The Encounter

It was a simple plan, but somehow, as he and his men followed the shackled man through the hills, Khawar wondered if it should have been simpler still. If they had been able to shoot him close to the police station earlier in the day, a story about a thwarted escape might have played out quite nicely. But his skinny constable, Javed, had noted that at that hour, there were too many day laborers passing by who knew the man, which could have created “complications.” Now he wasn’t sure why they had come here—to the mines, of all places. Who had decided that? Only he could have given the order, but he couldn’t recall it; he was even having trouble remembering the drive over. The adrenaline was disorienting him, which he didn’t like to admit but was perhaps natural, given that this was his first encounter.

The prisoner, Usmaan, a man in his mid-40s who looked a decade older, was handcuffed. Ankles bound in bar fetters, he shuffled through the grass. He was tall, and his head hung down, his eyes on the ground as he tried not to trip, and Khawar was struck by the man’s caution, his care. Then he sniffed, and Khawar wondered if he might be crying. For God’s sake, how would that help now? Then again, Usmaan wasn’t the usual fit for an encounter, a protocol reserved for the worst of criminals—rapists, dacoits, or gangsters of renown. Sometimes it was the only option the police had for delivering justice to men who were either impossible to jail or capable of easily buying their way out of it. An encounter was an act on behalf of the decent in the face of an indecent world, really; that’s what he’d been telling himself these past few days. Only here, they were trailing an anonymous, shabby-looking man with little to his name, a man whom they could all hear murmuring—prayers, insults?—under his breath.

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Up ahead were the abandoned barracks, glum and battered, behind a wire fence. The uranium mines had once brought the army, with its engineers and trucks, here. Khawar hadn’t come out this way in years; no one did, other than the villagers who grazed their animals on the hillside. The locals liked to complain about the mines, about the yellow sludge sliding down the hills. They talked incessantly of the dangerous waste they’d heard was buried in the mines, the damage it was doing to their animals and their children. And it was this that had brought Usmaan to their attention.

Two weeks ago, he’d dumped the bloated body of a cow on Sakhi Sarwar Road, the main route to the area’s most visited shrine. A single act of protest might have been ignored, but day after day, he’d dragged corpses—buffalo, goats, their tongues lolling from their mouths, their hooves strangely swollen—to the middle of the busy thoroughfare in his tiny Suzuki van. When they’d asked him why he’d done it, he’d said that no one cared, and so he’d had no choice but to make people see what was happening here by the mines.

This was true: No one did care. But Usmaan’s blockades had forced pilgrims to get to the shrine by the smaller back roads, where a group of newly assembled dacoits had taken the opportunity to lie in wait and rob them, often violently. Even if Usmaan claimed he had nothing to do with the criminals, he’d made it possible for the gang to operate. So when Khawar and his men couldn’t find any higher-ups from the actual gang to arrest, their patience with the man’s theatrics wore thin, and they decided that dealing with Usmaan would be good enough. It would reduce the recent criminal activity and restore both the flow of tourists and the reputation of the district’s police. So here they were, trailing this stooping man on a hillside caked in sandy effluent from the mines.

Something snapped; they all stopped to look around. But before they could start up again, Usmaan turned to face them, as if he’d decided this was as far as he’d go. Khawar stiffened, alert to trouble. He’d brought three constables with him— excessive, perhaps, but he’d felt the more bodies, the better, and now he wondered if his instincts had been right.

Usmaan cleared his throat. If he had been crying before, no trace of it remained now. The wind was blowing in long, hot gusts, and Usmaan’s kameez flapped up. He was balding, and the tufts of hair on either side of his head flew up too. He grimaced as the wind lashed his face. But Khawar could detect no tension in the man’s body, no indication that he was waiting for a moment to charge at them or run; he looked determined.

Khawar had thought about this moment a great deal the past few days; he’d pictured exactly how it ought to unfold. But as the man stared at each of them, unblinking, he realized that although he’d thought about the mechanics, he hadn’t fully confronted the business of killing a man. He’d known that it might come one day, particularly after his promotion to inspector, but he had expected that he’d function on autopilot, as he did most of the time: overseeing the logistics, getting the job done, filing the paperwork, fastidious as ever. And yet here he was—thinking!

