The rains of Pluvistan settled its faiths.

In this small and volatile city, located just off the edge of familiar atmosphere, religions grew under perennials rains and died quietly when it went arid again. Here, people worshipped leftover faiths and tendrils of mystic thoughts, and the city divided them into two groups: those it sent to heaven, and the ones it left behind. Such things were predetermined.

The people of this sieve city rarely ever remembered where they came from. Mostly they concerned themselves with paradise, a vague destination of which they had little idea to begin with, save for the whispers of all the remaining prayer signatures.

It rained everyday in Pluvistan, and this served to keep living things alive inside the city, all the while nesting prayers within the reaches of its inhabitants before the end of their term of life.

And whenever the end arrived, the city then passed judgment and purged itself of all living things and their beliefs. However, as with any sieve, some parts of every faith remained, and in this way the city moulded its strange character.

#

The scent of incense hung in the air like a confession.

They turned the corner to the heaventree alley of the Pind, as the light behind the ashen sludge sky dimmed. It was probably dawn, although Mumtaz Mali wasn’t sure.

“Dogs are not good to eat, right Papa?” Zainab asked. She knelt against the drawn shutters of a closed store, inspecting a wrinkled twig crawling out from underneath. The twig was dressed in a leafed sheet of dust and cobwebs, and shaped almost like a knife.

“I think,” replied Mumtaz, uncertain, “It would have made us sick. And it was not really meant for us. It was already in so much pain, didn’t you see?”

Zainab pulled at the twig and its leaf crumbled, but its hidden root refused to give, leaving a feathery dirt stain over her palm. She held it up to her father’s face and blew gently on it. Like the pappuses of the Pind marshes, the old Pind as she once remembered it, the dirt dispersed in the incensed air. “Do you think it’s in heaven now, the dog?”

Mumtaz nodded, and assuring her with a kiss on the ear, said, “It’s up there with your mother, jaan. Nowhere else for it to go.”

Zainab smiled and snapped the twig between her fingers, then placed it inside her mouth. It tasted like a hollow stick brined in ash.

Some time ago, before the air of their Pind swirled with smoke and secrets, she remembered she had always regarded the stray dogs that slept in the dust heaps outside their house with distant gratitude. They never looked much like food themselves, but they were always kind enough to keep watch over their homes.

“Is hunger a forever thing, Papa?” A shallow grumble had now settled inside Zainab’s gut. In the days and weeks between the capricious sun showers, she had taught herself to placate this feeling by giving it no chance to linger, chewing on twigs and other dead things to help distract her mind. She rose to her feet and led the way further into the alley.

Without answering, Mumtaz followed behind her, mulling over what his wife, Shahbano, had said to them at their exit from the Pind many months ago: hunger is the guiding temptation that will stitch the earth and sky back together.

“At least not in paradise, right?” Zainab continued.

She pictured her mother floating, a slender dog with dirt matted hair and a blood emptying chest accompanying her, promenading in orchards of leafy crackers, feasting on variegated seeds and inhaling the air that could condense to the taste of anything she desired it to, a breath of apples or vermillion milk or warm gales of slow-cooked lamb. Everything she could remember as good food.

Mumtaz, meeting his daughter’s gaze mid reverie, observed her face for the first time in a long while. It was narrow, except around her jaw which had become thick and full, as if hiding rocks below her teeth. Over her head she wore a curled branch of jasmines, its leaves and petals not nearly as rotten or shriveled for something uprooted long ago. She had found it under a sun shower and decided to keep it for later, like a bookmark.

To Mumtaz, it was a glaring reminder that his faith had forsaken him.

“If you’re hungry,” he pointed to her crown, “you can always have that, you know. It might die soon,” although he was almost certain it wouldn’t.

Zainab, ignoring his suggestion, continued to wonder aloud, “In heaven, Papa, we’ll have more food than we need, right?”

“In heaven, jaan, there will be life in things that have no reason to hold it. Tongues will grow out of everything, and they will sing praises to god and enjoy the taste of eternity this way. When we will eat, we will do it out of joy, not hunger – such a thing will not exist in our bodies or our minds. Even without food, we may never hear a sound from our stomachs again!”

Zainab considered this for a moment, before groaning, “But then, what are our teeth going to do? We didn’t learn how to bite into all those rotten things for nothing, did we?”

Mumtaz chuckled, and ruffling her hair, reminded her, “Maybe they can just relax for a bit and simply smile for us. Imagine, we might become the smiling idiots of forever!” And he opened his mouth as wide as his cheeks would allow, making Zainab laugh until her stomach began to hurt again.

She held her father’s hand as they continued walking, their step tempered with the usual caution that nearly screamed at the lack of need for it: nobody was left here, so what was there to really be afraid of?

