Page 98 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

THE MOSQUE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Usman T. Malik

They met the blind mullah and his dog by a haunted mosque in Sheikhupura on the outskirts of Lahore.

The mosque, a narrow, green-domed structure flanked by two minarets, was situated on the highway between a tire shop and a bakery.

In the shade of its eastern wall, the old man lay on a charpai, puffing smoke from a gurgling hookah.

By his head a cloud of flies buzzed over a jar of honey placed on a stool, an oakwood walking stick propped against the latter.

The dog, a droopy-eared spotted mongrel half-hidden under the jute-twine bed, panted by the man’s sandals in the afternoon heat.

Occasionally it lapped at the red clay bowl of water in front of it.

Nasir rolled Parrot to a stop before the mosque’s entrance, but kept the motor running.

He glanced at Palwasha sleeping in the rear, head against the rickshaw’s canvas door, a thread of spit dangling from her mouth.

She stirred when sweat from her forehead trickled down her cheek in a glistening line.

Nasir turned and swiveled the battery-operated fan in the partition toward her.

He retrieved the revolver from the partition compartment, slipped it into his vest, and smoothed the cotton kameez over it. Then he stepped out, looked up and down the deserted highway, and, lifting a hand in a friendly greeting, walked to the man on the charpai.

“Salam’o-Laikum, bhai-jaan,” he hailed the man in his accented Urdu. “My name is Nasir Khan. I’m traveling with my niece and we’re looking for some food, if you could spare any. We have things we can trade.”

Dreamily, the man blew out a smoke ring and sat up on the charpai’s mattress. He lifted his white farmer turban with an age-spotted hand and scratched his head. “Nasir Khan, eh? Where’s home? Where’d you come from, son?”

“Balakot, bhai-jaan. I worked at a hotel there.”

The man nodded, his milky-white gaze on the highway, and replaced the turban on his head. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you.”

The dog had slipped out from its resting place and stood watching Nasir, its head tipped to one side. It was larger than Nasir had initially thought, its tail curled like the noisemakers he had seen balloon vendors sell in Abbottabad before the wabaa. When he took a step forward, it growled.

“Easy, boy. We’re all friends here,” Nasir said to the dog soothingly in Pashto, then switched back to Urdu: “I gather he won’t bite?”

Up close the furrows in the man’s forehead were deep, the wrinkles around his cataract-clouded eyes thick like spiderwebs. A black taweez hung around his neck. His chest-length beard was oiled and entirely white. He must have been in his seventies.

He got up, stretched, one large brawny hand on his low back, and felt the ground with his feet.

He found his sandals and slipped them on.

“Hero won’t hurt you, will you, Hero?” The dog wagged its tail and gave a short bark.

The man bent and petted its head. “He’s watching out for me.

We both watch out for each other. Such are the days, aren’t they, Hero? ”

Hero craned his head back and licked the man’s hand.

In his previous life, Nasir hadn’t liked dogs.

They were dirty, and touching them broke your wuzu, so you had to do ablution again before praying namaz, but now he found himself reaching out to caress the animal’s head.

Hero yipped and retreated, then nosed forward, his tail stiff and moving powerfully from side to side.

He sniffed Nasir’s hand a few times and tentatively began to lick it.

“Good dog,” Nasir said, wishing he had a piece of bread or a bone for him. “How long have you two been here?”

“We never left, you see.” The old man patted under the edge of the mattress and came up with a small tin can.

He fished around in it with gnarled fingers and brought out a key ring jangling with keys.

“We stayed right here through it all, watched the entire city die. That was three months ago. Sheikhupura’s population before the wabaa was two lakhs.

Two hundred thousand people.” He sighed and gestured east toward Lahore.

“Lahore nearly forty lakhs. Forty lakhs! And what about all the villages between here and Lahore? Everyone is gone. Every mosque between here and Lahore and for all I know the entire world, deserted. No one to take Allah’s name anymore.

How could I abandon my mosque to owls, bats, and jinns?

Na son, I will stay here in the shadow of my elders until I’m dead, too. ”

Nasir watched him pick up the walking stick and shuffle to a side door of the mosque, the dog following on his heels.

The man opened the heavy padlock on the hasp.

“Stupid to lock up now, but force of habit. It’s the only thing that keeps us alive, you know, force of habit.

