Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending was selected by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2022 Louis Begley Fiction Prize.

Javed, 29km

There is the wind and the sun, and there are clouds. The sun is behind the clouds. High above, gray sky, and beyond that it is probably plain white, then blue, then darker still. Black, even. Above me, though, it is gray. Drizzling.

I am looking down the road. My house—what is left of it—is on the other side of a slight rise in the earth, behind me. I can’t see it when I turn. “Come on, Javed,” a voice says beside me. “You can’t keep standing here. Come back inside.” 

“Inside where?” I am thinking, as a hand pulls me back.  

I heard it first from Noor, who is only a few years older than me, and lives down the road. I found her running through the paddies, toward me. I was running, too, in the direction of my house. That was a day ago. “What are you doing here?” she had said. “Come back, now.” My mother had sent her, she said. “Didn’t you feel it?” she asked. “I did,” I said, “Was it very bad this time?” She took my hand in hers and we kept running.

Still earlier in the day, though not too long ago, I had gone looking for a bird’s nest with my friend, Mohan, since he said he remembered where he had seen it first. 

“There are two birds, one has purple feathers along its neck and the other is more or less yellow.” 

We had agreed, at school in the morning, to set out before dusk arrived, and I told him I would meet him in front of his house. We were excited about it. My mother was dozing on the chattai when I left, and my father had just returned from the fields. 

He had agreed to look after some of the others’ crops, too, for a part of their yields. Half the village had left in the few days since talk of the new world made it to these parts. That’s what everybody was calling it, the “new world.” We didn’t go because the rice was doing well, for once. “That’s reason enough.”

Father had been very tired ever since. “Javed, it’s going to rain,” he said to me as I was leaving. “Don’t go out.” He did not say it again when I put my shoes on and stood by the door, so I went. 

At Mohan’s house, his mother looked through the door at the graying clouds. “Mohan,” she said, “Don’t you dare get caught in the rain.” And he said he would not, and we went about on our way, down the road leading toward the forest.      

We were not far from the nest when the clouds began thundering and the air changed, the light faded and the sky darkened. Mohan looked at me with fear in his eyes and turned around and began running back toward the village. He went on shouting a single “Sorry!”—it trailed behind him like a kite’s string—the whole time until he disappeared from view, where the road dipped. 

The thought of sweeping the house made me miserable—I knew my father would hand me the broom as soon as I returned. And then I thought I caught a flash of purple in one of the trees ahead, and the trees were so close to me, so I continued walking toward it., 

Mohan had told me, “The nest is hanging from the end of a low branch.” I ran my hands across the bark of many different trees, but I could not find the nest. “It will look like a tangle of rubbish, but it will have the shape of a pear.” I went on walking through the forest, looking for it. 

I must have been in the middle of blinking when the earth began shaking, because I can’t remember it starting. That’s true every time it’s happened, though—the quaking, I mean. It seemed like the trees had always been groaning, the loose dirt always trembling, and I was just late in seeing it. This time, my knees were trembling, too, and I lost my footing and stumbled, and fell to the ground. I heard it through the earth—it had a sound of its own, a steady, grumbling sound, apart from everything else that it had disturbed. A little way away, a tree came crashing down and toppled another, and I scrambled back as fast as I could. 

And then it stopped. Just like that.  

Only then did I realize that it had been raining for a few minutes, at least, because the canopies shrugged off hundreds and hundreds of drops of water from their leaves, and they dropped at once. The pattering went on echoing, and I ran out toward the paddies, toward my house.  

I was out of breath when I got to the village. Noor’s hand had slipped out of mine along the way, and I had kept running.

A wind was gusting down the road and dust swirled in clouds. I heard coughing everywhere. Fumbling through that fog, by memory alone I thought I had found the way to my house. I kept on walking with my hand stretched out, thinking, I will feel the door, or a wall, now… now… now…  

And then I was suddenly inside, except the sky was above me and the clay tiles in shards on the floor. The walls were only half intact. Some of the houses on either side, too. Some of their roofs and their walls, too.  

