Ahmed carried the last pile of books off the kitchen table and stood it against the wall, and the table had a surface again.
He had not seen the wood in years. It was a cheap laminate printed to look like oak, with a burn mark by one corner from a pan he did not remember. He wiped it with a damp cloth. Then he set out eight glasses and a jug of water from the fridge, because it was hot, and because it would be hot all day, and the day would not end.
The seven came at what the clock called ten in the morning. They came in ones and twos up the stairwell, taking off their shoes on the landing. They sat round his table with their knees touching. There were only four chairs, and the rest were stools carried up from the office. The oldest was a woman of thirty-one who taught Quran to girls at a mosque school in Korangi. The youngest, Daniyal, was twenty-four and had a stammer that left him when he recited and came back when he stopped. Ahmed had chosen each of them over years, one at a time, for patience. None of them had expected to be sitting in his kitchen.
He put a new notebook in the middle of the table.
He had taken it from the drawer that morning, from the back, where he kept the spares. The drawer held eighteen years of case notebooks in the front, spines out, dated. His hand had passed over the one from the year of the woman in the house with the hot-metal smell, and he had not opened it. He had not opened it since the week he wrote in it.
"The hadith is clear on what to do," he said. "It isn't clear on how. That part is ours."
They had all heard it by now. Every mosque in the city had read it out in the first two days of light: the companions asking about prayer in a day like a year, and the Messenger of Allah telling them to estimate its extent. Ahmed did not read it again. They needed to agree on numbers.
They worked for four hours.
They took the times of the last day that had ended, from the printed sheet the mosque on his road gave out. They took the almanac's table for the coming months, so that the hours would drift through the year the way the sun would have drifted them. Daniyal did the arithmetic in a column down the margin, his lips moving, and did not stammer once. The schoolteacher wanted to follow Mecca's clock. Two of the others argued her down. Their city had its own last day, and people would keep the hours they could hear from their own minarets. In the end Ahmed wrote at the top of the first page, in capitals, "ESTIMATED", and underlined it. Under it he wrote the hours for the next thirty days, one line to a day.
"Each of you takes a district," he said. "Speak to the imams. Most of them have done this already. Some have done it differently. Don't argue with them. Write down what they're using, and bring it back, so we know where the city disagrees with itself."
Daniyal looked up from his column.
"And the cases?" he said. "There are more. Since the light. My uncle's building has three."
"I know," Ahmed said. "Bring those back as well."
He turned the notebook over and opened it from the back. On the last page, where the others could not read it, he wrote a second heading: "Cases since the light".
The Baigs' flat was on the third floor of a block near the port, with washing hung on every balcony and not moving in the still air. Ahmed climbed the stairs at a quarter past ten at night by his watch, with the sun standing over the stairwell's skylight like a lamp somebody had forgotten to switch off.
Mrs Baig let him in. She had pinned his timetable to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a mango. It was the same one-page sheet he had copied out for every family on his list. She had ticked off each prayer in pencil as she prayed it. The ticks went down the page in a neat column. There were five every day.
Asif Baig was on the sofa in a vest with the television on mute. The port had been quiet for a week. Ships were sitting off the harbour mouth with nobody sure whether to bring them in by the clock or wait for a dark that did not come. He had been sent home with half pay. On the coffee table his phone kept lighting up with messages, and he kept turning it face down.
"My cousin in Dubai," he said, when he saw Ahmed looking. "He sends me videos. There's a village on the road where it rained for three days. They're planting wheat in the dust." He laughed, and it did not go well. "Three days."
Mariam was on the floor with a colouring book. She waved at Ahmed with a green crayon and went back to it.
"The night prayer is at twenty to eleven," Mrs Baig said. "By your sheet."
"I am not going to pray the night prayer at noon," her husband said. He said it to the television. "I'm not going to stand on a mat in the daylight at midnight like a madman because a sheet on the fridge says so. Who made the sheet? You made it." He looked at Ahmed for the first time. "No offence. A man made it. Allah made the sun. If Allah wanted me to pray the night prayer, He'd have given me a night."
Ahmed did not argue. He had argued with frightened men before, and it had never once made them less frightened. He said only that the hadith had answered the question long ago, and that the sheet was his best estimate, and that he would rather keep an estimate than lose the prayer. Asif Baig turned the phone over, read something, and turned it face down again.
At twenty to eleven the mosque at the end of the block gave the call for the night prayer.
Its loudspeakers were old and the voice came through them thin, with a buzz under it. Mrs Baig was already standing, her prayer shawl over her head. Asif Baig did not move from the sofa.
Mariam put down her crayon.
She got up from the floor and walked to the corner of the room, the north-east corner, where a cabinet stood with the good plates in it, and faced it. Ahmed had seen her do it a dozen times now. He no longer recited over her when she did it. He watched. He had stopped expecting anything in her to answer, and he had not stopped watching for it.
Her mother began her prayer behind her, facing the west wall with the calendar on it, so that mother and daughter stood almost back to back in the small room. The television flickered on mute. The call went on through the buzz.
In the middle of it Mariam turned round.
She did it slowly, the whole of her at once, the way she turned toward the wall, as if something had swung her. She turned away from the cabinet and the good plates and looked across the room, past her mother's shoulder, past the sofa, to the window on the south side. The sun stood in it, white, over the cranes of the port.
Ahmed stood up.
Asif Baig had seen it too. His hand had gone still on the phone.
Mariam looked at the window, at the white sky and nothing in it. Her face changed. It opened, the way a child's face opens when someone she has been waiting for comes through the gate at the end of a school day, and she smiled.
There was nobody at the window. She went on smiling at it until the call had finished.