Jeeps roll up to the gates of the beach hut, two hours later than they were supposed to. But for the wheels and mudguards browned by their journey here, the vehicles are polished black and gleaming. In their size and ferocity, they dominate the scene, standing in contrast to the rust and the dust and the sand and the sky, and even Habibullah himself.

Habibullah sits on his haunches. Dark, cracked, hands shade his eyes from the midday sun. The jeeps empty their occupants. Armed guards, more than necessary and more than the jeep should be able to seat, spread out. They hold their Kalashnikovs to their chests like mothers holding their young; they are not trained to use their weapons but that will not stop them should they have to. Their hawkish eyes scan their surroundings for a threat to present itself, or barring that, some exposed flesh to ogle at. It is, after all, a day at the beach.

One of the guards, kicking up sand as he marches to the other car, opens the door and stands aside. A child, a little boy, beach ball in hand, jumps from the car and lands in a squat to stumble and fall. He loses his grip on the ball and it rolls to Habibullah who takes it in his hands, holding it out to the disoriented child. A man gets out of the car and holding the child by his arm lifts him back onto his feet. The boy is unfazed, but reluctant to take the ball from the strange man offering it back to him, choosing instead to hide behind his father’s legs. His fingers rake the hair on his father’s shorts-clad legs. The father urges him on, ruffling the curly hair on his head, and the child inches forward; he snatches the ball back, and with a garbled noise that is perhaps intended to convey thanks he runs off.

The father shouts something in English as the child takes off. He then turns back to Habibullah and extends a hand out in greeting. Habibullah reaches out as well. Salams are exchanged. Their hands meet; soft and hard, light and dark.

“Saleem Hashmi sahab?” Habibullah asks, his brows furrowed, staring into the face of the man in front of him.

“Yes I am! Is this Leghari’s hut? We booked it for the day” Saleem says and smiles, as if his straight, white, teeth are all the proof he needs to show that he is who he says he is. His hands are soft and he has not yet lost his hair; Habibullah can tell that smiling and shaking hands is what earns him his money. He has an easy-going air about him, a sign that Habibullah will be tipped well. He is here to spend a day at the beach with his family in a private hut at a private beach protected by a small battalion of armed guards. Life is good for Saleem Hashmi.

Habibullah removes a ring of keys and hands them to Saleem Hashmi, tells him he’ll be back by sundown to collect the keys and lock up.

“You can come back tomorrow, chacha. We plan on spending the night. Don’t worry, I’ll call Leghari and clear it with him. He’s an old school buddy of mine” Saleem Hashmi says, smiling.

Habibullah figures they’re probably the same age, but his annoyance is lost in the scowl that the harsh sun draws out from his face. He nods and turns to go, but Saleem Hashmi stops him with a hand on Habibullah’s shoulder and he leans in as if he means to hatch a scheme.

“By the way” Saleem Hashmi whispers, with a look in his eyes that has surely won him the confidence of many a man and woman, “are you the man to call if that bhoot Leghari mentioned shows up?”

Habibullah can tell that there has never been a joke this man has never been in on, no door he felt he couldn’t charm his way through.

“Leghari’s going to need a better story than some damn ghost if he wants to drive up the rent, that kanjoos saala!”

Saleem Hashmi is laughing now, looking to Habibullah to confirm that indeed this is all just a tall tale born from the ever-churning imaginations of some poor sea-folk, put to work by a conniving feudal lord. Habibullah has nothing to say, he simply nods, shielding his face from the sun. Saleem Hashmi looks uncertain of what to do now. He manages another chuckle, before clearing his throat and jangling the keys Habibullah has given him.

Habibullah doesn’t offer to show him the hut, he can’t stand being any closer to the sea than he already is. Neither does Saleem Hashmi particularly care for Habibullah to hang around any longer. They shake hands again and Saleem Hashmi walks towards the gate to the hut to unlock it. His family is gathered there, his son, a wife, two daughters, a set of grandparents. There are also servants as well as the aforementioned guards carrying crates and coolers. Habibullah turns to leave before any of them gets the bright idea that his is another able body that should help carry things from the cars to the kitchen. Walking past the jeeps, a guard stops him.

