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By Root 688 0

gave me a buzz, the four brothers turned into white pillars of permanence. I felt immortal. One of the angels of Allah. Given the familiarity with which the brothers talked about the Prophets, I figured they were ageless. They must have walked with Ibrahim and crossed the Red Sea with Musa; surely they had walked with Isa and ridden with Muhammad. They were above and beyond history, beyond Shia and Sunni, beyond India and Pakistan, beyond Muslim and not. There was a God; His name was Allah; He was represented by the act of pointing an index finger to the sky. There were the sons that Allah blessed you with. There was a hooka to be smoked at night. A prayer called isha preceded the little sleep. When the big sleep came, others offered a prayer on your behalf; then you were dormant till the Day of Judgment, when you were raised and whatever Allah had determined for you was given to you.

When the melodic words of the azan for isha rang out in the evening, the brothers’ conference of silence would come to an end.

“Big boss,” Dada Abu would ask. “What should we do now?”

“Abir ul Islam says it’s time to pray.”

8

Under Dadi Ma’s tutelage, Ammi became an inveterate storyteller. When she was in the kitchen, squatting on her green straw chowki, grinding masala in the stone chukki, kneading dough in the steel praat, tinkering with the kerosene choola, and wiping her nose on her shoulder, she spoke and spoke and spoke until her speech became narration, her sentences bedizened with similes and metaphors, and my cousins and I were treated to epics. It was as if her imagination were composed of a never-ending series of photographs for which, some time long ago, at the primordial gathering of mothers, she had been given the most appropriate, perfectly descriptive words to use.

All her stories related to Islam.

There was the one about the People of the Cave—the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus—who were so disappointed by the idolatry of the society they lived in that they withdrew to a cave, where they were put into a miraculously deep sleep by Allah, and when they woke up, they were in a better age.

Then there was the story of King Zulqurnain, whose name meant two-horned one, a monotheistic ruler who believed in the afterlife and traveled to the east, west, and a third direction, dispensing wisdom and justice.

“He saw the sun setting in the water, which is the west,” Ammi told me. “Then he visited a place where the people had no cover from the sun, which is the east.”

“Then where did he go?” I asked.

“He went to a valley; we don’t know where,” Ammi said, lowering her voice. “The people were being killed by Yajuj and Majuj!”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Absolute monsters!” Ammi said, making claws with her hands. “There were two tribes of them, and they were raiding the people of the valley, so the people begged King Zulqurnain to save them. He instructed the people to mine lead and iron and copper and brass, and he melted all those things in a huge furnace and poured the molten ore onto a wall, strengthening it to separate the people from the monsters.”

“But Yajuj and Majuj are going to get through the wall, aren’t they?”

“Well, each day Yajuj and Majuj try to break through the wall by licking it. They lick it all day, and each day they can almost see the other side, but then they get tired and go to sleep, and at night Allah thickens the wall again.”

“What if they get through one day?”

“Oh, that day will come,” Ammi said morosely. “Yajuj and Majuj are one of the promised azabs that will afflict the Muslims before the end of the world. When they lick their way through that copper wall, they’ll come out into the land and eat everyone—all except those people who hide in mosques. That’s why I keep telling you to go to the masjid. If you are in the habit of going, when the panic of Yajuj and Majuj strikes you’ll instinctively go to a masjid and save yourself.”

“I hope they come during Friday prayer. I’m in the masjid at that time for sure!” I said, feeling reassured.

“Well, whenever they come, we’ll know,” she said. “And we’ll