He nodded at his men to indicate that they should unshackle the prisoner. They crouched around his ankles and leaned over his hands, and Khawar felt embarrassed, as if he were watching something untoward, something private. He turned to look at the hills. With the smell of dirt hanging in the air and the grass lying in sheets of dull gold around his ankles, he had the urge to take off his boots and socks and feel the earth under his feet, God’s name hovering somewhere around him.

The prisoner’s chains clanked. This wasn’t the time or the place. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps this was exactly what a man supervising the death of another should be thinking about: God.

Had Inspector Salim Mirza of Karachi, legendary for his record of encounters, felt the same during each of his? How many had Mirza overseen? The number was said to be in the hundreds—it had transformed him into a folk hero of law enforcement. Perhaps the … protocols were different in a city like Karachi. Not that Khawar had ever been there, but it couldn’t be like this: like shooting a man from a neighboring village whom you’d likely wandered past countless times on your way to buy cigarettes. Khawar suspected it must get easier. But surely everyone remembered their first—the first time must feel different.

When he turned back, the constables were still fiddling with the chains, for God’s sake. “What’s taking so long?” he yelled.

The constables straightened and gestured that they were finally done. Then they all turned to look at Usmaan. Pervaiz and Musa stood behind Javed, their hands in their pockets, surveying the prisoner and the rolling hills behind him as though there were a great deal to see out here in the middle of nowhere.

“Come on, then,” Khawar said, indicating that they should proceed. Javed made an After you, sir gesture. Khawar swallowed. He had no intention of being the one to shoot the man. Inspector Mirza might do that kind of thing, but Khawar was here to supervise.

“Go on,” he said, and Javed, his shoulders dropping now, nodded at the others. They reluctantly took their hands out of their pockets and fiddled with their cuffs, their belts, their mustaches, but they did not pull out their guns. Khawar was feeling queasy; if they didn’t get this done quickly, he might start to retch. Mirza, Mirza, he thought in a bid to calm himself.

“Come on,” he said again. The constables finally took out their guns.

“Ready,” Javed said. Khawar thought the prisoner ought to cry now, to whimper—it seemed the right time. But Usmaan only closed his eyes, as if in prayer.

“Something’s not right, sir,” Musa said.

“What?”

Musa widened his eyes, trying to communicate something, but Khawar had no idea what he meant. Of course it wasn’t right, nothing was right.

“Shouldn’t we shoot him … in the back? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

Khawar flushed. Musa was right. An encounter was supposed to look like, well, like an encounter, like they’d shot a man escaping capture. The man had to run. Khawar chewed his lip—how would he ask the man to do that?

“You need to—” he gestured into the distance, flapping his hand outward. Usmaan looked at him, but he made no move.

“I never meant for any harm to come to others,” he said. “You all know I am innocent, that I am no dacoit. I work my land, that’s all I do, it’s all I’ve ever done.”

“Look—”

“Did you know,” the man interrupted, “you can love an animal, really love it, sir? One that you’ve named, that you’ve fed, that’s fed you?”

For God’s sake. A ruse to distract them at the crucial moment. As if he had time for any of this.

“We were just trying to protect our lives, our children. We’ve tried everything else. Complaints. The courts. No one listens.”

“That’s enough,” Khawar said.

“Enough? They’ve buried barrels of poison in there. God only knows how much. They tell us it’s safe because no one lives here, but we do, we live here. I have a son. I want him to live. Instead, the water we give our children, the food we feed our animals, makes them sick.”

“That’s not true—and that doesn’t excuse the merciless robberies—”

Usmaan took a step toward him. “Robberies.” He scoffed, narrowed his eyes to look at Khawar. “You don’t care about what’s true, sir. Our children get strange bubbles on their skin, they have breathing problems. They get cancers, young children. They die. Younger than they have in generations.”

Khawar’s constables were staring at the man intently, their mouths open, their mustaches drooping.

“Please, sir,” Usmaan said. “You must listen.” But he wasn’t pleading; he was adamant, his tone defiant, even. The nerve of the man. What made him think Khawar, an inspector, should listen to him? Who did he think he was? Khawar needed to get this over with. Then he could go home—to the cricket highlights, to hot tea after dinner, and put all of this behind him.

