Mariam woke up and checked before she even opened her eyes.
She checked the way you check a loose tooth with your tongue, pushing carefully, waiting for the wobble. In the long day the someone far away had always been there when she checked. He had been a pull, like a hand on her sleeve. Then, in the month, he had been busy, and the pull had gone faint, like a radio playing in someone else's flat. Even busy, he had been there. She had always been able to find him if she pushed.
She pushed now. There was nothing.
It was not like a radio turned down. It was like a radio taken away, and the table it stood on, and the room. She lay on her blanket with her eyes shut and pushed again, harder, to be sure. Nothing wobbled. There was nothing there to wobble.
She opened her eyes.
The grain store was very big and very high and half empty. Every morning there were fewer people in it. When they came in the siege the blankets had gone right up to the door in rows, and you had to step over feet to get to the toilets. Now there were bare places on the floor with dust in the shapes of where people had slept. The lamps on the pillars by the door were not lit any more. A pigeon had got in and was walking about in one of the bare places like it owned it.
Next to her, Baba was lying on his back with his eyes open, smiling at the roof.
Fatima plaited her hair after breakfast.
Fatima did it better than Mama. Mama was in Karachi with Nani, whose legs would not do the road, and she had sent Mariam and Baba with Mr Ahmed because Mr Ahmed was going where the help was. She pulled tighter and it did not hurt, and she did three plaits instead of two and put them together at the back so they would not come undone when Mariam ran. Mariam sat between Fatima's knees on the step by the water trough and held the elastic bands.
It started to rain while she did it. It came out of the whole grey sky, thin and cold, and it fell on the yard and the trough and the wall and the road outside, all of it the same, with no line anywhere where it stopped. Fatima held her hand out flat until there were drops on it. Then she wiped it on her knee and went on plaiting.
"Does it still not hurt?" Mariam said.
"Not since that morning by the wall. You were there."
"Can I see?"
Fatima tied off the plait and pulled the neck of her top down a little on the left side. The scar was under her collarbone. It was small and pale and a bit shiny, the size of Mariam's little fingernail. Mariam had seen it before, when Fatima washed, and it had always been a bit red round the edge, and Fatima had always had her fingers on it without noticing. Now it was only white.
"It looks like a mark from a pen."
"It does a bit."
Fatima let her top go back. She did not touch the scar.
Mr Ahmed was asleep sitting up against the pillar by the lamp that was not lit. He had his old notebook open on his knee, the small brown one, and his hand had fallen off it. Mariam went and looked, because she could read now, nearly everything. Most of the page was his little squashed writing that went in straight lines. But in the side bit, the margin, there were two words by themselves, and one of them was "please," and the other one was a name she had heard Fatima say.
She did not touch it. She went back to the step.
"Mr Ahmed wrote a name next to please," she said.
Fatima looked at Mr Ahmed asleep, for a long time, the way Mama looked at Mariam when she was asleep and thought Mariam didn't know.
"Yes," she said. "He did."
Before the noon call she went and sat by Baba.
He was still lying on his back. Somebody had brought him bread and he had eaten half of it and left the other half on his chest, and he did not seem to know it was there. He smiled when she sat down. He smiled at everything. It was the same smile as in Karachi, the picture of Baba stuck on the front of Baba.
But yesterday a man had come into the hall from the camp outside the city, a man like Baba, fat and pink and smiling, brought by his wife. And in the evening the man had started to cry, very loud, with his mouth open like a baby, and said his wife's name over and over. Everyone in the hall had heard. His wife had held his head and cried too. Then this morning they had gone home, both of them, with their bags.
Mariam had watched Baba all through the crying. Baba had not even turned his head.
"Baba."
"Darling."
"The call's going to come soon."
"Is it?"
"Do you want to pray? Mr Ahmed's going to. Everyone is."
He thought about it, still smiling.
"Maybe later," he said. "When it's not so bright."
It was not bright in the grain store. It was dim and cool and smelled of old grain and people. She looked at him and thought about Uncle walking into the fire that was water. She thought that Baba had walked into something too, and come out the other side, and left himself in there.
She did not cry. She had decided in Karachi not to cry about Baba, because it made Mama cry, and then nobody was doing anything.
The call came at noon from the mosque by the wall.
Mariam was ready. She stood up off Baba's blanket. Nothing pulled at her sleeve. The call came in through the high windows, the long first line and then the second, and it was like the school bell, the way it had been every time since the month, loud and kind and telling. Her feet knew.
They took her to the window first. That was the window at the end of the hall, very high up, with bars and no glass and a square of white sky in it. She stood under it and looked up and let the call come down on her face. She liked to do that. It was where she always started.
Then she turned round.
At home in Karachi, in the long day, she had turned to the calendar wall, and it had been the wrong wall, and everybody had known it was wrong except her. In the month she had turned to the window and not known which way the line went after that. Now she knew. She did not have to think. It was the wall the men were already turning to, down at the far end of the hall, where Mr Ahmed was standing up and the five young ones were coming in from the yard with their sleeves still wet. It was the wall the women in the corner faced when they put their scarves on properly. It was the long south wall with the crack in it shaped like a river.
She turned to face it. It was right. She could feel it was right, the way you can feel it when you finally put your shoe on the correct foot.
Behind her, someone was standing up.
She heard the blanket move. She heard the half of the bread fall off onto the floor. She turned her head and Baba was on his feet, behind her, in his socks, with his tight shirt and his pink face. It was the first time he had stood up by himself since the camp. He was not smiling. He was looking all round the hall, at the high windows, at the men making their line, at the women in the corner, at Mariam, as if he had woken up in a room he did not know and could not find the door.
He looked at her the way she used to look at him when she was small and lost in the market.
Mariam took his hand. It was soft and warm and it let her take it. She turned him a little by the hand, until he was facing the same way she was. Then she let go and lifted her arm and pointed, at the long south wall with the crack shaped like a river, where the men were standing shoulder to shoulder and the call was coming to its end.
"That way," she said.