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

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Jimil Jan Cochai read his story, The

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

Cochai was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

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

of Haji Hotak and other stories, will come out next year.

Now here's Jimil Jan Cochai.

The Haunting of Haji Hotak.

You don't know why, exactly, you've been assigned to this particular family and 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, Cochai Haji, even though you have no reason to believe that he

has ever actually completed the Haji pilgrimage to Mecca.

In fact, Haji 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

...