Summary

In “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” the narrator is a government intelligence agent. He has been assigned to watch the subject, “code-named Hajji,” and his family “in West Sacramento, California” (249). It is not his job “to wonder why,” although he starts speculating about Hajji’s potential crimes (249).

Hajji “hardly leaves home,” spending his time wandering “his house or his yard” (249). He lives with “his wife and his mother and his four children” (250). When Hajji is not searching for things to repair around the house, he watches murder mysteries or “foreign coverage of conflicts in Islamic countries” (250). His wife is code-named Habibi and his mother is code-named Bibi. Bibi spends her time praying, barely sleeping, and listening to the television and her family. She reports what she hears “to her only living brother, in Afghanistan” (251). The narrator wonders if Bibi was...