Page 165 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Jinn.”

“Jinn,” Khizar agreed, and lifted his teacup to his lips. “My grandfather used to tell stories about them. Said they lived in this area for millennia—long before people came here. When you’re a child, you believe such stories. As you grow older, you laugh at them. Eventually you forget them.” He put away the cup and reached for his hookah. “Buttheydon’t forget us, you see, even if we ignore them. The jinn move among us, building and migrating, majestic and silent, living their own lives that they mark in thousands of years. And when the wabaa overwhelmed us humans, they returned.”

Uneasily Nasir glanced at the door. It was possible that the old man was not allthere, that loneliness had worked on him as it had on all of them, but jinn were mentioned in the Quran, and in his hometown of Balakot, stories of evil jinn in the shape of cattle roaming lonely mountain roads at night were legion.

“Certainly, Maulvi sahib, many thanks. We’ll sleep in one of the houses. We don’t intend to impose on your hospitality for too long, anyway.” He got up to fetch the girl, but suddenly she was there, adjusting the discolored dupatta around her neck, staring at him with those green eyes he had always thought discomfiting, as if she could see more than she let on. “There you are, child. All well?”

“Yes.” She moved her lips twice, glanced over her shoulder into the shadows pooling in the courtyard, then back at him. “Yes, I think so. Maulvi sahib,” she said quietly. “Who’s Burqan?”

“Wa La Hawla Wala Quwwata. There is no strength or power except in God the Eternal and Majestic.” Khizar’s eyes had widened, the cataracts shining like white marbles. “Never speak that name again lest you call the jinn king. Wherever did you hear it?”

“It’s on the painting of the black-haired man with the fiery eyes. Hanging on the pillar next to the prayer sheet.”

They went out into the courtyard, where the pillars of the mosquestood dusking like ancient trees. Khizar lit two oil lamps and hung them up, and Nasir turned on a flashlight.

They searched for nearly an hour, the old mullah squinting and patting at the walls and pillars, but they couldn’t find the painting with the jinn king’s name.

Nasir found he’d lied to Khizar. They ended up staying with the mullah for several months.

Nasir convinced himself it was partly because he was worried about the blind old man, partly because they’d traveled a long way to get here, this green land of the Ravi and Indus with its acres of crops and fruit trees, some of which had survived thanks to the arrival of monsoon rains, and while the electric tube wells were useless and the once-lush villages and towns now crumbling into dust and green decay, the hand pumps in the fields still fetched sweet water and the mullah still gave the azaan five times a day, his melodious call carrying across miles and miles of silence, like God’s own voice over a subdued earth.

But really, and it took him some time to figure it out, Nasir had stayed because of Khizar’s stories.

Khizar was full of them. From his childhood spent in Old Lahore, where he grew up the only son of a pit wrestler, who wanted his son to follow him into the akhara, to his youth as a truant kite flier on the rooftops of Lahore, singing ghazals and radio songs to giggling pretty girls on neighboring roofs and indulging in glorious paichay with other kite fliers. Khizar smiled when he told this particular story, and Palwasha reddened and left the room on some pretext.

Nasir’s favorite stories were of those who’d passed through the area—both before and after the wabaa.

“I remember this man, as old as I,” Khizar said on a rainy day, as they put up a tarp canopy on the mosque’s western wall and strung mosquito netting around their charpais. August had arrived along withthe monsoon season, and soon malaria would be in the air. Or would it? Could the germ survive without people? Nasir had never heard of a cat or dog getting malaria. Hero seemed to be fine as he bounded around them, barking and begging to play fetch.

He and Palwasha had set up residence in one of the four-marla buildings across the road. The ground floor used to be a bakery with the top floor reserved for the owner’s family, which they now took over, and the smell of yeast and spoiled bread occasionally caught them by surprise, even though they’d cleared away the shelves and cleaned out the storeroom.

“He was from Sargodha, traveling alone,” Khizar continued. “This was a month or so after the wabaa began. His name was Allah-Bakhsh. He had a walking stick and on his shoulder a schoolbag in which he carried his things. He told me he was headed to the Wagah border so he could cross over into India. Why India, I asked him. He said he was born there. Spent his childhood in Amritsar. When the subcontinent broke into two, his grandmother brought him to Pakistan on a train in the middle of the night.

“But you take me to Amritsar train station,” he told me, “and I’ll take you straight back home. The house where I grew up. Where I cussed out Mausi Bashiran’s nephew when he stole my lychees and took off on his bike, laughing, as I yelled and chased him. Where my veer Nazir was born and died when he was five. We left him there and came here. How his spirit must have cried and searched for us in those streets.” Allah-Bakhsh’s eyes were rheumy when he said that. “And now everyone I know is dead. My children and their children. I buried them all.

“So, I’m going back home. Across the border to my veer, to tell him I’m sorry we left him. To the place that continues to steal into my dreams.”

They prayed isha together. Old Allah-Bakhsh spent the night in the mosque, and in the morning, he was gone without a goodbye.

“I hope he made it home okay. I hope his dream was worth thejourney,” Khizar said, gurgling his hookah, as they sat outside the mosque. A scimitar moon sliced the monsoon clouds in the sky, silvering the fields. Hero watched fireflies dance and weave through the dark with interest, and Palwasha, who had taken to the dog quickly, caressed his back with her toes.

Nasir had been cleaning and slicing the four partridges he had shot that morning. He dropped the birds in the bucket at his feet.

Dreams, he thought.

“Maulvi sahib,” he said. “Have you had any strange dreams since the wabaa began?”

Khizar pulled hard on his hookah and blew out a trembling ring that dissipated in the wind. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve had really weird dreams. They started when we were in Islamabad.”

“Oh?”

“I know I’m not the only one. Palwashay has them, too.” He smiled at her. “You talk in your sleep.”

The girl shifted in her chair and trailed one hand across Hero’s fur.

“So, I’m wondering: Have you or anyone you knew had any out-of-the-ordinary dreams?”