Ahmed pinned the blackout cloth back over the study window and the sun came round its edge anyway, a hot white seam down the frame.
He had pinned that cloth up three hundred and sixty times in the long day. He had taken it down the evening before, when the sun finally set, and folded it, and put it in the bottom drawer with a feeling he had not let himself name. Now it was up again. Outside it was half past six in the morning and would be, his notebook said, for the better part of a week before the sun reached noon.
He sat at the desk. He did not turn on the lamp. The map hung on the wall opposite in its deep frame, the red pins and the green, and under the edge of the cloth the light lay across it in one bar.
He opened the notebook at the page.
The word was there in the margin in his own hand, slanted, small, without a capital, in the blue ink he had used that year. "please" He had not remembered writing it for a long time. Then a woman with a scar had come to his door and said something frightened had been inside her that night and had not been lying. And an hour ago a jinn in an old man's shape, whose shadow was too dark for the window, had stood on Fatima's back step and told him what it was.
"He was a boy who wanted to be worth something."
Ahmed took a clean sheet of paper and wrote at the top, as he would for any case, the date and the address. Then he set it out.
The call routed through a voice he had trusted for nine years. A house on the east side of Karachi he already knew. A woman in the bed, three weeks of escalating episodes behind her, every sign in the books. The hot-metal smell. The eyes.
He had read. The thing had cycled through languages, which they did. It had held its composure, which they did. Then it had broken and said, "Cannot leave. Not mine. A binding." He wrote the words down exactly as he had heard them. His hand did not shake. He wrote: it said please once. He wrote: I continued. He wrote: it burned.
He looked at the page.
There was a second page waiting behind it, and he knew what was on it, because he had written it in his head a thousand times on the way home in the car. In his second year, a jinn in a girl in Hyderabad had wept and said it had been forced in and could not get out, and Ahmed had believed it and stopped. The girl had nearly died. He had sat with her father in the hospital corridor at four in the morning. He had learned from that night that jinn lie to delay expulsion, and that you do not stop. The rule had saved lives since. He could name them.
Every word of it was true, and it was the beginning of an excuse.
He did not write the second page.
He held the pen over the paper and made himself look at the first page only. A boy who wanted to be worth something. The boy had said he could not leave. He had said it was not his doing. He had said please. Ahmed did not know, even now, whether any of it had been a lie. Soren had told him what Kael was. He had not told him what had happened in the bed, and Ahmed had not asked, because he had seen in the old jinn's face that he would not be told.
He knew something smaller and worse. He had not waited to find out. He had heard a plea he had heard before from liars, and he had decided before it finished that it was a lie, because that was the rule, and the rule was quicker than listening. He had been sure. He had been proud of being sure. He had driven home and slept well.
He wrote one more line at the bottom of the page. Haste.
He prayed the night prayer at eleven by his estimate, in the small room at the back of the house where he kept the rug. The sun stood in the window at the angle of breakfast. He had prayed a year of night prayers in that light and his body knew how to do it, how to stand facing the wall with the sun on the side of his face and say the words as if it were dark.
When he had finished he did not get up.
He sat back on his heels, the way he had sat every night since the wave. Those nights he had asked the same question and left it there. Tonight he had a different one. He found it hard to say. He had said a great many words in Arabic over a great many beds, the Throne Verse, the chapter of the Jinn, the last two chapters of the Quran, and he had said them well and trusted that they were heard. He had never once said this.
He said it in Arabic, aloud, to the empty room.
"My Lord, I was hasty. I did not listen. Forgive me my haste, and whatever came of it that I do not know."
He did not add a reason. A reason was waiting in his mouth, the hospital corridor, the girl's father, and he closed his mouth on it. He thought of the verse in the chapter of the Troops that tells those who have wronged themselves not to despair of the mercy of Allah. He did not recite it. He did not feel he had the right to use it yet as a comfort. He sat with it, the way you sit with a letter you have not opened.
He stayed on the rug a long time. The bar of sun moved a finger's width across the floor, the only sign the hour had passed.
At last he got up, because his knees told him to, and went to bed in the bright room with the cloth pinned over the window and the edge of it glowing, and lay on his back. He did not sleep well. He did sleep.
He woke at seven by the clock and eight by the notebook, which had the day better than the clock did. He washed for prayer at the basin. He put on a pressed shirt. He made tea and drank it standing at the counter.
Then he rang the five.
He rang them in the order he always rang them, the eldest first. Each answered by the third ring. Each asked, in his own way, whether he had slept, and he told each of them the truth, which was a little. He gave them the timetable for the day like a month, which he had finished at the kitchen table at Fatima's house: the five prayers spread across the long light by the hours a normal day would have given them, the same method as before. He told them to copy it out by hand. He told them it would need correcting as they went.
None of them asked about the night before. He did not tell them. That belonged to him.
The intake folder lay on the desk where it had lain since the sun set. He opened it. There were four sheets. A family in Korangi whose grandmother had started speaking to someone at the foot of her bed. A shopkeeper in Saddar. A boy who would not come down from the roof. On top, in handwriting he knew, pressing hard into the paper, a message taken down by one of the five before dawn, when the dark had still been dark.
"Mariam's mother rang. Asks you to come. Says she turned round."
Ahmed read it twice. Then he put the notebook in his bag, closed it on the page with the word in the margin, and went out into the stopped morning to the first address on the list.