul-Aziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and ask for his support, which was duly granted, giving him and his family Saudi citizenship, thus changing their status once again, and in many ways, their destiny. This adjacency contributed to my father’s sense of belonging to this new country as well as his eventual path towards a more legitimizing profession and a small part of Saudi lore.

Unlike millions of football fans all over the world, Baba was not only a fan, but also what people dream of yet rarely become—a professional player. Baba’s career as a footballer was brief but brilliant. He played for the newly established Al Hilal, Arabic for Crescent Moon, today one of Saudi Arabia’s most beloved clubs, as a defense player starting in 1964. His stories about those years are filled with markers of how different the world was back then—often playing barefoot, which would yield him a lifetime of painful, gnarly toenails that we grew up making fun of. His tales about his teammates, many of whom were not literate and operated on a mixture of simplemindedness and superstition, were never disparaging. Instead, these stories pointed towards how fitra—what Muslims believe is an inborn state of purity and what some liken to Kant’s philosophical equivalent of “ought”—guided people towards their righteous paths. As one of the few players with a school education—the 16-year-old Baba was given a moniker by the other players of “Ustaz”, which is Arabic for “teacher.” I have a handful of memories of Baba bumping into one of his teammates. I would watch him transform into someone I didn’t know, a more jocular, mano a mano performance where it appeared like he was speaking a whole other language. Clearly, Baba existed in many worlds separate from the one he inhabited with us, and in this one, he was a revered athlete, the Ustaz.

Baba only played a few short years, but he became one of the team’s board members in the early 1980s. He pushed to hire the first foreign coach to elevate the team’s standards. He recruited a Brazilian coach, a move that elevated the team to be one of the best in Saudi and gain prominence across the Arab world. As a child, I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the television with my sisters, watching my father, pitch-side, reflected back to us from the screen. A tiny Baba on a television set, far away and close all at once. That part of my father’s life barely intersected with his family life, two worlds that remained separate and only touched when we watched a match together. So many of those people from his football days reached out to offer their condolences on the passing of Captain Ziad. A tweet by the Al Hilal account on the night he passed shows him in an archival image—black and white and smudged by time—standing with nine other teammates on the football pitch. Everyone is staring straight at the camera except for Baba, who is glancing to the side as if staring at the horizon, a point in the future. They had asked for a more recent photo to accompany the archival image, and I sent one of him in the barr, the Saudi desert, with his head wrapped up in a red and white shemagh, the Bedouin headdress. He has a wistful look in his eyes, as if he’s staring back at a younger self.

For Baba, Al Hilal was the only team that mattered. Its position was only trumped during the World Cup, when the Saudi national team would take precedence above club rivalries.

Two days after the Opening Ceremony, I successfully avoided watching. I got up early, vaguely aware that the first Saudi match against Argentina would be airing, but firmly committed to my stance. As I scrolled through my phone, it became obvious that social media would foil my plans before it even began. Countless videos revealed a manic energy surrounding the match. The excitement surprised me because a matchup against Messi could only result in one way: a defeat. My oldest sister Reem, chief archivist and record keeper of our clan, sent a photo on our family WhatsApp group of my mother watching the game, eyes glued to the screen back home in Riyadh in their early evening, her hair in curlers, an air of celebration permeating the tableau. I felt a pang of resentment, which I later realized was a combination of wanting my father in that chair instead, as well as the broader bitterness that she didn’t care much about football when he was alive. Haya, my youngest sister, was also in the frame, leaning forward towards the television, a visible tenseness in her hunched shoulders. At first glance, the photo landed with a thud of vindication, confirming a belief that my grief was more encompassing than theirs because I chose not to watch the match. But the photo told me something else: My family was continuing a ritual despite their pain, one that I decided to avoid fully, a pattern I had repeated throughout my life, trying to carve a place for myself that was in opposition to everyone else, a classic middle child move. 

I kept zooming into the photo, looking for clues that might lead me to some conclusion that would make the heartache soften. I searched for myself, or at least a spirit of myself, and could not locate it. My escape to New York, far from the pain born of familiarity, was proving to be a botched attempt at reconciling with death; the photo was proof. Instead of communion, I chose isolation, and now, far away from home and hurting, my awareness struck me hard. I did not want to face what a new configuration of family would feel like and chose distance as a route to imagined salvation.