“Chacha ji, has the muezzin already called out the azaan or is there time left before it happens? The guard asks, looking not at Habibullah but somewhere above and around as if the azaan will make itself visible to him. Without thinking Habibullah responds.

“There will be no azaan”.

The guards tense up; fists are clenched, gazes tighten,  moustaches bristle. Habibullah must offer up an explanation lest guns be fired. He throws up his hands as if to ward off impending blows. The truth tumbles from his tongue.

“The muezzin has drowned. The sea took him. It has been two months and we have not been able to replace him.”

“What sort of kaafir place is this that you don’t even have a muezzin anymore?” one of the guards started shouting, “Don’t you know what they say about places where the azaan can’t be heard? What sort of things take up residence there?”

Habibullah can only stare at the guard, he does not think the man expects an answer to the questions he has posed. The guards walk off, leaving Habibullah behind. Habibullah’s people too had taken up residence here, long ago, before the azaan had come to these shores, before the Holy Prophet had taught its words to Bilal the Abyssinian so that the believers could be called to prayer, and before their caravans and their ships and their saints and their soldiers had come to claim this land as their own. The waves of the high tide rush in to crash against the beach and the walls of the beach huts; the ever-present roar of the ocean reminding them who was worshipped here first.

As the Hashmis and their hired help settle into their temporary occupation of the hut, Habibullah makes his way past the road that leads to the city proper, over the dunes with their thorny shrubs choked with plastic bags and chips wrappers, back to his home

*

In the two months since he had his brother taken from him, Habibullah hears the ocean like never before. In their village by the beach, its song has always been sung, but like a ringing in one’s ears that appears suddenly never to leave, the sound of the waves has become an ever-audible taunt. Even in his dreams, he sees Khateebullah, standing at the pulpit in the dark hours of the morning, in the mosque with the peeling paint, raising his hands to his ears to call the believers to prayer, but all that comes out of his mouth is the sound of the endless assault of the ocean upon rock and sand. Habibullah wakes from these dreams in the room he once shared with his brother and lies in bed staring at the ceiling, counting his breaths as the ordained time for the fajr prayers recedes like the tide.

For now, Habibullah walks through the village, making his way home. The streets are empty, and not even children venture to play in the heat. Those villagers who remain are indoors as well, sleeping through the hottest hours of the day, as the sweat from their tired bodies soaks into their thin mattresses. Handheld fans give comfort where they can, the electricity supply is so infrequent that many have sold their electric fans, if they had any to begin with. Others have taken jobs in the city, as drivers or security guards, as hired help on private farms, or as conductors on busses. They visit when they can, if at all, and their fishing boats have either been sold off or lie rotting on the beaches, home now to stray dogs and crows.

Habibullah walks into his own house. His brother would greet the emptiness of it with a salam whenever he would return from somewhere, claiming that it is sunnah to do so, but Habibullah cannot. The silence is too loud to ignore but too terrible to acknowledge. He shuts the door behind him and goes and sits on his thin mattress. He has many hours to kill before Saleem Hashmi summons him to hand back the keys to the hut. In earlier days he might have prayed, but he has no way to know what time it is. The clock on the wall has been without batteries for so long that is only ornamental. The imam of the masjid, a man who vanished from the village the day Khateebullah drowned (some say out of grief, others say out of guilt) used to say that a true Muslim could tell when to offer which prayer using nothing more than the angle of the sun and the strength of his faith. Habibullah knows he is capable of no such feats. Like the villagers who slowly leave never to return so too has the azaan vacated their homes and their streets, and now only the ocean sounds its lonely and terrible call in his ears. He had been taught as a child that the very first thing that God had created when he made the universe was light, but Habibullah knows that the seas are blind and that the waves still crash even when it is dark.

            Habibullah sits and waits out the hours, answering the calls of hunger, thirst, and baser bodily needs when he must, and when the sun goes down and the ocean breeze picks up, he covers himself with his brother’s prayer mat and tries to drown in sleep.