My father and my mother had changed positions, it seemed. He was lying on his back, with his hand blocking his eyes, like he was trying to sleep. And she was awake, on her knees at his side. She turned when she heard me come in, then turned back toward my father. “Good, you’re back,” she said. “Are you hurt?” she asked. “No,” I said. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, but then she did not. Like the words that had been sitting on her tongue had dropped off, too. 

I stood by my mother’s side and watched Father’s chest rise and fall. The bits of house on his chest rise and fall. I watched Mother’s chest rise and fall. Breaths brushing back and forth across a strand of hair falling over her eyes, ever so slightly. I was afraid to put my arms around her. We remained like that for some time, just breathing. 

And when the sun had begun setting, Mohan came to say goodbye.  

“Did you see the nest?” 

I shook my head. “Where are you going?” 

“The new world, my father says.” 

“You’re leaving right now?” 

“Yes,” he said. “My father says we have to rush if we want to get there in time.” 

“In time for what?” 

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. 

“What about school?”

“I don’t know.” 

And then he hugged me and left. 

Noor’s mother was standing at a little distance from me, outside their house, which had more or less survived. She was saying to another woman, “It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen.” 

Someone came inside and lifted Father onto a wide khat, between two others. He did not make a sound, though the others lying beside him both groaned. 

My mother said, “I’m going to take him to the hospital, now.” She stood up and said, “You stay here, wait for me.”  

“When will you come back?” I asked.

“Soon,” she said. 

Four people held up a leg each, and my mother walked alongside it, down the road.  

I ran out behind her and shouted again. “Mother, when will you come back?” 

But by then she was a speck on the road, getting smaller and smaller, until there was only a dirty, flat line where moments ago she had been. I could almost hear the earth’s gears turning beneath my feet. I stood looking at the road.   

Didi, 21km

Thump, thump, thump—the wheels of our carriage bounce over the road. A boy is running alongside us. His parents are behind, lost in a large crowd, shouting at him to stop, or slow down. Soon he falls behind. The sky is darkening, my children and grandchildren, my siblings and in-laws—all of them that are still living—are sitting around me, crowded together, happily. Sleeping, looking at the countryside—sometimes at tiled roofs in the distance, sometimes at nothing more than the undulating plains—and talking about passing things. “Didi,” my sister says, leaning against her husband, “Why are you smiling like that?” I say, “I don’t know.” I had thought, when we set out, that I would feel at least a little unhappy. That is bound to happen, I thought. But here I am, and there is not a drop of sadness in me, not a single whisper of it. “Just because,” I say. The rain patters on the carriage top. The horse is whinnying and grunting; we have told the driver not to crack that whip, as much as he can. The road is stretching out in front of my eyes, the grooves we are leaving behind are deep, the rain gathers in them, and I think to myself, free, at last.

Karim, Mahfooz, Asif, My Brother & Me, 19km

The night and the rain have hidden everything away, and a few of us are having a rest around a couple big boulders.

It is drizzling, but the slant of the rock faces catches some of the showers first. About as dry as one can hope to be, in weather like this.  

A lamp is approaching and then it comes to a sudden stop. The lamp is tied to the arm of a cart, and on top of the cart, large, indistinct shapes are covered by a wet cloth. 

The cart is pushed forward and rolls back. The objects under the cloth shift, too, and the lamp sways like a head. The wheels and the axles make a creaking sound. The wheels are stuck in the mud. Ruts carve up the road—if this can be called a road at all. 

The cart jerks forward, again it stops. 

More lamps and lanterns, clutched in hand and drawn forward on carriages; other shadowed figures, empty-handed, or holding light duffel bags, or bent low under heavier loads—parting around the cart stalled in that makeshift road. Like water parts around rocks in a river’s course. Everything fades into the dark ahead. 

“There you are,” I say to my brother. 

“No need to wait for me,” says Asghar. “I will manage to get it moving soon.” 

Nobody is waiting, anyway. We are only resting, for a minute, before we must begin moving again.   

“I will have it moving in no time,” he grunts, trying to lift up the left rear wheel, as if he could. 

“Leave it, Asghar,” I say. “Sit down.” 

