1 - 9.00 PM - Government College Lahore. Iqbal Hostel was unusually quiet, everyone busy studying for the final exams. Fighting cravings for a post-supper game of chess in the common-room, my usual routine, I headed to my room, a cloud of guilt hovering over my head--I'd yet to sit down, open my books, and take the exam seriously.

Dimly lit by the pale glow of the desk lamp my cubicle looked gloomy--a bed at the far end with a crumpled bed-sheet; next to it and three paces from the door, a writing desk with shelves on top, and in front of the desk a chair with a broken armrest; my books, stacked on the desk like sediments of rock, frozen in time. Behind the books, inspired by the abundance and dance, the heat and light, the sumptuous throes of its victim against the lamp, a spider had been weaving a web for weeks; its filaments covered the top half of the poster on the wall, obscuring Neil Armstrong from the waist up in his spacesuit, standing by the ladder hooked to Apollo 11, the man-made spider, perched on the moon. Entangled in the web, a wingless body, which once flew happily around seeking sustenance, hid the planet earth: suspended in space, a disc of blue dotted with specks of white.

Blowing dust off, I picked up a book from the pile.

Three quick knocks on the door. Hasan walked in, breathless, his hairs stood vertical on his head. He was all ecstatic.

“Look what I’ve got,” he blurted, as he flashed his hand across my face.

Two movie tickets blurred past my eyes. “No more movies.” I said, looking back at my book.

“Come on! Don’t do this to me,” he said, putting his hand on his hips. “We’ve got to see this one--a lot of money has been spent on these, man.” He tapped the tickets, now placed on his palm.

“Which one?” I knew it would be impossible to push him out the door by mere refusal.

“Rocky. People are standing in long lines to see this movie, man--what are you waiting for?”

“Dude, you got rich parents. You don’t need to study like I do,” I said firmly, “good grades or bad grades--what difference does it make to you?”

“Look man, I’ve already paid twice as much for these tickets--not fair! I promise,” he said, placing both hands on his chest, the pair of tickets pressed to his heart. “Tomorrow, Inshallah, we’ll start together. Seriously!”

“Tomorrow will never come,” I said, inwardly feeling a tug towards the name, Rocky.

“One last time before the exam,” he said and touched his palms together as if asking for forgiveness in advance.

Knowing the battle had been lost, I snapped the book shut, put it back on the pile, and rose up in defeat.

“One last time before the exam.” I said. I felt like an insect caught in the web, fluttering.

The fort of books stood on my desk, proud, impenetrable as ever.

2 - That night, we returned to the hostel at 2.00 am. Hasan handed the customary donation to the gatekeeper who, wrapped in a woolen shawl like a cocoon, sat by the entrance, warming his hands over the glowing rod of an electric heater. Tucking the ten rupees note under his shawl, he gave us a nod. Hunched over we entered into the hostel, through a small door cut inside the massive wooden gate built more than a hundred years ago.

As I lay in bed, the images of the movie reeled by on my mind’s screen. I wondered if it was possible in real life to muster the willpower like Rocky, for nothing short of that could save me from doom. If I failed to get into a medical college--the sole purpose of my being here in Lahore--that would mean a lifetime of gloom for being stuck forever in Daska, my hometown--the place I’d been wanting to leave for good. Not to mention the sure depression that would eat my soul for failing to live up to the expectation of my mother to become a doctor. I remembered how she’d worked hard to get me into the best college in the country, Government College Lahore, the most prestigious place of learning in Pakistan; how she’d get up in the middle of the night, as I'd study for the high-school exam, to warm me a glass of milk, or make me a parathaa at dawn. ‘Your body needs energy when you use your mind so hard,’ she’d say.

My body squirmed in bed, as I felt squeezed by guilt.

“Yes, I can,” I said aloud, throwing my fist in the air.

Exams are still a month away, thirty-five days to be exact. If I could find a place where I’m left alone with books without distractions, and if I could manage ten hours a day, I can do it. I’ve done it before I thought, conjuring up scenes from Rocky.

And then it struck me. Why don’t I pack and leave for my hometown, Daska, stay there for a whole month, study all night and sleep during the day. And then I'd return to Lahore just before the exam, ready to take the monster head on.

I sprang up from bed, turned the light on, and started packing. I was done when the first rooster crowed, and then I fell asleep, my mind at peace.

3 -  Two years ago, the sermon blaring out of Jamia Masjid, the mosque of my mohallah, was not the usual Friday sermon. Like a squall blowing through a super-heated pipe, the Imam’s voice thundered around the skies of Daska. He was demanding re-election; he wanted the believers to overthrow Bhutto and his ruling party, the PPP; he wanted Sharia to be implemented in Pakistan; and then the chanting started, punctuated with the shouts: ‘The workers of Peoples Party are the enemies of Islam--let’s march!’

I raced to the top story of my house, for you could see a portion of the mosque’s courtyard from there. The chant--the meaning of Pakistan: no god but Allah--swelled over the packed mosque; it made the windows rattle and the ground quiver. And then suddenly the straight rows of the believers broke into a squirming mob, rushing to the exit. They poured out of the mosque like a stream of lava. I ran downstairs bursting with curiosity, and without informing my mother--she had strictly told me to stay away from the rallies--sneaked out of the house to join the procession snaking through the bazaar. It grew by taking more and more people in its wake; and by the time it emerged on the Main Road of Daska, it had swollen like a river in floods. I pushed ahead squeezing myself through the crowd. Black smoke rose from a pile of burning tires placed in front of the bus-stand. The shops’ shutters came down in panicky growls. In the Main Square, the crowd circled a four-storied building: a hotel whose second story housed the main-office of the PPP. I’d been to the place with my father. He’d been the president of the party in Daska at the time. Standing at the leading edge of the crowd, my toes pressed against the asphalt, I pushed back the arms and bodies to hold my ground. Behind me, someone shouted: ‘Kill the infidels’; and then the soda bottles started to fly in the air, hitting the brick walls, the windows crashing. For a fleeting moment, a familiar face appeared in the window by the broken piece of glass on the second floor; it ducked under the windowsill as a bottle hit that piece of glass, smashing it into pieces. I recognized him. He was the secretary general of the party, a close friend of my father. We called him, Uncle Khalid. Whenever my father had brought me along to attend the party’s meetings, Uncle Khalid’d treat me with snacks.

To my right, a group of people had gotten hold of a barrel of kerosene oil. They rolled it next to the hotel and filled dozens of empty Coke bottles with the clear bluish tinged liquid. They hurled the bottles towards the second storey. Many landed inside the building through the already smashed windows. When they ran out of bottles, they poured fuel around the hotel’s perimeter and set it on fire. Dark smoke came out of the windows of the second story, followed by tongues of flames, leaping high in the air.

A man appeared on the balcony of the second floor, reeling, his clothes on fire. He jumped and landed on asphalt. He tried getting up on his feet, but he couldn’t. Failing to stand up, he started crawling away from the flames using his elbows, his legs twisted all awkward dragging behind him. A group of men broke away from the mob and rushed towards him. My first thought was that they were going to help him. And then I saw skewers in their hands they had taken from the barbecue stall whose owner had ran away leaving the coals still hot and red. They kicked the man’s face, his back, and then they drove the hot metal rods into him, into his neck, into his eyes.

Two more men jumped from the balcony and landed on the road. One of them stood up. His clothes were on fire. He was Uncle Khalid. His face twitched as he turned around, patting and rubbing his clothes in frenzy, trying to put off the fire. For a split second, I thought I made eye contact with him. I wanted to run to him. The moment I took a step to go for him someone pulled me back and held me in one place. “Don’t do it,’ a voice whispered in my ear. “Don’t do it. They’re going to kill you too.”

Uncle Khalid hobbled, his back towards the torched building. The air shuddered with the shouts of Allah hu Akbar. He was not more than 10 feet away from me when he fell on his knees, his eyeballs rolled up and all white, and then he fell on his face. A skewer stood out from his back amidst the flames on his clothes. He was lifted off the ground, brought back towards the burning hotel, and then swung in the air, as the crowd chanted, one, two and three, and tossed into the flames.

I felt intense thirst. Slowly I elbowed my way back through a frenzied blur of bodies, hands and legs, my nose filled with the smell of charred flesh. I missed my father’s presence, his hand on my shoulder; and when I raced home, his face rose within me like a moon, bright and radiant, drowning the dizzying stars swirling in my head. His face stayed with me till I got home. It was the same face: solid and real, with the same fierce look and a gentle smile. I was five again, jumping up and down, looking up at the starry sky, shaking his shoulder: “Baba, how God looks like?” He turned and looked at me piercingly, his face solemn as a rock. “This is how He looks like.” He pointed to his face. His lips broke into a smile.

As I was running through the empty bazaar, its shops closed, I felt peace for the first time since his death. He had died six months ago in a crash, on his way home after speaking on a political rally in the neighboring town. He surely would have been there in that hotel had he been alive today.

I found my mother at the doorsteps, her lips moving without sound.

“Where have you been?” she demanded an answer from me.

“One day, we should leave this place,” I sobbed. “It’s not worth living in a place like this--to hell with the people of Daska.”

That day we reconciled with the death of my father.

4 - The sun had set when my bus arrived in Daska. Low on the horizon the sky was mottled with crimson, losing fast its remaining glow. A lone star twinkled, and next to it floated, indistinctly, a sliver of the moon.

I stepped off the bus and waited for my luggage.

Smoke rose from a barbecue stall filling the air with the smell of burned meat. An announcement wafted through the evening, from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque: ‘This is an important announcement for all the believers--the new moon has been sighted; the blessed month of Ramadan has arrived. Prepare to fast tomorrow, and rejoice, for the blessings will be manifold for those who remain steadfast and patient. The blessed month of Ramadan has arrived.’

“Babu ji, your tanga is ready.” The coachman had already taken my suitcase and placed it in under the seat in the back of his tanga.

During the ride I kept getting this nagging feeling as if I'd missed packing something crucial. Like a drumbeat, the hoof-beats rose in the twilight of dusk as the horse trotted down the road towards the town.

If it weren’t for that Friday Daska would have stayed in my memory as a typical provincial town of Punjab: friendly, lazy, surrounded by miles and miles of fertile land, peaceful, and most of all wholesome. Its air clean; its night a shroud sprinkled with dust of stars; its bazaar bustled during the day; and its days filled with the calls of the muezzins five times a day.

The coachman dropped me on the doorsteps of my house.

Lifting the heavy suitcase, I pushed the front door; it opened into the alleyway. In the dark I tiptoed under the grapevine that covered the passage leading to the sehen, the inner courtyard. Halfway down, to give my arm a break, I stopped and put the suitcase down.

The house, once filled with people from three generations, stood stark and solemn around me. I remember the same alleyway being filled with people, with a colorful blur of new clothes on Eid, a time for the family reunion; a long earthen pit filled with charcoal, smoke rising, sparks flying; everyone holding a skewer or two, fat dripping down the sizzling meat, coals hissing, flames leaping; the blood of the sacrificed goat collected in a pan being poured over the soil around the stem of the grapevine. ‘It’s the best fertilizer,’ my grandmother’s voice rose clear and sharp somewhere within me, startling me. ‘One healthy goat!--make sure to save some for the poor,’ this time it was my father’s voice that shot through me, giving me goose bumps. A cackle rose, the fire-pit spewed some more sparks: ‘Do you see the possibility of that happening?’ Another bout of laughter. ‘We ll’ be lucky if we can fill ourselves with one goat.’ Smoke blew, smell of burned flesh hit my nose--that unforgettable odor had lingered in my nostrils like an undying nostalgia.

5 -The aroma of my mother’s cooking welcomed me as I entered the sehen, salivating. On the far end, behind the see-through netting, the interior of the kitchen, lit by a meek light bulb, came through like a hazy painting set in a frame. Mother ate supper with my younger brother, a servant maid, standing at the stove, making chapatis.

“Look who’s here?” I said, entering the kitchen.

Everyone froze, wide-eyed.

“I thought we’re not going to see you till after the exams,” my mother said, beaming. She got up and hugged me. “I'd begun to wonder how could you stay away from home that long? We haven’t seen you in three months.”

“I’m here!--see this,” I said, patting the suitcase, “these are my books, and I’m here for one whole month--to do nothing else but study.”

By the time we finished our supper, I'd explained my plan.

“I'll be studying pretty much all night,” I said, “and after having breakfast, which would be my dinner, I will sleep.”

“You don’t have to worry about me bothering you--I’ll be in school all day,” Amir, my brother, said, after having heard my plans for the fifth time.

“I'll be fasting tomorrow. Would you like me to make parathaas for you, since I’ll be up for sehri?” my mother said.

“That’ll be great,” I said, not having the faintest idea what the night had in store for me.

6 - In my room, sipping a cup of bitter black coffee, I began jotting down an ambitious plan for my studies. Soon it became clear to me that I couldn’t afford to lose a single day from now on. Each wasted day would mean that an additional hour had been added to my ten-hours-a-day schedule.

Wearily I grabbed my Biology textbook and opened the chapter on Evolution.

Three loud taps followed by a screech.

Jamia Masjid sprang to life with a piercing azaan for the ishaa prayer. I put the book down and waited. The azaan was close to a finish when another mosque, Wahab Masjid, flanking the other side of my mohallah, cranked its loudspeakers on and began reciting its own azaan.