*

            The call comes in the hours before dawn. The jangling circus tunes of the ringing mobile phone wipe clean the sleep and fatigue from Habibullah’s eyes. Saleem Hashmi is on the other end, agitated and afraid, and more than a little intoxicated. He wants Habibullah to get here right now because something is happening that shouldn’t be happening and the children are afraid and the guards are getting restless and he needs to come here now and fix this and make it stop.

            Habibullah has received this call before. He knows Leghari Sahab will call him later and tear him a new one because this ghost or jinn or whatever it is keeps scaring away his clients, but still, Habibullah looks forward to these calls. He puts on his shoes, washes his face, and shuts his door behind him as he makes his way to the beach hut.

            The night air is cool and Habibullah has only his shalwar and kurta to cover him, but he does not mind. The early morning chill is an old friend to fisher-folk and it is only on nights such as these that he gets to experience it again. As children, he and Khateebullah would accompany their father out onto the water in their boat, and learn to cast nets and judge where the fish would be. In later years they would join their father as he would take paying guests out onto the water and catch crabs that he and his brother would then cook for them. That was before the bigger boats and their sardars had muscled them out of the business. Their father had sold the boat then and left for Karachi to try his luck. He had died there, working as a labourer, and his wife, with whom he had left behind his two sons in the village, had joined him some years later. Their graves, if those two unmarked and uncemented tracks of land could be called graves, now lay beneath what was to be a children’s park in an under-construction housing society that Habibullah would never be granted access to. At least Khateebullah’s grave was the ocean and the ocean never left him.

            Habibullah hurries now. There is only a half moon tonight but its light is sufficient for him to make his way through the village. Street lights had been installed here once but their solar panels were stripped and sold not long after. Their decaying remains line the road that he crosses to get to the beach hut. The gates are unlocked. All but one of the jeeps are gone. The guards stand there, as they had when they first arrived, but they are on edge. Some smoke, whilst others thumb rosaries and whisper silent prayers. Habibullah can smell it, guns have been fired here tonight. Their bloodshot eyes trail him as he walks from the gate to the door of the hut. The door is ajar. He walks through.

            The first thing he notices inside is the darkness. The door opens to a living area with a table and sofas and chairs and in the few hours that the Hashmis have been in possession of the hut they have strewn their toys and shoes and clothes and cutlery around the hut as well. The doors that lead to other rooms are shut. Only the door that leads to the balcony is open and in the faint light that the outside world lets in he can see that the children and the family are long gone. It is the only door open to him, so Habibullah weaves his way through the debris field of children’s shoes, empty beer cans, and juice boxes and makes his way to the balcony. There are steps here that lead down to the beach and that is where he sees the silhouette of Saleem Hashmi. Habibullah is halfway down the staircase when he hears it. On this night, as on several nights before, Habibullah hears his brother calling out the azaan from somewhere underneath the waves.

            Saleem Hashmi is in the water now, shirtless, splashing around as if looking for something he has lost. From all around him, Khateebullah’s voice calls out the words of the azaan, as he had five times a day for the past five years. The water is lit up by the light of the half-moon, but barely. The ocean is alive; unknowable and inscrutable, it is a churning and writhing beast with a silver sheen and a dread majesty that stretches beyond understanding. But for tonight it performs an unholy ventriloquism; crying out to the two men in the voice of a drowned worshipper of another god.

            The waves are up to Saleem Hashmi’s thighs. A large one could knock him over, one wrong step and he could be carried off. Habibullah wades in after him, his thin shalwar immediately clinging to his legs. He places a hand on the other man’s shoulder which is immediately knocked aside and Saleem Hashmi turns to face the caretaker of the hut.

            “What the fuck is this, Habib? Are you and Leghari playing some sick joke?” he says, breathing hard and fast. Habibullah can’t tell if he’s wet from the ocean spray or whether he’s sweating. His eyes can’t stay still, betraying his fear and his drunkenness; they search Habibullah’s face for answers.

            “You found your bhoot, Hashmi sahab” Habibullah can’t help but say.

            “This isn’t funny, behenchod” Hashmi says, mangling the expletive, the feel of it foreign to his mouth, “This is…this is wrong”

            “It’s the azaan. It’s my brother’s azaan. He was muezzin in the local mosque but he drowned here. It’s been happening ever since then.”

