#babla

Zulfikar had written: "...the Muslim country of Pakistan with its peculiar political, historical, geographical and economic factors should not be forced to undergo a big change such as the introduction of ‘Islamic’ law.."

Someone then asked: Wasn't it Bhutto himself who had abolished Sunday as the weekly holiday? So after Bhutto, they turned to Jinnah instead, saying: Was it not our Father of the Nation who first advocated Sunday as the day of rest?

Rehman had no particular desire to defend the Friday holiday. He wasn't school security guard or instructor living his life by a duty roster. As a young Balochi ganster, he had inherited his father's trade and dealt drugs alongside the Papu family's people. Strange thing, really. Back then, Rehman still walked arm in arm with Pashtun boys. Drug dealers, street thugs, gangsters... what did such people care about workdays and holidays? It was simply that he had grown accustomed, as a child and as a young man, to a life in which Sunday was a working day. And of all habits, those formed in childhood sink the deepest roots.

Many people who care little about politics remember only two kinds of leaders throughout their lives: the ones from their childhood, and the ones in power now.

Current leaders are like answers scribbled on a cheat sheet. When people talk politics and suddenly stumble over a name, unable to remember who announced what policy yesterday, the radio might casually report: "Benazir Bhutto stated that if civilian governments are to control the intelligence services, those agencies must be subject to oversight." And then people know. People say, "Well then, I suppose the army's finished."

The prime ministers and presidents of one's childhood are different. They are like the dust piled outside your front door, like the road that was never properly paved. From the day a child first goes out barefoot until the day he graduates middle school, he runs across that sandy road in slippers. Every time he passes, grit slips into his shoes and stains the soles of his feet brown-black. When he gets home and steps into a puddle, the water soon turns to mud. If he rubs at his ankles with his hands, thick layers of grime come off.

Meanwhile, the radio announces that another foreign minister has arrived in Pakistan on an official visit, and that the president or prime minister has received him. The adults are busy making a living. The news on the radio is often nothing more than white noise that makes labor feel less lonely. They do not care what happened today. The children—and children do not care either.... Ahmed isn't talking to me anymore. I'm going to throw his schoolbag into the drainage ditch. The Government of Pakistan strongly condemns the Soviet invasion and is actively supporting a United Nations General Assembly resolution demanding the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan.... Oh, Zainab, Zainab, don't tell my parents, I gave all of his bubble gum to you... If there were some kind of X-ray designed specifically to diagnose cognition, doctors used it to scan the minds of adults and children, we might discover that a child's mind contains countless cavities waiting to be filled.

An adult's mind, by contrast, resembles the lungs of a coal worker suffering from pneumoconiosis. The cavities have collapsed.The life already lived has often failed to produce those flowers of ordinary existence so frequently celebrated by non-working-class writers composing poems about workers. Instead, it has produced only scar tissue--overgrowths that clog the thousands upon thousands of empty spaces once waiting to be filled with possibilities.

The names of politicians enter a child's ears alongside the names shouted by vendors selling peanut brittle on the street. Both become imprinted. The politicians' names lose their political meaning and become part of childhood memory itself. They no longer represent policies. Instead, they become linked to a particular summer, to the private language of someone not yet grown up.

Even when that person reaches thirty, forty... eighty years old, and walks down the little road outside his house that municipal authorities have ignored forever--even if he now wears polished leather shoes--he will still think of those filthy little feet of his.

Rehman used a notebook to plan his journeys. He was not much of a reader. When he did read, it was usually sensational stories about the CIA or the KGB. Sometimes, over meals or during idle hours, he would share magazine he had been reading with his cousin-brother Uzair.

Uzair read even less than he did. The man believed that during his years at school he had already read every book he would ever need to read in this lifetime. From then on, only films and football matches were worth watching. Sometimes, after finishing a story, Rehman would add his own commentary. For example: "If they'd abandoned written communication and used a more secure method to pass information, the Soviets would never have discovered it." Uzair would usually nod in agreement. He thought Rehman Bhai possessed truly exceptional insight.