That match ended with an unprecedented win for Saudi Arabia, making it the greatest upset in World Cup history, made all the more gratifying when Argentina eventually went on to win the grand title, a series of unlikelihoods that would have prompted Baba to say something like, “Once upon a time, we beat the winners.” The Saudi win made me cave; not watching the game, even after the fact, would be a betrayal. I wish I could recount those two goals the way Baba would have, with spare and elegant language that would give the listener a full-throttle emotional immersion. I can’t. Gripping my phone tightly, I watched again and again, that second goal fly in a soaring arc, enter the goalpost and then after a beat, the cameras panned towards the stadium filled with fans going absolutely crazy, erupting into euphoric joy. I watched the striker, Salem Al Dawsari, stave off his incoming teammates, barreling towards him in congratulations in true football fashion, and execute a graceful and instantly iconic backflip with ballet-esque precision. I got to my feet, my body unable to contain the adrenaline rush, and softly whispered “goooooooaaaaaaaaaaaal”, understanding why people call it “the beautiful game.” I never expected to cry. But at that moment, tears began streaming down my face, a combination of grief and patriotism that was completely new to me. It dawned on me then that football was becoming a generational glue connecting our family with Saudi across decades and lives.

I watched the ripple effect of this win play out across the world, ranging from disbelief to celebration. Nine of the players on the Saudi team are Hilalis, and I fantasized about how Baba would’ve reacted to what everyone called an “upset” but to me felt more like a coup. I canceled all my plans, went deeper into my feed and blanket, manically switched between news reports, articles, and TikTok videos of Saudi men and women dancing in the streets of Doha to the tune of electronic dance music from the 1990s. A particular video entranced me, where  a group of Saudi men outside the Lusail stadium in a mishmash of local wear—classic white thobe and red & white shemagh while others were draped in emerald green football jerseys—crowded together and danced to “Freed from Desire,” an iconic Eurodance song from 1996 that reaches a famous crescendo before dropping with a “na na na na na na na, nah, nah, nah, na na.”  This was the most animated I’ve ever seen Saudis, which revealed the scale of the win against Argentina and its significance not only to Saudis, but to Arabs and Muslims all over the world. For the first time in a very long time, that part of my identity—the Saudi part—felt legitimized without explanation or defensive arguments. This victory ushered in me a new understanding of Baba’s embrace of his identity—that being Palestinian and Saudi could exist as a refuge outside of politics and perception, signified by something as simple and as universal as football. This win was about skill, tenacity, strategy and perseverance. And perhaps, a dose of good luck. But in that moment, there was no reason to listen to or defend Saudi from the usual attacks—autocracy, money, oil, Islamic extremism, human rights abuses, or whatever else is deployed to flatten an entire country down to a string of labels. This was just Saudi beating Argentina, fair and square, as Baba would always say.

When people ask me where I’m from, I’m quick to rattle off the list of countries I belong to in some tangential way, because all of my belonging feels tangential. I say I’m Palestinian but my father’s mother is Iranian. I say I’m also Saudi, not because of blood but because I’m lucky to have the passport. I say I grew up in Jordan and that my mother was formerly Jordanian but is now Saudi because of that passport. But she’s originally Syrian. I usually say this with a mixture of weariness and pride, as if I’m revealing something special about myself. All my life, I’ve wrung my hands and contorted myself into an all-defining identity crisis which feels like a comfort zone but operates like an enormous limitation, disavowing any chance for a real stake in the ground. My father, on the other hand, was dignified in balancing the different parts of his identity, able to gracefully blend in wherever he was and rise up to what was required to perform that identity. Without a doubt, his football career demonstrates this but a kind of historicity was at play as well. Baba experienced and existed within the major eruptions in the modern Middle East that defined the era I was born into in 1979—the dissolution of the British Mandate in Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel, the rise of Saudi Arabia as the wealthiest Arab state, Iran’s dramatic shift to becoming an Islamic Republic. But history aside, in his personal life too—whether in football or later as a businessman during Saudi’s oil boom in the 1970s onwards or even more ephemerally as part of the first generation of displaced Palestinians—his posture was active. I could go on but I suppose the point is this: My father lived the thing that culminated in creating my own complex identity. He was able to assimilate and maintain a sense of belonging because he had in fact belonged and I suspected that a part of that belonging had to do with witnessing and participating. That belonging may not only be about a nation-state but a culture-based connection that ties you forever with place.

