The tanker driver wanted cash, and he wanted it before the hose came off the hook.
Ahmed counted the notes into his hand in the middle of the road, with eleven people behind him holding buckets and plastic drums, and the sun standing over the street where it had stood for a hundred days. The driver did not look at the money. He was looking east, past the water tower, past the roofs of the next district, at the cloud.
It had been there since the morning by the clock. A long grey bank of it, low and heavy, the first cloud anyone in Karachi had seen since the sun stopped. It did not come any nearer. It sat over Korangi and the industrial roads beyond it and hung there like a lid, and underneath it, very faintly, you could see the grey threads that meant rain.
"They went out to the highway last night," the driver said. "Half of Korangi. The convoy came in with grain on forty trucks and they walked out and said yes." He hooked the hose over Ahmed's drum and opened the valve. "It started raining on them before the trucks were unloaded. My cousin sent me a video. Children in the street with their mouths open."
The water ran into the drum, brown for the first few seconds and then clear.
"Said yes to what?" asked the woman behind Ahmed.
The driver shrugged and shut the valve. "Whatever they asked."
Ahmed carried the drum back across the road in both arms, with the water slopping against his chest through the plastic, and did not look at the cloud again until he had set it down inside the door. Then he went up to the roof and looked at it for a long time.
From up there he could see where it stopped. The cloud had an edge as clean as a cut, and the rain fell inside it and nowhere else. On one side of a road he knew, by the brick kilns, the ground was dark and the trees had a green on them he had forgotten trees could have. On the other side the dust lay white to the walls. A goat stood on the dry side of the road with its head through the railings, stretching its neck toward the wet. He watched it until it gave up and lay down in the dust.
Five of them came to the meeting.
He held it in the office at the hour the notebook called evening, with the blinds down and the fan turning and a lamp on the desk, as they had every week since he built the timetable with them. The notebook lay open beside the lamp: the five prayers for each day of the long day, worked out by the clock from the last true sunset, the estimate the first circle had sent round and his own figures beside it in pencil, checked twice. They had argued over the night prayer for two meetings. Now they kept it.
The two empty chairs were Faraz's and Umair's.
"Umair sent this," said Daniyal, the youngest, and put his phone on the desk and pressed play.
Umair's voice came out small and tinny over the noise of a crowd. "Sheikh Ahmed, I'm sorry. I'm not going to them. I'm only going to see. They put water in my mother's taps. Her taps, sheikh. Nobody's had water in Landhi for two months. I want to see what kind of man does that. I'll come back and tell you everything." Somebody near him laughed, and the message ended.
Nobody in the office said anything. Saleem, who taught boys to read Quran in a garage in Lyari and had the steadiest hands of the seven, picked a thread off his cuff and looked at the floor. Ahmed sat with his hands flat on the desk. Then he turned the notebook round, and turned to the page at the back where he had copied out, months ago, the reports about the Dajjal in order, the way he copied out every case history, with the chain and the book written in the margin.
He read it to them without comment. Hudhayfa had reported that the Prophet said the Dajjal would come out with water and fire. What people saw as water would be fire that burned. What people saw as fire would be cool, sweet water. Whoever met that should fall into what he saw as fire.
He read them the other report as well, from the long hadith in Muslim, that he would come to a people and call them, and they would believe in him, and he would command the sky and it would rain and the earth and it would grow, and their animals would come home fat. Then he would come to another people and they would refuse him, and he would leave them, and they would wake in drought with nothing in their hands.
"So it's real rain," Daniyal said.
"It's real rain."
"Then why does Allah let it fall on them?" He was twenty-four. He had the best memory of the seven and the worst habit of saying the next thing in his head. "And not on us. We're the ones who refused."
Ahmed looked at him for a while.
"I don't know," he said. "I know it's a trial. I know we were told about it before it came, so that we'd know it when we saw it. That's all I've got."
In all his years of practice he had never said "I don't know" across this desk. He heard the words sit in the room under the turning fan, and nobody picked them up.
He went to see Mariam afterwards, because her mother had rung twice that week and hung up both times before she spoke.
The Baigs lived on the third floor of a block near the port, in a street of blocks like it. He knew before he was out of the rickshaw that the convoy's people had been there. Water stood in the gutter. Somebody had washed the stairwell and the steps were still dark with it. On the second-floor landing a woman was filling a bucket from a tap that ran full and clear, and she looked up at him with her face shining and wet and did not say hello.
Asif Baig opened the door before he knocked.
"She's fine," he said. "She's better. You can see her if you want."
Mariam was on the sofa with a new tin of felt pens, the plastic still round its lid. She did not look up. Behind her, in the kitchen doorway, her mother stood holding a prayer mat rolled under one arm, with her face set.
"They came yesterday," Asif said. He did not sit down. "Polite. Clean shirts. Two women and a boy with a tablet. They asked each flat the same thing, very politely, and everybody in this building said yes except one old man on the fifth floor, and this morning his taps are dry and ours run." He laughed, once. "I'm a clerk, sheikh. I count things. I can count that."
"What did you say to them?"
Asif looked at the window.
"He said yes," his wife said from the doorway.
"I said thank you for the water."
Nobody spoke. Mariam drew a sky with the green pen, carefully, staying inside the lines, and hummed something with no tune. Ahmed watched her for the length of a breath and could not find anything in the room that had not been there the first day: no heat, no smell, no pressure on his shoulder. Only a child who had stopped looking at the wrong wall a week ago and now did not look at anything at all except the page.
"I'll come again," he said.
"Do," said Asif, and held the door.
Ahmed went down the wet stairs and out into the white street and stood for a moment under the balcony, finding his phone to call a rickshaw. He heard the street door bang above him. When he looked up, Asif Baig was coming down the outside steps with a suitcase in each hand, and he went past Ahmed without a word to the little white car parked at the kerb, opened the boot, and put them in.
He went back up. He came down again with a cardboard box and a rolled mattress tied with string.
In the back seat of the car, Mariam knelt on the cushions facing the rear window, the green pen in her fist, looking up the road toward the highway.