Rehman had two sons. His elder son, Naeem, died several years ago. The circumstances were almost absurd: the killer was Naeem's biological grandfather. Rehman's wife, Ulfat, had already begun arranging a marriage for her eldest son. Barring any surprises, he would have married the daughter of a factory owner.

But surprises do happen.

While alive, Naeem was an adult who had never quite shed his boyishness. In front of his younger brother Faizal, who was still in secondary school, he carried himself like an authoritative elder brother. Yet before his elders, he remained a mischievous child. When Rehman and Uzair were discussing how a KGB agent ought to have replaced his notebook, Naeem would interrupt: "Isn't that just a mobile phone? Movies have been doing that for ages."

Uncle Uzair taking advantage of his height, would immediately grab Naeem's cheeks and knead them until he could no longer speak.

Who could have known? Later, he truly would never speak again.

The water pipeline project Rehman had financed was nearing completion. The contractors and the minister asked when he might honor them by attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Rehman opened his notebook.

Friday....Friday was impossible. On Fridays he liked to return home early. Ulfat would cook rice with a shoulder of lamb slaughtered that very morning. And Rehman would pray at a small mosque near his house. He had donated money toward the construction and renovation of many mosques throughout Lyari, yet none compared to the humble neighborhood mosque whose ceiling fans creaked and rattled overhead.

Ulfat prayed only at home. Afterwards she would cover her face, put on dark-colored shoes, and leave the smooth pavement before her house accompanied by a servant. She would pass through the old streets that smelled faintly of dog urine. Ahead lay a dairy yard. Karachi had many such places. A dozen cattle--perhaps fewer--stood idly inside hay-filled enclosures thick with the smell of livestock. Nearby residents came to buy fresh milk drawn on the spot. Some of the workers, when customers were not paying attention, would quickly pull out hormone injections used to stimulate milk production and jab the cows. Before Rehman became wealthy, Ulfat came here often.

Past the dairy yard stood several household-goods shops selling door handles, textiles, tables, and chairs. The owner of the furniture shop liked to place five or six tall blue stools outside his storefront. Children adored them. Every time Ulfat passed by, she would see several children perched on the stools, swinging their legs. Around the corner from the old street was the butcher's shop she had patronized ever since her marriage. The butcher's assistants fiercely drove away every stray dog drawn by the smell of meat. In time the dogs learned that this place was forbidden territory. Only cats came without fear of being chased off.

Ulfat liked cats. She often fed stray cats with leftover food. But the cats around the butcher's shop unsettled her. Sometimes they buried themselves in plastic bags full of scraps and leftovers, feasting greedily. Other times there was nothing to eat. While Ulfat waited for her order to be cut, she would glance to the side and notice two mottled cats. One sleek and glossy. The other gaunt, little more than skin and bone.

Above their heads hung half of a slaughtered sheep, already drained of blood. Only a few scattered stains remained on the ground, each no larger than a bottle cap. Cats lowered their heads and licked at the half-dried sheep's blood. The sight made Ulfat think of the blood that covered her husband.

Strangely, whenever Rehman returned home drenched in blood, she never felt afraid. She felt a certain excitement, as though she herself had taken part in some battle for dominion over Lyari. However these two cats felt demonic. They made her heart pound painfully.

Perhaps, she thought, it was because the Prophet did not want us to consume blood...

By the time Rehman returned from the khutbah, the smell of lamb shoulder would already have drifted all the way to the street corner....No, Friday was impossible.

Saturday would not work either. He wanted to spend it with his son. After Naeem's death, Rehman treasured the weekends even more, the days when his son did not have school. Not that weekends were free of homework. Faizal simply disliked doing it. He said he had already done enough from Monday through Thursday.

Rehman understood. He had hated homework when he was young as well.