I, on the other hand, inherited all that in adjacency, not truly experiencing any sense of belonging to any one of those different legacies, a kind of arm’s length existence. The two things I held onto my whole life were first, that the Shaath family name was immediately recognizable for anyone who followed Arab politics because my uncle, Nabil Shaath, was a long time member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and had been one of the chief negotiators for the now defunct Oslo peace process, therefore legitimizing my Palestinianness. And the second, that if my father was a founding player for Al Hilal, it meant I was, I am, a bona fide Saudi despite having no blood, no customs nor even the right accent to match that nationality. With his death, these two claims have largely disappeared, and I find myself gasping for air.

Baba’s illness was too quick. The four months and eleven days between diagnosis and death were breathtaking, as if we were experiencing cancer at 2x speed, as if swiftness would make the loss more tolerable. I could understand muscles weakening and strength waning. I could read medical reports and navigate hospital bureaucracy and feed and bathe and lift Baba. I could do all that forever if I had to. But the measure for that quickness which threw me was how a man defined by his charisma—a storyteller par excellence—became in a matter of months someone who hardly spoke, his voice a mere whisper, his appetite to regale us with tales gone. He lost the ability to walk quite suddenly, a mere two months into his diagnosis and two months before his death. He fell in the bathroom one night and, from that day on until he passed, was unable to walk unassisted and, gradually, not at all. I think that was a turning point for him. It had always been a source of immense pride that he had an athlete’s physique and agility, able to maintain a trim and fit figure his whole life, erect posture, and an uncanny knack to “fall well,” as he would say. A couple of months before his diagnosis, he slipped down a flight of stairs in an attempt to swat away a gecko with his slipper because Mama was scared of them. I wasn’t there to see the fall, but Mama says she looked down in horror, convinced his body was broken beyond repair. But because he knew how to fall, he emerged with just a dislocated finger on his right, slipper-swatting hand. Later, when he proudly recounted the story to his friend Abu Abdulrahman, his friend responded, “Ya Sheikh, don’t repeat this story or you’ll be hit with the evil eye.” Baba, never a believer in the occult or even slightly superstitious, dismissed the advice. A part of me believes Abu Abdulrahman was right.

During his last two long stays in the hospital, my sisters and I insisted on daily physical therapy, optimistic that this was all temporary, and that we were not anywhere near the point of no return. That soon, he would start responding to the treatment. That soon, his atrophying muscles would bounce back to their fullest capacity. That he could “fall well” into his cancer. I remember the first physical therapist who walked into the hospital room, a Saudi man, slight but seemingly capable. He introduced himself to my father. I, overbearing and always trying to strike harmony, urged Baba to converse with him, “Why don’t you tell him who you are?” I said, “Tell him that you’re an athlete.” And Baba, not wanting to disappoint me despite his recent reluctance to engage, grudgingly told him that he had been one of the original players for Al Hilal. The young physical therapist was in absolute awe despite being a fan of Al Nasr, one of the other major Saudi clubs, drilling him about the history of the club and the years that my father was the manager. Baba indulged him, albeit in a voice raspier than his usual clear and round pitch but animated nonetheless. My father could put anyone at ease, and in a strange reversal of roles, he took command of the dynamic between him and the physical therapist. Their bonding over rivaling Saudi clubs made the desperation of the situation feel a little lighter. Standing up on his skinny legs, made even skinnier from his illness, Baba circled his hospital room, regaling us with tales of the past. The storytelling seemed to revive Baba, to give him a reason to push forward, to try to stand up and take a few steps, to lean into his athleticism. 