            “But it’s just going on and on. How do we get it to stop?”

            “Do you know what one is supposed to do when one hears the azaan, Hashmi sahab?”

            “Pray?” the man replies, before the part of his mind that lies beneath the fear and the alcohol, the part that guides him from day to day and makes him good at his job, can stop himself.

            “No, first you answer it”

            The two men are silent now. There is the sound of the breathing of the ocean as its waves leap upon the sand and then draw back, like the turning of the pages of a vast book. There is the sound of Khateebullah calling the faithful to success and prayer. Then there is the sound of the beating of two hearts as they rattle their cages of flesh and bone. And in their hearts, amidst this cacophanous silence, the two men repeat the words of the azaan. This time when Khateebullah finishes the call, it does not start up again.

            “I know there’s something else you have to say when you answer the azaan, aside from repeating it back. I couldn’t remember what it was. My mother taught me when I was young and she was alive but I couldn’t remember what it was”

            Habibullah laughs now. It is a rare moment in time when the past and the future fall away and a man can laugh at another man, one he’s meant to be working for, and not worry about the consequences that might follow. He places a hand on Saleem Hashmi’s shoulder and tells him it’s okay. He ushers him out of the water.

            As they emerge from the waves, their wet feet taking on sand, Saleem Hashmi gestures to Habibullah’s soaked shalwar that clings to his bony legs.

            “Oh this” Habibullah says, “It’s all sea water, I swear!”. This time they’re both laughing.

*

After that night Saleem Hashmi cannot keep himself away from the hut. He comes back again next weekend with his family and his guards and his servants, but they leave by nightfall and then it is just him and Habibullah again that night in the water when the azaan rings out from the water. He tries to get his wife to stay some nights, his children too, but they never do. He tells Habibullah that he tells them that there is nothing to fear but they do not listen. Habibullah does not agree with Saleem Hashmi. There is something to fear, they just don’t know what it is.

One night, drunk, Saleem Hashmi crashes his car into the gate of the beach hut. After that night he buys the hut off of Leghari. He installs a generator, has one of the rooms converted into an office, and he moves in. His wife and children visit for a few days and then stop coming. Eventually, he stops going in to see them either. He has Habibullah move into the hut, as a permanent cook and caretaker. Habibullah, with no reason to stay in his home, packs up his few belongings, places a padlock on his door, and moves in.

*   

A woman starts visiting Saleem Hashmi at the hut. She wears her hair long and open. There are tattoos on her arms that she often leaves bare; birds and animals and words in Arabic and other scripts flow across her skin. She wears a red dot on her forehead like the Hindus although she tells Habibullah that her name is Maryam. She never spends the night but often she and Saleem Hashmi are locked in his study and Habibullah can hear them talking excitedly, in hushed voices, as the smell of hashish permeates from behind the closed door. One day Saleem Hashmi tells Habibullah she wants to hear Khateebullah’s azaan as well.

“What does she want with my brother’s azaan?” Habibullah says, putting the kettle on for their evening tea, his back turned to Saleem Hashmi.

 “She’s into things like these, Habib. Miracles and things that cannot be explained. She wants to feel what we feel” his employer says, running a hand through his hair that hasn’t been cut in months.

“And what do we feel?” Habibullah asks, turning to face Saleem Hashmi.

 “Habib, your brother has made this place sacred. My amma used to tell me stories about people who worked miracles in the name of god. I thought I couldn’t believe in any of that any more but here it is right before our eyes!” Saleem Hashmi is looking out of the balcony now, at the water. His back is to Habibullah, but Habibullah already knows the look on his face as he stares out at the ocean.

“Saleem sahab all I know is that that is my brother’s grave. He was the last family I had and he died here and this is all I have left of him. If I didn’t I’d have drowned myself too”

“Habib, I feel your pain but whatever this is, you don’t own it. We’re being given-”

 “I have more of a claim than you!” Habibullah says, shoving aside Saleem Hashmi as he storms out onto the balcony and down to the beach, “And my name isn’t Habib, its Habibullah!”