I instantly recognized the voice of the latter mosque. I had grown up seeing Master Mohammad Din, a mild-mannered highschool Urdu teacher of mine who’d lived next-door to Jamia Masjid, a Brailvi mosque, strolling past my house everyday to go to Wahab Masjid, a Wahabi mosque, to say his prayers. He’d never missed a prayer, and he’d love saying azaan in the microphone. As a child I’d wondered why would he trouble himself to walk all the way to a mosque located at a great distance from his house to say his prayers, while ignoring the one his house had shared a wall with. It’d taken me a considerable part of my adolescence to understand the differences between being a Brailvi and a Wahabi.

I waited, as the other mosques, located at varying decibel intervals from my house, began reciting their respective azaans--nine simultaneous emanations at various stages of their development. And then gradually they began to get extinguished one by one like candles in the wind, followed by silence.

I picked up my book and resumed my studies, accompanying Charles Darwin sailing in his HMS Beagle to the Galapagos Islands.

The quietness, I had taken for granted in the hostel, proved to be short-lived. Half an hour later, Jamia Masjid hit the air waves again--this time with the recitation of trahvees. Realizing that trahvees could easily last till midnight, I pushed on with Darwin’s observations, the tip of my index finger moving grimly under each and every word on the page. This didn’t last, however. The combination of sheer volume and the speed with which the recital poured out of the loudspeakers broke the back of my concentration, scattering my attention like dust in the wind.

Soon Wahab Masjid followed suit and began its own trahvees, its loudspeakers not as loud. The night throbbed as the other mosques joined the chorus. A moth kept hitting the lampshade, inaudibly, as if behind a wall of glass. Closing my eyes, I let myself drift, letting the riptides take me away into the ocean of sound.

-------------------------------------

It was midnight. The trahvees had ended in both mosques of my mohallah. The other half a dozen mosques carried on--their recitations tolerable, thanks to their distance from my house.

Preparing myself to work under any condition--as long as it wouldn't physically prick my eardrums--this time I picked up my Physics textbook and opened it to the chapter, ‘The Properties of Sound’, thinking: Nothing teaches you better than direct experience.

All the mosques were now done with their respective incantation. An eerie  silence took over the night, the ticking of the moth against the lampshade now audible. My gaze skimmed over the printed text as smoothly as the hands of a clock gliding over its dial.

I was jotting down pointers for revision when the microphone of Jamia Masjid was tapped. The tapping turned into a squeal. And then to my utter surprise the loudspeakers poured out the lyrics of a popular Hindi Movie song. It took me a few seconds to recover from my disorientation. What was being sung was, in fact, a naat--sung to the tune of a Hindi Movie song. The vocals, I must admit, were of a decent quality.

The Imam had to be a professional singer in his previous life.

The naat ended and another one started, and then another one, and then another one, and it’d continue, without a break, for two straight hours--for exactly 120 minutes--my studies forced to a pause.

Shortly people would be getting up for sehri.

It was around three in the morning when the loudspeakers went into hibernation. I found myself staring vacantly at the diagram of a sound wave on the first page of the chapter on sound. Feeling disheartened I put my Physics book down, and opening my Biology textbook I resumed the chapter on Evolution. In the next half hour, when silence reigned supreme, I’d grasped the fundamentals of Evolution, that how a combination of external stresses had forced the species to develop new strategies, and how, over a very long period of time spanning millions of years, by employing these newly acquired skills, some members of a given species would grow new organs, new appendages, new shapes and sizes. Those who’d failed to evolve would perish, because they’d not possess what it’d take to survive in an ever changing and hostile environment.

At three thirty in the morning the loudspeakers turned on again--this time for an announcement: ‘Hazraat, it’s sehri’s time. Wake up and prepare for sehri.’ The announcement was repeated three times, and then the naats resumed, interrupted by the wake-up calls every thirty minutes.

My mother came over to my room at a quarter to five.

“Is everything okay?--you don’t look too well!” she said, her face puffy with sleep.

“How do you manage to sleep in all this noise?” I said, feeling like a wrecked boat, bobbing up and down aimlessly, after a stormy night.

“When you’ve no choice you learn to get used to anything,” she said, and waited for the wake up call to finish. “You never complained before.”

“It was never that bad, if I remember correctly,” I said. “Who is this imam for Jamia Masjid?”

“He’s the new imam they have hired.” she said.

“What happened to Qari Nassrullah?” I said, remembering the firebrand imam who’d led the procession two years ago on that fateful Friday from the same mosque, leaving eight people murdered in broad daylight. Not a single person had ever been caught.

“He’s left for Dubai,” she said.

“Can’t believe that!” I said, burying my head in both hands.

Have the town’s people evolved to a higher level under the stress of the noise? Or, have the two years I spent in the hostel de-conditioned my ears?

“I won’t be able to study if this continues,” I said.

“Change your routine--study during the day,” she said.

“We practically live on a thoroughfare,” I said, recalling the piercing, melodious pitches of street hawkers selling berries, cotton candies and ice pops that would coat your tongue purple or orange or deep red, fruits and vegetables, bundles of smuggled fabric, my favorite toy boats made of tinfoil and powered by a tiny flame, perfumed oils, slide-shows peeped through a hole cut in a painted wooden box, and in Ramadan the beggars knocking on the door all day long. “During the day!--No way!” I shook my head.

“I can’t ask people to change their routines and make them stop earning their living,” my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.

“Out of all the mosques it’s the Jamia Masjid that had carried on all night long,” I said. “I’m going to talk to the imam.”

“You will do no such thing,” she said.

“All I’m going to ask him is to turn the volume down,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I’ve told you--NO!” she said. “Come to the kitchen in half an hour; your breakfast will be ready.”

-------------------------

After having a breakfast of prathaas with omelet, I was too tired and sleepy to study. Dawn was breaking. I took stairs to the top story of my house. The air was clear like glass. Far away, on the horizon rose a promontory, the size of my fist, the great snowy mastiff of Kashmir. Because of the distance, it’s rare to catch a glimpse of these mountains. They were separated, from where I stood, by a vast and vacant space. Right after the sunrise, they’d disappear from view, back into a past lived by my older generations. A past littered with bodies on the move, in the caravans of death, on foot, in the ox carts, on the trains; bodies sliced with sickles and swords, stabbed, shot, charred into heaps of ash amidst the burning timber of houses and neighborhoods, floating belly up in the ponds and canals; bodies laying on the forgotten railway platforms, perishing in the fields, in the ditches and irrigation channels; bodies oozing, letting the fiery crimson mixed with the water for the crops, of kharif, for the future generations; the ooze turning into a dark crust over the brown skins; bodies exhaling the stench of separation, attracting flies, ants and maggots, vultures and wolves.

Born and raised in Kashmir, my father had migrated to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947 at age 17. The train carrying his parents, sisters and brothers, during its four long days of journey had passed through an interminable tunnel filled with dark uncertainty. Miraculously, they had all lived through the journey.

The sun rose from the end of the carpet of green, behind the minaret of a mosque located at the edge of the town; its rays bathing in yellow the crumbling facades of many multi-storied havelis surrounding my house, the mansions once lived by those who had built them according to their tastes. The house where I stood now had been constructed by a Sikh doctor.

Daska had not changed much since the Partition, except for the growing number of mosques in each neighborhood, and the now faded memory that up until a few decades ago Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had been living and sharing peacefully the same neighborhoods for centuries.

I stood on the rooftop until the snowy peaks disappeared behind the gossamer threads of light in blue space.

7 - I slept till noon--a good six to seven hours straight. I awoke in the company of multiple azaans for zuhr, the noon prayer--the hum of the day taking their bite out. After having taken a shower and eaten my lunch I got out of the house to take a stroll through the Main Bazaar. As I passed in front of Jamia Masjid, I stopped at its entrance and mulled about stepping inside. I wanted to see who this new imam was. My curiosity won, and I entered the mosque. Leaving my shoes at the threshold, the sacred boundary, I proceeded across the open courtyard to the prayer hall. Standing in three rows, their shoulders touching, the faithful offered their zohur prayer behind the imam. I sat down behind them and waited.

Following the prayer, the imam turned around and sat facing the attendees, lining up for a handshake with him. Taking his hand they would bow--some touched their lips to it--and then placing their hands on their hearts they’d move away, hunched, taking steps in reverse.

The imam, to my surprise, was quite young. He must be in his mid twenties, his beard thin and curly, his eyebrows joined in the middle--a black bird stamped over a forehead. He wore a white skullcap. His eyes were dark and dreamy, and when I moved closer for my turn of handshake, I realized they had been lined with kajal.

My grandmother used to make kajal by mixing the soot of an oil lamp with pure butter--it was supposed to be good for the eyes, as well as making them look bigger and beautiful.

I was the last in line. Everyone had left the prayer hall. The imam shook my hand without eye contact. It was only when I sat down down facing him he looked at me briefly, and then he closed his eyes, his lips moving. The thumb of his right hand tapped his fingers, counting. Keeping his eyes shut, he took a deep breath, lifted the collar of his kurta and blew on his chest three times; and then he abruptly stood up, his eyes on the exit.

“Imam Sahib, would you please sit down and give me a few minutes of your time?” I said.

“Have I seen you before?” he said, his brows squeezed.

“I live a few houses down. I’m a college student in Lahore. I’m--”

“College student!” he said. “From Lahore! Rare to find college students in the house of Allah.”

“I am here to make a humble request.”

“I’m listening,” he said, scratching his beard, and looking towards the door again, and then back at me. He remained standing. He was lean, his shoulders uneven, his back slightly curved.

“I’m sure that I am not the only one--ah--umm--I’m not the only one--” I said, forgetting what I'd wanted to say. I kept my tongue moving. “I’m not the only student around in this mohallah who studies at night.” I stopped and waited for his reaction.

“What’s your point?” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and narrowing his eyes further.

“What I’m trying to say--is that there’s a lot of noise in the daytime due to worldly activities, hence many students, like me, prefer to study at night. On behalf of all of them I’d like to say, that it would be very kind of you if you could, please, turn the volume of your loudspeakers down a little--just a little--after you’re done with the trahvees.” I felt pleased for being direct.

Raising his brows he stared at me wide-eyed, as if expecting me to continue with my request. On his forehead, the blackbird’s wings almost touching his hairline.

Not a good start. I sounded too selfish perhaps. Let me try again.

“For a moment let’s just forget about me, or the students,” I said. “There may be many sick and old people living around the mosque.”

“How old are you?” he said, taking a step forward.

“Seventeen.”

“My advise: DO NOT interfere in the matters of religion,” he said. “Without a doubt, I can see that you need guidance. Most college students do. I’m in a hurry right now, but we’ll talk later.” He turned around and walked out of the prayer hall.

I sat, thinking: should I tell my mother I had spoken with the Imam? Deciding against it, I stood up and left the mosque to resume my stroll towards the main bazaar.

-------------------------

At midnight, once the trahvees were over, the loudspeakers went into a silent mode for exactly twenty minutes, and then they were cranked on again. The naats, to the tune of Hindi songs, poured out of the speakers one after the other--just like the night before. Around one in the morning the singing abruptly turned into a screech, and then the speakers fell silent.

Divine intervention!

Taking advantage for this unexpected gift of silence, I scribbled notes on Darwin’s observations, thinking that it must be some kind of short-circuiting which had blown the loudspeakers off.

The HMS Beagle was getting ready to set sails again, when the loudspeakers turned on again.

They must be teaching the electrician’s courses in the madrassaas?

The repair didn’t seem like a professionally done job, for the static would flare up from time to time. The singing continued. I struggled along with Darwin’s journey. Around two in the morning, I gave up, drifting into a dreamy state in which I saw that the imam stood in front of a microphone, the hairs of his beard glowing; folding his arm across his chest, he looked up towards Heaven; a flock of white-winged angels floated in space far above, some descending in circles towards the earth.

At three in the morning came the usual wake up calls, interrupting the singing, every half an hour thereafter.

My mother awoke before dawn. I heard the familiar clap of her making prathaas in the kitchen. I got up, and, stomping my feet, went to the bathroom to look at my face in the mirror. I looked pale, my eyes drawn inward, and my hair stood on ends as if charged by static.

Carrying my breakfast in a tray my mother entered the room. “You should eat now. Give your eyes and mind some rest.”

“This has to stop,” I said, pointing up in the air. The sound of the azaan for fajr filled the skies.

“This can’t be stopped and you know it,” she said. “Another couple of days and you won’t even notice it.”

--------------------------

I fell asleep after having breakfast. I got up at noon, took a bath, and headed towards Jamia Masjid. Inside the prayer hall, the zuhr was being offered. I waited outside in the courtyard for the namaaz to be over. When people started coming out, I entered the prayer hall.

Sitting on his prayer mat, his legs folded under him, the imam was done with the handshakes. I sat down on the straw mat, across from him.

He looked at me for a brief second, scratching his chin; and then closing his eyes, he swayed himself from side to side, his lips moving. The silence was broken with two chimes. He opened his eyes and stared at me, his lips still in motion. Turning his neck around, he looked at the clock, the size of a coffin, hung above the prayer niche.

“Allah has surely blessed you with a great voice, Imam Sahib,” I said.

“What can I do for you today?” he said, and continued the intoning with his lips.

“Yesterday, I came here with a request,” I said.

“And I gave you the answer,” he said.

“It wasn’t a question; it was a request.”

He narrowed his eyes, a vertical line formed between his brows. “Do you know who Muhammad Bin Qasim was ?” He had stopped swaying.

“Yes, I know who he was,” I said, “but what he has to do--”

“At your age he was the commander of the faithful--He was seventeen when he conquered India, by demolishing the mighty armies of the infidels.”

“That happened in the 8th century,” I said, a wave of heat rising up my torso. “There used to be no electricity to power the loudspeakers then.”

“When the hearts are filled with the light of faith,’ he said, looking up and taking a deep breath, slowly exhaling. “You don’t need any other power.”