The last time Baba spoke was the morning of Thursday, March 3^rd, 2022. We brought him home from his third stint in the hospital the evening prior, a long stay where he caught Covid-19, adding a further layer of strain on his lungs and a palpable silence as he struggled to breathe without the support of an oxygen tank. That complication probably had an exponential effect on the amount of days we had left with him. We knew we were close to the end because we were relieved to be home, happy that if it were to happen, he would be in a familiar place, the house of love he and Mama built for us. That morning, propped up on his navy-blue reclining chair, he looked so small. My sisters and I, along with my mother, who remained a reluctant bystander, incapable of accepting this reality, crowded around him as he seemed to momentarily regain his older self. His voice, full bodied and creamy, rose up as if readying himself for one last story.

Since my father died, Saudi football has risen in stature, skyrocketing in both reputation and skill. They’re in place to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034, unleashing a fresh wave of accusations for “sportswashing,” echoing the outraged reactions to Qatar’s winning bid a decade prior, which presumes that wealthy nations in the Arabian Gulf should be scrutinized through a different lens with different rules meted out. They’ve recruited global superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to the local clubs Al Nasr and Al Ittihad and attempted to woo Lionel Messi, who after losing to the Saudi team at the Qatar World Cup, went on to win the trophy for Argentina. The wooing party was none other than my father’s team Al Hilal. Messi went on to join Inter Miami but his name is constantly bandied about as a possible addition to Saudi football anytime international players are newly acquired. In moments when time and reality collapse, I imagine Baba, reclined on his blue chair, his arm resting behind his head, wryly commenting that he was never a Messi fan anyway and settling back to watch the beautiful game. 

Back in real-life New York, change kept apace and life, miraculously, moved forward. The seasons turned; each one offering a kind of distraction that led to the eventual softening of that grout-like grief. The starkness of winter was for burrowing, the fecundity of spring brought with it the possibility of joy and with the summer, glimmers of lightness returned. I spent the better part of those months walking the length and breadth of Manhattan on what I came to call “grief walks”, logging in 30,000 steps at a time, convinced I was crossing an invisible void to go back to a place where I could feel fully alive again. And then the fall crash landed with all its glory and I remember towards the beginning of October walking from 116^th on the west side all the way down through Central Park and then flanked by the Hudson River winding towards the Village with a sense of clarity and presence descending upon me that signaled whatever it is people mean when they say, “I’ve moved on.”

The Village and specifically my little corner of the neighborhood also changed. New places cropped up where old establishments once held court, a cruel double reminder of the city’s two truths: the real estate market rules our collective fate and everything has an expiry date—places, people and above all, cultural currency. A cool Yemeni coffee shop opened next to Joe’s, replacing a pandemic-era Italian spot and bringing with it throngs of the city’s young and hip, predominantly Arabs and Muslims and with a healthy smattering of the brown-curious community, not to mention, a solid population of football-obsessed young baristas. On the other side of Joe’s, a bodega, also owned by Yemenis, quickly became a daily stop for me—for water, snacks, and breezy conversations with the guys manning the cash register. By breezy, I mean politics (Palestine) and religion (Islam), of course and by guys, I mean twenty-something men already too burdened by life, displacement, and loss but burnished with inherited wit and wisdom, reminding me of different versions of Baba from throughout his life.

It wasn’t just storefronts. It was the mood. Long before Mamdani became the enfant terrible of Muslim New Yorkers, I began sensing a vibe shift wafting up from below my fire escape. I would yank up my windowsill in the morning and instead of hearing the usual expletive-laden cacophony of the city’s homeless moving locations and the last drunks of the night, I would catch the pronounced lyricism of the Quran wafting up to my first-floor walk-up. Instead of the aloofness of a New Yorker nod of recognition, I was now greeted with a “salam sister”, multiple times a day. I would sit on the small wooden bench that the bodega guys propped up in front of the store for evening tea-drinking purposes and watch that little strip between Bleecker and Sixth become a modest fashion runway; an aesthetic marriage between hijabi chic and cool urbanite that made me want to cover my bare arms. There was a quality of subtle sweetness to it all and it felt good. My tall and lanky neighbor John, who has lived at 11 Carmine for over 40 years, sits at our building’s entrance every evening at around six o’clock with his long legs crossed on a foldout wooden chair, a Tupperware of finger sandwiches next to him and a gin tonic garnished with a thick cucumber slice in hand. He usually has a tattered paperback on his lap, alternating between reading and people watching with the old timers stopping to say hello. One evening that fall, as I crouched down next to him enjoying the cool breeze and talking conspiracy theories, he looked over at me with his doe-like eyes and said in his thick, gravelly voice , “All of a sudden it feels like we live on a nice, quiet street.”