*

That night Habibullah sits on the shore and listens to his dead brother call out the azaan over and over. He does not respond, he simply lets the words and the voice wash over him again and again like the sea-foam laps at his feet. He has lit a candle in the sand. It drips its white wax into the spray as the ocean races up the shore to meet it and then races back. He has been sitting here since he stormed out of the hut. Salt and sand are flecked in his dark beard. The ocean has held his gaze ever since he sat down in the cool sand. His candle will soon die out.

He hears footsteps on the sand. Maryam and Saleem walk over to him and sit down on either side. Maryam is holding a candle and she sets it in the sand next to Habibullah’s; Saleem wraps an arm around Habibullah’s shoulders. That is when Habibullah breaks.

Habibullah might have cried when he and Khateebullah lowered their mother into her grave. Some tears were definitely shed when he had gone to claim his father’s broken body at the morgue. He had been beside himself when he had heard that Khateebullah had drowned. But now it comes through him, all of it, all at once. There is an ocean inside him and he is its voice. There is a village losing its people. A people who have lost their muezzin. Two brothers who have lost their parents. A man whose dead brother calls to him from his grave. Habibullah cries for all of it. Howls rend Khateebullah’s azaan. His shaking body is held by Saleem and Maryam. They wail long into the night.

Later, when both brothers are silent, the trio is still sitting on the sand, and the sun is peeking over the horizon like a child slowly waking from slumber, Maryam takes out a little plastic baggie. She takes something from it and places it on her tongue. She passes the bag to Saleem and he does the same. He gives it then to Habibullah. Habibullah holds it up to the faint light of the sun and inside is a tiny square. He can’t tell what it is but he gets the idea. He shakes his head and hands it back to Maryam. The candles have long since gone out. Habibullah gets up and goes back to the hut.

From the balcony, he looks back down to the beach. Maryam and Saleem take off their clothes and run into the water. They splash each other, playing like children. They both go under the water and Habibullah catches himself hoping that they never surface. But they burst up through the water. They’re laughing. Habibullah knows this is just the beginning.

*   

It goes as Habibullah expected it would. Saleem Hashmi and Maryam bring more and more friends out to hear the azaan. Some of them weep, others dance in the waters as Saleem Hashmi and Maryam had that first night. A few even ask how the trick is done, is it waterproof speakers? Habibullah meets a few of them in the beginning, tells them how it was brother, the local muezzin, who had drowned here. More foreigners, friends of Saleem and Maryam from abroad, fly in to hear the azaan. They can’t understand Habibullah so Saleem Hashmi tells them the story, but more often than not they don’t seem to care beyond hearing the miraculous call to prayer itself. Habibullah stops meeting these people. At night, by the waters, he sits apart as they give over to hysteria and reverie.

An architect is called in. Saleem Hashmi tells Habibullah that he’s had a vision whilst listening to Khateebullah’s azaan. In the vision he was instructed to build a mazaar here for him, one to rival the ocean-side mazaar in Karachi of the saint that holds back the sea. Both he and Habibullah and Maryam will live here and show people the wonders of the oceanic azaan that is called from beyond the grave. The mazaar will be open to all who wish to come and worship, he tells Habibullah. The guards that man the gate now, the ones to keep away the curious villagers, make Habibullah think this won’t be the case.

By this point Saleem Hashmi has taken to wearing beads around his neck, his hair comes down to his shoulders, and he only wears bright red, yellow, or orange kurtas now. Maryam now stays at the hut that will soon no longer be a hut. She sleeps in Saleem Hashmi’s room. They always wear a smile whenever they speak to Habibullah. Workers come and start tearing down the walls. Habibullah moves back to his house in the village.