“By the time the commander of the faithful was nineteen, he was dead,” I said.

“There’s nothing better than to die fighting in the cause of Allah,” he said.

“He didn’t die fighting in the cause of Allah; he died of suffocation inside a cowhide,” I said. “He died at the hands of his own men--the same Khalifa who had sent him to India would turn against him, because--”

“Is this what they teach you in the college?” he said, shaking his head. “In colleges and universities they brainwash you, feeding you all kinds of rubbish. Your mind has become a slave to the western propaganda, to the values of the infidels, to the so called secular education. And you want me to turn down the volume, the blessing that comes out of the house of Allah?” He pressed his lips, his teeth gritting, his nostrils flaring. “The godless system of the infidels! Allah’s curse on the infidels and their helpers!”

“This is not a propaganda,” I said. “This is history.”

“Muhammad Bin Qasim would live in our hearts as a true Muslim hero,” he said. “A young man like you should not waste his time studying nonsense like that.”

“Imam sahib, this is the second time, I’ve come here to make a request; and according to the teachings of Islam if the problem persists after the third try, then one is allowed to use other methods,” I said, looking straight into his eyes.

“Are you threatening me,” he said. He stood up abruptly.

“I’m just letting you know that I’ll be back tomorrow to make another request, my third and final,” I said. I stood up too.

“This is Pakistan, the land of the pure, created solely for the Muslims, so they could practice their religion the way they had always wanted to,” he said aloud, as he headed to the exit. “Lord, I take refuge in You from the workings of Shaitaan.” He muttered in Arabic, his breath blowing on my face as he passed by me.

I left the mosque berating myself for having made the decision to come to Daska for my studies, and that too, in the month of Ramadan.

6 - In my room, sipping a cup of bitter black coffee, I began jotting down an ambitious plan for my studies. Soon it became clear to me that I couldn’t afford to lose a single day from now on. Each wasted day would mean that an additional hour had been added to my ten-hours-a-day schedule.

Wearily I grabbed my Biology textbook and opened the chapter on Evolution.

Three loud taps followed by a screech.

Jamia Masjid sprang to life with a piercing azaan for the ishaa prayer. I put the book down and waited. The azaan was close to a finish when another mosque, Wahab Masjid, flanking the other side of my mohallah, cranked its loudspeakers on and began reciting its own azaan.

I instantly recognized the voice of the latter mosque. I had grown up seeing Master Mohammad Din, a mild-mannered highschool Urdu teacher of mine who’d lived next-door to Jamia Masjid, a Brailvi mosque, strolling past my house everyday to go to Wahab Masjid, a Wahabi mosque, to say his prayers. He’d never missed a prayer, and he’d love saying azaan in the microphone. As a child I’d wondered why would he trouble himself to walk all the way to a mosque located at a great distance from his house to say his prayers, while ignoring the one his house had shared a wall with. It’d taken me a considerable part of my adolescence to understand the differences between being a Brailvi and a Wahabi.

I waited, as the other mosques, located at varying decibel intervals from my house, began reciting their respective azaans--nine simultaneous emanations at various stages of their development. And then gradually they began to get extinguished one by one like candles in the wind, followed by silence.

I picked up my book and resumed my studies, accompanying Charles Darwin sailing in his HMS Beagle to the Galapagos Islands.

The quietness, I had taken for granted in the hostel, proved to be short-lived. Half an hour later, Jamia Masjid hit the air waves again--this time with the recitation of trahvees. Realizing that trahvees could easily last till midnight, I pushed on with Darwin’s observations, the tip of my index finger moving grimly under each and every word on the page. This didn’t last, however. The combination of sheer volume and the speed with which the recital poured out of the loudspeakers broke the back of my concentration, scattering my attention like dust in the wind.

Soon Wahab Masjid followed suit and began its own trahvees, its loudspeakers not as loud. The night throbbed as the other mosques joined the chorus. A moth kept hitting the lampshade, inaudibly, as if behind a wall of glass. Closing my eyes, I let myself drift, letting the riptides take me away into the ocean of sound.

-------------------------------------

It was midnight. The trahvees had ended in both mosques of my mohallah. The other half a dozen mosques carried on--their recitations tolerable, thanks to their distance from my house.

Preparing myself to work under any condition--as long as it wouldn't physically prick my eardrums--this time I picked up my Physics textbook and opened it to the chapter, ‘The Properties of Sound’, thinking: Nothing teaches you better than direct experience.

All the mosques were now done with their respective incantation. An eerie  silence took over the night, the ticking of the moth against the lampshade now audible. My gaze skimmed over the printed text as smoothly as the hands of a clock gliding over its dial.

I was jotting down pointers for revision when the microphone of Jamia Masjid was tapped. The tapping turned into a squeal. And then to my utter surprise the loudspeakers poured out the lyrics of a popular Hindi Movie song. It took me a few seconds to recover from my disorientation. What was being sung was, in fact, a naat--sung to the tune of a Hindi Movie song. The vocals, I must admit, were of a decent quality.

The Imam had to be a professional singer in his previous life.

The naat ended and another one started, and then another one, and then another one, and it’d continue, without a break, for two straight hours--for exactly 120 minutes--my studies forced to a pause.

Shortly people would be getting up for sehri.

It was around three in the morning when the loudspeakers went into hibernation. I found myself staring vacantly at the diagram of a sound wave on the first page of the chapter on sound. Feeling disheartened I put my Physics book down, and opening my Biology textbook I resumed the chapter on Evolution. In the next half hour, when silence reigned supreme, I’d grasped the fundamentals of Evolution, that how a combination of external stresses had forced the species to develop new strategies, and how, over a very long period of time spanning millions of years, by employing these newly acquired skills, some members of a given species would grow new organs, new appendages, new shapes and sizes. Those who’d failed to evolve would perish, because they’d not possess what it’d take to survive in an ever changing and hostile environment.

At three thirty in the morning the loudspeakers turned on again--this time for an announcement: ‘Hazraat, it’s sehri’s time. Wake up and prepare for sehri.’ The announcement was repeated three times, and then the naats resumed, interrupted by the wake-up calls every thirty minutes.

My mother came over to my room at a quarter to five.

“Is everything okay?--you don’t look too well!” she said, her face puffy with sleep.

“How do you manage to sleep in all this noise?” I said, feeling like a wrecked boat, bobbing up and down aimlessly, after a stormy night.

“When you’ve no choice you learn to get used to anything,” she said, and waited for the wake up call to finish. “You never complained before.”

“It was never that bad, if I remember correctly,” I said. “Who is this imam for Jamia Masjid?”

“He’s the new imam they have hired.” she said.

“What happened to Qari Nassrullah?” I said, remembering the firebrand imam who’d led the procession two years ago on that fateful Friday from the same mosque, leaving eight people murdered in broad daylight. Not a single person had ever been caught.

“He’s left for Dubai,” she said.

“Can’t believe that!” I said, burying my head in both hands.

Have the town’s people evolved to a higher level under the stress of the noise? Or, have the two years I spent in the hostel de-conditioned my ears?

“I won’t be able to study if this continues,” I said.

“Change your routine--study during the day,” she said.

“We practically live on a thoroughfare,” I said, recalling the piercing, melodious pitches of street hawkers selling berries, cotton candies and ice pops that would coat your tongue purple or orange or deep red, fruits and vegetables, bundles of smuggled fabric, my favorite toy boats made of tinfoil and powered by a tiny flame, perfumed oils, slide-shows peeped through a hole cut in a painted wooden box, and in Ramadan the beggars knocking on the door all day long. “During the day!--No way!” I shook my head.

“I can’t ask people to change their routines and make them stop earning their living,” my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.

“Out of all the mosques it’s the Jamia Masjid that had carried on all night long,” I said. “I’m going to talk to the imam.”

“You will do no such thing,” she said.

“All I’m going to ask him is to turn the volume down,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I’ve told you--NO!” she said. “Come to the kitchen in half an hour; your breakfast will be ready.”

-------------------------

After having a breakfast of prathaas with omelet, I was too tired and sleepy to study. Dawn was breaking. I took stairs to the top story of my house. The air was clear like glass. Far away, on the horizon rose a promontory, the size of my fist, the great snowy mastiff of Kashmir. Because of the distance, it’s rare to catch a glimpse of these mountains. They were separated, from where I stood, by a vast and vacant space. Right after the sunrise, they’d disappear from view, back into a past lived by my older generations. A past littered with bodies on the move, in the caravans of death, on foot, in the ox carts, on the trains; bodies sliced with sickles and swords, stabbed, shot, charred into heaps of ash amidst the burning timber of houses and neighborhoods, floating belly up in the ponds and canals; bodies laying on the forgotten railway platforms, perishing in the fields, in the ditches and irrigation channels; bodies oozing, letting the fiery crimson mixed with the water for the crops, of kharif, for the future generations; the ooze turning into a dark crust over the brown skins; bodies exhaling the stench of separation, attracting flies, ants and maggots, vultures and wolves.

Born and raised in Kashmir, my father had migrated to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947 at age 17. The train carrying his parents, sisters and brothers, during its four long days of journey had passed through an interminable tunnel filled with dark uncertainty. Miraculously, they had all lived through the journey.

The sun rose from the end of the carpet of green, behind the minaret of a mosque located at the edge of the town; its rays bathing in yellow the crumbling facades of many multi-storied havelis surrounding my house, the mansions once lived by those who had built them according to their tastes. The house where I stood now had been constructed by a Sikh doctor.

Daska had not changed much since the Partition, except for the growing number of mosques in each neighborhood, and the now faded memory that up until a few decades ago Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had been living and sharing peacefully the same neighborhoods for centuries.

I stood on the rooftop until the snowy peaks disappeared behind the gossamer threads of light in blue space.

7 - I slept till noon--a good six to seven hours straight. I awoke in the company of multiple azaans for zuhr, the noon prayer--the hum of the day taking their bite out. After having taken a shower and eaten my lunch I got out of the house to take a stroll through the Main Bazaar. As I passed in front of Jamia Masjid, I stopped at its entrance and mulled about stepping inside. I wanted to see who this new imam was. My curiosity won, and I entered the mosque. Leaving my shoes at the threshold, the sacred boundary, I proceeded across the open courtyard to the prayer hall. Standing in three rows, their shoulders touching, the faithful offered their zohur prayer behind the imam. I sat down behind them and waited.

Following the prayer, the imam turned around and sat facing the attendees, lining up for a handshake with him. Taking his hand they would bow--some touched their lips to it--and then placing their hands on their hearts they’d move away, hunched, taking steps in reverse.

The imam, to my surprise, was quite young. He must be in his mid twenties, his beard thin and curly, his eyebrows joined in the middle--a black bird stamped over a forehead. He wore a white skullcap. His eyes were dark and dreamy, and when I moved closer for my turn of handshake, I realized they had been lined with kajal.

My grandmother used to make kajal by mixing the soot of an oil lamp with pure butter--it was supposed to be good for the eyes, as well as making them look bigger and beautiful.

I was the last in line. Everyone had left the prayer hall. The imam shook my hand without eye contact. It was only when I sat down down facing him he looked at me briefly, and then he closed his eyes, his lips moving. The thumb of his right hand tapped his fingers, counting. Keeping his eyes shut, he took a deep breath, lifted the collar of his kurta and blew on his chest three times; and then he abruptly stood up, his eyes on the exit.

“Imam Sahib, would you please sit down and give me a few minutes of your time?” I said.

“Have I seen you before?” he said, his brows squeezed.

“I live a few houses down. I’m a college student in Lahore. I’m--”

“College student!” he said. “From Lahore! Rare to find college students in the house of Allah.”

“I am here to make a humble request.”

“I’m listening,” he said, scratching his beard, and looking towards the door again, and then back at me. He remained standing. He was lean, his shoulders uneven, his back slightly curved.

“I’m sure that I am not the only one--ah--umm--I’m not the only one--” I said, forgetting what I'd wanted to say. I kept my tongue moving. “I’m not the only student around in this mohallah who studies at night.” I stopped and waited for his reaction.

“What’s your point?” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and narrowing his eyes further.

“What I’m trying to say--is that there’s a lot of noise in the daytime due to worldly activities, hence many students, like me, prefer to study at night. On behalf of all of them I’d like to say, that it would be very kind of you if you could, please, turn the volume of your loudspeakers down a little--just a little--after you’re done with the trahvees.” I felt pleased for being direct.

Raising his brows he stared at me wide-eyed, as if expecting me to continue with my request. On his forehead, the blackbird’s wings almost touching his hairline.

Not a good start. I sounded too selfish perhaps. Let me try again.

“For a moment let’s just forget about me, or the students,” I said. “There may be many sick and old people living around the mosque.”

“How old are you?” he said, taking a step forward.

“Seventeen.”

“My advise: DO NOT interfere in the matters of religion,” he said. “Without a doubt, I can see that you need guidance. Most college students do. I’m in a hurry right now, but we’ll talk later.” He turned around and walked out of the prayer hall.

I sat, thinking: should I tell my mother I had spoken with the Imam? Deciding against it, I stood up and left the mosque to resume my stroll towards the main bazaar.

-------------------------

At midnight, once the trahvees were over, the loudspeakers went into a silent mode for exactly twenty minutes, and then they were cranked on again. The naats, to the tune of Hindi songs, poured out of the speakers one after the other--just like the night before. Around one in the morning the singing abruptly turned into a screech, and then the speakers fell silent.

Divine intervention!

Taking advantage for this unexpected gift of silence, I scribbled notes on Darwin’s observations, thinking that it must be some kind of short-circuiting which had blown the loudspeakers off.