“If it had been anything else, you know,” Mumtaz started again. “We could have eaten it.  Anything else, like a rat, or even some soft tree bark, that the sun showers guided us to.”

As if reciting a verse from memory, Zainab replied, “I understand, Papa.”

#

Before Shahbano retired to the air escape of her prayers at the heaventree, she blew recitations over her husband and daughter, imploring them to trust the will of the wind and remember god in every breath. Most of the prayers were aloft, and the sun showers would provide them sustenance; they were to eat whatever the sun rains fell upon, breathing or breathless, and even if it smelled putrid or had maggots growing inside.

She hurried through the rest of her instructions: walk as far away from the Pind as they could, and return when the sun showers ceased and they could taste the truth upon the gasping air. It was the only option available to all those unable to exhale. They could not stay behind to witness her and the rest of the Pind ride the air heavenwards.

Mumtaz and Zainab left for Pluvistan, the city that enveloped the Pind, and of which it was a small part at its center. They found it completely deserted, more so than the emptying Pind, and in their first few days without rain or familiar faces, they felt like lonely roots suddenly planted in cement.

To indulge his daughter, and to offer relief from the cold sights of the vacant city, Mumtaz dreamt up different stories about paradise every day.

One morning, as they strode along a tributary of the Nallah, the elaborate watercourse that ran out from the Pind to all edges of the city, now drained of all its waste and sheened with dust, Zainab heard a sudden crunch under her foot. When she lifted it, she found she had stepped on an egg, white as a dream of bleach and no larger than a marble. A thin thread of smoke rose through its cracks.

Looking to her father for an answer, she saw him peering into the distance, arrested by what he saw.

Golden pulses of sunlight were cutting through turbid clouds and overhead cables and the dead limbs of trees and dropping to the streets as rain. Drawing closer, they saw thin droplets, bright orange and yellow streaked with red, splashing soundlessly like molten stars against a fallen bird’s nest. The sun rain made thin wedges of rainbows that it quickly swallowed as it fell, all within a few meters of the nest, where sprawled the sun scorched corpses of several birds with clipped wings. Steam and smoke emerged from their seared bodies, rising against the sun rain.

Mumtaz and Zainab walked into the sun shower, unharmed and sundrenched. Like lounging on a charpoy under the summer sky, they felt the sun drops lick their bodies with warmth instead of wetness, as they then settled down to feast on their first sun shower meal.

#

The dog had appeared just outside the heaventree alley. It walked with a limp and followed them ominously for a while, before Mumtaz sensed a heaviness growing in his chest over where hung the taweez Shahbano had given him. His lungs felt like they were suddenly being filled with smoke. Never having felt this way before, and not knowing what it truly meant, he took it as a sign to end the mutt’s misery.

It could not have been mercy, he thought, because most things in Pluvistan were not meant to be killed. Things only ever died under the sun showers or rainfall, otherwise they simply passed on to heaven. This was known.

He remembered the look in its eyes, full of a weary hurt that was unseen in all of human eyes, yet also meant only to be read by them. But since it hadn’t appeared under a sun shower, they didn’t have it for food.

On the city streets, the two of them had survived on things the sun showers provided. Mostly these were wounded animals already in pain, and usually they didn’t run or fight back. Flightless birds and tick infested runts of cat litters all burned under the scorching rains, and sometimes brittle weeds and critters roasted beneath the soils they dug open, even flying insects lit up like fireworks. Grasshoppers were Zainab’s favourite; she called them heaven flies waiting to fly to paradise, just like the two of them.

They never questioned where these beings came from, or what made the sun rains fall on them. It meant food, and on them the two survived.

“It used to rain all the time, even when it wasn’t raining out in the open,” Zainab remarked. “But everything is different now. The wet rains are gone and the bright hot ones aren’t falling either. What happened, Papa; did the rains stop forever?”

“Not forever, jaan. It will be back after we go to heaven. The Buzurghs used to say the rainwater was as important as the drizzles of sunlight that poured when living things disappeared. They described Pluvistan like an anxious crop, one half of its time being spent under floods and the other half in droughts. In between the two was the time for penance for people like us.”

“What does that mean,” Zainab inquired, her eyelids narrow slits through which shot the emeralds of her eyes. “Penance?”

“It means knowing why we had to come back to the Pind. And finding out why we had to wait all this time. Now that the sun showers don’t fall as frequently as they used to, and we are back home, we will meet your mother really soon, I promise.”

Zainab screwed her lips into an excited smile. “Is she going to look the same as before? I really hope so. Nothing here is like how I remember it.”

“Yes, but this is the only path promised,” Mumtaz replied, yet he could hardly recognize any of it himself.

Shahbano had said the heaventree would be waiting for their return, but so far everything here seemed to have left without once looking back.