*

Habibullah has not slept in days. It’s not because of the heat, though it sears the skin, nor the sweat, which saps his strength as it seeps from his body. It has been a few months now since he left the beach hut if it can still be called that. Slowly but surely Saleem Hashmi’s shrine is coming into being. By day ant-like workers mill about, carrying and placing loads, and by night Saleem Hashmi’s new-age devotees descend on the beach to light fires and lose themselves till the coming of the dawn. Habibullah is never sure what they get up to, what new forms of worship these people have crafted, what rituals. What need does the rich man have for rituals? What can he worship but himself? Habibullah would ponder these questions in his hours out at sea. No longer employed by Saleem Hashmi, he found work on boats that families would hire for outings and on yachts where the crew would sit below deck as the vessel would be rocked by the thumping of bass and the stomping of dancing feet. Coming into port at the end of the day, they would see the fires raging on the beach and hear the distant call of the azaan in his brother’s voice. The boats would always dock in silence, each man wrapped in a cloak of his own fear and anger. Then one day Habibullah would awake from slumber to find that the ocean song that plagued his waking hours and wound its way through his dreams had become just a little bit louder. Later that day, standing at the dock with the vastness of the deep ocean bellowing in his ears, he would look out at the horizon and feel in his chest the great churning and gathering of wind and water. That night it would be announced on the news that a once-in-a-lifetime storm would soon make landfall in Karachi.

That was a week ago. Now Habibulah cannot stand being out at sea, let alone even in sight of the water. He does not leave his house, the few neighbors he has left bring him food when they can. They cannot understand the forces at work but they can see that he is afflicted, that perhaps God Himself is testing Habibullah. One of his neighbor’s children, a girl of no more than six or seven, as she was bringing him roti and daal as her mother had ordered her to, asked Habibullah if it was true that he and his brother were saints. His grimace conveyed exactly what was on his mind. Saints worked miracles and Habibullah, it seemed, lived at the mercy of one. As for Khateebullah, only God could provide an answer to the truth of his sainthood. God and Saleem Hashmi.

The storm draws ever closer and Habibullah can feel it. What at first he believed was just the sound of the ocean now was something altogether altered by the drawing near of the storm, a sound both alien and familiar. Where the crash of the waves ends and where Khateebullah’s azaan begins he cannot tell. The two sounds flow in and out of each other, merging like currents, trapping Habibullah in a maelstrom that grants neither the release of death nor madness. He has contemplated running away, out of the village and out of Karachi to mountains that have forgotten the kiss of saltwater spray. The thought, however, brings little relief. He knows he will not leave. He can only pray that one way or another, his torment ends with the coming of the storm. He lies in bed, adrift in his thoughts, when there is a tentative rap on the door.

“Habibullah?” a voice calls out. It is Saleem Hashmi.

Silence then, as neither man speaks. Then the turning of an old metal door on rusting hinges as Saleem Hashmi enters the room.

“How have you been, my friend?”

Habibullah turns his head to look at the man who would dare to call him friend. Saleem Hashmi’s appearance is much the same; his hair is longer, his robes more flowy, and the beads around his neck have grown in shape and number. It is his eyes, try as they might to smile, that betray the truth. Saleem Hashmi too is a man afflicted, he can hear the storm approaching.

“I’m surprised you managed to walk here, Saleem,” Habibullah says, propping himself up onto his elbows, his back against the wall. Another smile breaks across his guest’s face.

“I was driven here, actually”

“Of course you were”

“Won’t you offer me a seat?”

“Since when have you ever needed permission to take what wasn’t yours, Saleem?”

Silence again. Habibullah has never addressed him by his first name before. He hopes that will be enough to signal that whatever he has come for has no hope of being granted, but undeterred Saleem Hashmi sits himself down on the floor, crossing his legs.

“I know you can hear it too, Habibullah.”

“I’m surprised the whole of Karachi doesn’t hear it. God knows something big is making its way for us” replies Habibullah, looking now at the ceiling above. Saleem Hashmi leans forward like a fisherman plying his trade.

“No one at the shrine can and I’m willing to bet no one in the village does either. It’s only you and I who can hear the saint calling us to worship. Can’t you see that we’re bound together to see this through?”

Habibullah doesn’t have to look at him to tell that his eyes are glimmering, his tongue showing between his teeth. He is a man overtaken by visions, spinning gold with his words.

“You and I are bound in nothing, Saleem. Why are you wasting my time?”

“I want you to come back to the shrine, Habib. Your brother is calling you back, don’t you see? He wants us to welcome him, together as the rightful custodians of his shrine!”