The HMS Beagle was getting ready to set sails again, when the loudspeakers turned on again.

They must be teaching the electrician’s courses in the madrassaas?

The repair didn’t seem like a professionally done job, for the static would flare up from time to time. The singing continued. I struggled along with Darwin’s journey. Around two in the morning, I gave up, drifting into a dreamy state in which I saw that the imam stood in front of a microphone, the hairs of his beard glowing; folding his arm across his chest, he looked up towards Heaven; a flock of white-winged angels floated in space far above, some descending in circles towards the earth.

At three in the morning came the usual wake up calls, interrupting the singing, every half an hour thereafter.

My mother awoke before dawn. I heard the familiar clap of her making prathaas in the kitchen. I got up, and, stomping my feet, went to the bathroom to look at my face in the mirror. I looked pale, my eyes drawn inward, and my hair stood on ends as if charged by static.

Carrying my breakfast in a tray my mother entered the room. “You should eat now. Give your eyes and mind some rest.”

“This has to stop,” I said, pointing up in the air. The sound of the azaan for fajr filled the skies.

“This can’t be stopped and you know it,” she said. “Another couple of days and you won’t even notice it.”

--------------------------

I fell asleep after having breakfast. I got up at noon, took a bath, and headed towards Jamia Masjid. Inside the prayer hall, the zuhr was being offered. I waited outside in the courtyard for the namaaz to be over. When people started coming out, I entered the prayer hall.

Sitting on his prayer mat, his legs folded under him, the imam was done with the handshakes. I sat down on the straw mat, across from him.

He looked at me for a brief second, scratching his chin; and then closing his eyes, he swayed himself from side to side, his lips moving. The silence was broken with two chimes. He opened his eyes and stared at me, his lips still in motion. Turning his neck around, he looked at the clock, the size of a coffin, hung above the prayer niche.

“Allah has surely blessed you with a great voice, Imam Sahib,” I said.

“What can I do for you today?” he said, and continued the intoning with his lips.

“Yesterday, I came here with a request,” I said.

“And I gave you the answer,” he said.

“It wasn’t a question; it was a request.”

He narrowed his eyes, a vertical line formed between his brows. “Do you know who Muhammad Bin Qasim was ?” He had stopped swaying.

“Yes, I know who he was,” I said, “but what he has to do--”

“At your age he was the commander of the faithful--He was seventeen when he conquered India, by demolishing the mighty armies of the infidels.”

“That happened in the 8th century,” I said, a wave of heat rising up my torso. “There used to be no electricity to power the loudspeakers then.”

“When the hearts are filled with the light of faith,’ he said, looking up and taking a deep breath, slowly exhaling. “You don’t need any other power.”

“By the time the commander of the faithful was nineteen, he was dead,” I said.

“There’s nothing better than to die fighting in the cause of Allah,” he said.

“He didn’t die fighting in the cause of Allah; he died of suffocation inside a cowhide,” I said. “He died at the hands of his own men--the same Khalifa who had sent him to India would turn against him, because--”

“Is this what they teach you in the college?” he said, shaking his head. “In colleges and universities they brainwash you, feeding you all kinds of rubbish. Your mind has become a slave to the western propaganda, to the values of the infidels, to the so called secular education. And you want me to turn down the volume, the blessing that comes out of the house of Allah?” He pressed his lips, his teeth gritting, his nostrils flaring. “The godless system of the infidels! Allah’s curse on the infidels and their helpers!”

“This is not a propaganda,” I said. “This is history.”

“Muhammad Bin Qasim would live in our hearts as a true Muslim hero,” he said. “A young man like you should not waste his time studying nonsense like that.”

“Imam sahib, this is the second time, I’ve come here to make a request; and according to the teachings of Islam if the problem persists after the third try, then one is allowed to use other methods,” I said, looking straight into his eyes.

“Are you threatening me,” he said. He stood up abruptly.

“I’m just letting you know that I’ll be back tomorrow to make another request, my third and final,” I said. I stood up too.

“This is Pakistan, the land of the pure, created solely for the Muslims, so they could practice their religion the way they had always wanted to,” he said aloud, as he headed to the exit. “Lord, I take refuge in You from the workings of Shaitaan.” He muttered in Arabic, his breath blowing on my face as he passed by me.

I left the mosque berating myself for having made the decision to come to Daska for my studies, and that too, in the month of Ramadan.

- On my third night in Daska Jamia Masjid went wild again with the Hindi tunes once the trahvees were over. At 2.00 am, finding it impossible to concentrate on my studies, I sneaked out of my house. In the deserted streets the naat boomed even more loudly, bouncing off the downed shutters. Within a few minutes I was inside Jamia Masjid--its dome, tucked in between its minarets like a giant woofer, seemed vibrating.

After taking my shoes off I crossed the courtyard, stopping at the entrance of the prayer hall. From where I stood, the interior, lit by the fluorescent tubelights, looked drab. I stepped inside expecting to find the imam, glued to the microphone, somewhere at the far end, but there was no one inside. I spotted the microphone placed within the prayer niche, its arm swiveled all the way down to the floor and held in front what appeared to be a tape-recorder. Incredulous, I walked over to the prayer niche and knelt on all four to see if it indeed was a cassette player, my cheek pressed against the imam’s prayer mat. The spools rolled a Sony 120 tape, smoothly and effortlessly, the naat now hitting my eardrum directly from the tape.

A wave of anger bolted me back to my feet. I rushed out of the prayer hall, my fists clenched. From the courtyard, I looked up towards the sleeping quarter of the imam, the hujra, located a flight of stairs up on the roof. It was so loud that I could have blasted his hujra with heavy artillery and not a soul would wake up.

My blood started to heat up, my heartbeat accelerating. Gritting my teeth I climbed up the stairs and stood at his door, mulling over my next move. I wanted to kick the door open, but something held me back.

By the time I sneaked back in my house, I knew what my next step would be.

9 - In the morning it took me less than an hour to put together a delegation comprising three students from my neighborhood. Although they studied in the local college, they’re preparing for the same exam. I'd known them from my high school days. They were happy to accompany me to the office of the Assistant Commissioner of Daska.

The AC, a heavyset, bald man in his fifties, hunched over a file, raised his bushy brows as we were ushered into his office. The room smelled of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave lotion. Pushing his gold-rimmed glasses back up on his nose, he gestured us to sit down across from his vast desk littered with papers, and in its center, next to a pen-holder, a tiny flag of Pakistan hoisted on top of a cracked base, the size of a paperweight, held together by a clear tape.

Without saying a word, he listened to me, his knuckles supporting his chin, his attention unwavering. His face broke into a smile when I told him about the tape-recorder playing naats.

“Sir, you have to help us,” I said.

“How?” he said, his brows smooth. “What do you think I should do to help you?”

“By limiting the use of loudspeakers beyond trahvees,” I said. “Sir, I think it’s very reasonable, for we’re letting them use the speakers till midnight anyway.”

“Easier said than done.” He scratched his temple with his index finger. “I understand your plight. And I know perfectly well that you are asking me to intervene on your behalf using my office--but let me tell you young man: You have no idea how sensitive this issue is. If I do what you’ve asked me to do, I’ll be offending a lot of people. In no time the ban on the loudspeakers of the mosques will become a religious issue--and the next thing you know, it will have become a major political issue.”

“I understand, sir. Perhaps we’ll have to figure a way on our own to deal with this issue,” I said, getting up from the chair. “Would that be fine with you, sir, if we ?”

“Please be very very careful what you do,” he said, standing up and shaking our hands warmly. “People don’t hesitate to kill when they feel their faith is under attack. Don’t forget, we are very emotional people when it comes to religion.”

“Thanks for listening.” I said, shaking his hand.

As we all came out of the Assistant Commissioner's office, one of the students said to me: “My advice: stay put—you‘ll get used to the noise in a few days. It’s not easy but it’ll become tolerable.”

“You may be right?” I said. “But, unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of a few days at my disposal.”

“You have no choice,” he said.

“Help comes to those who try,” I said.

I came home feeling exhausted and went straight to my room, my books scattered around my room like shot birds fallen from the sky. I set up the alarm for 1:30 pm, and as soon as I hit the bed I was out.

10 - At 2.00 pm I was back in the courtyard of Jamia Masjid, the sun warming the back of my neck. I waited for the prayer of zuhr to be over. I entered the prayer hall once the faithful started coming out. I sat down at my usual place, a few feet away from the imam. After the handshake with the last person, the imam abruptly turned around, as if he’d sensed my presence, and gave me a piercing look, his eyes black with soot. I stared back at him, keeping a calm smile on my face. Failing to stare me down he closed his eyes and began swaying his body, his mouth muttering a prayer.

“Last night I was in the mosque to see you,” I said. “You weren’t here, so I left.”

“What time?” he said. He opened his eyes and became still.

“Exactly sixty minutes before you woke up to change the side of the tape,” I said.

He remained quiet, combing his beard with his fingers, his eyeballs jerking from one side to the other.

“I then went upstairs to see you in your hujra, but upon hearing your snores I changed my mind,” I made up the bit about snoring, since it wasn’t possible to hear someone snoring in that noise. “I don’t bother people when they’re sleeping.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “We’ve had two meetings already--What’s the purpose of your visit now?”

“I came with a hope that my third request may work. You never know unless you try till the end.”

“The fact is that one who hears the praise of Muhammad,” he paused, and after muttering the salutation, raised his fingertips to his lips and then to his eyes. Sliding his palms over his beard he resumed. “That person automatically gets the swaab.”

“Obviously you don’t think my request has any merit,” I said.

“Like you’ve spent ten or fifteen years of your life studying the worldly knowledge, I’ve, too, spent a lifetime studying Deen in a top madrassaa. For a true Muslim the study of religion is far more important than what you learn in a college--things which make you forget your Deen.” Fixing his gaze on me he kept on sweeping his beard with the hollow of his palm, his brows contracted.

“Do you realize that there may be sick or old people living in the neighborhood, and that they may not be able to get proper sleep because of your loudspeakers blaring at full volume all night long?” I stared back at him.

“How come no one has ever complained before?” he said.

“Because people have chosen to remain shut up--”

“Your disrespect for Islam and the messenger of Allah is obvious,” he cut me off.

“What made you say that?”

“What else should I think of a man who wants to shut the naats down or the volume to be turned down of the words of Allah? Quran is full of warnings against those who may appear Muslim, but whose sole purpose is to mislead the believers--a painful doom awaits them on the Day of Judgement,” he said, and then he recited something in Arabic to that effect.

“I’ve made three requests to you, and according to Islam one is then free to take whatever action one deems appropriate,” I said, standing up.

He remained seated and kept swiping his beard with one hand and tapping his knee with the other.

11 - I came home and to avoid bumping into my mother, I went straight to my room; and when I heard my mother calling my name, I was already floating in a dream world.

I awoke after sunset and joined my family for supper. My mother asked me if I needed anything and how I was doing handling the noise. I reassured her that everything was fine, and that I was adjusting to the loudspeakers rather well. After having supper I went to my room and sat down to revise my schedule. I'd already lost two straight nights to the imam. Something had to be done.

I prepared myself to ignore the songs, no matter how loud or how long they were to be played.

With a determination bordering on madness, I studied through the trahvees till midnight; and then I was rewarded with a nice hour-long silence, totally unexpected. At one in the morning, the speakers squeaked on. I imagined his fingers pressing the ‘play’ buttons.

He defied my imagination once more. He sang live. A brand new naat at that--out of tune, but live and loud as hell.

He was on his third consecutive naat when, unable to sustain my concentration, I put my book down. By the time he was on his fifth one, he began rendering in free-style.  I, grudgingly, admired his devotion.

The naats continued to pour out without a pause till sehri, turning my concentration into hopeless pieces of  junk floating in space aimlessly. I tried various mental games to distract myself, but without any success. At one point, I took my scientific calculator out and calculated the amount of swaab I'd earned on my third night by multiplying the approximate number of residents of the town who were sound asleep, oblivious to this audible-Constant emanating from the house of Allah by a factor of seventy, the usual increment for the month of Ramadan; and then multiplying the resultant figure with the speed of sound. The result turned out to be Infinity.

I struggled with my studies off and on till four in the morning, feeling like an old truck whose carburetor needed a cleaning. My mother got up for the sehri preparations. She brought my breakfast to my room, carrying in a tray.

“You are studying too hard,” she said, handing me the tray of food. “You should take some rest.”

“I’m trying,” I said, “but I’m not sure if I would do well in the exam.”

“You’ll do just fine,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

-----------------------------------

It was quiet after dawn. In the next couple of hours I finished the chapter on Sound. The next chapter was on Light.

The twilight of dawn turned into a bright morning. Resisting sleep which had started to roll over me in waves, I struggled to stay alert by writing down notes and drinking several cups of black coffee. For some reason the images of Rocky kept popping in my head.

12 - At ten in the morning, my eyes began to lose focus, and my head, as if filled with lead, kept drifting sideways before settling over my chest. Putting my books down, I got up and stretched my back. Thinking that a quick stroll would freshen me up, I left the house, heading for the Main Bazaar.  As I passed in front of Jamia Masjid, I remembered my last meeting with the imam. An urge to see him snarled within me, its futility obvious. The mosque appeared empty since it was too early for the zuhr prayer.

Good time to catch him alone--Maybe I should just let it go since it’ll only make him angry--But he may change his mind this time; you never know until you try.

Pondering over these contradictory thoughts, I continued to walk, passing the main gate of the mosque. A few feet down the gate, I stopped, eyeing an opening in the wall, a narrow stairway going up. Blue sky showed through the opening at its top end, flushed with the rooftop of the mosque. I took the steps, my shoulders touching its sidewalls. Halfway up, I changed my mind and came back down.

