What Jahar did have was the experience of growing up Muslim in the United States after September 11. In his case this experience was barely mitigated by the experience of commonality and belonging that many other Muslims enjoy: he hardly ever went to mosque, and while some years he fasted (and abstained from smoking pot) for the daylight hours during Ramadan, in his family this was an individual rather than a group choice. In his life, being Muslim was purely a mark of otherness. He did not share even this experience with the Kazakhs. Though they were similarly vaguely practicing Muslims for whom Islam was code for heritage and family rather than religious practice, they had grown up in a country where the majority of the population shared their identity. They had never before encountered people who found the very idea of Islam frightening. Toward the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, Jahar tried spending a bit more time at mosque, but this too failed to give him a sense of community. Here he stood out because of his height and his pale skin, and people kept asking him when and why he had converted.
With the possible partial exception of Tiffany, no one in the group was much concerned with studying. Robel was suspended for a marijuana violation toward the end of the first semester of sophomore year and was not allowed to return in the spring. Azamat, the only nonsmoker in the group, got a letter in early January notifying him that he was suspended for failing to maintain the required grade-point average. He did not bother to do anything about this, even though the notice rendered his student visa invalid. As it turned out later, the system had made a mistake: Azamat’s grade-point average was good enough. Jahar’s grades, on the other hand, were slipping. At the start of his sophomore year, he changed his major to biology; this did not seem to help his grades or his morale.
In February or March, Jahar saw Larry Aaronson across Norfolk Street and called out to him.
“Are you in school?” Larry asked. He was always worried about kids staying enrolled—though he had never seen any reason to worry about Jahar.
“Yes.”
“Are you wrestling?”
“No.”
Larry was surprised.
“It’s a lot harder than I thought, this second year,” said Jahar.
Perhaps Aaronson sensed a lost quality in Jahar; perhaps he imagined it later. There was nothing in the boy’s demeanor or dress that seemed to have changed. Larry suggested Jahar could come to him for help with his studies, and Jahar seemed happy at the offer—and when he seemed happy, he always seemed genuinely happy. He never called.
From Cambridge, Tamerlan stayed in touch with his friends back in Dagestan by Skype. Skype has a special place in many Chechen immigrants’ homes. Those who have arrived in the United States after broadband Internet connections became widely available often maintain a semipermanent link with relatives at home, creating a close approximation of daily life still lived as a clan, with news and gossip exchanged while chores are done and meals are consumed or even virtually shared. Tamerlan now had his own connection to “back home.” He showed Mohammed Gadzhiev his daughter and the long beard he had grown as though on behalf of his brothers in Dagestan: they could never wear a beard that ostentatious without being identified, arrested, and likely executed for supposedly being Wahhabis.
Tamerlan boasted of his growing outspokenness. He had twice raised his voice in mosque—in fact, he had twice either staged a walkout or been removed from mosque for objecting to the imam’s acknowledgment of non-Muslim holidays. First it was Thanksgiving, and then Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in January. Gadzhiev reacted with his familiar mix of approval and condescension: Tamerlan was still acting like a big baby—speaking up against the imam in mosque is not a done thing—but on the other hand, his heart was clearly in the right place, even if his intention was still muddled.
On January 23, Tamerlan filed his petition for naturalization as a United States citizen. The form asks applicants if they want to change their name—an option many people take to Americanize their first names and to simplify spellings that have often been copied from foreign-issue documents. Tamerlan wrote that he wanted to change his first name to Muaz, presumably in honor of Emir Muaz, an insurgent killed in Dagestan in 2009. The emir’s name at birth had been Umar Sheikhulaev, and he had been the anointed leader of Dagestan in an aspirational greater Chechen state called the Caucasian Emirate.
ONE EVENING in late February or early March, Azamat, Dias, and the girls were cruising for some weed. The search naturally led them to Jahar. He said he had something else in mind, and everyone got into a car—some people were in the BMW and some were in the car Jahar was driving. He had banged up his green Honda Civic a bit and had given it to Tamerlan to fix, so somehow he had a black Camaro on loan, which gave the evening a tinge of gangster glamour. He led the group to the banks of the Charles River, where he got a black backpack out of the trunk and some fireworks out of the backpack and set them off. Then everyone got back into the cars and drove back to New Bedford, where there was pot to be smoked. It had been pretty. It had also been cold. Fireworks, unless set off by professionals as part of a licensed display, are illegal in Massachusetts. But then, so is the sale of marijuana.
IN EARLY MARCH, Tamerlan was calling Musa Khadzhimuratov in New Hampshire to arrange a time to drop in: Musa’s mother-in-law was visiting from Chechnya, and custom dictated that every Chechen in the area stop by to pay his respects. The matter was urgent because the old woman’s stay was coming to an end. Tamerlan wanted to come on a weekday—he wanted to bring his family, and Karima worked weekends. Musa had endless medical appointments during the week, so he resisted. In the end, Tamerlan and Karima figured out a way to visit on the last weekend of March, which also happened to be the old woman’s last weekend in the country.
Musa’s mother-in-law thought they were a gorgeous family, and attempted to tell Karima as much in Chechen.
“Mama, she doesn’t understand.”
The old woman switched to Russian.
“Mama, she doesn’t understand that, either.”
“What’s such a beautiful boy doing with a girl who doesn’t understand anything?”
Everyone laughed.
Tamerlan made mistakes, as always: he picked up Zahira, in violation of a custom that prohibits Chechen men from picking up children in front of elders. Musa ribbed Tamerlan about being more Dagestani than Chechen. Tamerlan said he still thought of himself as more of a Chechen but regrettably had no family in Chechnya. (Jamal, though he was often there, maintained his home base in central Russia now.) He said his aunt Malkan had recently sold her place in Central Asia to move to Chechnya—maybe he would be able to visit there more often now.
OVER A MEAL IN MARCH, Jahar told Dias and Azamat that he knew how to make a bomb. He said he had learned it in chemistry class. He also said there were things, perhaps some things in the Koran, that were worth fighting for, using force. His friends did not think anything of it: they spent a lot of time together, and a lot of things were said. Jahar was no Muslim fanatic—Dias and Azamat had both seen a couple of those, and Azamat thought maybe Tamerlan was one when he foisted some book on him during the one night Azamat spent at Jahar’s place in Cambridge. Jahar just had a way with random pronouncements. Like, on New Year’s Eve he tweeted, “I meet the most amazing people, spent the day with this Jamaican Muslim convert who shared his whole story with me, my religion is the truth.”