So Sunday it would be. Conveniently enough, once the ceremony was finished on Sunday, the workers responsible for maintaining the pipeline could begin work on Monday.

That was how he settled on Sunday for the trip. He informed Uzair, telling him to write it down as well.

Jaskirat, the Indian operative hidden within their gang--or rather, the man they knew as the Baloch youth Hamza Ali Mazari--learned that Rehman would leave the Baloch-controlled neighborhood for the ribbon-cutting ceremony that day.

He chose Sunday as the day Rehman would die. After he and SP Aslam ambushed Rehman, they carried the dying Baloch man to a hospital. As they had hoped, Rehman survived less than a few minutes after arriving.

The doctors were preparing to wheel him into surgery.... there was nothing left to do but send him to the morgue.

Hamza sat on a bench in the hospital lobby. Rehman's death had attracted a flock of journalists outside, circling like vultures. They competed with one another to interview the tuktuk driver who had transported Hamza and Rehman to the hospital.

He stood perfectly straight, his hands clasped behind his back, as though he were wearing an embroidered sherwani instead of a driver's old clothes. Perhaps he really had been an excellent student before leaving school. With solemn dignity, he recounted the dangers of the journey and his regret that Rehman could not be saved.

The reporters thrust microphones toward him. His voice boomed across the hospital grounds like one of those trumpet players who wander the streets during Ramadan, singing verses while soliciting donations for a future Hajj.

Hamza covered his ears. He wanted not to hear. Yet couldn't. Perhaps some reporter outside would notice the silhouette of a man struggling with his grief, hands pressed over his ears. The next day, a newspaper might embellish the scene with literary flourishes, inventing emotional depths behind Hamza's gesture. They would pity him. Pity a man sitting there, waiting for the dead man's family, waiting to perform grief for public display. That pity only made Hamza suffer more.

Uzair arrived not long afterward. He said nothing. Hamza said nothing either. Looking at the tears running down Hamza's face, Uzair understood that he had lost yet another relative. Tears began streaming from his own eyes as well. Like losting his soul, he stumbled into Hamza's arms and clutched tightly at the shoulders of the man who had orchestrated Rehman's death.

His mouth opened as if in a wail. Yet no sound emerged. Only Hamza could hear it. From Uzair's wide-open mouth came a strange mixture of breathing and sobbing, something like the rattling respiration of a man afflicted with a throat disease.

For perhaps two minutes he breathed this way in silence. He suddenly realized that he had not yet seen Rehman's body. Maybe he was still alive... Maybe the doctors, the driver, Hamza.... everyone, had made a mistake. Maybe Rehman was still breathing.

He staggered backward, tore himself free from Hamza's embrace, hurried away without looking back. Hamza watched him leave. Only after another fifteen minutes did he himself enter the morgue.

The white sheet covering Rehman's face had been pulled down to his chest. He had been dead for some time, his complexion had already turned bluish. Uzair knelt beside the metal table on which the body lay. He gripped Rehman's dangling hand with desperate force.

His forehead rested against the edge of the table, leaving a red mark on his skin. Rehman's hand lay against his face. At times Uzair treated that hand as though it were a telephone line connecting him to the world beyond death, pouring out fragments of grief that never formed complete sentences. Or he was too choked with sobs to speak at all. Then he can only simply kiss the cold back of Rehman's hand again and again. Perhaps he wished to warm Rehman's hand with his own heat. Or perhaps he wished for himself to become as cold and silent as Rehman.

That day, Rehman was not the only one who died. SP's task force had exchanged fire with Rehman and Donga on the highway. At least a dozen policemen were killed. And Donga strap explosives to himself and die together with them.

Before the firefight began, Hamza had killed Babla inside the car. Siyahi hadn't been in the car, therefore survived a little longer. After Hamza fled, he somehow discovered that Hamza was the true culprit. Shouting "traitor," he pursued him. They fought for a long time.

