The youngest of the five came in at the night prayer with his notebook open and nothing written on the page.
"Nothing," he said to Ahmed. "The east hall, nothing. The women's hall, nothing. I walked the rows twice."
He sounded almost offended. The other four came in after him and said the same, each in his own way. One had sat for an hour with an old man who wanted to be told his dead wife was not standing at the foot of his blanket, and she was not, and the old man had slept. That was all. Five reciters, two thousand refugees, and the whole of a night's work was an old man who was afraid.
The grain store was half empty. Families had begun to leave that morning when the news came up from the coast, and by evening the rows nearest the door were bare stone with the shapes of blankets still on the dust. The lamps on the pillars had been let go out where nobody slept under them. It made the vault look higher.
"Go to bed," Ahmed told them. "All of you. Sleep the whole night. If anything comes, it will come tomorrow."
They looked at one another as if he had told them to go and swim. Then they went.
He sat down against the pillar by the lamp. Fatima was asleep a few yards off, on her side, with his work notebook under her hand and her column open in the back of it. The last entry in the column was from the dawn by the east wall, when the ache had stopped. She had written nothing in it since. She had kept the notebook under her hand anyway.
Ahmed unbuttoned the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the other one.
It was small and soft-cornered, with a cardboard cover gone the colour of tea. He had carried it out of Karachi in this pocket, and across the border, and through the siege. It had come apart at the spine in the spring, and he kept the two halves together with a rubber band. He had opened it in Fatima's kitchen with the jinn Soren across the table, and at his own desk the morning after, and not since.
He began at the first page.
He read it the way he had been taught to read another man's chart, from the beginning, without skipping to the part that worried him. The first entry was from a winter he hardly remembered: a man in Korangi who heard his name called from the water tank, forty minutes, the Throne Verse and the last three chapters, "clear." Then a girl of nine in a flat above a tyre shop. Then a woman who had stopped speaking to her husband in any language he knew. His handwriting was cramped and level all the way down, every page the same, as though the same afternoon had been written over and over.
Date. Street. Age. Kind. Passages. Time. And the last word, every time.
Clear.
He made himself stop at each one. He made himself ask the question he had added to his method this year, the one he had asked over the farmer in the grain store and over every case since the march began: had anything in that room asked him to stop?
The notebook did not say. It had never been built to say. It was built to say what he had recited and how long it had taken and whether the room was empty at the end. Where the jinn had spoken he had written "spoke" or "bargained" or "performed," and once, in the spring, "wept, stalled, continued." He looked at that one for a long time. A boy of twelve in Lyari. Two hours. He could see the stairs of the building and the colour of the boy's mother's scarf. He could not see anything of what had been in the boy. He had not been looking for it.
He turned the page.
The cousin. Last spring before everything, in the house on the east side: "Stopped sleeping. Third state. Two visits. Clear," and the word underlined once because it had taken two. Then the autumn: "The boy, four, stares at the north corner of the courtyard room," forty minutes, "clear."
He turned the page, and there it was.
He knew where it was on the paper before his eyes reached it. He knew the pen had skipped on "settled" and that he had gone over the word twice, and there were the two strokes, the second slightly to the right of the first.
"Fatima, 25, sorcery-bound, settled." The passages. An hour and ten minutes. "Tear below left collarbone at exit. Parting spite." And under it, the same word as the cousin and the boy and the man in Korangi.
"Clear."
In the margin beside it, in the same cramped hand, slanting a little more than the rest, was the word "please."
He had never remembered writing it. He did not remember it now. He had sat at the lights by the cracked minaret with the engine running and seen it there and felt something touch him that went before he could name it, and he had driven home and gone to bed. Then the next case, and the next. Then the surge. Then a year of noon.
Parting spite. He read his own diagnosis of the wound as if somebody else had written it. Every sign in that room had said deep, settled, three weeks and longer. The heat. The eyes smudged at the rims. The calm voice cycling through languages to land on one. He had read each sign correctly. He had been taught to, and he had taught others. And a boy who had wanted to be worth something had used the last of himself to say one word, and Ahmed had filed the word with all the other things a jinn will say, and gone on reading.
He went through the rest of the notebook. He made himself. The surge filled the last half: two cases a night, three, seven, the handwriting getting smaller to fit, the abbreviations he had made up at the time and could still read. "Clear." "Clear." "Referred." "Clear." Somewhere in the middle of the surge he had stopped writing what the jinn said at all. There had not been time. On the last page there was only a list of addresses and the word "coordinated," underlined three times, and then the page ran out.
He closed it on his finger and sat with it.
There was no going back through them, and he knew it. He could not knock on the doors in Korangi and Lyari and ask the mothers whether anything in their children had begged. He could not ask the thing on the ceiling of the boy's room what it had been. Most of them had been what he had taken them for. He believed that still. The framework held because it stood on something too simple to break. The jinn is in the body, it should not be, it must leave.
It held. He had only stopped knowing what else was in the room with it.
"You're reading it."
Fatima had turned over. She was lying with her head on her arm and her eyes open, looking at the notebook on his knee. She did not sit up.
"I've read it," he said. "All of it."
"And?"
He did not have an answer that would fit in the hall. He opened the notebook again at the page, because it had opened there by itself when he moved his finger, and turned it so the lamp fell on it, and held it where she could see.
She looked at the word in the margin for a while. Then she reached out and laid one finger beside it, on the blank paper, not touching the ink.
"Kael," she said.
She said it the way she had said it in the hall on the night by the east wall, trying the sound in her own mouth. She had heard it from his father in her kitchen. Ahmed had heard it from Soren at a kitchen table. Neither of them had heard it from the boy.
Across the hall, by the east wall, a small figure was sitting up on a blanket in the dark. It was Mariam, awake as she so often was before dawn, watching them with her chin on her knees. She did not say anything.
Ahmed took the pen from his pocket. It was the cheap kind the pharmacies sold by the dozen, the same kind as that night, though not the same pen. He uncapped it with his teeth.
He wrote the name in the margin, next to "please," in his cramped, level hand.
The pen skipped on the second letter. He went over the name again, slowly, the second stroke a little to the right of the first, until it was as dark on the page as the word beside it.