Across the street, sitting upright on a wooden plank, his fat knees bare through his dhoti, sat Latif halvaee, the sweetmeat seller. Holding an iron rod the size of a lance, he stirred a huge saucer-shaped pan of milk, a stove underneath hissing away a blue flame. He shot me a curious glance, as he rocked back and forth, as if rowing a boat. Waving at him, I grinned and turned around to climb back up.

The stairs led me to the sprawling roof of the mosque. The hujra of the imam, a cube of concrete, stood in one corner of the roof overlooking the bazaar. Beyond the hujra stood a pair of minarets, and gracing their tops were four pairs of bell-shaped speakers, two on each minaret, positioned to spread the sound 360-degrees. One of the pairs, darker and older than the rest, was slumped, facing down into the courtyard of the adjacent house that belonged to Master Mohammad Din, my ex-Urdu teacher. I remembered how the students in his class had to repeat their answers several times when he would ask them a question.

He must be completely deaf by now.

I walked towards the hujra and stood in front of its shut door, its unpainted wood furrowed with aging. Upon listening to the rhythmic snoring of the imam, my body temperature began to rise. I tried to think of my next move, but my mind refused to cooperate.

I knocked at the door, feeling a pounding in my chest.

The snoring stopped.

I waited. The snoring started again, this time with a different frequency.

I turned around to head back towards the stairs, but instead found myself taking a sidestep, standing next to the door, and giving it a sustained knocking. My ears felt burning hot as if smoke coming out them.

What the hell I’m doing?

“Who is it?” A voice rose from inside--more like a moan.

I knocked the door, more forcefully this time.

A few seconds later the door opened with a yank, and it took the imam another few to bring his eyes into a focus. “You!—How dare you!” He growled, his face twitching. “Do you realize that you’re knocking like a mad man, trying to break the door?”

“I’m here to talk to you,” I said, moving a step closer to him, looking straight in his eyes. Images of Rocky reeled past me in a flash.

He grabbed my collar, snarling. “I am done with you.” His eyes were red, the soot smearing his orbits.

“Take your hands off me.” I clenched my fists, my breath deep and fast.

He let my collar go. “Now get lost,” he roared, pressing his index finger on my chest, his nostrils flaring, his nail digging into my skin like a nail. “DO NOT ever bring your dirty face in the mosque again--you son of a kafir!”

Without saying a word, I grabbed his collar with both hands, and pushed him back with such force and speed that it sent his arms waving in the air, like a swimmer doing back strokes. “How dare you call my father a kafir?” I roared.

The look of bewilderment on his face deepened when his buttocks hit the windowsill, cut low in the wall behind him on the far end of the room, making the window fling open into the bazaar below. Keeping a firm grip on his collar, I pushed him further. He held my wrists and tried to break my grip on his collar. And it was then, mustering all my strength I gave him a another thrust, bending his torso backward through the opening of the window. Leaning on him, I pressed him down, my feet firmly planted on the floor next to his.

“You have raised your hand on the imam of Jamia Masjid,” he shouted. “You are now wajib ul qatle.” Specks of foam flew out of his mouth, landing on my face.

“I’m going to throw you down,” I shouted, pressing his chest with the point of my elbow.

“Help! Help!” he screamed, turning his head around, hoping that a passer-by might look up upon hearing his screams.

“Shut up!” I said.

“Help! Oh, people your imam is being desecrated by the forces of evil,” he yelled.

It was halvaee Latif who spotted us first suspending precariously from the window a story up--at the time he was weighing his famous carrot-halva in his infamous hand-held scale for a child customer. Upon seeing us, his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and his brows shot up to his hairline. He recoiled from his seat like a compressed spring into the air, still holding the scale that had weights on one side and the halva on the other. The abrupt upward thrust of his body unwound his dhoti from his waist. Uttering a groan, he released the scale from his grip and groped for the falling cloth, which had already crossed his hairline under the fold of his bulging belly; the scale, along with halva and weights, fell into the pan with a splash and disappeared from sight. Fumbling with his dhoti around his waist, he jumped onto the street, and standing in the middle of the bazaar he started to shout and wave his arms in the air, as if trying to stop traffic on a highway.

The imam screamed for help louder upon realizing that we had been spotted. Keeping my weight on him the same, I watched a gathering crowd of shopkeepers and passers-by down in the bazaar. In the next instant a few of them rushed towards the steps while the others watched, their mouths open, their eyes transfixed.

A moment later, I heard them entering the hujra behind my back. Someone grabbed my waist and pulled me inside. A couple of men got hold of the imam and extracted him back in the room. Breathless, he kept blurting: “Wajib ul qatle.”

I felt suffocated, for the room was small and occupied by about a dozen people. I waited for someone to hit me, but no one came forward.

“What you did was not nice,” Latif halvaee said. “You are in a big trouble now.”

Keeping silent I watched the imam who was being tended by three men. He looked beaten up, though I'd no recollection of hitting him with my fist. His eyes looked bloodshot and his face all blotchy with soot. He raised both arms as his torn shirt was being taken off. His naked torso shook which made his head nod, and then someone wrapped a bed-sheet around the sorry droop of his bony shoulders.

In the hushed air of the hujra, the faces had a vacant look, the pair of eyeballs playing pin-pong within their sockets.

“I’ll wait for your singing tonight,” I said, looking sternly towards the imam, my breath calm. He stared at the floor, muttering: ‘May Allah protect me from Shaitaan.’ He looked in my eyes and immediately turned his gaze away. “Wajib ul qatle,” he said meekly.

I proceeded towards the door barred by the bodies, looking straight ahead, for the slightest sign of weakness on my part could cost me dearly. The bodies parted away giving me an opening. Maintaining a calm pace, I came down the stairs of the mosque, and as I started walking towards my house with slow and deliberate steps, I could feel the prick of stares on my back, a legion throwing arrows dipped in poison.

I knew something terrible had happened, which would lead to an even more terrible outcome.

- On my third night in Daska Jamia Masjid went wild again with the Hindi tunes once the trahvees were over. At 2.00 am, finding it impossible to concentrate on my studies, I sneaked out of my house. In the deserted streets the naat boomed even more loudly, bouncing off the downed shutters. Within a few minutes I was inside Jamia Masjid--its dome, tucked in between its minarets like a giant woofer, seemed vibrating.

After taking my shoes off I crossed the courtyard, stopping at the entrance of the prayer hall. From where I stood, the interior, lit by the fluorescent tubelights, looked drab. I stepped inside expecting to find the imam, glued to the microphone, somewhere at the far end, but there was no one inside. I spotted the microphone placed within the prayer niche, its arm swiveled all the way down to the floor and held in front what appeared to be a tape-recorder. Incredulous, I walked over to the prayer niche and knelt on all four to see if it indeed was a cassette player, my cheek pressed against the imam’s prayer mat. The spools rolled a Sony 120 tape, smoothly and effortlessly, the naat now hitting my eardrum directly from the tape.

A wave of anger bolted me back to my feet. I rushed out of the prayer hall, my fists clenched. From the courtyard, I looked up towards the sleeping quarter of the imam, the hujra, located a flight of stairs up on the roof. It was so loud that I could have blasted his hujra with heavy artillery and not a soul would wake up.

My blood started to heat up, my heartbeat accelerating. Gritting my teeth I climbed up the stairs and stood at his door, mulling over my next move. I wanted to kick the door open, but something held me back.

By the time I sneaked back in my house, I knew what my next step would be.

9 - In the morning it took me less than an hour to put together a delegation comprising three students from my neighborhood. Although they studied in the local college, they’re preparing for the same exam. I'd known them from my high school days. They were happy to accompany me to the office of the Assistant Commissioner of Daska.

The AC, a heavyset, bald man in his fifties, hunched over a file, raised his bushy brows as we were ushered into his office. The room smelled of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave lotion. Pushing his gold-rimmed glasses back up on his nose, he gestured us to sit down across from his vast desk littered with papers, and in its center, next to a pen-holder, a tiny flag of Pakistan hoisted on top of a cracked base, the size of a paperweight, held together by a clear tape.

Without saying a word, he listened to me, his knuckles supporting his chin, his attention unwavering. His face broke into a smile when I told him about the tape-recorder playing naats.

“Sir, you have to help us,” I said.

“How?” he said, his brows smooth. “What do you think I should do to help you?”

“By limiting the use of loudspeakers beyond trahvees,” I said. “Sir, I think it’s very reasonable, for we’re letting them use the speakers till midnight anyway.”

“Easier said than done.” He scratched his temple with his index finger. “I understand your plight. And I know perfectly well that you are asking me to intervene on your behalf using my office--but let me tell you young man: You have no idea how sensitive this issue is. If I do what you’ve asked me to do, I’ll be offending a lot of people. In no time the ban on the loudspeakers of the mosques will become a religious issue--and the next thing you know, it will have become a major political issue.”

“I understand, sir. Perhaps we’ll have to figure a way on our own to deal with this issue,” I said, getting up from the chair. “Would that be fine with you, sir, if we ?”

“Please be very very careful what you do,” he said, standing up and shaking our hands warmly. “People don’t hesitate to kill when they feel their faith is under attack. Don’t forget, we are very emotional people when it comes to religion.”

“Thanks for listening.” I said, shaking his hand.

As we all came out of the Assistant Commissioner's office, one of the students said to me: “My advice: stay put—you‘ll get used to the noise in a few days. It’s not easy but it’ll become tolerable.”

“You may be right?” I said. “But, unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of a few days at my disposal.”

“You have no choice,” he said.

“Help comes to those who try,” I said.

I came home feeling exhausted and went straight to my room, my books scattered around my room like shot birds fallen from the sky. I set up the alarm for 1:30 pm, and as soon as I hit the bed I was out.

10 - At 2.00 pm I was back in the courtyard of Jamia Masjid, the sun warming the back of my neck. I waited for the prayer of zuhr to be over. I entered the prayer hall once the faithful started coming out. I sat down at my usual place, a few feet away from the imam. After the handshake with the last person, the imam abruptly turned around, as if he’d sensed my presence, and gave me a piercing look, his eyes black with soot. I stared back at him, keeping a calm smile on my face. Failing to stare me down he closed his eyes and began swaying his body, his mouth muttering a prayer.

“Last night I was in the mosque to see you,” I said. “You weren’t here, so I left.”

“What time?” he said. He opened his eyes and became still.

“Exactly sixty minutes before you woke up to change the side of the tape,” I said.

He remained quiet, combing his beard with his fingers, his eyeballs jerking from one side to the other.

“I then went upstairs to see you in your hujra, but upon hearing your snores I changed my mind,” I made up the bit about snoring, since it wasn’t possible to hear someone snoring in that noise. “I don’t bother people when they’re sleeping.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “We’ve had two meetings already--What’s the purpose of your visit now?”

“I came with a hope that my third request may work. You never know unless you try till the end.”

“The fact is that one who hears the praise of Muhammad,” he paused, and after muttering the salutation, raised his fingertips to his lips and then to his eyes. Sliding his palms over his beard he resumed. “That person automatically gets the swaab.”

“Obviously you don’t think my request has any merit,” I said.

“Like you’ve spent ten or fifteen years of your life studying the worldly knowledge, I’ve, too, spent a lifetime studying Deen in a top madrassaa. For a true Muslim the study of religion is far more important than what you learn in a college--things which make you forget your Deen.” Fixing his gaze on me he kept on sweeping his beard with the hollow of his palm, his brows contracted.

“Do you realize that there may be sick or old people living in the neighborhood, and that they may not be able to get proper sleep because of your loudspeakers blaring at full volume all night long?” I stared back at him.

“How come no one has ever complained before?” he said.

“Because people have chosen to remain shut up--”

“Your disrespect for Islam and the messenger of Allah is obvious,” he cut me off.

“What made you say that?”

“What else should I think of a man who wants to shut the naats down or the volume to be turned down of the words of Allah? Quran is full of warnings against those who may appear Muslim, but whose sole purpose is to mislead the believers--a painful doom awaits them on the Day of Judgement,” he said, and then he recited something in Arabic to that effect.

“I’ve made three requests to you, and according to Islam one is then free to take whatever action one deems appropriate,” I said, standing up.

He remained seated and kept swiping his beard with one hand and tapping his knee with the other.

11 - I came home and to avoid bumping into my mother, I went straight to my room; and when I heard my mother calling my name, I was already floating in a dream world.

I awoke after sunset and joined my family for supper. My mother asked me if I needed anything and how I was doing handling the noise. I reassured her that everything was fine, and that I was adjusting to the loudspeakers rather well. After having supper I went to my room and sat down to revise my schedule. I'd already lost two straight nights to the imam. Something had to be done.

I prepared myself to ignore the songs, no matter how loud or how long they were to be played.

With a determination bordering on madness, I studied through the trahvees till midnight; and then I was rewarded with a nice hour-long silence, totally unexpected. At one in the morning, the speakers squeaked on. I imagined his fingers pressing the ‘play’ buttons.

He defied my imagination once more. He sang live. A brand new naat at that--out of tune, but live and loud as hell.

He was on his third consecutive naat when, unable to sustain my concentration, I put my book down. By the time he was on his fifth one, he began rendering in free-style.  I, grudgingly, admired his devotion.