In the end, the false Baloch strangled him with a vine and left him hanging from a tree.

The dead policemen were carried back to their station during SP Aslam's withdrawal. They became martyrs, medals, and compensation payments for their families. Donga, Babla, and Siyahi were treated differently. As if venting his anger, Aslam abandoned their bodies by the roadside.

All three were bachelors. Only Babla's parents were still alive. Donga and Siyahi were like the stray dogs they used to toss bones to. Their parents had long since died, in some forgotten summer. Uzair should have collected their bodies that very night. But he, and indeed the entire Baloch faction, was drowning in grief, lost the ability to act.

Not until noon the following day did Uzair return to the horrific scene. One of the killers accompanied him. Hamza parked the car several dozen meters from the site of the firefight.

He helped Uzair out. The previous night, both of them had coped through excess. Hamza had consumed food almost vindictively. An unprecedented hunger seemed to burn inside his stomach. After Yalina prepared dinner, he tried to eat. Yet every mouthful caught in his throat as sobs threatened to overwhelm him. Only when Yalina fed him directly could he swallow. Without awareness of what he was doing, Hamza finished an entire plate of rice. Then he stood up and staggered away to drink water.

The water diluted the acid in his stomach. Soon afterward he began vomiting. He vomited until every grain of rice he had just eaten came back up.

As for Uzair, he drank continuously until he lost consciousness. Alcohol always left him parched, and every time he drank he woke early from thirst. When he rose from bed to get water, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. The gaunt face staring back made him pause. For a moment he wanted to mock the man in the reflection. But with whom?

The answer struck him at once. Donga and the others still lay unburied. He was obviously incapable of driving. So he called Hamza.

The two men walked along the roadside. Ahead stood the vehicle Rehman had ridden in on the day he died. Half of the windshield was stained red by blood and fragments of flesh thrown there by the explosion. Donga's torso and arms remained largely intact. His right leg was gone. His left leg hung from the body by little more than flesh. Apparently the explosives had been concentrated around his waist and abdomen.

Hamza had expected the blast to rip open Donga's stomach and scatter his organs across the road. But it had not happened. Uzair quietly lowered himself into a cross-legged position beside the corpse. He turned over Donga's body, which had been lying face-down. The abdominal cavity had split open. Loops of intestines, stomach, and spleen bulged outward in a swollen mass. Part of the swelling came from the enormous meal Donga had eaten that afternoon at the Water Authority's expense. The rest came from the relentless work of bacteria after death, decomposing and fermenting within his body.

Nearly all of Donga's digestive organs protruded outside the abdominal cavity. Only their remaining attachments to the organs above and below prevented them from spilling completely onto the ground.

Uzair stared blankly at Donga's ashen face. He reached out and poked it with his index finger. A dent appeared in the flesh and lingered for several seconds before slowly fading. Donga had always seemed destined to land himself in one predicament after another. The gang teased him by calling him Donga, not only because his stomach seemed as vast as a cooking cauldron. The name itself suited him. Donga. Donga. It sounded like the name of a man incapable of delicate feelings or careful thought. And indeed, he had always acted on impulse, never looking ahead, never considering consequences.

"But where's Siyahi?" Uzair asked. Hamza guessed that the question came because Donga's face already bore obvious lividity. Of the two remaining bodies--Babla and Siyahi--Uzair's thoughts had first gone to the man whose face was marked by a birthmark like spilled black ink.

"I don't know," Hamza said, blinking. It wasn't that lying made him uncomfortable. The body had been lying here since yesterday afternoon. After a night of roughly twenty-three-degree weather, it had begun to emit a distinct odor of decay. The hydrogen sulfide and ammonia stung his eyes and forced tears from them, creating the illusion of grief.

