The rickshaw driver took the long way round Gulshan because the short way went through Block Thirteen, and Block Thirteen had gone out to meet the trucks.
Ahmed saw why as they passed the end of it. The block was green. Neem trees that had stood bare along its service road since the first month had leafed overnight, months ago now, and were still in leaf, and the gutters ran with clear water that came from nowhere he could see. Children were swimming in a drainage channel. On the near side of the main road, where Ahmed's own side of the city began, the dust lay in drifts against the shop shutters and the mosque's water tank had a padlock on it and a queue.
"They have mangoes," the driver said, over his shoulder. "In the middle of all this. Mangoes. My wife's sister sends us some." He laughed. "I don't ask."
Ahmed held his bag on his knees and did not answer.
Mariam's mother had rung at eleven by his watch. She had not said hello. She had said, "We're back," and then, after a breath, "Please come," in the voice people used when they had already decided the call was a mistake and were making it anyway. He had cancelled two appointments. One of them was the weekly visit to Fatima, whose scar he had been watching for a month and writing down in its own column, and he had rung her himself to say he was sorry. Of the seven young reciters he had gathered before the sun stopped, five still answered his calls. He had not phoned any of them about this. He had washed for prayer before leaving, as he did before every case, and he had put the notebook in his breast pocket with the pencil clipped to it.
The car was in the street outside their building. Its windscreen was cracked straight across and its roof rack was empty. Someone had drawn a smiling face in the dust on the boot.
The father was on the sofa.
He had gained weight. In six weeks he had put on what most men put on in five years, and it sat on him evenly, in the cheeks and the neck and the backs of the hands. He wore a clean white kurta Ahmed had never seen. When Ahmed came in he stood, smiled, and offered his hand.
"You're welcome," he said. "Please. Sit. Will you have tea?"
Ahmed shook the hand. It was soft and dry and it let go at exactly the right moment.
Before the camp, this man had sat on this sofa and told the television, loud enough for Ahmed, that he would not pray in daylight at midnight. At the door afterwards he had said that a clock was not a sky, and that a reciter who asked his daughter to turn her face from a wall should first explain what was on the other side of it. He had shouted it. Ahmed had liked him for it. A man who shouted at you was a man you could argue with.
"How was the journey?" Ahmed said.
"Very good. Thank you. The roads are much better now."
"Where did you stay?"
"In the camp. They gave us a tent with a floor. There was food at every hour." The father smiled again. It was the same smile as before, the same width, and it went away at the same speed. "Will you have tea?"
Mariam's mother was standing in the kitchen doorway with a tea towel wound so tight round one hand that the fingers had gone pale. She looked at Ahmed and then at the floor.
When the father went to fill the kettle she came across the room and spoke fast and low, with her back to the kitchen. "He sleeps the whole night. He eats whatever I put in front of him. He hasn't prayed once since we came back, and he doesn't argue about it, he just doesn't. He hasn't asked about his mother. He hasn't asked about anything." She glanced at the window. "She's been waiting for the call since we got home. She asked me what time it would be."
The call to prayer began at a quarter past twelve, from the mosque at the end of the street, by the estimate the imam had pinned to the mosque door the week the sun stopped.
Mariam had been sitting on the floor by the window with the tin of felt pens, uncapping them one by one and laying them in a row by colour. Ahmed had watched her come out of the bedroom and look at him, and look at her father, and sit down there without a word. At the first words of the call she put down the pen in her hand. She stood up, turned her back on the window and the room, and walked to the north-east wall. She stood with her face a hand's width from the plaster and her arms at her sides.
In the second week of the light, in this room, she had turned away from that wall for the first time. She had turned toward the window and smiled at something in the light. Ahmed had written it down with the date and underlined it. He had let himself hope.
He knelt on the rug beside her, not touching her. He recited the Throne Verse in Arabic, and the last two verses of the Cow, and the last three short chapters. He watched her the whole time, the way he had been trained to watch: the eyes, the breathing, the small muscles at the corners of the mouth, the hands.
Nothing in her answered. No flinch, no heat in the skin, no change in the pupils, nothing using her throat. In eighteen years he had learned the feel of a room with something in it, the thickness of the air at the back of the tongue. The room was clean. A girl of nine stood facing a wall, patient, the way a child stands at the window when a parent is late and she has been told to wait there.
After the last verse the weight on his right shoulder pressed down once, as it had at odd moments since the wave. No chime came. The chime came before a bad room, and this room was clean. He did not know where to put that in the notebook.
When the call ended she stayed a little longer. Then she turned round and looked at him, calmly, as if he had asked her a question.
"Uncle didn't come back," she said.
"Your father's brother?"
She nodded. She went back to the window, sat down, and went on laying out the pens, the green one last.
In the notebook, under the date, Ahmed wrote "north-east wall again" and "nothing present" and "uncle". His pencil had pressed hard enough to dent the page under it.
He found the father in the kitchen, pouring tea into two glasses with great care, so that the level in each was exactly the same.
"Your brother," Ahmed said. "Junaid. Mariam says he didn't come back with you."
"No." The father set the pot down. "Sugar?"
"What happened to him?"
The father considered it. His eyes went to the window over the sink, where the light came in white and stood on the draining board, and they stayed there. Ahmed had sat across from grief many times and knew its face. This one belonged to a man trying to remember where he had put his keys.
"There was an evening," the father said. "They called it an evening. Everyone in the camp went out to the big ground. He stood up in front of us all, the man, and on one side of him there was a river, clean, you could hear it, and on the other there was a fire. A wall of fire, high as this building. He said, whoever doubts me goes into the fire." He picked up a glass and held it without drinking. "Junaid doubted. He'd been saying so for days, in the tent, at night. They took him by the arms."
Mariam's mother made a sound in the doorway.
"He didn't fight them," the father said. "He was reciting. He walked in." For a moment something moved behind the father's face, the way a fish moves under the surface of a tank, and was gone. He looked at Ahmed with mild, polite surprise.
"He showed us his fire. My brother walked into it and it was water."