Page 164 of The End of the World As We Know It
For weeks Maulvi Khizar had visited the sick and the dying, sitting by their bedsides, holding their hands, listening to them recite the declaration of faith one last time with swollen, discolored lips. He sprinkled water on their faces as they gasped and wheezed, and cleaned snot off their chins. When they passed, he helped their loved ones cart their bodies to the graveyard behind the mosque. He abandoned that practice after the bereaved died, too, and no one was left to help him move them.
“With my own hands, I buried fifty or more people who came to the mosque in their last hours, seeking its holy vicinity in death,” Khizar said, pouring hot tea from a kettle, as the three of them sat at the rickety table in the middle of the imam’s room. “I prayed fifteen, twenty janazas daily for weeks, then took them in a wheelbarrow five by five to the ditch by the graveyard. I lowered them down as gently as I could and poured a handful of dust over each. Would that I could give them a proper burial, but I’m an old blind man and all I could do was wait for the last person to give up the ghost before I began filling in the ditch.”
His teacup shook a little as he brought it to his mouth and sipped. His sightless gaze traveled over his room and Nasir and the girl, Palwasha. She ate an entire packet of Prince chocolate biscuits andlistened to the old man ramble, then to Nasir as he narrated their story.
After his family and friends died, Nasir had walked around Balakot in a daze, his grief larger than the mountains that surrounded him, deeper than the emerald waters of the Kunhar River that mocked him with their swiftness, their indifference.We stop, the world doesn’t stop, he thought again and again as he slept in a different bed each day in the fancy hotel he used to guard before the wabaa took everyone.
No one had believed the world was ending. His neighbors had sneered, even as the Christian missionary hospital in Garhi Habibullah sent panicked messages to the surrounding clinics, asking people to put on masks and stay at home. Stay at home? A Christian conspiracy, they said. Everyoneknewthe wabaa had been started by Amreeka to render all Muslims impotent, but instead Allah’s wrath fell upon them and it turned on its makers. Oh yes, they’d been following the news on TV and radio, how their glittering cities fell and the infidels died in the streets. And now these Christian traitors were jumping on the bandwagon, trying to send the Muslim men home, while they planned evil, satanic things in the dark of night!
The people of Balakot weren’t fools. They’d teach those Christian chuhras a lesson or two.
But before a mob could form and march to the hospital—it was over. The ringleader, a man named Qadri, who’d been inciting and goading the men of Balakot for days, was dead. Killed by the wabaa.
The plague, it turned out, was egalitarian and secular. It didn’t discriminate between rich and poor, crescents and crosses. Everyone in Balakot died—except Nasir.
He buried those he could and left the rest where they had fallen, for what was the point of breaking his back? He wasn’t twenty anymore. Besides, nature and rot would have their way. From mulch we come and to mulch we return.
He’d found fourteen-year-old Palwasha rocking in an armchair by the roadside in Abbottabad, an hour from Balakot. At first, she hadhidden inside a handicraft shop, she’d tell him later, but she had been alone for so long and the voices of the dead were louder every night. Her baby sister, her brother, her father with his big, strong mechanic’s hands, and her aunt Bano, her mother’s sister, who’d taken care of Palwasha after her moray died from an untreated fistula gone bad. They’d begun talking to her in the silence of the night and, later, in the daytime as well.
She couldn’t stand it, Palwasha said. The resounding emptiness, being alone with the alone. She knew it would drive her insane—so when she heard Nasir’s motorbike in the distance, she thought,Sweet death… or a friend?Were they even different now? The stench of rotting flesh still in her nostrils, she came out from her hiding place and waited for the stranger, her eyes squeezed shut, rocking, rocking, pretending she was still in her father’s embrace.
The tall, bearded stranger didn’t hurt her. His voice was kind, and he had a knack for calming her fears. Also for finding and preserving food. Sun-drying, brining, pickling, or salting was the trick, Nasir told her, as he substituted the bike for an abandoned Toyota Corolla, its keys clutched in the driver’s rotted hands. Palwasha looked away as Nasir dragged the family of three out of the car to the roadside and placed a rain-slick tarp over them.