“That way,” Khawar said. “Away from the sun.” Better chance of a clean shot. He glanced at Usmaan, embarrassed that they needed his help. Each of the constables was looking down; big-eyed Pervaiz seemed on the verge of tears. What was wrong with him, with all of them? He wanted to shake them, to cry out: They were pathetic! Surely Inspector Mirza would not have tolerated such nonsense. “Hurry up!” he yelled, and the constables shakily drew their guns.

Usmaan looked around the hills, took in some deep breaths as if calming himself. He closed his eyes for a moment, then he nodded and said: “Okay.” He turned his back to the guns that were trained on him. He started to walk, then sped up to a gentle trot headed toward a distant ridge; a second later, he was sprinting.

“Now,” Khawar shouted into the wind. The bang of gunfire rang out across the hills, but the man was still running. For God’s sake!

“Again,” Khawar called, and the constables fired. The man was still running.

“Fire!” he yelled, and they fired again and again. Still, the man ran. “Get him!” he screamed at his men. “Catch him!”

Usmaan disappeared over the top of a hill as they tripped and stumbled up the steep climb. Khawar’s heart was pumping hard as he ran against the wind, his only thought oh God, oh God. But where the hill plateaued, the constables stopped and looked around uncertainly.

“What? What is it?” he puffed as he caught up to them. Javed gestured to the open, yellow plain that lay before them. There was no one in sight. They staggered down the hill; they fanned out and searched. There was no place he could have fallen, no ditch into which he might have rolled. But he was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.

After an hour and a half of searching, Khawar led them back toward the car. His muscles were stiff with fear, and for good reason; they’d allowed a man slated for death to get away, which would have terrible repercussions, because men did not just disappear into thin air.

On the drive back to DG Khan, Javed drove. Pervaiz closed his eyes, then fell asleep. Musa chewed his fingernails. None of them had said a word when Khawar listed a string of possibilities for where they might look for the vanished man—known associates, family, clansmen. They all appeared fairly relaxed for a cohort of men facing a bigger problem than the one they’d started with.

Javed swerved to steer around a crow pecking at the remains of some dead creature in the road, and Khawar started.

“Stop the car,” he said.

“Sir?” Javed replied.

“Now,” he said. Now.”

Khawar got out and paced a little as the men sat inside. Dust blew across the fields. The wheat swayed. He recalled the interminable jangling of the chains, the mournful faces of the men as they’d pulled their guns from their holsters; they had seemed more worried about the prospect of getting rid of the man than they were about his disappearance. They weren’t terrible shots, and the man had not been that fast. He leaned down into Javed’s open window. “You missed on purpose, didn’t you?”

Javed held his gaze. He said nothing. The other constables looked away.

“Get out, all of you,” he said. The men climbed out of the car slowly. They stood, their eyes trained on the ground.

“Did he pay you? Are you connected to him? Is he from your clan or something?” Javed shook his head.

“Then why?” Khawar braced himself, but they said nothing. “It’s over, for all of you. Do you understand? I have a list of men ready to have your jobs. Jobs they’ll actually do—”

“Sir, it’s not what you think. He showed us. We couldn’t, not after we saw it.”

“Saw what?”

Javed glanced at Pervaiz, who nodded back. Javed took out his phone and scrolled through it, then stopped and held up a photo. Khawar squinted. He could just make out the edge of a shoulder, perhaps, a brown patch.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s him. Usmaan. He’s marked by God, sir. See? There’s a birthmark. On his shoulder. God’s name. It spells God’s name.”

Khawar peered at the picture. Javed told him that Usmaan had shown them the mark last night in the holding cell. The picture wasn’t that clear—there were some long lines and a curve, true, but it didn’t look like anything more than an unusual birthmark. Only, Khawar couldn’t say that out loud to them, just as they could not have denied Usmaan’s claim once he’d made it; to deny seeing God’s name written could be dangerous, ruinous, a potential death sentence.

“It would be a crime to do anything to him, sir. A crime against God,” Javed said. “If he hadn’t had such a mark on him …” Javed shrugged. “And look at what just happened, sir. He disappeared—that must be the work of God.” The other men looked up at him now too. “I wasn’t sure before, but now, after what we just saw, I am. Sir.”