About the Pind, it was always said that it had a life of its own, untethered from all other stations of Pluvistan. Those who belonged to this tiny village at the heart of the city rarely ever left it, except to preach its faith; and those who wandered into it, whether by accident or in acts of pilgrimage, sought to use it to rise to paradise at the end of their lives.

Mumtaz had been brought here by his wife when Zainab was born.

He remembered it as a place steeped in quietude, where the only things that ever really spoke were the prayers wafting humbly in the air. Religious worship, practiced frequently, demanded strange servitude to acts of breathing and respiration. The village folk were polite, and they didn’t converse so much as they passed along solemn wishes and recited all their dreams. It was a while before he gradually settled into its mysterious logic.

Just like in the rest of Pluvistan, it rained all the time in the Pind as well. Here, however, the rain bespoke a personal affair. It rained on people, not places. Once every day, sometimes in a little open corner of the village, or even inside a room of a mud roofed house, the low lying rainclouds opened up and gushed down over the villagers.

The elders, who were called Buzurghs, scavenged the Pind in search of prayer signatures and parties to sermonize. They always appeared at once heavy and weightless, anchored to the ground as they stood, but then walking as if over leafed steps that didn’t crumble under their weight. Nobody knew how old they really were, or what made them so able to absorb leftover invocations from previous cycles of Pluvistan rains.

Mumtaz tugged his daughter’s shoulder, “Did I ever tell you the story of the Watcher of the Sleepers?”

“No, I don’t think so. Or maybe you did, but I don’t remember it,” Zainab said. “Tell me, is it a good story with a nice ending?”

“It’s just a story, jaan,” he said. “I don’t know where it comes from. I might have heard it from a Buzurgh, once. Maybe he had absorbed it from a taweez, the prayer signatures, of an owner afraid to go to heaven alone without their beloved dog. The story involves a group of pious sleepers, six or maybe seven of them, who have holed themselves up in a cave to escape from an oppressive king. At the entrance of the cave awaits a dog that refuses entry to all those who attempt to pass through. The sleepers spend several hundred years inside the cave, and during that time, the king sends many expeditions that fail because of the watcher dog. It concludes with the sleepers awakening one day far into the future to find the king having passed away, and then they return to the world outside the cave. The dog, in the end, is admitted into heaven.”

After a brief pause, Zainab produced a sigh, “I hope our dog goes to heaven too. It will be nice if it follows us up there. It was the purest thing left here.”

Mumtaz agreed, despite not being able to reconcile what he had done to it.

Upon their return to the Pind, they had found in place of the village a lake of dust and sepia vapour, populated by islands of skeletonized vegetation. What had been trees stood naked and lifeless in pastures become dry clearings, as if some violent wind had suddenly undressed everything except a few mud houses and withered stumps.

The passageway they now walked, which once belonged to a meandering network that connected homes and markets with the shared air brimming with voices and whispered prayers, was now deafeningly silent. Scenes of premeditated abandon permeated the incensed air, the dirt path leading to the heaventree lit only by stubborn slivers of veiled sunlight.

“We will stop to pray soon,” Mumtaz said, passing a large, torn grey cloth. It swayed under a tender breeze, attempting to stir the stagnant time. When he was last here with his wife, she had not permitted him beyond this point. “There is a place of worship up ahead.”

#

Living things started evaporating in a zephyr.

The day it arrived by their house, Zainab was perched upon a high ledge, observing a plump spider threading its silk spiral home over a curled leaf of a climber. She watched the spider dive down this leaf, and when she looked up the other side, it was gone. Only a sickle of smoke, like a feather betraying gravity, climbed over its edge.

When she told her father about it, he said she must have blinked for too long, or else the spider had misled her with its cunning trickery.

Soon the villagers reported the disappearance of patches of crops and fruit trees and cattle, along with other animals whose feet or wings could no longer hold their swelling weight. Men and women and little children were said to be growing into pods of air and merging like whispers with the innocent clouds above.

Mumtaz suspected an outbreak of disease at first; only some miasmatic force could explain such a thing. It escaped his notice completely that it had also stopped raining.

It wasn’t really like dying, however. Caged birds and potted plants vanished from slowly emptying verandas and market squares, but no dead things remained. Human breaths slipped out from their lungs to settle under their skin, and when a group of Dais, the village birth attendants, swore upon witnessing a newborn slipping out from a mother’s womb as a distillation of smoke, the Buzurghs finally announced it was the end of life.

Everyone was urged to wait patiently for it to transpire through their exhalation prayers. One by one, the village folk scurried to the heaventree like eager ants taking flight off some hallowed hilltop. It would be like travelling inside of a sigh, they were assured.

