The Outcast Hours Read online

  Nazeem took it with a laugh. “Forget the ‘sahib’ stuff, yaar. I’m Nazeem. You all set to start?”

  “Yes,” Bilal said, and while he tried his best to sound eager, Nazeem could tell there was fear beneath it.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nazeem said, squeezing the hand that was still pumping his up and down. “You’re riding with the best.”

  Behind the center, parked in a lane just wide enough to contain it, was the ambulance. A small Suzuki minivan, it might once have been white as well but like the tiles, that too had been encroached upon. Large rust patches and splashes of mud and dirt had left the original paint limited to small Vitiligo patches. The only consistently maintained color was the red EDHI and 115 emblazoned in large letters along the sides.

  They checked first the van itself: tire pressure, oil, petrol, spare tire, siren, lights, battery. Then the interior contents: bottles of water, an oxygen tank, a stretcher, a small box of white gloves, a locket containing a single strand of the Prophet’s hair, a pair of long, heavy sticks, and in the dashboard a Quran. Nazeem smiled as he watched Bilal consult a handwritten list before checking each one, then ticking them off with a pen that he placed primly back in his front pocket. He had never been that careful himself; he hoped the boy’s diligence wasn’t going to be a hindrance. The things they had to face were, in his experience, best confronted with an improvisational attitude.

  “How many days did you train?” Nazeem asked.

  “Three,” answered Bilal. “They said that’s all I’d need.”

  “Two more than necessary. Still, the first aid stuff helps I suppose. Just remember, once we start, instinct over education, okay?”

  “Yes, of course, yes,” said Bilal, now starting to pull at the edges of his mustache. “How much training did you get?”

  Nazeem counted on his fingers, going through all ten twice, paused to consider with his eyes closed, then grinned and curled two fingers into a zero.

  “I started this division. I had to convince Edhi sahib twenty years ago to let me. The stuff I go through is what you new kids are taught. But I had to figure it out myself.”

  Bilal didn’t look suitably awestruck, just kept tugging at his mustache.

  “And that’s all we’ll need,” he asked, jerking a thumb at the van. “Not even a gun?”

  “You can’t save lives with a gun,” Nazeem said. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed into the van, Nazeem on the driver’s seat while Bilal settled into the shell behind him. The van gasped and coughed awake, headlights flaring in the alley, and as Nazeem eased it out onto the street, Bilal begin to recite the Ayat al-Kursi loudly, asking Allah for protection on their hours and hours of journey ahead.

  They had barely left the Edhi center and the radio began crackling urgently. Nazeem pulled the microphone to his face with one hand, twisting the steering around with another so they could swing past a slow moving rickshaw.

  “Nazeem to base. Go ahead. Over.”

  “Salaam Nazeem bhai.” This was followed by an address. Then, “Family says it’s a Churail. Over.”

  Nazeem heard Bilal stifle a yelp behind him. He grinned. A Churail was perfect to blood the boy with. He flipped a switch and the siren blast leapt ahead of them, pushing traffic out of their way. It was still too early in the night for Karachi streets to afford much space. Every flattish surface was congested with cars, bullied out of the way by kamikaze buses, and trucks so overladen they were given a wide berth only in case they toppled over. In the gaps between, filling spaces with a diligence that can be attributed to natural law, were motorcyclists and rickshaws. Even on a clear night, the moon was obscured by the haze of dust and exhaust. Despite this continuous battle for forward motion, every traveller maintained a respect for the authority of every Edhi ambulance. Each person knew one day it would be them riding in the back, and so space was afforded for Nazeem to plummet ahead. And those that delayed in giving way were shamed loudly through the megaphone on the ambulance’s roof.

  “Red car, move you bastard!”

  “Sufi sahib, your beard is bigger than your sense, move it!”

  “I’ll shove that motorcycle up your ass idiot, move!”

  An elderly man was sitting on the sidewalk outside the house when they reached, dressed in a shalwaar and white T-shirt, fanning his face with a newspaper, a dirty cloud of mosquitos drifting over his bald pate.

