I first came to Coney Island Avenue as a bride. I didn’t know anything about Brooklyn at the time. New York was crowded and noisy, I knew, but it would still be part of the gleaming white First World. We lived above a Pakistani restaurant that fried samosas in stale oil, fumes rising up to our apartment. A sign just under our window proclaimed “Income Tax, Overseas Transfer” in Urdu. I hung my head out the window and read the sign upside down, a pattern without words.