Shahbano approached Mumtaz one night while he was toiling in the soil of their lawn. She put her bare feet before him, and when he noticed her toes, he winced and felt a shooting pain in his chest. Her toes were all terribly swollen, the largest so bulbous and disfigured it looked like a gangrenous pocket of skin under which some bug had slipped inside. She pressed it with her thumb and he heard the crackle of tight air underneath.

It was time for them to leave, she said.

In the days that followed, although Zainab never said it aloud to her father, she wished she had gone earlier with her mother. It was because she was special, her mother had said, that she had to stay a little while longer. Like the bloom of a fig tree that you can never glimpse before the fruit arrives, she would also just arrive in paradise, and she would find it prepared all for her, fresh rainbow garlands and wind chimes singing in a cool morning wind that stretched out forever.

#

The incense smell now became defiant, impossible to ignore. It crept over them from all sides, swelling then diminishing with a toying nature.

An arched entrance came into view. The heaventree alley had narrowed on all faces up to this arch, formed of dull grey craggy rocks through which dense dead branches protruded and obscured its upper limit. It seemed like an opening into a mountain that wasn’t there.

At the mouth of this entrance was a brass gate, left ajar and revealing only diffuse darkness behind it. At its foot, several thin metallic containers of incense lined a raised platform. The incense sticks were all alight.

Mumtaz glanced deeply at the burning ends of the sticks, wondering why their orange-red tips did not fall. They left no trace of ash either. Slowly and sinuously, all the thin smoke clouds from the burning sticks flew into the shape of dancing grey flames.

“Are these candles?” Zainab asked. She could hardly contain her curiosity, but Mumtaz also sensed a growing feeling of unease about her.

“We used to have a different name for them,” he tried to remember. “Your mother believed they worked prayer through smoke, although I thought it was nonsense. All she ever did was talk of supplication, and I never once believed anything she said.”

When she had left them outside the Pind, Shahbano had given Mumtaz a prayer signature in the form of a leather pouch that he had hung around his neck. It was a taweez she had made for them. He ran his fingers over his chest now, the tightening in his lungs relieved. Out on the streets of Pluvistan, it had been his only source of comfort. Things were very different outside the Pind – everything seemed to have left in a hurry out there.

“She could have left us a few of these sticks, don’t you think, Papa,” Zainab said, reaching for a container. “We could have used some real prayers all this time. Wouldn’t it have been better than just cupping our hands skywards? I don’t even know the words, and a lot of the time I feel my prayers falling through between my fingers.”

Mumtaz quickly brushed away her hand, and instead brought down his own palm on the burning ends of the sticks. He felt no warmth or smoke-cloud caress, only a soft whooshing sound that drowned as he removed his hand, untouched by ash. Slowly, the smoke began to return to the shape of a candle flame.

“I don’t know the words either, jaan. I never learned them from the Buzurghs, or from your mother,” Mumtaz confessed.

What he found most odd about all this was the smell of the incense – it spread so effortlessly around them, but the smoke never left its funeral pyre.

“Strange,” he said, collecting a container. He aligned the burning sticks together in a bundle and showed her the way the vapours stayed and danced just above the sticks. “Like the smell is not born from the smoke itself, but the other way around. For some reason it reminds me of your mother.”

“She always smelled very nice,” Zainab admitted. “Could you use it to smell just like her? To wash away bad and rotten smells? We haven’t had a wash since the Nallah turned to foam.”

“They said you could smell this in the air every time something died, which was rare in Pluvistan, and I don’t remember what that was like since it was a long time ago. Maybe it was really just for that: prayers for all the dead people.”

“But you said,” she spoke, pausing to remember it just as she had heard him say it, “all this is just as if everyone else had died.”

Mumtaz motioned to Zainab to pick a container for herself. “What we are often afraid of is the very thing we should be worshipping instead, jaan. Come, now,” and they headed through the brass gate that sounded a howl, a gust of smoke following right behind them.

#

The god of Pluvistan was one without form or scripture, and was suspected to live in the interstices of the city’s thoughts. Part imagined and part inherited from prayer pockets left by previous faiths, this god sifted through the ways of the city people’s worship and made itself manifest through rainfall.

In the city, buildings and other brick and metal structures stood like weak fingers that succumbed to the rains. Where it poured, it stormed. Streets, which one day were narrow and muddy and abutted by nests of hawkers and the limbs of encroaching houses would next be eroded into barren, swollen plateaus. Violent torrents uprooted the city’s infrastructure and juggled its cars and machinery and asphalt, and all the rainwater collected the residue prayers on the streets and poured them into the Nallah. Markets and housing districts were indistinct, and entire households would turn into camps of public offices at the next drop of rain.

Even the city residents, all animated in character, each brimming with solemn hopes of ascension, swung between faiths and occupations. Everyone longed to believe in something that could survive a stormy night.