“You won’t get any more money for getting there a few minutes quicker,” I say again, but my brother stays where he is, bent over by the wheel, heaving.   

We are on the road toward the new world—Karim, Mahfooz, Asif, my brother and me. Our instructions are simple: “You are going there anyway, right? Take these things over with you and you can earn a little money for your travels.” Odds and ends inside the boxes and on the cart—some rich man’s things. “He will meet you there.” 

We said, “Alright, we’ll do it,” and then we set out. That was four nights ago. 

“How did you get stuck lugging that big thing around?” Mahfooz asks. He kicks his own load with a flick of his leg. “This is all I was given.”  

“That’s because of your chicken arms, Mahfooz. Nobody could trust you to lift anything heavier than a twig.”

“My wonderful chicken arms will get paid just as much as you, Asif. But, please, you enjoy that iron trunk.” 

“If you are good, Asif, maybe Mahfooz will even use some of it to buy you a nice shirt in the new world. God knows you could use it,” Karim says.

“Watch it,” Asif says. “My mother stitched me this herself.”

“God help her, too, then…” 

“New world, new world… what is the point of dragging all these old things to such a new place?” I say. 

“So that it can look just like this one.” 

“You’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” Asif says, since he will drop the man’s things off and return to his family. 

“Yes,” Karim says. “Alright.”  

Soon, Asghar gives up trying to move the cart and sits down beside me. 

“What do you think it will be like, really?” he asks.  

There is nothing above us—no clouds and no moon. It feels like there is no sky at all, that’s how dark it is.   

“Who cares? I just want to get somewhere I can sleep.” 

Around us, though out of sight, the river of travelers continues flowing.

Jibrail, 11km

“Heaven, right here on earth,” one of the men is saying. “Can you imagine that….” He puts his hand on his heart over the pocket stitched into the chest of his checkered shirt when he says this, heaven, he says. He is standing with his arms crossed, under a torn sheet of tarpaulin. The man has lips like a fox and long hair that hangs like a crown on his forehead. A steady stream of rain drips down from the edges of the sheet, into the dark, muddied street. “Nothing like this shithole,” he says, stomping the ground with his dirty boot. “Nothing like everything else, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“We have all heard that, you fool,” I am grumbling under my breath, into the pot of water boiling on the stove top. 

A voice from another corner of the crowd says, “God has lit a path for us, my friends!” A cheer goes up around me. Another voice adds, “And it will not crumble beneath our feet.” Again, there is a murmuring of happiness. The first voice shouts, “Free at last!” Then someone else shouts out, “Which one of you scoundrels has taken my bag!” and nobody has much to say about that.    

Umh! My eyes are rolling inside their sockets like polished marbles. A young man, with a bag slung across his chest, thrusts two coins into my hand. He asks, “Say, what is the name of this town?” 

I respond, “The city of mud, of course.” 

“The city of mud,” he says haltingly, like it is a question. I think it is obvious: look anywhere, on any corner of this hill, you will find mud under it, on top of it, inside it, or around it, or it will just be plain mud that you are looking it, in which case you might have fallen down, so stand up. 

“Yes,” I respond, “Mud. Now take your stinking tea.”

My name is Jibrail and I am tired of saying, to these infernal travelers, “Can’t you see that I’m closed for business?” But the more I say it, the more people shout out, and the louder they shout, “Onto the new world!” Yes, fools, I am thinking to myself, take your speeches there, please, far away from me…

“Alu,” I say, “I can’t bear this any longer…” 

Alu is my wife. She has no use of her legs anymore and is sitting at the door to our room, watching everything.

I have begun trying out a number of different excuses that might drive these infernal travelers back to their precious road, but nothing is working. 

I have tried: “I’m afraid I’m out of sugar—will salt do?” 

I have pretended I am a traveler myself. I say, “Excuse me, I am overjoyed to be traveling with you!” I repeat the words I have heard them say, to sell my performance. “Free, at last!” I say, “Hope, at last!” And then I ask, “But do you know whose shop this is?” and I look about in confusion. 

