Square Root of the Verb To Be

Haven’t we all wondered what our lives would have been like had we taken another direction? What if…? To escape the civil war devastating Lebanon in 1978, Talyani Waqar Malik’s family takes the first available flight to Paris. What might have been their destinies had they fled to Rome, Houston, or Montreal, or had they stayed in Paris or Beirut?

Forty—two years after their exile, Talyani describes their lives in the week following the August 2020 explosion in the Port of Beirut from the poi...