The Districts by Johnny Dwyer

Author:Johnny Dwyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

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IMRAN WAS THE THIRD of five children in the Rabbani family. They lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a featureless brick building in Flushing, Queens. The family did not stand out there. Flushing was an immigrant community several miles directly east from the heart of Manhattan. Most New Yorkers ventured to the neighborhood for two landmarks on its industrial periphery: Shea Stadium (now Citi Field), to see the New York Mets play, and Arthur Ashe Stadium, to watch the U.S. Open tennis tournament. Despite growing up down the street from both, Imran hadn’t had the chance to experience either.

Flushing centered on the crowded, kinetic Chinatown on Main Street, the terminus of the 7 train line, just a few blocks from the front door of the Rabbani family’s brick-faced apartment block on a side street that pulsed with traffic. The Chinese community made up the majority in Flushing, but residents from more than seventy countries made the neighborhood their home including dozens of families from Pakistan, where the Rabbani parents had emigrated from. The Rabbani children, like many of the children from immigrant families in the neighborhood, were born American citizens.

Imran attended John Bowne High School, an inner-city public high school filled with first-generation children. Nearly one in three students dropped out of John Bowne, and a little more than 50 percent went on to college. But the Rabbani sons had bucked these trends. Inam, the eldest son, went on to St. John’s University, where he graduated magna cum laude before attending law school there. The second son, Ikram, was John Bowne’s 2013 valedictorian. He went on to Dickinson College on a full scholarship. Unlike his older brothers, Imran didn’t distinguish himself academically. Instead, when people discussed him, they often mentioned his character. He was handsome and well built and had grown a neatly trimmed beard while still in high school. A teacher remembered him as “extremely intelligent and sophisticated” but also a “loving, supporting, and caring person,” one who would linger after class to wait for a girl he had befriended. When a close friend’s mother desperately needed an organ transplant, Imran helped the friend lose weight so that he could qualify as a donor. The cliques at John Bowne separated along racial and religious lines, but Imran easily traversed these social boundaries. Many of the students at John Bowne were from struggling families and lacked direction, often growing up in strict and insular households with immigrant parents. Many students ditched classes and blew off academics, but Imran pushed his friends to take their educations seriously, to recognize the limited opportunity they had and to make good on it. Some friends saw Imran’s concern for others as a weakness, a dangerous naïveté: “He could not see the worst in others. He always saw the best in everyone.”

Imran wasn’t without his difficulties. Unlike his focused and accomplished older brothers, he rebelled. At fourteen, he snuck out of the house and stole his neighbor’s car, taking it for a joyride in a nearby Home Depot parking lot to spin doughnuts.

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