Hamza wanted to feel sorrow for the ruined Baloch men lying here. But the desolation and pain that had followed Rehman's death had raised his threshold for suffering. If a man were forced, grieving and unwilling, to hack off his father's limbs with a cleaver while meeting the despairing gaze of a betrayed parent, then when he afterward killed the brother who burst through the door and witnessed everything, he would discover that no deeper sorrow remained. After that first death, everyone else became the same. Everyone, is nothing but walking flesh and bone.

Uzair gently patted the stiff chest of the corpse, the same way he might have soothed Faizal to sleep. If Donga had still been alive, Hamza thought, and he had told him, You will pat Donga's body gently, the way you soothe a child, both Donga and Uzair would have laughed themselves breathless. They would called it disgustingly sentimental. And asked what demon had deposited such an absurd idea into Hamza's head.

But Donga was dead. Hamza began to suspect that what he had set in motion was not the opening act of a power struggle among Lyari's gangs. Rather, it was the raising of the iron curtain on a madhouse. Uzair seemed genuinely unhinged. He no longer appeared capable of distinguishing between the friends who had smashed shop windows and traded curses alongside him, and those helpless infants. He acted entirely on instinct. And his instincts told him: This thing is silent, asleep....You must protect it. Otherwise someone will take it away, and you'll never find it again.

The stench of decomposition made tears stream down his face. Reluctantly, tenderly, Uzair pushed the protruding intestines back into the abdominal cavity. Then he and Hamza lifted Donga's body into the car.

They continued onward. Eventually they stopped beside a bloodstained road sign. Babla's headless body lay beneath it. The corpse didn't look as though he had been killed outside the vehicle. Which meant that Hamza, who had been inside the same car, ought to know how Babla had died.

Uzair turned toward him:"Who killed him?"

"We got forced cursh to a fire hydrant," Hamza replied. "He flew out through the window. Landed on the sign."

Uzair said nothing. He walked a dozen meters away toward the severed head that like a football. The previous night he had smashed nearly everything in his bedroom, as though each object were the bones of SP's men, the bones of the Pashtuns. He had sworn that he would cut off their heads and kick them like balls. Now scavenging insects had already begun to colonize this beautiful head.

Babla's skin had lost its healthy flush. The last time Rehman had been arrested by SP, their gang had needed someone to infiltrate the Lyari Task Force headquarters during a surprise attack. So they had dressed Babla in a burqa, passed him off as a woman. His build had been perfect for it--not overly muscular, merely slender enough that beneath the garment he resembled a somewhat tall young woman.

During the drive to the task force compound he had lifted the burqa occasionally to let air circulate underneath. Hamza had hardly dared look at him. Such as Jaskirat secretly feared the brightly dressed transgender women he occasionally encountered, the sight of a handsome young man concealed beneath a burqa and left his soft curls down, filled Hamza with a peculiar anxiety.

Babla's face had been full of color then, and live, and pretty. Now that beauty was gone. The color had drained from his face forever. Only his hair remained unchanged, catching the sunlight and gleaming like strands of copper wire.

Uzair picked up the severed head. It was as if he had completely lost his sense of smell, he stared into the closed eyes. Meanwhile Hamza's thoughts drifted elsewhere, to the corpse hanging in the forest, the place where they had fought...Surely no scraps of his clothing had been left snagged in the branches there?

**

Lately, Siyahi had often dreamed of dying a violent death.

In his dream, a black lion chased him and tried to tear him apart. He fought back desperately, but the scene suddenly shifted. A rope tightened around his neck. He found himself standing in a wilderness. Why would there be a gallows in the middle of nowhere? (Donga objected: "Why not? It's a dream. In your dreams, even Mahnoor Baloch shows up in the wilderness...") Siyahi clawed frantically at the noose around his throat. His legs kicked wildly beneath him. It was useless. He was eventually hanged. At the very moment of death, he woke up.

"Oh," Donga said, "so that's why you kicked me onto the floor." The Baloch man dusted himself off and said, "You're really something. Floodwaters couldn't move me, but you managed it."