  “My grandson is inside,” he said. “The Churail appeared in his window every night and we prayed for her to keep away but it didn’t work. Now she’s got him.” The old man conveyed all this with a tone of disappointment, as though he were informing them of a dessert he had been hoping to eat but found the insects got to it before he could.

  Bilal began to ask for more details, but Nazeem cut him short. Instead he asked if there were any women of the house who needed informing of their arrival. The old man said the siren would have alerted them, pointed them towards the entrance, then sat back down on the sidewalk and resumed his observation of the night sky.

  “Let’s not waste time,” Nazeem instructed. “Do you smoke?”

  “No,” said Bilal.

  “There’s a box of matches in the dashboard. Get them. Once we’re inside, don’t look in its eyes. Just do what I say. I don’t want to be here too long, I haven’t had my chai yet.”

  The small house was crammed with too-large furniture, and every wall had a framed painting of the Kaaba, or a Quranic prayer in swooping calligraphy. There were two women, the old man’s wife and a younger one in her teens. Both had covered their heads with shawls, the older not bothering to hide her face. She was the one who led them to the door near the back. Nazeem thanked her and stepped into the room, followed by Bilal. The door was hurriedly pulled shut behind them.

  Afterwards, seated across from each other at a wobbly plastic table, gently swirling steaming chai that was poured onto a saucer to cool, Bilal interrogated Nazeem over what they had just done.

  “I didn’t look at her, like you said, but I caught glimpses,” he said. Sitting at the cafe, bathed in the undeniable reality of electric lighting, news blasting behind them from a wall-mounted TV, rotating fans swiveling their heads from side to side with arthritic squeals—all this had taken the hysterical edge from his voice. In the first moments after they had dealt with the Churail, Nazeem had even considered slapping Bilal, but was pleased to discover the boy recovered fast, faster than the last half dozen apprentices who’d served under him.

  “What did you see?” asked Nazeem, waving over the small boy wiping down tables with a cloth dirtier than the surfaces it was supposed to clean and asking him for some paratha to dip in their tea.

  Bilal turned over his memories.

  “I saw an old woman. Her skin was like… like the concrete here.” He pointed at a bare pillar next to them. “I looked down quickly, so I can’t be sure, but I think she had a mouth. I saw teeth, long teeth like a picture I once saw of a man who had never cut his fingernails, and they were curled round and round. Her teeth were like that, I think. So long they were curled round and round. All the darkness around her, was that her hair?”

  Nazeem appreciatively slurped some more tea, then refilled his saucer. “Yes, they have thick black hair all around them. I’ve never looked at them directly either. Then what did you see?”

  The parathas came, piled high on a plate like stacks of pancakes. Bilal tore a bite and tossed it in his mouth, not even noticing how it was still too hot to barely even touch.

  “She was standing over the man. Touching his face. Then the door closed behind us and she was gone. Just gone. The room was brighter.”

  The room had indeed brightened as suddenly as a switch being flipped. When they walked in it had been submerged in blue shadows, the only color being the Churail’s pallid skin. Then she was gone, and it was as though she had never been there. The only evidence being the skinny, naked man, barely in his twenties, curled up on the ground. As Nazeem and Bilal watched, the color b
leached from his hair, and it turned as white as

  skin

  paper. His eyes were open, staring up as tears brimmed inside, then spilled over. Most trailed down to his ears, but some followed the curves of his gaunt face all the way to his mouth, where they dripped into the rictus scream. Nazeem had motioned to Bilal and they walked to either side of him, lifting the man off the ground by his arms and placing him on the bed at the end of the room. It was placed right under an open window, through which the tips of finger-thin branches grasped, their leaves whispering to each other.

  Nazeem wrapped a blanket around the man, then reached under his pillow. Not finding what he wanted there, he rolled the man away from the edge, lifted the mattress as much as he could and peeked underneath.

  “Ask him where it is,” he’d said to Bilal. Realizing the boy was staring at the man’s hair, Nazeem repeated the question loudly, snapping his attention back.

