Summary

This section starts off with a recount of Mansoor’s life directly after the explosion. We learn that he felt a great deal of guilt for leaving his friends, dead, at the market. Mansoor spent the summer after the bomb inside his house, with a broken arm, venturing out only a few times. His parents—who had never been religious—brought him to mosques and temples, but he experienced anxiety when in public. “Holy men” (118) were brought to his house to see him, pray with him, and give him “potions” (118).

When the summer ended and he returned to school, his anxiety was still with him. He was the only Muslim at his school, and the other children asked him if he blew up the market himself. During his physical therapy, which he went to...