He patted his backside and stood up. The clock on the wall read half past twelve. Normally the street outside would be bustling with noise and activity. Today there was only rain and silence

"Is it still raining that hard?" Siyahi asked as he pulled on the undershirt he had already worn for two days, got out of bed as well. The clothes he had worn on the first night were covered with vomit and urine. After waking up that morning, he had fought down his disgust, pinched the corner of the garments between two fingers, and dropped them into a plastic basin to soak. Half an hour later, when most of the food scraps and filth had settled to the bottom, he transferred the clothes into a washing machine that roared like road-construction equipment whenever it ran.

At the time, the storm had seemed to be easing. Looking out at the water that had accumulated overnight--water reaching almost to the calves of a grown man--Siyahi had thought: Once the rain stops, give it an afternoon and I'll be able to leave.

He had never met his mother. Perhaps his parents had disliked babies born with birthmarks. Or perhaps his father had been a womanizing customer of prostitutes, and his mother a prostitute herself. Only through hard lessons and the advice of kind people on his street had Siyahi acquired enough practical wisdom to survive. That wisdom had kept him alive on Karachi's streets, allowed him to join Rehman Baloch's gang, and eventually brought him a life where he no longer worried about food or clothing.

Karachi flooded frequently. Political factions fought so constantly that they could never agree on improvements to basic infrastructure. The drainage system in Lyari was almost exactly the same as it had been when Siyahi was a child. Back when he had been shorter than the  sugar cane juice cart pushed through the streets, an old beggar once stopped him from running through a rainstorm to a shop where he intended to steal a little money amid the chaos.

The beggar said:"A utility pole's fallen over. There could be electricity in the water. Step into it and you'll die." Then he glanced at Siyahi's height. "And besides, the water's too deep for you. It'll come up to your chest." The old man grinned obscenely. "That water's soaked dead cats and dead dogs. If your little bird gets wet in that filth, you'll be running a fever within days. Blisters'll start growing around the hole you pee from and rot their way all the way down to your balls."

Shortly after noon, the rain intensified again. Dark clouds covered the sky. Had it not been for the Adhan to the Dhuhr prayer drifting across the neighborhood, Siyahi might have believed it was already 6pm.

Monsoon winds drove the rain sideways through the windows. He had been forced to hang his clothes from the curtain rod instead of the drying rack. The air inside the house was so damp that nothing dried. Instead, the clothes had begun to develop a faint smell of mildew, like moss. In this infuriating rainy season, he could only comfort himself with one thought: At least he had washed the clothes before the storm knocked out power across the entire neighborhood. Imagine if all that filth had started growing green fuzz indoors. That would have been unbearable.

Donga did not even bother looking out the window. He walked straight into the kitchen. The refrigerator contained almost no vegetables or meat. This bachelor never cooked. At the beginning of every month he simply delivered stacks of cash to several nearby restaurants. Afterward he treated them the way a sultan might treat a collection of concubines, demanding food from a lucky restaurant suited his mood that day and having it delivered. Sometimes he ate far more than he had prepaid. Sometimes nearly a whole month he barely ordered from certain restaurants at all. No one complained. Compared with the hoodlums who simply stole money from cash registers, Donga at least paid.

That said, everyone knew that preparing food for this Baloch man required exceptional care. At the time, commercially sold pilaf spice mixes often contained bay leaves. Donga hated it when restaurants failed to remove the bay leaves before serving the rice. Perhaps the gaps between his teeth were unusually large. Whether that had anything to do with his habit of chewing betel nut, nobody knew. In any case, one day a bay leaf became wedged between a tooth and his gum. When he pulled it out, it came away stained with blood.

The restaurant responsible closed and changed ownership within days. Maybe the owner returned to the countryside. Nobody knew. One neighbor later recalled seeing him board a minibus with his wife and children, luggage slung over his shoulder, bandages wrapped around his head. The neighbor called through the window: "Where are you moving to?"