  “Where what is Bhai?”

  “Where her keepsake is. Ask him. He’ll know.”

  Bilal had to gently slap the man several times just to get his eyes to focus away from the ceiling. When he repeated the question, the man emitted a wire-thin wail, then slowly shifted his gaze at the window sill. Nazeem reached over and pulled at the base of the sill. The wood pulled forward just a few inches, revealing a small compartment, inside which was a lock of black hair bound by a fraying pink ribbon. Nazeem prayed softly, then picked it up, laid it on the ground, and lit it with a burning match. The hair curled, then writhed like a salted slug until the small flame swallowed it whole. Nazeem stamped it out then, spreading the ashes across the floor with his foot. The man had been able to walk after that, although not without support, and they led him to the ambulance, laying him on the stretcher. The old man had climbed in the back with Bilal and both were deposited to a hospital close by. Then Nazeem and Bilal had gone for their chai.

  “There’s usually one or two a week. It’s always the same too, as long as you can find the keepsake and burn it.”

  “What if you can’t?” asked Bilal.

  “Then you tell the family to keep searching until they find it. Or the Churail wins and you don’t need to search anymore.”

  Bilal considered this. They finished the last of the paratha, dipping it directly into the tea, the glistening skin of milk floating on the surface wrapping around it.

  Their next job, an hour later, was a man standing in the middle of a busy road. Cars were mostly swerving around him, but some had been coming too fast and it was only after those passed through him that they had gotten the call. The man was dressed in the same white shroud he must have been buried in, though it was soaked and thus transparent in places. Even his long grey beard was a knotted wad of sponge, and a puddle of water trailed him as he was led to the side of the road by Nazeem. He walked away only once Nazeem had assured him they would inform the graveyard owners of the water pipe that must have burst next to the grave.

  And so the night went. They sped back and forth across the city, the siren always heralding their arrival. The streets of Karachi emptied as the hours passed, even the skies clearing of filth enough to show the moon, a curve of bone caught in the night’s throat.

  A woman with her feet twisted backwards had been seen feasting on a little girl, they’d found only the child’s remains and wrapped all the bits in a cloth, taking the bundle to the morgue. A grown man had been pulled up a tree by something with claws and a lion’s roar. Negotiating his release had involved raw meat and poetry. From the beach they’d pulled a woman’s bloated corpse, thick blue veins marbling her skin. Someone had heard her yowling like a baby, even though her drowned eyes had sunken away. Bilal almost dropped her corpse when a baby’s face peered out from inside her mouth. He and Nazeem carried her back to the water, letting whatever crawled up from her throat thrash its way back into the ocean. They would finish one job, and the radio would crackle, sending them hurtling to the next.

  Nazeem would glance at Bilal when he was sure the younger man wasn’t aware, assessing his resilience. There was exhaustion more than shock, eyelids drooping when the van’s gentle rocking would soothe him. Nazeem had seen the opposite happen to others before, when by this time of the night they were staring unblinkingly ahead, whispering words of reassurance to themselves in increasingly unconvinced tones.

  With only a couple hours left before dawn, they arrived at the apartment entrance. It was the kind that sat on the outskirts of the city, with spotlights syringing the sky around it, and a moat of private security guards needing to be crossed to get past the high walls. Within its borders were enough resources to ignore the Day of Judgment if its residents wished, with entertainment options. The police van parked in front of the apartment tower they had been summoned to looked even more incongruous than they did. Ambulances were still seen here from time to time; even rich people, when dying, had to contend with the same bare resources as the poor. The police, however, had no authority here, and would have had to request permission even to enter the compound.

  Nazeem recognized the Superintendent, smoking a cigarette with a cluster of his officers. They were sheltered under the caramel glow of a sodium light. They exchanged pleasantries. The Superintendent’s hands were shaking, Nazeem noticed. He knew the man had survived two Taliban attacks and attended to almost as many bomb blasts and gang-war aftermaths as someone with a lifelong career policing Karachi’s streets could accumulate.

  “So what happened?” asked Nazeem.

