The square of sun on the kitchen floor had not moved off the cracked tile.
Layla noticed it the way she noticed a child in the back row who had stopped writing. She was halfway down a pile of spelling tests at the kitchen table, her red pen in her hand. When she sat down after lunch the patch of light from the window had lain across the cracked tile by the fridge. It was still there. It had the same edges. The shadow of the drying rack lay inside it like a grille.
She looked at the clock over the door. Ten past six.
She put the pen down and watched the edge of the light for a while. It did not creep. In this kitchen, in this month, it should have been halfway up the cupboard doors by now, turning orange. It lay flat and white on the floor at the angle it had at one in the afternoon.
Her mother was at the stove with the lentils, her back to the room.
"The days are still long," her mother said, without turning round. "Even at the end of summer."
"Yes," Layla said.
She did not tell her about the tile. Since last summer she had learned to keep the first strange thing to herself for a while, the way you hold a cup you think is cracked before you pour anything into it. She had lost four days to something once, and come back to her own face with Karima's voice reading over her. She did not trust a feeling in a room until it had stayed. She turned to the next spelling test. The child had written "because" three different ways on one page. She circled all three in red and wrote the right one underneath. Then she wrote it again, slower.
The light stayed on the tile.
Tariq came in at seven with his tie already off and the television remote in his hand before his shoes were.
"Have you seen it?" he said. "They've had it on at the office since six."
The news channel had a camera on the sea at Karachi. The picture was all flat bright water and a crowd along a wall, shading their eyes. The clock in the corner of the screen said 19:02. The caption said the same thing in two languages: the sun had not set. A man from the meteorological department was explaining something about refraction. When the presenter asked him a second question, he stopped explaining. He said he did not know. Behind him on the studio wall a map of the country glowed with the same small yellow sun over every city.
Hamza came out of his room at the sound of it, nineteen and barefoot, his hair flat on one side from lying on his books all afternoon. He looked at the screen, then went to the window and looked up, and he laughed.
"It's stuck," he said. "The whole sky's stuck."
He held up his phone and filmed the sun through the glass, turning to get the clock on the cooker in the shot. He was talking to his friends as he filmed, narrating, his voice light, the way he talked when an exam had been cancelled.
"Seven o'clock, everybody. Look at that. Finally a day long enough to revise in."
Tariq laughed too, a little. Layla watched her son's back and the phone held up against the white sky.
Her mother had turned the gas off under the lentils. She went to the drawer by the door where she kept her prayer shawl, took it out and shook it open. She did it every evening at this time. Other people looked at a watch. She had her arms up to put it over her head when she stopped.
"Which one is it?" she said.
Nobody answered.
"Which prayer," her mother said. "Is it still the afternoon one? Have I missed it? Is it time for the sunset prayer, or isn't it?" She looked from Tariq to Layla to the window. Her voice was not frightened. It was the voice of an old woman asking for the bus timetable. "Who do I ask?"
Hamza lowered his phone.
He stood at the window with it hanging from his hand and the little red light still on. He looked at his grandmother with the shawl half lifted, and then at the sun. His face did something Layla had seen it do once before, on the night she came back to herself in the bedroom. It went still and careful, as though he had heard a noise in the house and was waiting to hear whether it came again.
He stopped the recording without sending it.
"I'll find out," he said quietly, and went to get his shoes.
Their street was full.
Layla had never seen it like this at an ordinary hour. Everyone was out on the steps and the pavements, in house clothes and slippers, as people came out after an earthquake or a wedding. The greengrocer stood in front of his shutter, which was half down, with his hands in his apron. The family from upstairs had brought their baby out and were holding her in the shade of the doorway. Two boys sat on the bonnet of a parked car with their heads tipped back, squinting. Their mother shouted at them to stop looking at it, and they did, for a moment.
The light was wrong everywhere. Layla saw that now that she was outside. The shadows lay short and dark right under things. Under the cars, under the cat on the wall, under the people, they made little pools at their feet as if each of them were standing in a puddle of ink. Nothing had any colour of evening in it. The swifts that came out over the roofs every night at this hour were not out. The air smelled of hot tarmac.
Tariq stood beside her with his hands in his pockets. Her mother stood on the top step with the shawl over her head after all, holding the rail. Hamza was a few doors down with the greengrocer's son. Both of them were looking at their phones and then up and then at their phones again.
"My app says sunset was at ten past seven," someone said behind her. "It says it's passed."
"Then your app is wrong," someone else said, and a few people laughed, and the laughing stopped quickly.
Layla listened to the street the way she had learned to listen to rooms. Under the voices and the traffic on the main road there was the same thickness she had felt in her kitchen in the week of the doors. It was a silence that sat under the noise, like a room after snow. She looked at the end of the street, at the mosque's green dome two streets over, and waited.
At twelve minutes past seven by every watch on the street, the loudspeakers on the minaret clicked.
The street went quiet.
The imam began the call to the sunset prayer. Layla heard him hesitate before the first words, a breath held too long, and then he gave them. Allah is the greatest, he called in Arabic, out over the roofs, into a sky as white and high as the middle of the day. His voice went out slowly. It had gone out that way since the wave, heavy, as if there were more in the air for it to push through. Twice it cracked. He did not stop.
Nobody moved.
By now the men would have been walking toward the mosque. They stood where they were on the pavement, looking at each other, then at the sun. The greengrocer took a step toward the corner and stopped. Tariq's hand came out of his pocket and went back in. On the top step her mother had her lips moving with the words, her eyes on the minaret.
The call finished. The loudspeakers clicked off. The sun stood over the street at the top of the sky.
Down the pavement, Hamza had put his phone away. He was looking at her across the heads of the neighbours, waiting to see what his mother would do.