The restaurant owner's eyes immediately filled with terror, like a bird hearing a gunshot. He turned his face away with nervous haste and refused to answer.

Donga's kitchen contained only a plate of samosas and some oil-preserved eggplant. There were still twenty or so cans of beer and soft drinks, however, along with potato chips, cookies, and coffee in the cupboards. Donga found this perfectly satisfactory. Siyahi was less pleased. Not because of the living conditions, he was simply worried that a diet consisting entirely of such food might make it impossible to take a proper shit.

The two men sat side by side on the sofa, mechanically stuffing food into their mouths as though fulfilling a biological obligation. The call to prayer spread across the neighborhood. Loudspeakers mounted atop the minarets still functioned on emergency batteries. They pretended the district still had electricity. In a sense, it did. There was electricity everywhere--in the water.

Holding a samosa, Siyahi wandered over to the window. The water was now deep enough to cover his thighs. A utility pole had snapped and fallen into the flood. Not far away floated two bloated dogs.

Suddenly one of them burst apart, then Siyahi realize that it had not actually been swollen. It was merely covered with flies. The insects had settled on every exposed surface, either feeding or resting after growing tired of flying above the water. Crumbs fell from his samosa with every bite.

The elderly muezzin called out that Allahu Akbar and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Siyahi said the call was probably prerecorded. Donga agreed:"Yeah. The man's over sixty now. It'd be cruel to make an old fellow go out in weather like this. Still, somebody has to be in the mosque to play the recording. What do you think--did he walk there, or paddle over in a kayak?"

When the time came for the Hayya ala Salah , however, today's adhan was different. The muezzin called: "Pray in your homes. Pray in your homes." Then he returned to the usual wording, after the adhan ended, the old man added in a low, hoarse voice, as though offering a commentary: "The Messenger of Allah said, why do you not pray in your homes? He did not wish hardship upon you, walking through mud and difficulty..."

Siyahi and Donga exchanged glances. These two men, who drifted through life without much purpose, suddenly felt a powerful stirring. All they could see was each other, staring wide-eyed like fools. Yet both were certain that their unambitious minds had been overtaken by the image of an old muezzin they had never seen--a man trudging toward the mosque in slippers heavy with rainwater, wrapped in a robe soaked through by the storm.

"You think he'd count as a martyr if he died on the way?" Donga asked, scratching his head.

"More than we would," Siyahi replied. "Look at why we're trapped in the same house. Maybe this is divine punishment."

"Well, what are we supposed to do about it? What's done is done." Donga snorted heavily through his nose, irritated by this sudden outbreak of moral anxiety. "Maybe I need scrub you inside with a wire brush."

"That's not fair..." Siyahi buried his face in his hands. He looked remarkably like one of those pathetic men who only discover a child isn't theirs after the kid is already old enough to run around the streets.... Perhaps that was a poor comparison. Given Rehman's family history, people in the Baloch faction generally avoided joking about men who raised someone else's child.

He groaned: "Why am I the one having nightmares all the time? How come you're completely fine?"

Donga considered this. "Because you're a terrible person."

"And you're some kind of saint?"

"I don't piss on other people's rooftops."

"Oh, fuck off." Siyahi sat upright. "Hamza didn't even care. How long are you going to keep bringing that up? Swear to me you've never pissed by the roadside."

Donga slowly leaned toward Siyahi's ear. A mysterious expression spread across his face--the same expression he wore whenever he invented increasingly absurd stories about SP's mother's love life.

"I don't reach my age and still piss my pants."

Siyahi immediately lunged at him. The two of them tumbled into a wrestling match. Only the Devil knew why the first time they had slept together had been so astonishingly enjoyable. Siyahi had been masturbating in the bathroom. Donga, annoyed that he had occupied the bathroom for so long, though it was, in fact, Siyahi's own house, had twisted the worn-out doorknob open. Then had Siyahi learned that the metallic click he heard every time he locked the door was little more than a courtesy sound effect.