“He ran,” Khawar said. “He grew up around these hills, he knows the area better than we do. He knows some special hiding place out there, and that’s where he is, lying low.”

“No, sir.” Javed, usually so ready to acquiesce, was firm, “No, sir. We didn’t fire directly at him, that’s true, but we didn’t just watch him run away, he vanished.”

“Even when we brought him in, sir. Even before we saw the mark, there was something about him, sir. Something different,” Pervaiz said. “We could all tell. The villagers told us the same thing.”

Khawar squinted at the constable—baffled by him, by all of them. He looked at the picture again.

“It was a miracle, sir,” Javed said.

“Get back in the car,” Khawar said.

He had only half-entertained the idea that the man had vanished, not really believing it until Javed had said it out loud. A man marked by God. A man whom his three constables had conspired not to kill. Now they would all lose their jobs. The men were right to be afraid, perhaps of God (his wife would say so) but also because if this man had such a mark and others knew it, who could say what might happen to any of them for harming him?

Mobs had surrounded the homes of people for all sorts of alleged violations on far flimsier evidence. He thought of the photos he was sent sometimes on WhatsApp, pictures of the unlikely places you might find God’s name: watermelons cut open, wheat fields shot from above. The branches of the tree on the side of the road quivered. A kikar tree: a friend through joy and sorrow, Muneeza had said of the ones she’d planted in their garden. Perhaps there were words buried in the grooves on its trunk, or the crows in the sky, circling the carcass on the road, might be making letters. If you looked hard enough, if you believed in signs, God’s name might be anywhere you set your eyes.

When he got home, Muneeza was sitting wrapped in a chador on her prayer mat, with a glass of water beside her and her phone playing a prayer. He sat down on the bed. Once the tinny sound of the zikr was finished, she picked up the glass of water and drank it. This was some new ritual her pir had prescribed, another snatch of verse he’d sent her and the women in her WhatsApp group. Something to dispel the force blocking whatever it was that each of them sought: an end to menstrual cramps, better-paying jobs for their husbands, good exam results for their children—children, always children. Babies. He would find her scrolling through the zikrs, one male voice followed by another, on nights she couldn’t sleep, something frantic about her search, as if whatever wrongs they had suffered could be righted only through the selection of a certain passage, the correct words to speak to God.

When she got up, she rested her hand on his cheek for a moment, but when he reached for her, she was already gone. He wanted her to ask him about his day, the way she used to. But piety had become all-consuming; prayers could make the impossible possible, could make life, the pir said, and that was what Muneeza wanted most of all.

What would Khawar tell her if she even cared to listen? That he had abandoned a pile of paperwork on his desk? Or that he had tried to kill a man and failed? The revulsion hit him then—she would never believe that he could sit a man down in a car with such intent. It’s a job, it’s my job, he would say to her. You cannot hold my job against me.

She came back into the room, a small cloth purse with her. “Look,” she said, emptying out a handful of semiprecious stones. She smiled, delighted. “I have to grind these and wash with them.”

“And then what?”

“It will help to dispel the dark cloud that’s blocking us.”

He felt his eyes filling, though he wasn’t sure why. “And how much did you give him for this?”

“Anything we give him goes to the poor.”

She sat down by her bedside table and set about grinding the stones against a nail file, collecting the dust in a tissue for her bath. He surprised himself by grabbing the stones from the table, marching out to their small veranda, and hurling them into the dirt among the kikar trees she’d planted after the first miscarriage.

Perhaps it was his failure to do what had seemed a simple task this morning, perhaps it was years of waiting for God’s blessings to be visited upon them, perhaps it was months of watching his wife’s face open to strangers selling her prayers and holy relics, touching her head and hair with hands that claimed to have felt God’s power. Idolatry, he wanted to shout as he stared at the trees, the stones lost in the dirt.

She stood behind him. He wanted her to cry. To watch her scrabble around in the dirt, to feel the rightness of his belief. But she didn’t. She only said, “You will find those stones, and then you’ll bathe in the water too.”

She turned, walking away from him, and the desperation he felt was sharp as he followed her into the bedroom. He wasn’t thinking when he spoke, the words just came out: “I met a man marked with God’s name today. A birthmark.”