I have resorted to prophesizing disaster, even. I say, to a young woman rocking her crying baby uselessly, “My wife says this whole joint is about to come crashing down… trust me, she has a sixth sense about these things.” But the baby continues wailing, the tea continues boiling, the travelers continue speaking.

And Alu is glaring at me from a distance. 

“What?” I am asking her glaring eyes. 

“Jibrail! Watch the tea.” 

A young boy, no more than fifteen, approaches the fox-lipped man and asks, nervously, “Do you really think it’s true?” His boots are two sizes too big for him. 

The man, whose hand is still fondling his heart through his chest, says, “I have no doubt about it.” Then he says, “The ocean is only a few dozen kilometers away—we will be there by sunrise. Don’t lose faith and you will be rewarded, son.”

Umh! I am nauseated… Choke on your words, idiot! I am thinking, when Alu throws a shoe at me. The shoe she has thrown at me is one of my own—that tells you all you need to know about my wife. 

She says, through gritted teeth, “Jibrail! It’s not nice to think like that.” 

That is another thing about my wife, Alu. She has drawn the short end of the straw in almost every way. As I have said, she has no use of her legs—I won’t get into that sad story, it is long and predictable. On top of that, she has weak lungs—but everyone does… all that dirt—and weak bones. 

She even has trouble hearing—except when it comes to me. I can be on the other side of town and she will know that I am complaining about her snoring, which, by the way, is so loud that sometimes I wake up getting ready to run to open ground. She can read my mind, too—she says she can her me thinking. Whether that is love or just bad luck is decided every day.   

“Umh! Alu! Stay out of my head!” 

“No! Just keep your head clean, Jibrail.” 

I say, “Alu, this is all your fault.” 

Because this is how it began. 

I was cleaning the stove, a few hours ago, thinking of how I would hold Alu at night. The whole day I had dreamt about it and it was the only thing on my mind. What can I say? I am a romantic, and the rain is miserably cold. I was dragging the stove into our room when the first of these leeches emerged from the night and knocked on my bamboo pole, as if it were made of rock. 

“Be careful with that! It’s holding up more than you know,” I said. 

Then he said, “A cup of tea, please.” 

His frail shoulders were drooping and he was not wearing any shoes. I said, “Try again tomorrow. I do not wish to work anymore today,” and I turned my back on him. Alu said, “Jibrail! Look how tired he is, he must have come a long way…” Then, she whispered, “Be good and I will let you hold me tonight.” She does that—she is strategic about her powers over me. Anyways, that is why I am spooning sugar into milk right now, listening to these travelers serving each other their foolish dreams.  

“So, which is it?” a woman is asking.

“I have heard it both ways, Khadija.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me that?”

“Relax…” he says.

“Is it that there is already a town there, or will there be boats to take us somewhere, wherever this place is?”

“I told you, I’ve heard it both ways.”

“So, you’re saying you don’t know?” she asks. 

“I know what everyone else knows. You heard it yourself!”

“Yes, but that was only talk…” 

“You’re just getting cold feet,” he says.

“No,” she says, “I’m… I…”  

“What does it matter? We’ll find out which it is soon enough.”

“What does it matter?” she asks. “We left everything behind, Javed. I know it wasn’t much, but… because you said you were certain, you said that…” 

Just then rain gathering in the folds of the tarpaulin swishes and leaks, suddenly, through a hole in the sheet, like a faucet, and the man jumps forward at his soaking bundle and shouts, “My clothes!” His wife is staring at him, scrambling, on his knees in the mud. 

I am chuckling—it is the little things. 

“Old man, another tea, if you please?” It is the fox-lipped man speaking.

“Umh! Of course,” I say. “Do you want it in a cup or shall I pour it straight down your throat?” 

“Cheer up. Aren’t you coming along, too?” 

“No,” I am muttering. “But be sure not to stop by and say hello on your way back.” 

“You will eat your own words, old grump.”

As I am pouring his tea into a cup, under the sagging tarpaulin, beside the water running through the road in braided, black rivulets, I look at Alu. She is looking at me, too. 

When we first heard the rumours, a few days ago, I asked her if she wanted to go and have a look for herself.