Just like a fragile peace however, my momentary relapse into a state of normalcy was not meant to be. By November 2023, just one short year after that World Cup win, I found myself back on my white boucle couch, with a few more stains and a lot more sunken, unable to get myself out of the house. It was early days, but many already knew what we were witnessing—a full scale genocide, an unspeakable horror then, now. Gaza, the seaside town of my Baba’s youth, became the center of the world and the bleeding heart of the collective consciousness. And my grief, what I whittled down into a manageable nugget and began to carry lightly, exploded into a mushroom cloud of something else. Something unrecognizable that barreled through me and over me, flattening me into a mere wisp of myself. It went from being an insular and individual experience to a larger, all consuming, many-tentacled monster of an emotion rattling with white-hot, capital R, Rage. The flood of sorrowful tears and fetal positions and listlessness of Baba’s loss transformed into a clarifying fury, sinewy and muscular; dominated everything. It was an electric rod version of that grief but with a forcefield of destruction with an ever-widening scope. All to say, it ate me up.

But unlike losing Baba, instead of avoidance, I went the opposite way. I bought a television. The news cycle, relentless and endlessly enraging, became a twisted kind of raison d’etre. Every morning till evening, for days and weeks, just like Baba had done for his entire lifetime, I would sit on the edge of my couch, head in my hands and alternate between watching with utter disbelief and cursing in despair and devastation.  Countless days, pacing up and down the uneven floorboards of my railroad apartment, hyper conscious of the booms and bombs and screams emanating out of my state-of-the-art speakers connected to my screen and into the hallways of my building. Countless nights, walking in a safe loop up Sixth Avenue onto Cornelia Street down Bleecker and back to Carmine, frantic and at a loss, listening to voice notes from friends echoing identical bafflement. Finishing up my degree at Columbia and focusing on my writing receded quickly into the background and time took on a different quality, forcing all energy for practically everything to just dissipate. Like Baba, I found myself slumped in front of the screen, chain-smoking, heartbroken.

For so many people in New York City and around the world that fall and winter, my life began revolving around marches and protests and talks and vigils and sit-ins, getting me out of the house and into the street. Prior to that I had no history of protesting, no experience in activism, nothing that I could point to as an expression of solidarity beyond financial support for causes that I believed in. And I remember, I remember so clearly trying to ignore the loud and admonishing voice of Baba in my consciousness telling me it is futile. I didn’t want to hear it then and I don’t want to face it now but after every one of those acts of solidarity—ones that absolutely feel futile almost three years into this horror—I would walk home to my little corner of the city, stopping by Qahwa House for a Yemeni chai and a little chat on the bench in front of the bodega, trying to convince myself I had made a difference, even if infinitesimal. I don’t know how many nights I spent like this, indulging in idle people watching, by far the city’s greatest pastime, and tuning into the patois of Arabic and English and Urdu and Farsi, of dialects and accents and regional tonalities, mingling together as droves of people walked past me, that sonic background drowning out a truth I did not want to acknowledge. I don’t know how many times I was momentarily pulled out of a mindless reverie, to find myself locking eyes with a younger guy—they were always younger—and smiling, something of their posture reminding me of Baba, mistaking that flash of recognition as some kind of sign from the afterlife, a signal of his approval. I would shoot out a message to my sisters saying something to the effect that I feel Baba would be proud of me for doing this or saying that, for marching here or chanting there. I did all I could to ignore what he would have actually said with a long and weary shake of his head that spanned the length of time and said everything about his despondency.

By March, I made a decision to pack up my dream and my apartment and my life and leave New York. By the end of August, I was out, leaving America and an unshakeable sense of complicity behind and a once-again shattered heart. As hard as I tried, in the end I had to face the reality that Baba would have told me what he always told me—come back home to where you belong.