2

It was only later that Murad realized how much the year he met Sofi had changed him.

He had spent New Year’s Day in Lahore. The day was empty, without significance. In his room, Ammi had placed a calendar with dual Gregorian and Islamic dates, “January 2006” displayed prominently in black, with “Dhul Hijjah 1426” inscribed in bright green below. The years seemed interchangeable to Murad, an arbitrary jumble of numbers.

Spending winter in Pakistan had added to the sense of being unmoored in time. January in Lahore felt unreal, a betrayal of all Murad’s childhood memories. He had often visited the city in summer, where the heat of the gardens in his grandfather’s house overpowered him, where his soft body slept next to his mother in languid afternoons, the ceiling fans above them delivering a cool endless peace. Summers in Pakistan were spent away from school in the innumerable countries in which his father’s bank had stationed them. When the family moved to Canada, the blistering Lahori heat still beckoned, the dried lawn of their suburban Canadian home never as green or moist as the monsoon-fed grass he remembered. The winter he was dropped to now felt dry and tasteless, only slightly warmer than the cold he’d left behind in London.

The university allowed weeks of holiday time during Christmas, and he was content to stay in London for the season. It was his parents, spending winters in Pakistan away from Toronto, who wanted him with them. Whether Ammi and Abbu simply wanted his company or if they didn’t trust him to be alone by himself to stew in his own thoughts was unclear to Murad.

The morning of the new year he’d woken to face the early morning darkness, before the muezzins declared to the world how prayer was better than sleep and the chowkidars banged the gates with their bamboo staffs to remind everyone of the striking dawn. He didn’t pray. Nothing pulled him toward God. He marvelled over it, how that distance between him and the Divine had grown. For miles around him were worshippers who accepted the agony of sleeplessness to wake and face that love. Thousands – but not him.

Yes, he marvelled over it – marvelled and agonized over it. What had he become now that he no longer yearned to be close to God?

He’d slept for a few hours the previous night, still exhausted, a tiredness beyond jetlag as he had already been in Lahore for a week and a half. He surveyed his room as he rose: It was small, arranged by his mother, with a bed, wooden bookshelf, television and dresser. Every object was ordered fastidiously, an arrangement made to approximate familiarity but instead felt sterile, like a guest room for visitors in transit.

He had forgotten to take his medicine before sleeping the previous night. Citalopram, twenty milligrams, half a pill before he slept. The pill performed as bot