“It’s not far,” I said.    

“I know. Do you want to go?” she asked.

“It’s all the same to me.”

“You wouldn’t want to live somewhere else? Somewhere you can trust the ground not to give out under your feet?” 

“No,” I said. “I’m fine where I am.”

“Is it pride?” she asked. “You don’t want to be seen running?” 

“No,” I said again. “It’s not pride. Do you want to know, really?”

“Yes.” 

“Many years ago, before I ever met you,” I said, “I was living on the shore of a tremendous lake, by myself, in a place I did not know. Big as a sea, really. I did not think my life was worth much—I had just lost my parents and was convinced it should have been me and not them, grazing the cows along the cliffside that morning. I spent my days sleeping and my nights fishing, mostly because there was no one to tell me otherwise. 

“One of these nights I was more tired than usual, I had been having vivid dreams all morning, and I let myself doze off on the boat. Both my oars must have slipped out of my hands at some point, because I could not find them when I finally awoke. Around my boat, the water was black as coal and glittering like knives. The water was vast and shimmering, and the land was not in my view. I was not panicked. I told myself, someone is bound to find you in no time. Don’t panic, I kept saying for a long time. 

“The night had a few hours left in it yet, when the lake turned wild beneath my flimsy boat. I knew it was not a storm because wind was not gusting through my hair—in fact, I was sweating, and the clouds were hanging, bunched around the moon, here and there. Motionless. As the water entered my boat, surging wave after wave, I dropped to my knees with a tin pail—I had brought it for the fish—and got to work. Of course, there was more of the lake than room in my bucket—and, as things went, I saw that the bottom of the bucket was perforated with little, rusted holes. 

“The water was at my shins, around me it was frothing like I had been thrown into a boiling pot, when I sat back and gave up the act. There is no easy way out on a boat, I thought, nowhere for me to run. Nothing beyond its meagre, wooden hull. The water kept rising, now at my calves, now at my knees, and the boat kept on sinking. I had a single cigarette in my pocket and though it was soaked, I put it between my lips and crossed my legs beneath me, on the wet, wooden slat, just above the water. There is no easy way out on a boat, I thought. Nothing to keep you afloat, when the waters churn and flash perilous.”

“You know,” Alu said after a moment, “That I know,” she said, “That you have never left the city of mud, much less touched a living fish in your life.” “You know,” she said, “That I know,” she said, “Your parents are still alive.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know, I made the whole thing up—but that is not important. Did you like my story?”

“Yes,” she said, “I thought it was fine.”

“So, do you understand that it is not pride?”

“Yes,” she said, “Let the others play with their buckets.” 

Then, she said, “I’m fine where I am.”  

And so, we decided not to go to heaven on earth, the new world, “free, at last.”

Thunderous clouds—the rain is falling harder now, in white sheets on the city of mud. And the travelers are cowering under their bags, under makeshift defenses against the rain, and trudging into the dark. A long, shiny stain winding up the road, bending where it bends, dipping where it dips, and disappearing into the distance. The last of them are still sitting on upside down crates, under the tarpaulin, talking in low voices now.

Something about the pure, blue tips of the gas flame, bending around the last pot of tea—this, for my wife and me—draws my eyes toward it, and then I am looking to my left, where the lopsided shacks, perched light as birds on the uneven ground, are melting into the dark, the flickering lamps inside—and the shadows they have thrown up on so many nights—blinking out, one by one. I am looking at the unlit night-sky, leaning down toward us, and then I am looking at the flame again, which trembles and surges in the wind, and goes on burning. “Alu,” I say, “Don’t forget what you promised me… I’m almost done, I’ll be inside soon.”

Laiba, 7km

“Is that all you’re bringing?” a man asks me. “Yes,” I say, “I have nothing else that is valuable to me—for better or for worse.” I am walking through the winding roads of the city of mud, to get to the other side of the hill, and then to the sea. And so is he, this man I have just met. I have nothing in my hands, except a single, plastic file. Inside it, my photographs—well, they are mine, now. I didn’t click the pictures—Aziz did. “Would you like to see them, my photographs?” I ask the man. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll tell you the whole story, then,” I say.

