Summary

Sorry to Disturb – It is June, 1983. The narrator allows a Pakistani businessman named Muhammad Ijaz to enter her Jeddah apartment on Medina Road to use her telephone. It seems that Muhammad is lost. He speaks on the phone in Arabic, thanks the narrator for her time and telephone, and then leaves the building. The narrator explains the events of the day to her husband when he gets home that afternoon. Her husband works for a Toronto-based geological consulting company and the Saudi Ministry of Mineral Resources. As such, he and the narrator take whatever living arrangements the government can provide. Their current building is largely international, and mostly Arabic.

The next afternoon, Muhammad Ijaz returns to thank the narrator and to tell his own story. He is a graduate of a business school in Miami. He is married to an American...