The thermometer screwed to the mosque wall said forty-six, and it was not yet half past ten.
Ahmed moved his mat a foot to the left to stay inside the shade. The shade came off the mosque's east wall in a band as wide as a bus and shrank by the hour, and the seven had learned to set out the morning's intake along it in a line, one clipboard to each, like clerks at a ration office. Behind them the courtyard tiles were too hot to stand on barefoot. In front of them the families sat on the strip of pavement with their backs to the wall, holding umbrellas and wet cloths, waiting.
This was the third summer. The rains had been thin the first year and the second, and this year they had not come at all. The monsoon had been a week of white cloud over the sea in July and then nothing. In Karachi the taps in most houses ran for an hour every few days, and in some for no hour at all. Water came by tanker if it came. The mosque kept a tank on its roof and filled it from the tanker that came on Mondays and Thursdays at four.
Today was Monday.
Saleem had the first clipboard. He wrote without looking up, in the small square hand he used for teaching boys their letters in his garage in Lyari, and he did not hurry anyone. Daniyal, at the far end, was already saying the next question before the mother in front of him had finished answering the last one. Ahmed had told him twice that week to wait. He would tell him again.
They had come to him at the end of July because he wrote to them. They stayed, he thought, because the work had changed under all of them at once and nobody else would say so. Half the cases on the clipboards now were the ordinary kind. The other half were heat.
"Sir."
Saleem had put his pen down. In front of him an uncle in a sweat-dark kurta was holding a boy of about twelve upright on the pavement by the back of his shirt. The boy's head rolled. His eyes were open and moving under half-shut lids.
"Since this morning," the uncle said. "He says things. He talks to people who aren't there. His eyes go up. His mother says it's the thing from the house on the corner, the one the woman had in the spring."
Ahmed came and knelt on the pavement. He did not touch the boy's eyes first. He put the back of his hand to the boy's neck, then his palm flat on the chest under the shirt.
The skin was hot and dry. There was no sweat on it anywhere. The heart under his palm went fast and light, like a bird's.
"What do you see?" he asked Saleem.
Saleem looked for a long moment. "His eyes slide," he said. "But they slide everywhere. Not away from you. Everywhere."
"And his skin?"
"Dry."
"In this heat a frightened boy sweats," Ahmed said. "This one has stopped. That is his body, not a guest. Write it down that way."
He sent Daniyal running for the clinic on the next road. Daniyal came back in four minutes with his shirt stuck to him and said the clinic had no ice and no beds, only a nurse who said to wet him and fan him and bring him if he stopped answering. So they wet him. They soaked two of the mosque's prayer sheets under the washing tap and laid them over him in the shade, and the uncle fanned him with a piece of cardboard from a crate of bottled water, and the boy's eyes came down slowly from wherever they had gone and found his uncle's face.
Ahmed wrote it on his own sheet. Heat, not affliction. Wrong referral. Mother told by neighbours.
It was the fourth that week.
By two the band of shade was as narrow as a corridor and the seven had moved the intake inside, onto the cool floor by the back pillars, under the fans. The fans turned and pushed the hot air from one end of the hall to the other.
The washing tap in the courtyard ran a thread of water, and then a trickle, and then a cough of air. A small boy holding a plastic bottle under it looked at the tap and then at Ahmed, as if he might be able to do something about it.
"At four," Ahmed told him. "The tanker comes at four."
The boy went and sat by the gate with his bottle.
Umair had a radio in his bag. He kept it low, out of respect for the hall, but they could all hear it. Forty-one dead in the city yesterday, the newsreader said. The morgue at the civil hospital was full and the Edhi ambulances were taking bodies to the cold store of a fish exporter in Korangi. She said it the way they said road deaths, in the same voice, between the price of flour and the cricket.
"My mother's taps have been dry nine days," Umair said, to nobody.
An old man waiting with his granddaughter on the end of the line had been listening. He had a face like a walnut and a white cap, and he shook his head slowly the whole time the radio talked.
"My mother used to say," he said, "that before the end there are three hard years. In the first the sky keeps back a third of its rain. In the second, two thirds. In the third it keeps back all of it." He held up three fingers, bent with age. "This is the third."
Daniyal opened his mouth. Ahmed looked at him and he shut it.
"Your mother said it," Ahmed told the old man, gently. "I have not found it in a book I trust. I won't tell you it's true and I won't tell you it's false."
The old man nodded as though that was the answer he had expected from a younger man, and took his granddaughter's hand.
Ahmed wrote the morning's numbers on the back page of his notebook, in the column he had begun in June. Intakes. Heat. Affliction. Wrong referral. Under it, in a separate column, the dead the radio counted. He did not know yet what the second column was for. He kept it because a column kept the same way every day showed a shape sooner or later.
At four the families were back by the gate with their cans and bottles and the small boy was at the front.
At half past four the tanker had not come.
At five Ahmed rang the depot. The number rang out. He rang the driver's mobile, the number written on the wall of the roof stairwell in marker, and it went to a recording that said the number was not available. The mosque's caretaker went up to the roof and knocked on the tank with his knuckle, and came down, and did not need to say what it sounded like.
The women by the gate began to talk among themselves, low and fast. A man shouted at nobody about the water mafia, about the hydrant on the main road where the tankers filled for the rich houses in Defence. Somebody told him to be quiet. A woman said there had been three tankers stopped on the Lyari road the week before, men with sticks, the water sold off by the can. Somebody else said no, it was Korangi. Nobody knew.
The call for the afternoon prayer had come and gone at ten to five. The heat had not moved at all. The light on the courtyard tiles was white.
Ahmed stood by the gate with the families and waited, because there was nothing else to do and it seemed wrong to go inside and leave them waiting alone. Saleem stood with him. The small boy with the bottle sat on the step and drew lines in the dust with his finger.
At twenty to six his phone rang.
He did not know the number. Then the name came up from his contacts, a name he had saved three weeks ago and not called since. Baig.
He remembered the intake sheet at once: a mother's handwriting pressed hard into the paper, a girl of eight who stood facing the wrong wall of the room whenever the call to prayer sounded. There had been an appointment at eleven, on a Monday at the end of August. He had recited over her and nothing in her had answered. Two days later the mother sent a message: it had stopped on its own. Mariam was herself. She was sorry to have troubled him.
He had put the folder in the drawer with the cases that closed without his knowing why.
"Mrs Baig," he said.
At first he heard only her breathing, and behind it a fan and a television and a man's voice saying something sharp in another room.
"At the afternoon call," Mariam's mother said. "She got up from her tea. She's turned to the wall again."