Ahmed squared the three sheets on the desk until their edges lined up, the way he lined up two translations of one verse to check them against each other.
They had come to him over two weeks by three roads, from people who did not know each other. He had copied each one out by hand, word for word, and written at the top where it came from and when. He read them in order. Then backwards. Then in pairs.
The first was the father on the second floor of the courtyard building, taken down on the step the morning the stranger did not come.
"A man came to the courtyard. He was ordinary. I could not have picked him out in the market. He didn't say who he was and he didn't ask for anything. When my son was at his worst the man told me three things: where to take him, who to have with him, and what not to say in front of him. I did it. My son was calmer the same day. I don't know his name. I didn't ask. He didn't offer."
The second came from his colleague in Hyderabad, read down the phone in a tired voice: three scraps from three of his clients, each of whom had brought up the same stranger without being asked. It was from the first weeks of the wave, before Ahmed had started counting.
"He sat with my mother for an hour. She stopped screaming while he was there. He did no rite. He talked to her. When he left she slept for the first time in six days."
"He was at the clinic. I don't know who brought him. He went from room to room, and in every room people were less afraid after."
"He told me not to call my daughter by her name for three days. I didn't understand. I did it. On the fourth day she came back."
The third was an email from an ethnographer he had known for years, a careful woman who studied religious movements across South Asia and sorted everything she heard under headings.
"Reports from two southern villages of an unknown man who responded effectively to what the communities call mass affliction. Descriptions match across informants: middle-aged, unremarkable, plain clothing, no instruments, no affiliation. Does not raise his voice. Does not touch the afflicted. Gives specific instructions on placement, speech and timing. Outcomes improved. Stayed several days in each place, then gone. He fits none of the four types of religious responder I work with. Any frame you can offer would help."
The first likenesses jumped off the page: the plain face, the calm, the missing name, the instructions that were never general.
The second likeness took him until the third reading, and it was in the grammar. Nobody said the man had done anything to the afflicted. In every account he had moved something around them: which house, which relatives in the room, which words said and which held back. And every arrangement fitted one person. This son to an aunt. That daughter three days without her name. That mother an hour of company and no rite at all.
A protocol makes everyone alike. These were readings, and readings take knowledge. To give them the man would have to know what kind of thing was in each house, what in the house fed it and what starved it, when to speak and when to let a silence work.
Ahmed had read about men who knew those things. They lived in the classical manuals on recitation over the afflicted, the ones he had studied at twenty with a pencil behind his ear. In seventeen years of practice he had never met one.
He went through the kinds of men he knew.
A reciter of some line he had never met. But every reciter of every line he knew of worked through the recitation itself, and these accounts had almost none.
A devout layman who had come by study or hard luck to a reciter's eye. He had met two in his life. Each had been good at one narrow kind of case. This man had worked with children and the old, with new cases and settled ones, with jinn that were plainly not the same kind.
A trained practitioner who had put down his tools for reasons of his own. Ahmed wanted that one. It fitted without asking him to step outside the work he knew. But a man with that skill in this region would have a name among reciters, and nobody had a name.
There was a fourth.
It came from further back than any book on his shelf. Friday sermons, the men's side of the mosque, a boy of nine cross-legged on a carpet that smelled of feet and rosewater, and the old imam with his white beard gone yellow at the chin, whose voice thickened every time he reached the last days and the man who would come in them. Every child in that mosque knew the word.
Ahmed did not say it, even inside his head. He held it off the way he would hold a dish straight from the oven, by the edges, at arm's length.
It fitted better than the other three. That was the trouble with it.
At eleven his colleague rang, as he did most nights now, to trade numbers. Ahmed gave him his. Then, before he could decide not to, he read him the three sheets, all of them, in the flat voice he used for reading case notes to a family.
The line was quiet for a while. Ahmed heard a kettle start and stop.
"The third one's the ethnographer?"
"Yes."
"She doesn't exaggerate. She once corrected me on the spelling of my own village." The lighter clicked. "So. You've got a man with no tools who does our work better than we do, and you rang me at eleven at night to tell me about him."
"You rang me."
"You picked up on the first ring." A breath of smoke. "My father had a word for a man like that. You remember the sermons as well as I do. Are you going to say it?"
"No."
"Good. Neither am I." His colleague's voice went careful. "Ahmed. In my father's time two men in our city said that word about themselves. One of them had a following of four hundred within a year. The other one is still in the asylum on the Sukkur road, last I heard, and he was the better of the two."
"This one doesn't say anything about himself. That's half of what's in the accounts."
"That's what I don't like about it," his colleague said, and hung up without the usual blessing.
He turned to a clean page in the notebook that held the surge map and the word coordinated, and wrote only what he could stand behind.
"Unknown figure. Three accounts, three communities, unconnected sources. Consistent description. Effective in cases that resisted standard intervention. Type of practitioner not identifiable. Not to be reported to institutional contacts until identification is surer."
He signed it and dated it. Then, because his hand was already moving, he turned back a page to the map.
He put a small cross where each account came from. The courtyard in his own city. Hyderabad. The two villages in the south, which he had to guess at from the ethnographer's description of the river.
He sat back.
Each cross sat on the worst number of its week. The southern villages in the first fortnight, when nobody else had noticed the south. Hyderabad in the week it climbed past eleven. The courtyard quarter in the week Ahmed had stopped sleeping. The man went where it was heaviest, the way spilt water finds the lowest corner of a floor.
Ahmed ran his finger along the column of his own city's numbers, district by district, the figures his colleagues had phoned in over three weeks. Most of them were still rising. One was not.
The eastern district had stopped climbing eleven days ago. Its numbers sat level, then dipped by two, then by three, and not one reciter he knew had been working there.