Pray for Kabeer, Chapter II: The Pastor, the ‘Cult’ and Its Troubled Past

Published on Sports Illustrated, July 15, 2020

Two sisters pace along the grassy bank of a small creek. They’re middle-school age—if they went to school—dressed in long skirts and scarves that cover their heads. The younger sister looks up at the highway running above her head and watches the cars pass. She tries to work up the courage to run up onto the road, stop a car and beg someone to take them anywhere else. Her back is bruised from a recent beating. Her older sister is in worse shape; her hair has been falling out in clumps and her forearms are covered with the scars of several suicide attempts.

While they have every intention to run away from the religious compound they’ve grown up on, the fear of leaving is even more stifling than the fear of staying. Now, they sit frozen beneath the highway, the crescendo of what has become their routine: sneak into the barn; pick the crickets out of the peanut butter barrel and fill their jars so they’ll have something to eat once they make it off the land; follow the creek a couple of miles to the overpass until the overwhelming dread of what might happen to the rest of their family turns them around again.