Muneeza stopped. She turned to look at Khawar, a blank slate.

He thought his legs might buckle under him, but he spoke, thrilled and terrified by the intensity of her attention. He detailed his desperation that morning, his horror at his failure, the dread at what might follow in the days ahead. If the truth got out, he was well and truly finished.

As soon as he stopped speaking, she began to pace, muttering frantically. He realized that he had not expressed much discomfort about the task itself, the plan to kill the man. She must think him a monster.

“Muneeza,” he said, trying to calm her intensifying panic.

She stopped. “It’s him,” she said.

“Who?”

“It’s him. Pir sain told me, he said there would be a man. A man who’d seen extraordinary things. A man who would bring a message.”

“What man? What message?”

“This man, this is obviously the man. Why else would this have happened? God saved him for a reason. You have to find him. He has a message that will help dispel the djinn that’s plaguing us.”

“This is the man who will lose me my job, Muneeza.”

“Killing is not much of a job.” She looked contrite for a moment, as if she, too, was startled by the frankness of her speech. But then her expression hardened, and she crossed her arms. He blinked. That is not my job, he wanted to yell, but it was exactly what he had just described. “My job,” he said, “pays for all of this—the endless feeding of your pirs, for the sadqahs, the ta'weezes, for the things you keep buying to make a miracle happen.”

“God saved him and you. He saved you from your own sin for a reason. You’ve been blessed.”

“Blessed? I’m a dead man. My life is over if this gets out.”

“A man marked by God—”

“Ya Allah! Is there nothing you won’t believe? Palm readers and fakirs, black magic. Now this. God’s mark. It’s not faith, it’s not devotion. It’s desperation. You’re so desperate, you’ll believe anything.”

“I’ve never denied that I’m desperate.” She closed her eyes and held in a breath, the way she always did when she wanted to stop herself from crying. She looked at him, defiant now. “What’s wrong with it? With wanting what I want? With needing it.”

He flushed; there was discomfort in her naming it, her longing, in its loud unfurling between them, so alive and uncontained when she wasn’t weaving it into her prayers.

“I don’t know. God could have turned him into a bird to save him, or showed him some invisible path out of there—I don’t know how—but I do know that what you saw was a miracle.”

“Just because I don’t know what happened doesn’t mean it was an act of God. I investigate things like this all the time. They are not miracles, they’re just the things we don’t know. Yet.” His throat felt tight, his rage strangling him.

When she spoke, her voice was steady, “God has given you—us—a second chance. You would be—” she stopped herself. “It would be foolish of us to ignore it.”

She glanced out the window; the sunset had dissolved into the dim light of dusk. She put her hand to her heart. “I’m late for Maghrib,” she said, and she left, disappearing from him as she always did.

He kicked over the small side table on which she had placed one of her embroidered doilies. He stared at the fallen table, the underside of the embroidery with its stitching crudely visible, as the bedroom door clicked shut.

For two days, he thought of nothing but the vanished man. He ignored Muneeza, who trailed him around the house, neglecting her prayers, asking what he intended to do. Would he find the man, could he? Would he at least talk to the pir, listen to his prophecy? Could she talk to the pir about it?

“You talk to no one, tell no one,” he snapped, bristling every time her WhatsApp pinged, saying nothing when she noisily cleared the plates from the table, sloshing curry onto his uniform.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, in a tone that didn’t sound at all sorry. She was seething, but so was he. Instead of comforting him, she had turned his professional crisis into a spiritual one. It was ridiculous for her to think that this—whatever it was—meant something, to even put the idea in his head. But in all these years of watching Muneeza pray and pay for access to God’s favor, hadn’t he longed for a sign? Hadn’t he told himself that all he needed to keep going was some message that they weren’t throwing away their money, their time, the years of their marriage on some futile hope? What if this was that very—but then he stopped himself; he couldn’t afford to waste time on such thoughts, on superstition. He had to think straight, rationally, to get himself free of this. The intercessions of holy men would achieve nothing.

