A small brown man with one good eye is driving through his Texas-sized apartment development in northeastern Dallas, on the way to dinner. It is September, nearly a week after the tenth anniversary of 9/11. He's chosen to take his second car, easier on gas than his BMW, a five-year-old Toyota Matrix he was stuck with after cosigning a loan for a friend, a seemingly small act of Muslim charity gone puzzlingly awry, another jarring cultural lesson to add to the many he's learned since coming to America.

The night is dark, with hard rain and gusting winds, an epic cloudburst to wash away temporarily the summer's lingering triple-digit heat wave. In truth the man is a bit agitated. Thirty-eight years old, a native of Bangladesh — a former elite-military-academy cadet, Air Force pilot trainee, minimart clerk, telephone solicitor, waiter, and computer-programming student — he has been working around the clock, holding down the equivalent of two jobs. His time is at a premium. With nobody to clean or cook for him, he sometimes forgets to eat. There are phone calls to make, memos to write, an organization to create, a Web site to manage ... and so many interviews to do, more and more lately, which doesn't actually bother him, because at the time of his shooting he was pretty much ignored. Over the last few months he's lost twenty pounds.

In one of his roles, Rais Bhuiyan (pronounced Race Boo-yon) is a six-figure-a-year supervisor of global IT for a travel company, responsible for teams of systems engineers in India, the Philippines, and England. He lives in a planned community called the Village Apartments. There are jogging paths and soccer fields, cooking classes, even a country club. Most afternoons he strolls beside a man-made lake with its central fountain, taking in the utopian panoply. The ducks like corn. The squirrels like sunflower seeds. They eat out of his hands. For the fish he brings a piece of bread; no creature unconsidered.

The other cap he wea...