On his return to the city, by the time they reached the basin cemetery, Mumtaz found Pluvistan still and seemingly robbed of its erratic breath. Anything that remained from its urgent abandonment had but become carrion for smoke and ash and dust. Everyone was gone, and none of the heaventrees remained.

In those days, as they shuffled in the vacuumed streets, waiting for their meals from the sun showers that had grown infrequent, Mumtaz often wondered if they were last humans alive.

But one day, as they were passing through an empty thoroughfare that he remembered as both a train station and a busy city center from the days of his youth, they saw the shape of a frail old man on a collapsed charpoy. He was gnawing at the charpoys weaves, unconcerned with the world around him. Mumtaz immediately turned and hurried the other way; whether out of fear or fatigue, he didn’t really know.

Zainab later admitted she was very upset by this. If such a person was also in wait, she pointed, then he must have been special as well.

Eventually though, they came across across others like them, all the unpermitted of the world, rummaging through foam waters or scraping bits off walls. Mumtaz acquiesced to meeting them, and found they were not unkind but unusually helpful. They each carried books and strange apparatuses that they hoped would turn them into air, and they shared helpings of their food and drink which they had all gathered from the sun rains. After exchanging prayers, they all parted their separate ways. Such was the camaraderie of the damned.

Although Mumtaz was always cautious around them, Zainab never sensed a threat in their presence. Maybe it was because these people never appeared under a sun shower. And neither, she always hoped, did they to the rest of them.

#

At first they were greeted by an enveloping dark, but as their eyes slowly adjusted, they both reeled at the sight of the candle flame smoke dancing aglow.

It was like awakening from a dream about the moon, a small moon-sized imprint lodged everywhere they looked. Dark shadowy lines then formed inside the smoke and quickly spilled everywhere, throbbing and losing a shade with each stroke. Mumtaz closed his eyes as a pleasant hum of swirling air entered his ears, and when it finally settled, he looked around.

“It’s breathtaking,” Zainab exclaimed through eyes wide and stuffed with wonder.

A graphite pointillism came alive before them. The empty blackness slowly crawled away to reveal hundreds of containers, identical to the ones they carried, all lighting up with an effortless smoke-cloud luminescence. Shapes emerged from the containers like tongues. One by one, they concentrated the light to form a picture of gentle illumination, like stars in the night sky throwing a thin shawl of brightness over the world. As this fluid brightness raced about assigning forms to their surroundings, Mumtaz wondered: is this what god sees when he announces the break of day?

The light unmasked a pristine courtyard, plainly empty and exquisitely white. Stretching upwards from the clean marbled floor were several columns that held nothing but the open air, before disappearing into a thicket of branches full of many coloured leaves. White-washed walls lined the wide perimeter of the courtyard – they were blank and seemed almost too spotless to be walls and not illusions of the smoke. In the center of the courtyard, with its leaves appearing moist and rustling before the gunmetal canvas of a hidden sky, stood the heaventree.

It was a spacious and plump rooted structure that made all other trees look like sunken effigies of itself. Large and surfeit with life, it carried a distinct character that was palpable on the air outside. Its leaves, which shifted between shades, were assorted into thick vibrating clusters. Its strong trunks wormed up to branches in wayward ways, some straight and erect like the columns, others taking tortuous paths and yet still some betraying an unspoken urgency of purpose that made them open into branches through gaps in the polished marble floor. The roots of the heaventree burbled with a hidden movement that confirmed an ancient suspicion Mumtaz had long ago forgotten: maybe the world still breathes.

Zainab instantly felt a rested sensation inside her flesh, a crisp and weightless, filamentous slackening and smoothing of an overlong tautness. “This is more than home, Papa. This has to be heaven itself!”

At the foot of the tree were spread chips of sandalwood over a corrugated platform that nestled at its base a carpeted recess. “This looks like the supplication area,” Mumtaz pointed, and moved to seat himself there.

The smell of incense rich in the smoke-cloud from the containers, he inhaled all the sights as he sat down; the marble floors, the rising shafts of the heaventree stretching up to its umbrella canopy in the presence of the last lung of an expiring world.

“When we’re done with our prayers here,” Zainab asked curiously, “can we stay here for a little while? I don’t want to leave paradise so quickly.” Her awe was now touched with an apprehension of leaving, which he could tell by her fingers squeezing tightly in his grasp.

Mumtaz didn’t say anything. He worried, if it didn’t work, where would they go then? Was this enough for his daughter? And more importantly, would it stay this way?

“There could be wonderful things here, Papa. We don’t know what the tree holds inside.”

Zainab dropped into the bowl of her father’s crossed legs while he removed the leather pouch from his neck. Running through it were irregular straw stitches that were stained a fixed, dark red. He chewed open the stitches and drew back the folds of the leather to unveil a human toe.