“You’ll die if you stay in that half-finished hut. There is no shrine and there is no saint, Saleem. He was my brother, and you’ve been bitten by a mad dog if you think you have a claim to anything.”

“I own the land the hut is on, Habib. I’m the one who opens the gates for the people who come to worship and I’m the one who answers your brother’s azaan every night. When we’ve constructed his tomb I’ll be the one to drape the chadar on it. I’m the one trying to honour his gift while you waste away in your grief!”

Saleem Hashmi is standing now, hands on his hips, fire in his eyes, speaking words meant to pierce. Habibullah feels them wash over him. He feels something begin to flood through him. He thinks he has finally succumbed to madness and despair before he feels it for what it is: rage. Propelled forward, he breaks through his torpor and launches himself at Saleem Hashmi. Before he can react Habibullah has the man’s robes clenched in his fists, his eyes reflecting hate, his lips launching spray. Habibullah holds the taller man against the wall. Saleem Hashmi’s limbs thrash but Habibullah is immoveable.

“The only gifts my brother left are grief and anger and love. It is me he cries out for and it is my voice he yearns for, as I yearn for his. Your money can touch none of it and all you have are delusions to sell to your friends. All that you own is a pile of sand and may it never be otherwise. A curse upon your shrine, Saleem! You worship only your pride!”

In the moments before Saleem Hashmi frees himself and escapes back to his car the two men lock gazes and Habibullah sees in them what he saw the first night he showed him how to calm his dead brother back to sleep under the waves; the fear of a man discovering the limits of what he thought was possible. Saleem Hashmi musters no defence. Never having been spoken to in such a way by one he considered lesser-than, he has no guide for these uncharted seas. He leaves and Habibullah feels the rage recede. Slumping against his door, he closes his eyes and waits for the storm.

*

That night Saleem Hashmi and his fellow worshippers gather at the half-finished shrine that was once the hut to await the coming of their saint. As the rain lashes the walls and the wind rattles the windows, sure enough, they can hear Khateebullah begin to call them to prayer. They hold each other close and give thanks. There is a time, albeit brief, where Saleem Hashmi can forget Habibullah’s words. The palm trees prostrate themselves and the waves thrash in a feeding frenzy. Holding Maryam close as she weeps and holds her arms out to the sky, Saleem Hashmi laughs as he envisions himself transformed by the approaching saint.

Khateebullah’s azaan grows louder and louder till it drowns out the noise of the wind itself. Huddled in his home, Habibullah can hear it too. It is a taunt, the chastising bellow of an angry deity that assails the coastline with its wind and its voice. For the first time, he is afraid of his brother and what he will let loose upon the would-be worshippers. Whispering, as if his brother were sitting beside him and not meting out his wrath upon the world, Habibullah answers his brother’s prayer, over and over again. If this is to be the end, either of himself or the world, Habibullah knows not whether his words can avert what is to come. The storm and the saint thunder together, louder than Habibullah could ever have imagined. If there can be no intercession, Habibullah thinks to himself, let there at least be communion.

*

The next morning the villagers will go to the shrine that never was and find that it has been wiped off the face of the beach. Nothing will remain there and neither Saleem Hashmi nor Maryam or any of their friends’ bodies will ever be found. But that night they will hear Khateebullah call the azaan again, and so they will return and soothe him as Habibullah had done the night before and as they will do every night hence. In time they will build their own mazaar for the saint whose prayers interceded on their behalf against the wrath of his brother. They will remember that they were spared that night as the ocean and the skies waged war against them and they will give thanks to the saint who didn’t hold back the sea but let them survive its wrath nonetheless.

The years will pass and the legend of the saints and the call to prayer will grow. The villagers will forget that a rich man and his friends tried to lay claim to wonders that were never theirs to own. Devotees will come to listen to the saint and hear of his brother who kept vigil for him and answered his azaan and they will do the same. The waters will rise, cities will drown, and nations will fall. In Karachi, even Baba Shah Ghazi will not be able to hold back the waves and a world will come to an end. But here, at what was once a beach hut by a village where there was nothing to believe in anymore, the people will hear the azaan and will remember the brothers and their love that made them call to each other across death, and they will know that to love is to believe that you can drown and still make it back.

END