  The cop pointed at the tower behind them. “We were asked to come here two hours ago. I came myself, just in case. The building manager said the man in one of the apartments hadn’t come out in a month. Went up myself and could hear him moving around behind the door. I sent two of my boys in. One never came out, the other one did but charged at me. I had no choice but to shoot him just to save myself.” At this he pointed next to the police van. Nazeem and Bilal hadn’t seen it when they pulled up because they had been on the other side, but on the ground next to it was a cop’s body, the face covered by a bloodied shirt. Over his heart was a single bullet wound, still leaking.

  “Did you shoot him in the face, why is it covered?” asked Bilal, looking back at the Superintendent, who had motioned to one of this subordinates to light him another cigarette, his hands being inept to the task.

  “No, in the chest. One shot. You can see it. We covered his face because it was too hard to look it. He came out of the apartment that way you see. With his face turned.”

  “Turned,” asked Nazeem.

  “Inside out,” said a younger cop. He tried to smile when he said it, then burped once, ran away from them, and vomited on the black tarmac.

  “How long were they inside?” asked Nazeem.

  The senior cop pulled hard on the cigarette, then indented the air with muddy grey smoke.

  “Less than a minute,” he said.

  Every apartment was serviced by a single private elevator. As they rode up, Bilal turned to Nazeem. “Do you know what this is?”

  Nazeem shook his head.

  The elevator rose so silently the only way they even knew it was travelling upwards were the numbers changing in the digital display overhead. “Why did you volunteer for this?” Nazeem asked, after a second had passed.

  “Edhi sahib told me to,” Bilal said. “I grew up in one of the orphanages. I was a cot kid. I met him a year before he died, and he asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to help him, so he said when I was ready, to come to you. Do you… do you think I can handle it?”

  “You’ve been good so far, child,” said Nazeem, squeezing Bilal’s shoulder. “Now let’s see what this is.”

  The doors opened with a floral chime, and they exited into a small hallway. Just a few steps in front of them was the front door to their destination apartment. It was antiseptic white, the entire hall was, in contrast to the stink that suffused it.

  Nazeem knew that stink well. He’d spent most of his adult life dealing with
rotten corpses, especially in his early years as a regular ambulance driver tasked with collecting bodies wherever they were found. The first one had been blocking a sewer, left there for days before they had been sent to collect it. He was riding with Edhi himself that time, and the old man hadn’t even flinched at the syrupy stench. He rolled up his sleeves, lifted the corpse as gently as possible to stop it from pulling apart, and laid it onto a white blanket. “We’ll all smell the same one day,” he told Nazeem, who had been unable to even approach the body. “It’s a smell more common than the smell of a rose.” Eventually, Nazeem had learned to dull himself to it, registering but never reacting to the stink anymore. Since then he had seen bodies blown apart by bombs, dead of all ages being abandoned by poverty and neglect, and countless others who were found only when they had alerted the living through olfactory signals.

  Bilal gagged next to him. Three days’ training. Two of them would have been basic first aid. The third telling him of the kinds of creatures he’d face working with Karachi’s only exorcist.

  Nazeem turned the handle and the door opened. In the center of the room sat a man in his underwear, his body glistening with sweat. Arranged in a circle around him were half a dozen bodies. They were recognizably human, but barely so, twisted and stripped of almost all skin and muscle. And then emanating outwards, all over the floor, all along the walls, on every surface of the cavernous space, were neatly spaced words, daubed in gleaming black strokes.

  “Come in,” hissed the man.

  Nazeem and Bilal exchanged a glance, then entered. Nazeem felt it right away. The room exerted a pressure that was immediate: it began as an uncoiling of pain in his guts and the throb of something barbed pressing against his brain. His eyes hurt and he felt food and bile rising up in his throat.

  “What have you done?” Nazeem choked out.

  The man grinned lecherously at them. He had a few wisps of neatly combed hair, a long drooping nose, and no discernable chin. Sweat had puddled in the folds of his belly, and yet he was so clean, even the soles of his feet were pale.