” He called back over his shoulder, “You hungry? I have plenty of canned food and—Hero, keep out!” He prodded the dog gently with his foot to nudge him away from the doorstep. “You know you aren’t allowed in there.”

Hero sat down at the threshold, head on his paws, and gave a little whine as Nasir came to the door.

Nasir’s gaze went to the graveyard behind the mosque, hundreds of ancient marble headstones jutting out from the earth, then at the large dirt mound between the mosque and the graveyard.

He peered into the mullah’s room, at the sparse furnishings—another charpai, plastic table, shelves lined with copies of the Quran and biographies of the Prophet, and framed magic squares filled with Arabic numerals and letters hanging on the walls.

Nasir Khan tapped his foot on the doorstep, considering for a few moments, then turned and went to fetch the girl.

His name was Khizar and he was the mosque’s imam—or had been. After the wabaa hit and, town after town, village after village fell, there wasn’t anyone left to lead in prayer.

For weeks Maulvi Khizar had visited the sick and the dying, sitting by their bedsides, holding their hands, listening to them recite the declaration of faith one last time with swollen, discolored lips.

He sprinkled water on their faces as they gasped and wheezed, and cleaned snot off their chins.

When they passed, he helped their loved ones cart their bodies to the graveyard behind the mosque.

He abandoned that practice after the bereaved died, too, and no one was left to help him move them.

“With my own hands, I buried fifty or more people who came to the mosque in their last hours, seeking its holy vicinity in death,” Khizar said, pouring hot tea from a kettle, as the three of them sat at the rickety table in the middle of the imam’s room.

“I prayed fifteen, twenty janazas daily for weeks, then took them in a wheelbarrow five by five to the ditch by the graveyard. I lowered them down as gently as I could and poured a handful of dust over each. Would that I could give them a proper burial, but I’m an old blind man and all I could do was wait for the last person to give up the ghost before I began filling in the ditch. ”

His teacup shook a little as he brought it to his mouth and sipped. His sightless gaze traveled over his room and Nasir and the girl, Palwasha. She ate an entire packet of Prince chocolate biscuits and listened to the old man ramble, then to Nasir as he narrated their story.

After his family and friends died, Nasir had walked around Balakot in a daze, his grief larger than the mountains that surrounded him, deeper than the emerald waters of the Kunhar River that mocked him with their swiftness, their indifference.

We stop, the world doesn’t stop , he thought again and again as he slept in a different bed each day in the fancy hotel he used to guard before the wabaa took everyone.

No one had believed the world was ending.

His neighbors had sneered, even as the Christian missionary hospital in Garhi Habibullah sent panicked messages to the surrounding clinics, asking people to put on masks and stay at home.

Stay at home? A Christian conspiracy, they said.

Everyone knew the wabaa had been started by Amreeka to render all Muslims impotent, but instead Allah’s wrath fell upon them and it turned on its makers.

Oh yes, they’d been following the news on TV and radio, how their glittering cities fell and the infidels died in the streets.

And now these Christian traitors were jumping on the bandwagon, trying to send the Muslim men home, while they planned evil, satanic things in the dark of night!

The people of Balakot weren’t fools. They’d teach those Christian chuhras a lesson or two.

But before a mob could form and march to the hospital—it was over. The ringleader, a man named Qadri, who’d been inciting and goading the men of Balakot for days, was dead. Killed by the wabaa.

The plague, it turned out, was egalitarian and secular. It didn’t discriminate between rich and poor, crescents and crosses. Everyone in Balakot died—except Nasir.

He buried those he could and left the rest where they had fallen, for what was the point of breaking his back? He wasn’t twenty anymore. Besides, nature and rot would have their way. From mulch we come and to mulch we return.

He’d found fourteen-year-old Palwasha rocking in an armchair by the roadside in Abbottabad, an hour from Balakot.

At first, she had hidden inside a handicraft shop, she’d tell him later, but she had been alone for so long and the voices of the dead were louder every night.

Her baby sister, her brother, her father with his big, strong mechanic’s hands, and her aunt Bano, her mother’s sister, who’d taken care of Palwasha after her moray died from an untreated fistula gone bad.

They’d begun talking to her in the silence of the night and, later, in the daytime as well.