At the station, he told his constables to avoid doing anything that might draw attention to what had happened; they were to appear occupied with station business. They trudged around town, around the station courtyard, silent and morose. If this was a miracle, it had not delivered much in the way of jubilation. Instead, a new kind of dread seemed to hover over them. The sense of God’s nearness, God’s truth, was perhaps enough to make even a constable reflect on his life. For God could hold your job against you, and a police officer might well be first among sinners to be punished. Javed even asked for leave to visit Sakhi Sarwar’s shrine, where Khawar presumed he intended to ask the saint to intervene preemptively on his behalf.

His own plan, if he had one at all, was to resolve the matter before his superiors found out, but he dithered and delayed, unsure of how to appease his bosses, his wife—God. Before he knew it, he was summoned to see the superintendent; secrets were not well kept in stations, and miracles, it seemed, were even less so. It was cowardly to blame his constables, but then, it was also the truth—they had not followed orders.

“Superstitious nonsense,” the SP said, with disgust. “I almost never see any of your men at Jumma, and some of them don’t even fast. And here they are, spouting this rubbish. It’s an affront to the sanctity of our beliefs, but I’ll leave that punishment to the Almighty.” He paused and looked at Khawar. “You’ll have to be firm. Appropriate disciplinary action for defying orders will be necessary. After you find and deal with the dacoit, of course.”

“Sir,” Khawar said. “Sir” to everything. He didn’t raise the matter of what the villagers might do if they heard that the police had killed a man marked by God. The only thing likely to appease them would be the return of the man himself. When, after a week, no mobs had arrived at the station, he knew that Usmaan must have returned to his village safely. That meant it wouldn’t be long before the SP and higher-ups found out the man was still alive too; no doubt a new pile of animals would appear on the highway soon. His only choice—if no one was prepared to finish the job—was to chase the man out of the area. Whatever Usmaan still had here—land, family, animals—he would have to be persuaded to abandon it all.

The constables said nothing when he gave them their orders, but they would not look at him. “You’re not going to do anything to him,” he promised. “You’re just going to bring him in, and I’m going to ask him to leave.”

He had thought about accompanying them, but he worried that their mistrust of him would lead them to sabotage the plan. Trusting them to find Usmaan ought to show that he meant him no real harm. That he, like them, was a believer, that he, too, had witnessed the miracle.

The moon was fat and bright by the time he heard a car pull up in front of the station. When he stepped outside, he found not the returned constables but his brother-in-law, Raza, parking his Toyota in the courtyard, with Muneeza in the passenger seat.

“Is everything all right?” he asked Raza, who squinted at him through cloudy glasses with tired eyes.

“Muneeza said she had to come,” Raza said. “Insisted. Not sure what’s so urgent that you’d have your wife come here in the middle of—”

“I didn’t ask her to come.”

Muneeza tapped the bonnet of the car, signaling that Raza could go, the look on her face pleading him to do so. “Thanks, Raza bhai.” He sighed, seemed about to say something more, but then reversed out of the courtyard, clicking his tongue at Khawar as he went.

“What are you doing, coming here?” Khawar snapped as the car left. “And why did you call your brother, of all people?”

“You haven’t called me back all day. Or responded to my messages. I wanted to see if there was any news. And I knew you wouldn’t have let me come.”

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll get someone to drive you.” His jaw was tight.

“I went there,” she said. “I went to the mines to see for myself. It all looks … normal.” She was exasperated.

“How did you get there?”

“Raza took me.”

He closed his eyes; soon, everyone in town would know about the man, the mines, the failed encounter.

“It all looks fine up there, but it’s not, is it? Maybe we can’t see the poison, but it’s there. He sees it,” she said.

“You don’t have to be a holy man to see it,” he said, thinking of the dead animals Usmaan had dumped in the middle of the road.

“Perhaps you have to be a holy man to speak out about it. Who else will speak of it?” He turned to walk away.

“What will you do when you find him?”

“I’m going to get him to leave the area,” he said.

“You can’t. He has to stay. The miracle happened there for a reason—so we wouldn’t forget it.”

“You have to go. Now.”