It was the first thing Shahbano had packed for him. Bloated with air, blood-dimmed and still appearing as grotesque as the day Mumtaz had first laid eyes on it, back when it remained attached to her foot.

“What are we going to recite?” Zainab asked, not recognizing the amputated piece of her mother’s body.

Mumtaz gently placed the toe at the foot of the heaventree, and watched as a thin thread of smoke slithered out through the skin pores and spread on the ground before rising to meet the air. As he closed his eyes and inhaled, he felt awash in dreams of floatation and unfamiliar words of prayer, all in the voice of Shahbano. The prayer signature left by her passed through him as gently as a sigh.

“I’m going to whisper to myself,” Mumtaz said, the invisible lid of weariness now withdrawn from his eyes, “and you can look at the way my lips move and remember your mother’s voice. Try, now, to think about any kind of heaven you please.”

“I understand,” she replied. “I’ll think of this place. Hopefully when I wake up, it’ll all still be here, and we will meet mother again.”

Slowly Zainab sunk into the space between her father’s legs, and soon grew drowsy watching his mouth stumble over words she had never heard him utter before. He looked aged, with his dirt smitten cheeks and all the hope in his face sunken deep into the worry lines of his forehead. Together, curled inside each other’s embrace, they both thought of Shahbano, the woman who had left them behind.

#

Shahbano belonged to the Pind. From an early age, she was circulated among the houses of the Buzurghs like some arcane message, and they had taught her all the prayers she knew. She could taste fortunes on the moisture of soothsayer winds, and farm and distill the air for when they would all need it later. She grew up with a love for eternity in the travelling air, to which she believed all things would return, because it was where god and all their love was meant to reside.

When she reached of age, she was sent out into the city to plant sprouts of the heaventree and bring the city people over to their faith. The end of life, the Buzurghs augured, was nigh.

Contrasted against the lung cooling winds of the Pind, where her fellow villagers welcomed the rain and shared meals with fragrant spices and drank teas steeped in prayer beads and kissed each other with words of blessings that settled like dew upon the humid air, Shahbano found Pluvistan a horrendous, nightmarish diversion from their ways.

But after several weeks in the city, trying desperately to adjust to its constantly changing landscape and gathering few followers, she met Mumtaz while strolling along the banks of a large basin that sat inside the city’s slum district.

A younger man, the first time she laid eyes on him, he resembled a clay figure, dirty and wind weathered, like an anchored mote of dust held against the slumscape.

He was a gardener who visited the basin everyday. When Shahbano explained to him about the task she had been assigned, Mumtaz’s expression lit up and he offered to help her, claiming to know more about the treacherous soil of this city than anyone else. It would also give him a chance to learn more about the Pind, he had promptly added.

Together they searched for fertile soils that wouldn’t be uprooted by storms, while Shahbano described to him the Pind in the ways of its worship and its people and the air their prayers inhabited. Mumtaz was drawn to all the visions she painted in his mind, especially of the heaventree; she told him it was a staircase to heaven, but only for those who believed in the worship of their understanding. He could hardly tell from the heaventree shoots, which always looked ordinary to him.

Shahbano found Mumtaz a quiet man who practiced his gardening religiously. He handled the earth in his fingers the way they did their prayers back in the Pind, she mused, and he discovered soils from sludge in all the corners of the city where the rainwater wouldn’t flood.

With his help, she was able to preach and plant several heaventrees along the Nallah banks and in the slums and even at the edges of the basin, where, one day he confessed about having lost something there many years ago.

He was sleeping one night in his family home, he recalled, in their brick and cement bungalow that was bare of vegetation and prone to attacks of rainfall, when a violent rainstorm had arrived and avulsed the earth over which their house stood, folded it in on itself and swallowed everything and everyone he ever knew. The next morning when he awoke, he found himself atop a charpoy rocking like a porous boat adrift the basin formed anew.

For several days, he stood watch at the shore of this basin as it collected rainwater and waste, waiting for someone or something to emerge from underneath. People of the city passed him by without dealing condolences. The rain poured and the city continued to change. Soon, slum houses scattered themselves in the muck and fruit-sellers with donkey carts set up shop around the basin, their shepherding dogs briefly joining him in his watch before abandoning him when he provided them no food or affection.

Eventually, Mumtaz also abandoned the search, and over time the basin became a disposal ground for all things that were robbed of life by the Pluvistan rains. The Nallah travelling out of the Pind grew a limb that fed into the basin, and then it became a reservoir for expired prayers and industrial refuse into which the children of city swam against their elder’s wishes and then recited sermons of sacrilege to each other.

