This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Jemil Jan Kochi read his story, The Haunting of

Haji Hotak from the November 8th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Kochi was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

His first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, was published in 2019, and a story collection,

The Haunting of Haji Hotechak and other stories, will come out next year.

Now here's Jamil Jan Kochai.

The haunting of Haji Hottuk. You don't know why exactly you've been assigned to this particular family in this particular home in West Sacramento, California?

It's not your job to wonder why. Nonetheless, after a few days you begin to speculate that the suspect at the heart of your assignment is the father, Kodnan Hajee,

even though you have no reason to believe that he has ever actually completed the Hajj pilgrimage

to Mecca. In fact, Hajie hardly leaves home at all. He spends hours at a time wandering around his

house or his yard, searching for things to repair, rotted planks of wood, missing shingles,

burned out bulbs, broken mowers, shattered windows, unhinged doors, until his old

injuries act up, and he is forced to lie down wherever he was working. And if he happens to be in the

attic or the basement or in some other secluded area of the house, away from his wife and his mother

and his four children, sometimes he will allow himself to quietly

mutter verses from the Quran, invocations to Allah, until his ache seems to ebb and he returns

to work. When hajee has exhausted himself, he often retires to the living room, where he watches

murder mysteries or foreign coverage of conflicts in Islamic countries.

If his wife, codenamed Habibi, is in the kitchen, and if she isn't already chatting with one of her many friends,

most of whom you know, Hajee despises, he will request a cup of tea and ask about his mother's health,

...