She looked at him closely. “You’ve found him, haven’t you? He’s coming, isn’t he?” She seemed to quiver, and then she walked toward a plastic chair outside the station doorway. She sat down; she would not be leaving. He started to speak, but she was already lost to him, her fingers gliding across the smooth beads of her tasbih, the light of the moon falling gently on her hands, on her lips as they moved silently. He went inside the station, pretending not to watch her from his window as she stared at the gate with perfect concentration. He’d always dismissed Muneeza’s rituals, her relics and saints and talismans—the practice of the poor, the ignorant, the illiterate. Those in frantic need. But what if some people just couldn’t see signs, no matter how clear—what if he was one of them? The kind who, even when God made His power visible, would only ever question it, doubt it? In the stories of the prophets, the glorious stories of the birth of his religion, the shadowy presence of the unbelievers also existed—the enemies, those who did not come around, who doubted, who just could not see what God was revealing to them. What if—and this made him shudder—he was like those men?

Another hour passed before the constables returned. He heard them banging on the gate outside the courtyard to announce their return or that they had a prisoner with them. He went to stand in the doorway, and Muneeza raised her head to watch as the car crawled into the courtyard. She called to Khawar and stood, ready to move toward the car.

“Wait,” he said to her, watching Pervaiz open the car door. The tall man stepped out into the darkness of the courtyard. Muneeza was breathing heavily. “Wait,” he said again. “What if it’s all just luck? All the good things, all the bad things.”

She clamped her lips together. “God wills the good luck, the bad luck. Everything is God’s will. He just asks that we show patience—faith.”

“What if there’s no message? What if this isn’t the right man?”

“Then we wait, we wait to see what God has in store for us.”

“Some days I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m not sure about anything. About what we’re doing, about what any of this is for.” He gestured to her tasbih, paused. He had said too much. She swallowed, looked around: Quiet, she meant. These were not things to say, not out loud.

The constables were heading toward them with Usmaan in tow. Once he stepped inside the station, once he was seen here, Khawar would have to make a decision; people would know what he, Khawar, had done, what he had not done. Even with the weight of this, what he really wondered was how much more of his life would be spent in pursuit of this want, her want; how many more places would they travel in search of messages and signs? How many more paychecks would be spent in pursuit of what he sensed was an impossible wish?

“I can’t go on with it. I can’t keep on with all this,” Khawar said, because he could not stop now.

“You can, you will,” she said, her eyes unmoving. “You will not deny God’s message.”

“God’s plans are better than your dreams. Isn’t that what your pir says?” he said. “Isn’t that the lesson we’re supposed to learn?”

She looked taken aback for a moment, her shoulders slumped. “Maybe. Maybe this is God’s plan.” She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them and stared at him. “But we don’t know that yet. And I’m not leaving ’til I know if God has sent him here. For us.”

As Usmaan reached the threshold of the station, she said, “Sain … pir sain,” and Usmaan stopped.

“You are?” Usmaan said. He sounded clear, firm, not at all fearful in the presence of men who’d seemed ready to shoot him a few days ago. She was silent. From inside the station came the sound of the radio. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, a rickshaw spluttered.

Khawar braced himself, instinctively put his hand on his holster—wouldn’t it be, even now, the easiest solution? He reached into the edges of his mind for a story that would make sense, but just then, Muneeza stepped in front of Usmaan, shielding him.

“I heard what happened, sain. My pir said I should watch for a sign, and after I heard about the miracle … I came to find you.” She paused. “I’ve been waiting to hear … your message,” she said, as if Usmaan ought to know her.

Khawar wanted it to be true, he wanted to feel it could be true that God sent messengers and gifts and even punishments. That He could turn men into birds. That He could plant life in wounded bodies, in broken marriages. That people could be transformed from djinns into men, into decent men, even men like him who were, when so instructed, ready to walk other men to their death.

Usmaan squinted at Muneeza. The constables stared at her too, and then at Khawar, awaiting instructions, loath as they might be to fulfill them.

“I do have things to say,” Usmaan said, and Muneeza inhaled sharply, her face open with hope.

Khawar gestured that the constables should hang back, and he stepped back as well, his arms now limp by his sides, desperately trying to imagine what it felt like to know, to be sure the way she was—a sense of flight, or a warm wind blowing her hair about her face, the strands tickling her skin, what? And he watched as she, just as desperately, willed this stranger to gift her something, while the poisoned hills stood in the darkness behind them, silent and mysterious as God.

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