Like the heaventree was for Shahbano, he claimed the basin cemetery was his staircase, and the earth beneath them was his paradise, the giver and taker of all things, worthy of fear and worship.

Despite their differences, Shahbano and Mumtaz grew fond of each other in the days they planted heaventrees together, and soon she birthed him a child, Zainab, whom she insisted needed to be sent to the Pind to learn her religion, even if Mumtaz hadn’t accepted it himself. When Mumtaz agreed and they moved to the Pind, they were welcomed warmly by all the village folk with an air of promise that Shahbano would teach them both to float.

But when the end of life arrived a few years later, and as everything took to the air, Shahbano asked them both to leave her.

It was again at the basin cemetery, many weeks later, seeing it brimming with rust water that did not glint, that Mumtaz noticed small wavelets of rainfall forming on the water’s surface. The cycle was coming to an end, and nothing in all those years had ever emerged from his paradise beneath the earth.

There was no penance for those who didn’t believe what the city meant for them to believe, he thought. And the two returned to the heaventree of the Pind.

#

“Come here, jaan,” a whisper sounded in Zainab’s ear.

When she awoke, her father was sleeping and the heaventree still stood above her, colored and cushioned by the incensed light. She felt instantly relieved.

Zainab staggered to her feet, and rubbing her eyes, marveled again at the sight of the heaventree that towered and stretched all around her, as if preparing for an embrace.

With dewless leaves that somehow glistened in the incense smoke, it appeared like something made of brilliant plastic, infused with the delicate murmur of life. In between its fissures, which ran along the length of its twisted trunks and separated them into branches or blind-ending stumps, she observed a thick glue-like fluid coursing underneath.

It reminded her of the Nallah. Nobody knew where its waters originated from, and similarly with this heaventree, she couldn’t tell where its paste came from, only that it drew the smoke and smells and carried them with a breathing, beating whir to be effused from its clustered leaves.

She pressed her ear against its smoked lichen bark.

“Did you get some sleep?” Mumtaz asked. Zainab turned around to see her father on the brink of awakening, releasing a long drawn yawn.

“I don’t feel tired anymore,” she nodded, and a bubble cast of smoke, like a chrysalis, dropped from her ear and landed its threadlike feet on the ground before dissolving. Zainab felt lighter, then, as if her ears had suddenly been washed clean of a dream or a memory.

“And do you still feel hungry?” Mumtaz stretched his limbs, brushed off the smoke and dust that had settled over his clothes.

“I’m all right for now. But maybe later, when I get really hungry again, I will probably swallow this tree whole!”

He chuckled, but then reminded, “You know you can’t do that, right? Not without the sun rain. It would be wrong, just like with the dog, and it’s only a matter of time, now,” although he wasn’t sure himself.

“I understand,” and Zainab again faced the heaventree, brushing her fingers against its leaves, different shades of green over yellow and turquoise, all swinging like feathers. “It’s like a cloud. Like someone left a cloud for us on the ground here. Come, won’t you touch it? You love trees, don’t you?

“I helped your mother plant them in the city,” he said, beginning to move in his daughter’s direction, “They weren’t as large as this one, which I’d never seen before, and we left before we had a chance to see the city ones grow, but I remember how deeply she regarded them,” and he stopped abruptly, arrested by the sight of a foot appearing from the smoke of the courtyard perimeter behind Zainab. Then, tumbling like a dune of ash, came the rest of the figure.

A vermiculate pattern of smoke traced the outline of a human body that swept toward them in a sparse gait, drawing smoke from all the containers and extinguishing their flameless sticks. As it moved, its thin naked shoulders stood firm.

Mumtaz quickly grabbed ahold of Zainab and retreated a few steps.

A stream of sunlight suddenly shot through the canopy and landed on the figure’s surface, precipitating the smoke-cloud into fluid skin in a deep grey tinge, a human countenance creeping down its crown, and on a sparingly sculpted template of a human face appeared the familiar features of Shahbano.

“Time to go to heaven, jaan,” it said, the screen of smoke that was its skin flowing all through her body. “I have grown tired waiting for you.”

“Bano?” Mumtaz shuddered, his voice trembling with uncertainty. He caught the glint of his wife’s deep brown eyes, and the curve of her smile spilled out from below the haze. “Is that really you?”

“This is where the prayers come true,” it said. None of the menace of its form was shared by its voice, which was calm and full and just the way he remembered it. “I am only a prayer in wait, and this is a place of safe passage. Look around you.”

The courtyard was doused in smoke. From crevices and containers seen and unseen, viscid grey vapours had emerged and mixed with the light that was now a ring above them, hovering below the stretching branches of the heaventree.

Everything was suddenly alive with fluid movement, nothing so much as the heaventree.