He thought embarrassment had made his dick to be weak. Instead, Donga mocked him of being inconsiderate, standing there in front of his friend with an erection leaking pre-ejaculate. Even when Donga had hoisted up his legs and penetrated him while he sat on the toilet, Siyahi had still felt as though he were dreaming. First, he hadn't wanted to be penetrated. Second, he had found the experience far more pleasurable than expected. Third, he had never imagined it happening to him at all. Unlike the rival gangsters and policemen who liked to joke about Rehman exposing a pale backside during some detention-room humiliation in his early twenties, Siyahi's birthmark and his overly masculine square jaw had never allowed him to imagine himself as one of the boys who got fucked.

He could not tell whether he was being fucked by Donga's cock or by Donga's belly. Whenever the big man thrust forward, his stomach hit Siyahi's gut before anything else did. Siyahi yelped with excitement like a dog. Donga became equally frenzied. He slung Siyahi's legs over his shoulders, called him a spotted bitch-dog, and climaxed inside him.

For the sake of recreating that legendary night, they tried again and again. They never succeeded. Not until the night before the flood, when both were so drunk they could barely function. Neither of them could maintain an erection.

Donga had not even bothered fully undressing Siyahi. He rolled him onto his stomach, tugged down his trousers to expose half a buttock, and then produced his own limp member. One Baloch man weakly prodded at another Baloch man's tightly clenched entrance. The sphincter refused him every time. Donga felt insulted. Reduced to using his hands, he gave up on penetration.

Even then, Siyahi's alcohol-dulled brain barely understood what was happening. While those fingers fucked him shamelessly, he thrust his hips, fucked the pillow pinned beneath him. Later a beer bottle found its way into him. His memories dissolved into fragments, his stomach filled with beer again and again; beer spraying back out in exaggerated streams; him wetting his trousers; everything seeming wonderful.... Even Donga's soft, wormlike penis. When it was pressed near his mouth, he had eagerly kissed it, sucked at it, and nearly choked on his own saliva.

Perhaps the two of them could only feel sexual desire toward familiar men when accidents happened or when consciousness itself had begun to fade. Now Siyahi sat astride Donga, breathing heavily. The weather was stifling. After wrestling around for a while, sweat poured from his temples. He felt as though he were sitting atop a large mound of yielding flesh. Looking down, he saw only an entirely unglamorous middle-aged man. He rolled up Donga's undershirt, exposing an impressive belly and a chest only slightly less substantial. Sometimes they joked that certain young prostitutes had smaller breasts than Donga.

Ignoring Donga's curses, Siyahi leaned down and sucked briefly at one of them. People sweated easily in weather like this. Smacking his lips afterward, he thought of goat's milk. It really was a little saltier than cow's milk. "Next time I'm fucking you," Siyahi declared.

"Go to hell," Donga replied.

Obviously, no one was having sex today. After the power failed, the water supply became unreliable as well. Siyahi turned on the faucet, hoping to cool his head. But the water emerged was muddy yellow. The two men returned to the sofa.

Fortunately, they eventually discovered a Snakes and Ladders board tucked away in a drawer. While they played, one of them--neither could later remember who--brought up taweez.

Both agreed that a taweez sounded like a good way to get rid of nightmares. After the floodwaters receded, Siyahi contacted Jameel.

Jameel was rather like a wishing well: make a request, and somehow he'd always manage to grant part of it, though never quite the full amount.

"My boy, oh, my boy, this is exactly my field. When Yalina was born, my wife went there to meditate and got herself a taweez..."

Sufism spiritual master listened to Siyahi's description and nodded confidently. "I can immediately rid you of the jinn attached to you."

Siyahi outwardly behaved like an attentive student. But throughout the consultation he kept hearing Donga's voice in his head... A Pashtun woman... a jinn... frantic sex...