What we see in the hajj is not just a unified pilgrimage which draws millions of Muslims around the globe each year, but in fact a multiplicity of hajjes that co-exist through time and in space.
Or the Hajjes would eventually bring relatives over themselves.
The grandmotherly group had become the Hajjes' funders, chauffeurs, tutors and all-around tacticians.
The Hajjes cringed at making requests of their patrons or doing anything that could seem like taking advantage.
The Canadian government had already funded part of the Hajjes' integration, and without financial support from the sponsors, they might have to go on welfare.
The Hajjes were supposed to be self-sufficient by next February, but she feared they had virtually no chance of succeeding.
A few nights before, a fire alarm had woken the Hajjes, but because the sponsors had thought to explain what to do, they exited the apartment calmly.
When the Hajjes lost their fourth child, shortly after birth, in Lebanon last year, the two brothers stood shoulder to shoulder to dig the tiny grave.
The Hajjes' best hope for helping their relatives, they believed, lay with Ms. Karas and her partners, who could sponsor additional family members or find other Canadians to do so.
In Canada, just the evening before, an older couple had approached the Hajjes in the park, asked, "Syrian?" and insisted on sharing their phone numbers in case they could do anything for the newcomers.
The women had no way of seeing the daily flood of pleas to the Hajjes, the depths of Wissam's misery or Mouhamad's struggle to work up the courage to ask them about his brother.