“They won’t miss it,” he commented as they got into the vehicle. He wouldn’t look at her and she hoped he couldn’t hear the invisible fingers tap-tapping on the windows as they drove away, heading to Islamabad, thinking they would find life and some semblance of law and order in the capital city.
They didn’t. Just more dead at every chowk, traffic signal, hamlet, and bungalow. Brown kites, eagles, and vultures soared over the city, while feral cats roamed in packs. And wasn’t that odd, Nasir thought one night, as they sat outside a guesthouse under a fourteenth moon, him smoking an expensive cigar he’d found in a VIP suite, Palwasha biting into a miraculously edible apple from the kitchen’s cold storage that had long ago stopped working. None of the feral animals worecollars. They were all strays. Where were the expensive purebreds of the city’s rich and elite? Of all those diplomats from foreign countries, one week of whose cat food cost more than their chowkidar’s monthly salary?
They stayed in Islamabad for three weeks, foraging, scavenging, waiting for someone to appear, something to happen, before Nasir finally decided to try Lahore. He’d thought long and hard about it and it made sense to him to move south. There would be more traffic of the living in the heart of Punjab.
Also, there were the dreams.
But he didn’t tell Maulvi Khizar about them yet. Instead, he talked about the GT Road, that iconic highway built in the sixteenth century by the emperor Sher Shah Suri, now desolate and crammed to the brim with dented, rusting vehicles and corpses bloated in the summer heat. They had to abandon the Corolla early on and switch to the rickshaw, which was able to navigate the obstacles on the highway far more easily and carry more than a motorbike could. Palwasha wanted to name the rickshaw. Nasir thought that silly, but really what did it matter? They named it Parrot.
And it was on GT Road near Jhelum that they had their first encounter with the Wolves.
Palwasha shuddered as Nasir described to Maulvi Khizar how they ran into the fields and managed to hide behind a grove of banyan trees right before the contingent rolled into view. Watching them move across the highway, laughing and herding boys and girls in ropes and chains, was the first time Nasir realized the world wasn’t merely empty, but that it had been emptied of good people. Evil men, like cockroaches, had survived.
Khizar counted beads on a tasbih as Nasir told their story. When he was finished, the old mullah sat in silence, his fingers telling the rosary reverently, gently, as if he were touching dewdrops, then said, “We’re strange creatures, aren’t we? We hope in futility that the world will change, and when it does, we long for what once was.”
Nasir watched fondly as Palwasha drank the last of her tea and got up. They had plenty of opportunity along the way to pick up new clothes and she had changed into clean shalwar kurta, but despite Nasir’s persuasion she refused to throw her old green dupatta away. It must have complemented her jade eyes once, but now, oil-stained, blackened with dirt, it clung to her neck like a net of vines.
She asked in accented Urdu, “Where is the bathroom?”
Khizar thought for a moment, then he gestured to a door that led to the pillared interior of the mosque. “Into the courtyard and on your left. Baita,” he said to her as she shuffled to the door, “indulge an old man and recite the prayer hanging on the eastern pillar before you enter the bathroom, okay?”
The girl stared at him, nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “Jee, Maulvi sahib.”
When she’d left, Khizar turned to Nasir. “You’re both welcome to stay as long as you wish. I have plenty of tinned food and spices, and there are herds of cattle and game roaming the fields around here. You’ll never run out of meat if you have any skill with a gun.”
“I brought a few guns with me from Abbottabad.” Nasir scratched his long and unkempt beard. He needed to trim it. “And I can shoot.”
“My room is small, as you can see, and can’t accommodate all of us. My advice,” Khizar said, “is for the girl to either sleep outside—I can put up a couple charpais behind the mosque—or in one of the houses across the road.”
“We certainly don’t want to inconvenience you, and we’ll sleep wherever you want.” Nasir studied the mullah’s face. “But I don’t think space is your real concern here, is it?”
Khizar fell silent. Outside the postern door, dusk extended its tentacles, covering the mullah’s charpai in shadow. Hero was nowhere to be seen. After a rabbit or stray cat perhaps.
“There really isn’t any other way to put it.” Khizar’s cataract-glazedeyes were upon the courtyard door. “The mosque is inhabited by jinn and the girl isn’t safe in here after dusk.”