The naats continued to pour out without a pause till sehri, turning my concentration into hopeless pieces of  junk floating in space aimlessly. I tried various mental games to distract myself, but without any success. At one point, I took my scientific calculator out and calculated the amount of swaab I'd earned on my third night by multiplying the approximate number of residents of the town who were sound asleep, oblivious to this audible-Constant emanating from the house of Allah by a factor of seventy, the usual increment for the month of Ramadan; and then multiplying the resultant figure with the speed of sound. The result turned out to be Infinity.

I struggled with my studies off and on till four in the morning, feeling like an old truck whose carburetor needed a cleaning. My mother got up for the sehri preparations. She brought my breakfast to my room, carrying in a tray.

“You are studying too hard,” she said, handing me the tray of food. “You should take some rest.”

“I’m trying,” I said, “but I’m not sure if I would do well in the exam.”

“You’ll do just fine,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”

-----------------------------------

It was quiet after dawn. In the next couple of hours I finished the chapter on Sound. The next chapter was on Light.

The twilight of dawn turned into a bright morning. Resisting sleep which had started to roll over me in waves, I struggled to stay alert by writing down notes and drinking several cups of black coffee. For some reason the images of Rocky kept popping in my head.

12 - At ten in the morning, my eyes began to lose focus, and my head, as if filled with lead, kept drifting sideways before settling over my chest. Putting my books down, I got up and stretched my back. Thinking that a quick stroll would freshen me up, I left the house, heading for the Main Bazaar.  As I passed in front of Jamia Masjid, I remembered my last meeting with the imam. An urge to see him snarled within me, its futility obvious. The mosque appeared empty since it was too early for the zuhr prayer.

Good time to catch him alone--Maybe I should just let it go since it’ll only make him angry--But he may change his mind this time; you never know until you try.

Pondering over these contradictory thoughts, I continued to walk, passing the main gate of the mosque. A few feet down the gate, I stopped, eyeing an opening in the wall, a narrow stairway going up. Blue sky showed through the opening at its top end, flushed with the rooftop of the mosque. I took the steps, my shoulders touching its sidewalls. Halfway up, I changed my mind and came back down.

Across the street, sitting upright on a wooden plank, his fat knees bare through his dhoti, sat Latif halvaee, the sweetmeat seller. Holding an iron rod the size of a lance, he stirred a huge saucer-shaped pan of milk, a stove underneath hissing away a blue flame. He shot me a curious glance, as he rocked back and forth, as if rowing a boat. Waving at him, I grinned and turned around to climb back up.

The stairs led me to the sprawling roof of the mosque. The hujra of the imam, a cube of concrete, stood in one corner of the roof overlooking the bazaar. Beyond the hujra stood a pair of minarets, and gracing their tops were four pairs of bell-shaped speakers, two on each minaret, positioned to spread the sound 360-degrees. One of the pairs, darker and older than the rest, was slumped, facing down into the courtyard of the adjacent house that belonged to Master Mohammad Din, my ex-Urdu teacher. I remembered how the students in his class had to repeat their answers several times when he would ask them a question.

He must be completely deaf by now.

I walked towards the hujra and stood in front of its shut door, its unpainted wood furrowed with aging. Upon listening to the rhythmic snoring of the imam, my body temperature began to rise. I tried to think of my next move, but my mind refused to cooperate.

I knocked at the door, feeling a pounding in my chest.

The snoring stopped.

I waited. The snoring started again, this time with a different frequency.

I turned around to head back towards the stairs, but instead found myself taking a sidestep, standing next to the door, and giving it a sustained knocking. My ears felt burning hot as if smoke coming out them.

What the hell I’m doing?

“Who is it?” A voice rose from inside--more like a moan.

I knocked the door, more forcefully this time.

A few seconds later the door opened with a yank, and it took the imam another few to bring his eyes into a focus. “You!—How dare you!” He growled, his face twitching. “Do you realize that you’re knocking like a mad man, trying to break the door?”

“I’m here to talk to you,” I said, moving a step closer to him, looking straight in his eyes. Images of Rocky reeled past me in a flash.

He grabbed my collar, snarling. “I am done with you.” His eyes were red, the soot smearing his orbits.

“Take your hands off me.” I clenched my fists, my breath deep and fast.

He let my collar go. “Now get lost,” he roared, pressing his index finger on my chest, his nostrils flaring, his nail digging into my skin like a nail. “DO NOT ever bring your dirty face in the mosque again--you son of a kafir!”

Without saying a word, I grabbed his collar with both hands, and pushed him back with such force and speed that it sent his arms waving in the air, like a swimmer doing back strokes. “How dare you call my father a kafir?” I roared.

The look of bewilderment on his face deepened when his buttocks hit the windowsill, cut low in the wall behind him on the far end of the room, making the window fling open into the bazaar below. Keeping a firm grip on his collar, I pushed him further. He held my wrists and tried to break my grip on his collar. And it was then, mustering all my strength I gave him a another thrust, bending his torso backward through the opening of the window. Leaning on him, I pressed him down, my feet firmly planted on the floor next to his.

“You have raised your hand on the imam of Jamia Masjid,” he shouted. “You are now wajib ul qatle.” Specks of foam flew out of his mouth, landing on my face.

“I’m going to throw you down,” I shouted, pressing his chest with the point of my elbow.

“Help! Help!” he screamed, turning his head around, hoping that a passer-by might look up upon hearing his screams.

“Shut up!” I said.

“Help! Oh, people your imam is being desecrated by the forces of evil,” he yelled.

It was halvaee Latif who spotted us first suspending precariously from the window a story up--at the time he was weighing his famous carrot-halva in his infamous hand-held scale for a child customer. Upon seeing us, his jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and his brows shot up to his hairline. He recoiled from his seat like a compressed spring into the air, still holding the scale that had weights on one side and the halva on the other. The abrupt upward thrust of his body unwound his dhoti from his waist. Uttering a groan, he released the scale from his grip and groped for the falling cloth, which had already crossed his hairline under the fold of his bulging belly; the scale, along with halva and weights, fell into the pan with a splash and disappeared from sight. Fumbling with his dhoti around his waist, he jumped onto the street, and standing in the middle of the bazaar he started to shout and wave his arms in the air, as if trying to stop traffic on a highway.

The imam screamed for help louder upon realizing that we had been spotted. Keeping my weight on him the same, I watched a gathering crowd of shopkeepers and passers-by down in the bazaar. In the next instant a few of them rushed towards the steps while the others watched, their mouths open, their eyes transfixed.

A moment later, I heard them entering the hujra behind my back. Someone grabbed my waist and pulled me inside. A couple of men got hold of the imam and extracted him back in the room. Breathless, he kept blurting: “Wajib ul qatle.”

I felt suffocated, for the room was small and occupied by about a dozen people. I waited for someone to hit me, but no one came forward.

“What you did was not nice,” Latif halvaee said. “You are in a big trouble now.”

Keeping silent I watched the imam who was being tended by three men. He looked beaten up, though I'd no recollection of hitting him with my fist. His eyes looked bloodshot and his face all blotchy with soot. He raised both arms as his torn shirt was being taken off. His naked torso shook which made his head nod, and then someone wrapped a bed-sheet around the sorry droop of his bony shoulders.

In the hushed air of the hujra, the faces had a vacant look, the pair of eyeballs playing pin-pong within their sockets.

“I’ll wait for your singing tonight,” I said, looking sternly towards the imam, my breath calm. He stared at the floor, muttering: ‘May Allah protect me from Shaitaan.’ He looked in my eyes and immediately turned his gaze away. “Wajib ul qatle,” he said meekly.

I proceeded towards the door barred by the bodies, looking straight ahead, for the slightest sign of weakness on my part could cost me dearly. The bodies parted away giving me an opening. Maintaining a calm pace, I came down the stairs of the mosque, and as I started walking towards my house with slow and deliberate steps, I could feel the prick of stares on my back, a legion throwing arrows dipped in poison.

I knew something terrible had happened, which would lead to an even more terrible outcome.

I chained the door as soon as I entered my house. The alleyway, shaded from the sun by the canopy of grapevine, looked as if filled with a green haze, a corridor lined with bricks of memories through a transparent time, my nose filling with a familiar odor, my mind a colorful blur of familial memories.

Leaning against the door as I grappled with what had just happened my lips felt warm and sticky, my mouth salty. A drop of blood fell on the back of my hand, and then another one, and then it gushed out of my nose. I didn’t recall getting my nose hit. I had no pain.

The hemorrhage was brisk. Blood streaked over my neck and soaked the collar of my shirt. It filled my throat as soon as I pinched my nose.

I squatted besides the grapevine’s stem, letting my nose pour over its trunk, and I watched as my blood snaked over its bark towards its roots, into the soil, soaking it with the World Best Fertilizer, dousing my thoughts with the color of my grandmother’s tales, the mottled crimson at sunset, the color of the ooze of the still warm bodies dumped in a ditch, the color of the flame devouring stabbed bodies on that Friday.

Since the death of my father, we had not performed sacrifice on Eid, for the joy once filled this house had departed along with the departure of his soul.

I sat holding onto the stem. Gradually the gush turned into a trickle, and the trickle into a string, hung from the tip of my nose like a dyed thread of silk, glistening. Wiping the blood off my nose I stood up. The light seemed to have dimmed, making the colors lose their luster. I felt drained. The congelation at the back of my throat took several noisy attempts to get dislodged.

l heard my mother’s voice calling my name.

She appeared at the far end of Gali, as if at the other end of time. She looked stunned as soon as she saw me, and she raced towards me, breaking through the phantom of time still there under that grapevine.

“Are you hurt?” she said, her breath agitated, her face pale.

Holding onto my nose I shook my head.

“Did you get into a fight?”

I moved my head up and down.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Yes, but--”

“With whom?--When?” She cut me off.

“It’s from my nose,” I said, releasing my nose. “Has nothing do with the fight.”

“Just look at yourself!” she said, pointing at my shirt. “Is this all your blood? You used to have terrible nosebleeds when you’re little--Take your shirt off.”

Without saying a word I started to walk in order to avoid her glaring eyes.

“Tell me what happened.” Who did you fight with?” she demanded, walking by my side.

“With the imam of Jamia Masjid.”

“What!?” she halted in her steps.

“I pushed him.” I stopped walking and looked at her, and then at the uneven bricks under her feet. I wondered if they stored memory or recorded time.

“Why?--Why did you push him?”

“He cursed my father, calling him a kafir.”

“Where were you at the time when that happened?”

“Outside his hujra.”

“What were you doing there?”

I remained quiet.

“Who were you seen by?”

“Please. Let me change my shirt first.” I resumed walking.

“Who heard him call your father a kafir besides you?”

“No one.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” she demanded, as we entered the sehen, the lines on her forehead deepening.

The moment I opened my mouth, the loudspeakers of Jamia Masjid were tapped. An announcement blared: Today, a short while ago, the respected imam of Jamia Masjid was assaulted, as He was resting in his hujra. The desecration of our repected imam was witnessed by dozens of people. We demand severe punishment for the aggressor. His evil action has called forth an exemplary punishment.

The announcement was repeated several times.

My mother looked at me wide-eyed, her face losing color. “What were you doing there in his hujra?

“I can explain everything,” I said, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my shirt. “I--”

“Go to your room,” she commanded. “Go--right now, and stay there. I’ll bring you a new shirt.”

13 - As I sat in my room, waiting for my mother, the announcement was repeated again. Holding a clean shirt in one hand and a wet towel on the other my mother entered the room--her eyes, a balancing bubble, trying to stay poised in the center.

“Did you raise your hand on the imam?” she asked, wiping blood off my face with the towel.

“I didn’t hit him--I pushed him,” I said. The announcements had started to make my stomach queasy. “He was the first to grab my collar--I was about to leave when he called me the son of a kafir, and---”

Someone knocked at the front door. My heart sank when the door was pushed in, the chain rattled but held.

“Do not come out of this room unless I tell you to,” she said. “I think they are here.”

The announcer in the mosque seemed to have stepped off, leaving the microphone on--several people could be heard talking simultaneously. And then someone took the microphone: On behalf of the imam, we ask the faithful to congregate in Jamia Masjid as of now. We will hold a protest march to the house of the boy who profaned our imam.

The knock, on the door, was sustained and forceful this time, reminding me of my own knocking at the door of the imam’s hujra.

“I’m deeply sorry that this is happening. Please forgive me,” I said, feeling the noose tightening around my neck. “Please go and open the door--otherwise they're going to break it.”

“You stay here--don’t move from this room,” she said. She looked up taking a deep breath, her lips moving in a prayer. Then she covered her head with the shawl she had on, and hurried away.

I sensed a force building around the house, the funnel of a cyclone.

The slamming on the door stopped.

I put the clean shirt on and pressed my ear to the door. Soon the sehen was filled with voices. I could make out four male voices interspersed by my mother’s. I recognized two of them: the Khawja brothers, the main donors to Jamia Masjid. Being part of the administration of the mosque they had been running its financial affairs for years. They had been close to my father. They had even supported his political campaign. The other two voices were unfamiliar to me.

I couldn’t make out what, exactly, was being said. The brothers spoke politely and were frequently interrupted by the stern and angry tones of the other two men. From time to time, everyone talked at the same time, the volume gradually increasing, interrupted by pauses, and then the steady and polite voices of my father’s friends filling those pauses.

I felt the presence of my father in the sehen.

Then they left and the house fell silent.

I opened the door, walked to the sehen, and found my mother sitting on a chair, her head buried in her palms.

“What happened?” I said. I felt dizzy. I must have lost a lot of blood.

“People are gathering in the mosque; they plan to march here,” she said, staring past me. The lines seemed to have sunk deeper on her whitened face.

“Who the other two people were besides the Khawja brothers?”

“One was Haji Momin, the one who owns that big shoe-store at the end of Main Bazaar--”

“And the other?”