“Many years ago,” I begin, “When my husband and I were still running a modest hotel outside the city of mud, Aziz checked in and stayed with us for many months. He was a strange, rich man—or so I’ve always thought. We never did learn much about him, and he never gave us reason to ask too many questions. He was never late paying his bills, though he did not have a job—not that I ever knew of, at least. He ate breakfast with us sometimes, but he only ever asked questions about us, or my son, Alam. And if one of us managed to slip in a question about him, he did his best to answer it in very general terms. 

“Neither of us thought too much about it—we were preoccupied, instead, with his beautiful camera, which he carried around everywhere. He took long walks every day, sometimes leaving in the morning and returning at night. On these walks, he went around taking his pictures. Sometimes, if he was in a sociable mood, he would volunteer to show us what he had captured. I always envied them and would jump at every chance to spend a few hours flipping through his stack of photographs. 

“At the time, I thought I was drawn to them because so many of my friends had hung family portraits in their houses—it was something of an impractical trend, given the nature of things, and it has since fallen out of fashion. Over the years, though, I have come to realize that it was his choice of subjects—and the permanence of those prints—which moved me so much. Most of the photographs were scenes of the streets in that town, taken from various vantage points. I don’t know how to explain myself, other than by saying that it was only when I looked at his pictures that I remembered there was, in fact, a real world outside my doors—that there was life to be seen, marveled at, from every imaginable angle. 

“One evening, he found me in the kitchen and said he was leaving—it was a family emergency—and that he was not likely to return. We said our goodbyes that very moment, since he said he would be leaving early the next morning. I was sad to see him go, but I went about making dinner for the other guests, like it was any other day. It was only when I saw him step out at night, to finalize his other travel arrangements, that I thought to take some of the pictures to keep for myself.  

“So, without a moment’s hesitation, I went into his room and stole a handful of pictures of the town—not all, but enough, and they have kept me company every day since. In many ways, these pictures are the only proof my life. 

“Look at this,” I say. “This is a favorite of mine, a photograph of a street crossing in front of the school in which my son was enrolled. Any one of these children, with their backs turned to the lens, could have been him. Oh, I wonder… I have always thought the back of this little boy’s neck looked just like my Alam. 

“On top of some of the photographs, you’ll see, I’ve added my own drawings and annotations. This is a picture of my neighbourhood, before it was no more. Aziz must have taken it from a rooftop. My husband had stepped out to buy a sack of rice—I’ve marked our house (o)—and I’ve also marked the spot (x) I found him, lying in the road.” 

When I look up, I see that the man is no longer walking beside me, but it doesn’t bother me. I am leaving the city of mud, with my memories pressed into my hands, as real as the road under me and the strangers jostling me in this crowd. 

Amina, 2km

We are far from Mother as the sun begins rising. “Come on,” I shout. “Are you a slowpoke?” Little Brother is many steps behind me, trudging up a steep hill, through the wet grass. Mother has given the hill this name: the hill of the lopsided tree. On my chest, the baby is awake. She is fidgeting inside the blanket like an earthworm. My name is Amina Karim Khatoon, and I am fifteen years old. I look after my siblings until dark, every day, so that our mother, whose name is also Amina Khatoon, can work in the junkyards in the city of mud. Little Brother is asking, “Shouldn’t we just turn back, Didi, toward the house?” Separating him from our mother is an almost impossible task; he is like a leech. Mother often says, about him, “Your brother is still afraid from being in the dark those nine months.” At night, he cries—he is inconsolable—if she removes her arm from between his grimy fingers, even though he will complete eight years this July. He only wants to hold the thickest part of her arm, above the elbow and below the shoulder, despite the fact that his fingers are not long enough to close around it. “Not yet,” I say to him, “We have to finish our task, don’t we?”

He is groaning and throwing his hands around like pinwheels, and this makes the baby laugh. The baby has a laugh like the crackling of the radio between stations; sometimes it can also sound like she is choking. “But now we won’t get home before dark!” Little Brother complains. He is dragging his feet behind me. “Stop whining!” I say. “I told you, Mother wants us to do this for her. Don’t you want to be a good son?” 