It unfurled and untwisted and cast off its bark to unmask a network of moist blue and black vessels carrying the paste upwards to its leaves. As it shivered, the leaves pulsated and grew little by little into swinging pods that drank the paste with each beat, sifting between shades and shapes until finally settling on the deep purple of figs. Suspended from the trees with the casual grace of miracle, the figs undulated.

“This is the promise,” the figure spoke. “By the heaventree stairway, we ascend to paradise with all our prayers. So moves the wheel of the city’s will.”

Mumtaz and Zainab stood arrested as the heaventree spread open into a vestibule of smoke, winged by its trunks, with the paste still rising in unbroken columns to the tips of its leaves. As its branches untangled, one of its figs dropped to the floor.

“Hunger is the last temptation,” The figured faced Mumtaz, wiry fibers dripping from the place where moved its lips.

Unconsciously, Zainab reached down for the fallen fig and her crown of jasmines slipped off her head.

“We, the leftover seeds spit from the mouths of all those who eat from the fruits of paradise, are only slaves to the will of the rain.”

Zainab watched the jasmine twig extend wispy roots that cut through the marble floor and dug into the ground beneath. Slowly, and with practiced gulps, it sucked the variegated paste of the soil all the way up to its petals, turning the flowers into tiny figs.

The smoke figure slithered around Zainab, and remarked in Shahbano’s voice, “The rains grow us to our ends, and the sun showers only burn the living things that remain. Hunger prevails in our prayers.”

Zainab felt something move inside a pocket of her gut – it was her stomach beginning to turn. Filling and emptying, being pumped then perforated. Her eyes were transfixed on the figs of the jasmine twig, while Mumtaz stood by weakly and only stared in disbelief at what seemed his wife.

In a quick motion that escaped her father’s notice, Zainab picked up the fig and crushed it between her teeth.

“She will be rising now,” the figure exclaimed knowingly, and only then did Mumtaz remember Zainab, who smiled back at him through teeth like coloured pebble stones, her lips drenched in purple.

Behind Zainab, the elaborate phantasm of the heaventree suddenly began to fall apart

With a loud, growling sound, all the figs were instantly bleached. Swiftly they retracted into their branches that went limp and shriveled and died. The heaventree trunks stiffened to the likeness of dead fingers as the smoke around them carved a pit of red, grey and green inside which they now stood, the hum of life silenced.

The heaventree withered before their clouded gaze.

Through a mouth stuffed with fruit and smoke, Zainab faced Mumtaz and asked, “What’s happening to me?”

On her lips, the fig juices bubbled and slid down her palate as a narrow scream the length of a dream snaked up the front of her spine and out her mouth. She froze and dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

Within breathing distance of Mumtaz, the smoke figure revealed, “The fate of all things is to end where their hunger takes them.”

Zainab’s skin began to separate from the flesh underneath. The swelling started in her toes and moved up her legs and in from her arms to reach her face. She lay shaking on the floor, a distending mass of air, lips apart in a smile.

Mumtaz, who had stood helplessly still, tried his way toward Zainab’s writhing body, but as soon as he moved, the marble floor fractured beneath his feet and from it emerged dead soil-and-dirt fingers that clasped him. The fingers crawled up from his toes and curled all over him, arresting him in place as he witnessed the air escape from his daughter’s body.

Branches and barked shoots of the heaventree ran all about them. Zainab was lifted from below and pulled from above by the wispy fingers that gathered the air from her body and mixed it with the smoke of incense in the light ring above her.

“What is happening to her?” Mumtaz pleaded.

In its worm-like fingers, the smoke figure held Shahbano’s amputated toe. “All prayers must be fulfilled. Because you yearn to be planted, the rains will see to you,” and turning in Zainab’s direction, she said for a final time, “Come here, jaan.”

Tears welled up in Mumtaz’s eyes as he struggled to move. They rose upwards over his eyebrows as he sunk slowly into the now colourless muck paste soil of the ground below the marble floor.

The last Mumtaz saw of Zainab was her body suspended between heaventree stalagmite and stalactite, levitating in a narrowing gyre of smoke. The figure that had been his wife constricted to a spiral thread that was swallowed by her toe, which fell to the ground and dissolved at the same moment as the first drop of sun rain.

As the sun droplets fell noiselessly, they burned his drowning body, scorching the hair off his scalp and penetrating his skin like golden pellets. He crumbled in the arthritic embrace of the cold heaventree, dissolving in a shower of his screams.

At the entrance of the courtyard appeared the distinct shape of a dog, frail and wounded on its chest, from where grey-red blood oozed and effervesced. It glared at what remained of the heaventree collapsing in on itself, before turning its back to it and standing vigil for this strange paradise of two, maybe three.

Then, when every living thing had finally vanished from the face of Pluvistan, the water raindrops fell.