“The other was the imam of a Brailvi’s mosque from the older part of the town.”

“I heard them talking angrily with you,” I said. “How dare--”

“Had it not been for the presence of your father’s friends, they were prepared to take you by force--they had their men stationed outside the house, waiting.

“You think we’re going to be alright?” I said, the sink in my stomach draining my remaining strength away.

“In the house they’re calmed down by the Khawja brothers. They’ve all gone over to Jamia Masjid now, and I’m not sure if they’d do the same to the crowd already gathered in the mosque,” she said.

Without saying anything, I dashed to the second story of my house, springing over the steps like a cat, filled with a sudden burst of energy. I ran across the roof to get in one of the rooms whose windows faced Jamia Masjid, remembering that one of the windows had a hole in its panel.

What I saw through the hole made my heart skip a beat. In front of the mosque’s entrance, a crowd had gathered, blocking the pedestrian traffic, chanting: The meaning of Pakistan, no God but Allah; the same chant the crowd had uttered two years ago.

I can run and disappear, and they’ll never catch me. All I’ve to do is to climb over the wall separating my house from my neighbor’s. I’ve done that hundreds of time as a child, running after kites--and jump onto the roof of the neighbor’s house. And from there I can just keep going over the connected rooftops and I’m gone.

I withdrew from the window.

But what about my mother?

I looked though the crack again. I saw four men in front of the crowd, their backs towards my house, their arms held up in the air. I knew they were the same four men who’d been to my house. One of the Khawja brothers started addressing the crowd. He was interrupted time and again by shouts and hoots. He’d raise his arms, his palms facing the crowd. He’d wait for them to quieten down. After having delivered his speech, he stepped back.

The chanting swelled over the crowd.

The second person stepped forward and began addressing the crowd.

This must be the shoe-store owner, Haji Momin.

The crowd listened to him--this time without shouts--chanting from time to time.

Standing next to the speaker was an elderly man with a long, white beard. He stepped forward when Haji Momin ended his speech, and began addressing the crowd

This must be the imam of the Brailvi’s mosque from the older part of the town.

The chanting, which interrupted the imam’s speech few times, now subdued. With each passing minute, it grew dimmer, and then the crowd began to disperse. The imam stopped speaking and stood with the other three men facing the crowd. Within a few minutes the crowd had vanished.

I ran downstairs and saw my mother sitting on her prayer mat, holding her hands up, her eyes closed, her body swaying.

“They’ve left--They’ve gone--We’re going to be okay--I saw them leave with my own eyes.”

“I just pledged to say one thousand nafals to thank Allah if He saves your life,” she said, taking the shawl off her head.

“You should have thought about your knees,” I said.

 

14 - That day, I stayed inside the house the whole day. The night came and after the customary prayer of trahvee, the loudspeakers of Jamia Masjid didn’t hit the airwaves. They remained silent for the rest of the night--not even the wake-up calls were blurted out.

After going over the remaining few pages of the chapter on Evolution, I proceeded to the Mandelian’ laws governing the genetics of inheritance. Then in the lavish stillness of the twilight of dawn, I studied Properties of Light, and by the time the first ray of light hit my window, I was done understanding the basics of Light, too.

Closing my books I let myself float into sleep.

---------------------------------------------------------

My mother awoke me around 2.00 in the afternoon.

“We’ve some visitors. They’d like to see you,” she said. “Wash up--make sure to comb your hair.”

“Is everything fine?” I asked, bolting up from the bed.

“Go and find out for yourself,” she said, her face expressionless. I have them sit in the drawing-room.’

After taking a quick shower, and putting on my faded jeans and a pressed sky-blue shirt, I entered the drawing-room, bursting with curiosity.

Four men, each with neatly trimmed beards and white skullcaps, dressed in starched white clothes, sat on the sofas expectantly, their mouths held in a persistent stretch, their eyes glowing with affection. They all stood up when I entered the room. The room smelled of a combination of Detol and Lifebuoy soap. From the style of their beards, and the way the hair on the back of their necks were cut, I could tell they were not Brailvis. One by one they shook my hand, and then we all sat down.

The eldest among them cleared his throat and said, “We’re from Wahab Masjid, sent by Imam Abdul Wahab--We’re here to invite you, on behalf of our imam sahib, to join our mosque. Everybody in Daska knows what happened yesterday.” He paused, and looked at me as if trying to read my thoughts.

Since I had been a child I never liked going to Wahab Masjid. I had taken Wahabees to be utterly boring, stern, dry, and their imam to be a terrible storyteller. They hated the stories of saints and their miracles, all the juicy stuff that I loved, the bread and butter of Brailvis.

“Sure, I’d love to do that,” I said, grinning and thinking what could be the best possible way to end this meeting as soon as possible.

Luckily, they didn’t take long, and I, too, didn’t have to offer them any refreshments, thanks to Ramadan. They were in a hurry themselves to get back to their mosque for zuhr.

I was seeing the Wahabi delegate off at my doorsteps when I saw Master Mohammad Din rushing towards me, his face a hairy crop of white as if he hadn’t shaved for a few days, his typical look.

I greeted him and, out of politeness, invited him to come in the house.

“You’ve to come with me,” he said. His eyes peering at me from behind his thick pair of glasses, the same squarish black framed glasses that he had been having on when I first saw him a decade ago. “My mother’s been wanting to see you.”

I didn’t know his mother was still alive. He himself looked well above seventy.

“Some other time, Master Sahib,” I said. His house was right next to Jamia Masjid. It was too soon to venture out in that direction.

“Listen to me carefully,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. Placing his hand on my shoulder, he brought his face next to mine. “No one can touch you if you’re with me--come, let’s go.” He gave me a tug.

I walked by his side towards his house as he kept his hand on my shoulder. We had barely taken a few steps when we bumped into two of my friends from my neighborhood, the students who had accompanied me to the office of the Assistant Commissioner, their faces beaming; and without saying a word they patted my back.

As we resumed walking many of the shopkeepers descended from their shops and began shaking hands with me, their faces jubilant, and they, too, did not say a word; and as I moved passed them, another throng of well-wishers surrounded us. They patted my back, some gave me a vigorous handshake, some rubbed my head. I wished they would say something, but no one said anything, until an elderly man, supporting himself with a staff, winked at me and said, “May Allah protect you.”

The air felt light and bubbly as I walked past the entrance of Jamia Masjid, Master Sahib’s hand glued to my shoulder. I felt as if something simmering for a long time had been let out--like pus after an incision into a boil.

We entered the house of Master Muhammad Din--next door to the mosque. He led me through a cemented courtyard of his house, separated from that of the Jamia Masjid’s by a wall. I stopped in the middle of the courtyard and looked up. There they were: the pair of dark, bell-shaped loudspeakers, festooned on top of the minaret, looking down on me menacingly. I felt small in their presence.

At the far end of the courtyard, we entered a windowless room, separated from the main house by an empty ken of hens. Inside, a woman, a ragged bundle of bones and skin, lay on a charpoy as ancient and decrepit as the woman itself.

The room was damp, and smelled of old age; its floor cracked. Around the post of her charpoy, ants, hording tiny dots of something white, swarmed around a crack forming two lines. Up on the ceilings, around the corners hung spider-webs.

A net of fine wrinkles covered woman’s face, an otherworldly presence behind a web weaved by life itself, its creases frozen in time. Her baggy lower eyelids could have easily held a cupful of tears. Her eyes, bright like lamps, were the most striking feature on her face.

She took my hand in hers and gestured me to sit down.

Holding her cold, bony hand I sat down on the edge of her charpoy. She closed her eyes and began moving her lips in a silent prayer, and then she opened her eyes and blew her breath on my face, three times. Her eyes twinkled in the light streaming in the room through the door.

“How are you, Amma Ji?” I asked, gently pressing her hand. “Asslamu alaikum!”

Ignoring my greetings, she kept looking at me as if trying to read something off me. Then the smile on her face deepened and she squeezed my hand.

“She can’t hear a thing,” Master Mohammad Din said, as if shouting. He stood across the charpoy, watching both of us.

“Good for you,” I said aloud, looking in her eyes. Her hands had begun to warm up due to the heat of my hands.

“You’ve to scream in her ears,” he said. “Only then she may hear you. When I told her what had happened yesterday, she wanted me to go and fetch you; she wanted to give you her blessings--she believes you need her blessings to be safe---”

Before I'd the chance to say anything, the loudspeakers blasted with the azaan for zuhr, the sound so powerful that it made me shudder. I stood up plugging my ears with my fingertips and looked around reflexively, as if looking for a shelter, like the primitives did, from the thunder-god of the skies.

Master Sahib’s face cracked into a smile. The old woman’s face assumed a sudden seriousness, her eyes fixed on me, her lips moving. I unplugged my ears and brought my ear close to her lips. The sound of the azaan was so overpowering I couldn’t make out a single word that came out of her mouth. I stood back up, her face a mask of radiance, her eyes now cool and indifferent.

When the azaan came to an end, the ensuing silence felt deafening, until it was broken by Master Muhammad Din’s voice: “She was saying: ‘Only Allah makes it possible for a deaf like me to still hear azaan. It’s the only sound I hear, five times a day.’

I wondered for how long Master Sahib himself had been deaf, for one needed years, to live without the sense of hearing, before mastering the art of lip-reading.

“Allah works in mysterious ways,” I moved my lips without uttering a sound as I looked at her face, solemn as a rock, chiseled with age, covered by a membrane made of the fabric of life; and then her mouth cracked into a smile, as if she understood what I had just said. For a fleeting moment, as if a veil had been lifted within me, I saw that hers was the same face I had seen when I was five, on that starry night, looking up and shaking my father’s shoulder, and asking him: How God looks like?

It was the same face that rose like a moon when darkness fell upon a bright Friday, filling hearts with soot.

 

I returned to the hostel three days before the exam feeling confident, for I had managed to accomplish what I had set out to do. I entered my cubicle and turned the light on.

The spider had grown a big belly, the size of a walnut; it rested in the center of its silky hammock over my desk--under the bookshelves--its web now obscuring the poster of Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon completely.

I need to reclaim my desk space, my estate.

I picked an old shoe of mine lying under the desk, and started breaking the web with its toe-end. The spider lunged on the wall and started crawling towards the ceiling, too heavy to move fast. Shutting my eyes, I slammed it with sole of my shoe, smashing it flat on the wall. I opened my eyes and recoiled with fright. Hundreds of tiny spiderlings had come out from the ruptured belly of the mother, crawling in every direction on the wall, looking for a cover. I killed as many as I could, but they were agile and many managed to escape, into the hard-to-reach recesses.

 

The End

Copyright 2011 by author A. Asif. All rights reserved

I chained the door as soon as I entered my house. The alleyway, shaded from the sun by the canopy of grapevine, looked as if filled with a green haze, a corridor lined with bricks of memories through a transparent time, my nose filling with a familiar odor, my mind a colorful blur of familial memories.

Leaning against the door as I grappled with what had just happened my lips felt warm and sticky, my mouth salty. A drop of blood fell on the back of my hand, and then another one, and then it gushed out of my nose. I didn’t recall getting my nose hit. I had no pain.

The hemorrhage was brisk. Blood streaked over my neck and soaked the collar of my shirt. It filled my throat as soon as I pinched my nose.

I squatted besides the grapevine’s stem, letting my nose pour over its trunk, and I watched as my blood snaked over its bark towards its roots, into the soil, soaking it with the World Best Fertilizer, dousing my thoughts with the color of my grandmother’s tales, the mottled crimson at sunset, the color of the ooze of the still warm bodies dumped in a ditch, the color of the flame devouring stabbed bodies on that Friday.

Since the death of my father, we had not performed sacrifice on Eid, for the joy once filled this house had departed along with the departure of his soul.

I sat holding onto the stem. Gradually the gush turned into a trickle, and the trickle into a string, hung from the tip of my nose like a dyed thread of silk, glistening. Wiping the blood off my nose I stood up. The light seemed to have dimmed, making the colors lose their luster. I felt drained. The congelation at the back of my throat took several noisy attempts to get dislodged.

l heard my mother’s voice calling my name.

She appeared at the far end of Gali, as if at the other end of time. She looked stunned as soon as she saw me, and she raced towards me, breaking through the phantom of time still there under that grapevine.

“Are you hurt?” she said, her breath agitated, her face pale.

Holding onto my nose I shook my head.

“Did you get into a fight?”

I moved my head up and down.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Yes, but--”

“With whom?--When?” She cut me off.

“It’s from my nose,” I said, releasing my nose. “Has nothing do with the fight.”

“Just look at yourself!” she said, pointing at my shirt. “Is this all your blood? You used to have terrible nosebleeds when you’re little--Take your shirt off.”

Without saying a word I started to walk in order to avoid her glaring eyes.

“Tell me what happened.” Who did you fight with?” she demanded, walking by my side.

“With the imam of Jamia Masjid.”

“What!?” she halted in her steps.

“I pushed him.” I stopped walking and looked at her, and then at the uneven bricks under her feet. I wondered if they stored memory or recorded time.

“Why?--Why did you push him?”

“He cursed my father, calling him a kafir.”

“Where were you at the time when that happened?”

“Outside his hujra.”

“What were you doing there?”

I remained quiet.

“Who were you seen by?”

“Please. Let me change my shirt first.” I resumed walking.

“Who heard him call your father a kafir besides you?”

“No one.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” she demanded, as we entered the sehen, the lines on her forehead deepening.