I hear him stop and think. Then, I hear him sprinting to bridge the distance between us. His legs thump up and down on the ground, like dum dum dum, and his skin chafes against the high grass, like sh sh sh, and he sounds like a frenzied heart pumping blood in a sudden flash of danger. Little Brother catches up at last. Gasping, he asks, “Will you at least tell me what Mother wants us to wish for, please?” I say, “Maybe,” but I won’t, because Mother has made me promise.

We continue climbing the hill. I can see the tree hanging on at the summit: half rooted in the soil, always on the verge of falling, but never hitting the ground. I can see its knotted roots and the rain dripping down its slanted trunk. “We’re almost there,” I say, “And then we can make Mother’s wish at the tree,” and Little Brother shouts with joy.   

I think of yesterday. Mother does not return until very late at night. Before that, it is evening and I am resting on a stool outside the house, throwing the baby up above me and catching her as she comes back down. As soon as I stop, the baby begins crying; it is because she remembers that she is hungry. Little Brother is standing on top of a large mound of dirt down the road, with two other boys, with dull rocks in their hands. He is waving his arms at me. “We are going to dig for treasure!” I have lied to the boys and told them that a merchant of toys used to have a house there, and that he abandoned it—and the trove of toys inside—the last time the earth quaked.

The truth is that it is just like any of the other ruins around. Maybe the boys will find the shards of a pot, or the pocket of an old shirt. I don’t feel mean for lying—I only have two hands and two eyes, and both are watching the baby, and the boys are young and too easy to trick. The boys inform me that they are hoping to find, in no particular order, a sword in its sheath, rubber balls, a pot of gold, and a cart with functional wheels. “Look carefully!” I shout after them. 

My arms are sore from lifting the baby up and down. When Little Brother is tired, when he complains, Mother says to him, “How can you be tired already? You’ve only been alive for the blink of an eye.” The sun is disappearing behind the houses, into the mud. Around the world, I imagine everyone removing their clothes from the drying lines and bringing them inside; I imagine them kneeling down by stove tops to keep a watch on the tea, or resting on their backs, under the darkening sky, sighing and breathing and watching the night turn into morning before their eyes, and I wait for Mother to return. 

I can see, down the road, to where it bends and disappears from view, and I watch it for what feels like a long time. Soon, the boys abandon all use of the rocks. Instead, they paw at the dirt, throwing it back like feral dogs digging holes to hide old bones and other precious leftovers. Little Brother even howls. By then the baby is wailing and can’t be stopped, and nobody comes down the road. The boys break up for the night and Little Brother begins fidgeting. He has found a rusted shovel in the debris and is banging it against the ground, inside the house, singing, “When will Mother return! Wh-en wi-ill Mo-ther re-tu-urn!” 

Past midnight, when the baby has tired herself out and Little Brother is whimpering, Mother stumbles through the door soaked in sweat and looking pale. Her eyelids are heavy with sleep and her eyes are vacant. Before she does anything else, Mother puts out the lamp, even though none of us have eaten, and says, “Go to sleep, both of you.” She slurs her words. When Little Brother runs up to hug her, Mother brushes past and disappears into the back of the house, where I have kept a couple pots of water. She emerges with wet hair and sits down on the chattai, in the dark. I can hardly see her. Then she lifts the baby to her breast and lets the child feed. The baby goes on nursing for a very long time, until Mother pulls her away and the baby cries, because she is still hungry. Mother hands me the child and lies down. Little Brother, who has been waiting this whole time, lies down beside her and takes her hand. “Ma?” he asks. She makes an almost imperceptible sound, but she does not shake her arm free of his grip. “Nothing,” the boy says, and closes his eyes. When the baby quiets down, I put her in a cot and lie down on my mother’s other side. “You’re a good girl, Amina,” she says, in a drowsy voice. And I hold her other arm all night long. 

Little Brother is tugging at my sleeve. “No,” I say, “I’m not telling you!” He stomps his foot. We are standing on the summit of the hill, under the shade of the tree. Plink! plink! Drops of rain drip down from the leaves, from the thick, green boughs to the damp ground. Where the trunk has been pulled up from the soil, under a knot of withering roots, there is an opening in the earth. The hairs on the roots look like fingers grasping at the wet soil. Mother brings us here to make wishes, and the wishes come true, sometimes. Sometimes I ask that the earth stop shaking, other times I ask that Mother not work any longer. Once I asked for a ring and, when I found one in the road a few weeks later, I felt like I had wasted my shot at something better.

“Go ahead,” I say, “Make your wish first.” Little Brother stops sulking and asks me to stand at a distance so I don’t spy on him. I roll my eyes, because everyone knows he always asks to be given a moustache and a beard, as soon as it might be possible. He drops to his knees and lies down flat on the ground, in the mud, without a second thought. He cups his hands around his mouth and whispers into the opening in the ground, in the shadow of the falling tree, a wish for himself. And then he says a prayer and stands up—just like Mother showed us, the first time. “I wish that my children never leave my house.” Little Brother returns and takes the baby from me and holds her to his dirty chest. I approach the tree and kneel down at its feet. The opening is dark, and cool, and inviting. 

This morning, when I woke up, she was lying on her back, staring at me through the corner of her eyes. Her lips were blue. The sweat was in perfect, round drops on her forehead, glistening in the light falling through the door. “Amina,” she said, “You must listen to me.”

Now, I speak Mother’s words into the ground. “I will soon be dead, Life. I am leaving three pieces of myself in your care, and I am asking that you steady my children’s legs, each time the world comes undone. I am asking that you make their breaths long and deep, when the skies have emptied of air and filled up, instead, with dust and dirt. I am asking that you light their path and make them stubborn of mind, and stubborn of heart. 

“But listen, Life, I am not worried, and I do not make my wishes out of fear. That dark and shadowed thing about which everyone is always speaking, that husbands complain to their wives about, that friends argue about at night and drunkards in the day, that wives pass onto the children kicking in their wombs, farmers sing to the crops on hot days, night-watchmen cry to the moon and kiln-workers bake into the bricks, that politicians make into speeches and lovers whisper across pillows—I want nothing to do with that withered thing. 

“No, I am not afraid, but I am not a fool, either. I have seen your shaking, your trembling, your sudden rending. Your buckling, your quaking, your slashing, shuddering and shivering, starting, then stopping, your convulsing. I know the world will keep turning, and in the course of its turning, things will fall and others will stand up. I am asking, only, that you grant my children the courage to withstand fear. That is all. I thank you, and I go.” 

I am staring into the opening, thinking that maybe Mother will rise up out of it. Little Brother is approaching. The baby is crying and he is trying to rock her dimpled body on his small shoulders, he is lit up by the last look of the sun. My shadow draws his face in half. “Can we go now home to Mother now?” he asks. The summit of that hill feels like the center of the world. She is dead behind me, lying in the city of mud, where night is still leaving the houses, rising up from the grass and untangling itself from the branches of the trees. Ahead of me, the sky is pinking into morning, and the land runs flat from the foot of the hill to the coast. I think I can hear the waves, rushing into the sand and drawing back, if I am very, very quiet. Where should we go, Mother? 

“Leave me behind,” Mother had said, “Go wherever you must go, and make a life for yourself.” Yes,” I say to Little Brother, “We can go now.” I take his arm in mine and we linger on the hill of the lopsided tree, before we start moving, again. 

0km

Everyone, not everyone, but so many are there, waiting. And the sun is rising over the ocean. The earth is turning—some of them can feel it turning, and others swear it has stopped. Someone asks, “Do you know which way it is from here?” Everywhere, the voice of Life can be heard, in near and distant towns, its ringing and its tolling, chirping and shrieking, shouting and whispering, loving and threatening, promising and admonishing, in shacks and huts and houses, on the road and under the ground, above the mountains and inside the glittering sea, in the light and in the dark—and everyone is waking up, or is already awake, asking that question, “Do you know which way it is from here?”