The moment I opened my mouth, the loudspeakers of Jamia Masjid were tapped. An announcement blared: Today, a short while ago, the respected imam of Jamia Masjid was assaulted, as He was resting in his hujra. The desecration of our repected imam was witnessed by dozens of people. We demand severe punishment for the aggressor. His evil action has called forth an exemplary punishment.

The announcement was repeated several times.

My mother looked at me wide-eyed, her face losing color. “What were you doing there in his hujra?

“I can explain everything,” I said, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my shirt. “I--”

“Go to your room,” she commanded. “Go--right now, and stay there. I’ll bring you a new shirt.”

13 - As I sat in my room, waiting for my mother, the announcement was repeated again. Holding a clean shirt in one hand and a wet towel on the other my mother entered the room--her eyes, a balancing bubble, trying to stay poised in the center.

“Did you raise your hand on the imam?” she asked, wiping blood off my face with the towel.

“I didn’t hit him--I pushed him,” I said. The announcements had started to make my stomach queasy. “He was the first to grab my collar--I was about to leave when he called me the son of a kafir, and---”

Someone knocked at the front door. My heart sank when the door was pushed in, the chain rattled but held.

“Do not come out of this room unless I tell you to,” she said. “I think they are here.”

The announcer in the mosque seemed to have stepped off, leaving the microphone on--several people could be heard talking simultaneously. And then someone took the microphone: On behalf of the imam, we ask the faithful to congregate in Jamia Masjid as of now. We will hold a protest march to the house of the boy who profaned our imam.

The knock, on the door, was sustained and forceful this time, reminding me of my own knocking at the door of the imam’s hujra.

“I’m deeply sorry that this is happening. Please forgive me,” I said, feeling the noose tightening around my neck. “Please go and open the door--otherwise they're going to break it.”

“You stay here--don’t move from this room,” she said. She looked up taking a deep breath, her lips moving in a prayer. Then she covered her head with the shawl she had on, and hurried away.

I sensed a force building around the house, the funnel of a cyclone.

The slamming on the door stopped.

I put the clean shirt on and pressed my ear to the door. Soon the sehen was filled with voices. I could make out four male voices interspersed by my mother’s. I recognized two of them: the Khawja brothers, the main donors to Jamia Masjid. Being part of the administration of the mosque they had been running its financial affairs for years. They had been close to my father. They had even supported his political campaign. The other two voices were unfamiliar to me.

I couldn’t make out what, exactly, was being said. The brothers spoke politely and were frequently interrupted by the stern and angry tones of the other two men. From time to time, everyone talked at the same time, the volume gradually increasing, interrupted by pauses, and then the steady and polite voices of my father’s friends filling those pauses.

I felt the presence of my father in the sehen.

Then they left and the house fell silent.

I opened the door, walked to the sehen, and found my mother sitting on a chair, her head buried in her palms.

“What happened?” I said. I felt dizzy. I must have lost a lot of blood.

“People are gathering in the mosque; they plan to march here,” she said, staring past me. The lines seemed to have sunk deeper on her whitened face.

“Who the other two people were besides the Khawja brothers?”

“One was Haji Momin, the one who owns that big shoe-store at the end of Main Bazaar--”

“And the other?”

“The other was the imam of a Brailvi’s mosque from the older part of the town.”

“I heard them talking angrily with you,” I said. “How dare--”

“Had it not been for the presence of your father’s friends, they were prepared to take you by force--they had their men stationed outside the house, waiting.

“You think we’re going to be alright?” I said, the sink in my stomach draining my remaining strength away.

“In the house they’re calmed down by the Khawja brothers. They’ve all gone over to Jamia Masjid now, and I’m not sure if they’d do the same to the crowd already gathered in the mosque,” she said.

Without saying anything, I dashed to the second story of my house, springing over the steps like a cat, filled with a sudden burst of energy. I ran across the roof to get in one of the rooms whose windows faced Jamia Masjid, remembering that one of the windows had a hole in its panel.

What I saw through the hole made my heart skip a beat. In front of the mosque’s entrance, a crowd had gathered, blocking the pedestrian traffic, chanting: The meaning of Pakistan, no God but Allah; the same chant the crowd had uttered two years ago.

I can run and disappear, and they’ll never catch me. All I’ve to do is to climb over the wall separating my house from my neighbor’s. I’ve done that hundreds of time as a child, running after kites--and jump onto the roof of the neighbor’s house. And from there I can just keep going over the connected rooftops and I’m gone.

I withdrew from the window.

But what about my mother?

I looked though the crack again. I saw four men in front of the crowd, their backs towards my house, their arms held up in the air. I knew they were the same four men who’d been to my house. One of the Khawja brothers started addressing the crowd. He was interrupted time and again by shouts and hoots. He’d raise his arms, his palms facing the crowd. He’d wait for them to quieten down. After having delivered his speech, he stepped back.

The chanting swelled over the crowd.

The second person stepped forward and began addressing the crowd.

This must be the shoe-store owner, Haji Momin.

The crowd listened to him--this time without shouts--chanting from time to time.

Standing next to the speaker was an elderly man with a long, white beard. He stepped forward when Haji Momin ended his speech, and began addressing the crowd

This must be the imam of the Brailvi’s mosque from the older part of the town.

The chanting, which interrupted the imam’s speech few times, now subdued. With each passing minute, it grew dimmer, and then the crowd began to disperse. The imam stopped speaking and stood with the other three men facing the crowd. Within a few minutes the crowd had vanished.

I ran downstairs and saw my mother sitting on her prayer mat, holding her hands up, her eyes closed, her body swaying.

“They’ve left--They’ve gone--We’re going to be okay--I saw them leave with my own eyes.”

“I just pledged to say one thousand nafals to thank Allah if He saves your life,” she said, taking the shawl off her head.

“You should have thought about your knees,” I said.

 

14 - That day, I stayed inside the house the whole day. The night came and after the customary prayer of trahvee, the loudspeakers of Jamia Masjid didn’t hit the airwaves. They remained silent for the rest of the night--not even the wake-up calls were blurted out.

After going over the remaining few pages of the chapter on Evolution, I proceeded to the Mandelian’ laws governing the genetics of inheritance. Then in the lavish stillness of the twilight of dawn, I studied Properties of Light, and by the time the first ray of light hit my window, I was done understanding the basics of Light, too.

Closing my books I let myself float into sleep.

---------------------------------------------------------

My mother awoke me around 2.00 in the afternoon.

“We’ve some visitors. They’d like to see you,” she said. “Wash up--make sure to comb your hair.”

“Is everything fine?” I asked, bolting up from the bed.

“Go and find out for yourself,” she said, her face expressionless. I have them sit in the drawing-room.’

After taking a quick shower, and putting on my faded jeans and a pressed sky-blue shirt, I entered the drawing-room, bursting with curiosity.

Four men, each with neatly trimmed beards and white skullcaps, dressed in starched white clothes, sat on the sofas expectantly, their mouths held in a persistent stretch, their eyes glowing with affection. They all stood up when I entered the room. The room smelled of a combination of Detol and Lifebuoy soap. From the style of their beards, and the way the hair on the back of their necks were cut, I could tell they were not Brailvis. One by one they shook my hand, and then we all sat down.

The eldest among them cleared his throat and said, “We’re from Wahab Masjid, sent by Imam Abdul Wahab--We’re here to invite you, on behalf of our imam sahib, to join our mosque. Everybody in Daska knows what happened yesterday.” He paused, and looked at me as if trying to read my thoughts.

Since I had been a child I never liked going to Wahab Masjid. I had taken Wahabees to be utterly boring, stern, dry, and their imam to be a terrible storyteller. They hated the stories of saints and their miracles, all the juicy stuff that I loved, the bread and butter of Brailvis.

“Sure, I’d love to do that,” I said, grinning and thinking what could be the best possible way to end this meeting as soon as possible.

Luckily, they didn’t take long, and I, too, didn’t have to offer them any refreshments, thanks to Ramadan. They were in a hurry themselves to get back to their mosque for zuhr.

I was seeing the Wahabi delegate off at my doorsteps when I saw Master Mohammad Din rushing towards me, his face a hairy crop of white as if he hadn’t shaved for a few days, his typical look.

I greeted him and, out of politeness, invited him to come in the house.

“You’ve to come with me,” he said. His eyes peering at me from behind his thick pair of glasses, the same squarish black framed glasses that he had been having on when I first saw him a decade ago. “My mother’s been wanting to see you.”

I didn’t know his mother was still alive. He himself looked well above seventy.

“Some other time, Master Sahib,” I said. His house was right next to Jamia Masjid. It was too soon to venture out in that direction.

“Listen to me carefully,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. Placing his hand on my shoulder, he brought his face next to mine. “No one can touch you if you’re with me--come, let’s go.” He gave me a tug.

I walked by his side towards his house as he kept his hand on my shoulder. We had barely taken a few steps when we bumped into two of my friends from my neighborhood, the students who had accompanied me to the office of the Assistant Commissioner, their faces beaming; and without saying a word they patted my back.

As we resumed walking many of the shopkeepers descended from their shops and began shaking hands with me, their faces jubilant, and they, too, did not say a word; and as I moved passed them, another throng of well-wishers surrounded us. They patted my back, some gave me a vigorous handshake, some rubbed my head. I wished they would say something, but no one said anything, until an elderly man, supporting himself with a staff, winked at me and said, “May Allah protect you.”

The air felt light and bubbly as I walked past the entrance of Jamia Masjid, Master Sahib’s hand glued to my shoulder. I felt as if something simmering for a long time had been let out--like pus after an incision into a boil.

We entered the house of Master Muhammad Din--next door to the mosque. He led me through a cemented courtyard of his house, separated from that of the Jamia Masjid’s by a wall. I stopped in the middle of the courtyard and looked up. There they were: the pair of dark, bell-shaped loudspeakers, festooned on top of the minaret, looking down on me menacingly. I felt small in their presence.

At the far end of the courtyard, we entered a windowless room, separated from the main house by an empty ken of hens. Inside, a woman, a ragged bundle of bones and skin, lay on a charpoy as ancient and decrepit as the woman itself.

The room was damp, and smelled of old age; its floor cracked. Around the post of her charpoy, ants, hording tiny dots of something white, swarmed around a crack forming two lines. Up on the ceilings, around the corners hung spider-webs.

A net of fine wrinkles covered woman’s face, an otherworldly presence behind a web weaved by life itself, its creases frozen in time. Her baggy lower eyelids could have easily held a cupful of tears. Her eyes, bright like lamps, were the most striking feature on her face.

She took my hand in hers and gestured me to sit down.

Holding her cold, bony hand I sat down on the edge of her charpoy. She closed her eyes and began moving her lips in a silent prayer, and then she opened her eyes and blew her breath on my face, three times. Her eyes twinkled in the light streaming in the room through the door.

“How are you, Amma Ji?” I asked, gently pressing her hand. “Asslamu alaikum!”

Ignoring my greetings, she kept looking at me as if trying to read something off me. Then the smile on her face deepened and she squeezed my hand.

“She can’t hear a thing,” Master Mohammad Din said, as if shouting. He stood across the charpoy, watching both of us.

“Good for you,” I said aloud, looking in her eyes. Her hands had begun to warm up due to the heat of my hands.

“You’ve to scream in her ears,” he said. “Only then she may hear you. When I told her what had happened yesterday, she wanted me to go and fetch you; she wanted to give you her blessings--she believes you need her blessings to be safe---”

Before I'd the chance to say anything, the loudspeakers blasted with the azaan for zuhr, the sound so powerful that it made me shudder. I stood up plugging my ears with my fingertips and looked around reflexively, as if looking for a shelter, like the primitives did, from the thunder-god of the skies.

Master Sahib’s face cracked into a smile. The old woman’s face assumed a sudden seriousness, her eyes fixed on me, her lips moving. I unplugged my ears and brought my ear close to her lips. The sound of the azaan was so overpowering I couldn’t make out a single word that came out of her mouth. I stood back up, her face a mask of radiance, her eyes now cool and indifferent.

When the azaan came to an end, the ensuing silence felt deafening, until it was broken by Master Muhammad Din’s voice: “She was saying: ‘Only Allah makes it possible for a deaf like me to still hear azaan. It’s the only sound I hear, five times a day.’

I wondered for how long Master Sahib himself had been deaf, for one needed years, to live without the sense of hearing, before mastering the art of lip-reading.

“Allah works in mysterious ways,” I moved my lips without uttering a sound as I looked at her face, solemn as a rock, chiseled with age, covered by a membrane made of the fabric of life; and then her mouth cracked into a smile, as if she understood what I had just said. For a fleeting moment, as if a veil had been lifted within me, I saw that hers was the same face I had seen when I was five, on that starry night, looking up and shaking my father’s shoulder, and asking him: How God looks like?

It was the same face that rose like a moon when darkness fell upon a bright Friday, filling hearts with soot.

I returned to the hostel three days before the exam feeling confident, for I had managed to accomplish what I had set out to do. I entered my cubicle and turned the light on.

The spider had grown a big belly, the size of a walnut; it rested in the center of its silky hammock over my desk--under the bookshelves--its web now obscuring the poster of Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon completely.

I need to reclaim my desk space, my estate.

I picked an old shoe of mine lying under the desk, and started breaking the web with its toe-end. The spider lunged on the wall and started crawling towards the ceiling, too heavy to move fast. Shutting my eyes, I slammed it with sole of my shoe, smashing it flat on the wall. I opened my eyes and recoiled with fright. Hundreds of tiny spiderlings had come out from the ruptured belly of the mother, crawling in every direction on the wall, looking for a cover. I killed as many as I could, but they were agile and many managed to escape, into the hard-to-reach recesses.

 

The End

Copyright 2011 by author A. Asif. All rights reserved