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To others the augury might have appeared cryptic; but according to Razia’s personal logic, there could no longer be any uncertainty about the day of the birth. A retinue of servant girls was installed in Leila’s room. The midwife arrived, and brought with her fresh news of the river-island mosque, how the faithful were crowding the one available boat, a few throwing themselves into the waves to swim towards the work of angels, each swimmer wishing to be the one who would say the second call to prayer from the minaret.

As the morning progressed, excitement heightened in the mansion. A desiccated Flower of Mary, brought back from the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, had been placed in a bowl of water: a tight knot of wooden tendrils, grasping itself to itself, it opened slowly in the water and was believed to absorb the pain of the mother into itself during birth.

By the time of the noon prayers, however, when they heard again the call from the minaret, Leila still hadn’t given birth. And Timur’s child had not been born by the time of the afternoon prayers either. Leila, with a dreamlike expression, contemplated every nuance of the muezzin’s call both times, but it wasn’t the same voice as at dawn.

With the sun moving towards the west, the mother-in-law became acutely anxious, an anxiety that proved baseless because Leila’s pains began, at last, just as the evening prayers approached – the hour every Thursday when the dead visited the living.

Timur was being kept informed via a mobile phone that a servant girl operated for Razia. Initially he stayed in the men’s section of the mansion, but as time passed he came closer and closer to Leila’s room, until eventually he was just on the other side of the door. He was a man of exact speech who seldom smiled even when alone, and he had carried Leila away from her village a year ago to be his bride, her eyes seeming to cast a brief spell on him. Like his father and grandfather before him, and the fathers and grandfathers before them, he would have needed time to think if asked how many people he had killed or caused to die.

That evening he was exhausted because he had slept very little during the previous seventy-two hours. In addition to the revelries for the upcoming birth, during the last three nights he had been supervising a group of workers as they secretly built the mosque on the island owned by his rival landowner. Lushly fertile, it was prime terrain and Timur had always been envious of it, always looking for a way to claim it as his own. The mosque was the ideal method to begin depriving the enemy of it. The masons and labourers had to work with minimum light, overcoming fear of snakes, djinns and scorpions. Only once did they think they were about to be discovered – when a truck broke down close to the riverbank and its driver and passengers got out to repair it, their voices reaching the island, the truck’s headlights visible. But they were members of a jihadi organization returning from Faisalabad, the city full of textile factories from whose markets chemicals used in explosives could be bought in bulk without raising suspicion. That was the sole incident. And the plan seemed to be working. Timur had sent word to surrounding villages about the miracle of angels, and the arriving crowds were threatening to tear his rival and his men to pieces if they pulled down the sacred structure, or hindered anyone’s access to it.

Timur heard a cry from Leila’s room a few minutes before the call to the fifth and final prayer of the day sounded. He was at the door and the midwife emerging from the room in great panic ran into him. She stumbled to her knees and then, repeatedly begging his and his family’s forgiveness, receded towards the staircase, her bloody hands leaving smears on the floor. The servant girls were the next to come out, and they too fled. Finally, with a look of utter devastation on her face, his mother appeared. Timur went into the room where he saw Leila dead on the bed sheets, the crying newborn by her side. He knew she was dead, but then she made a movement and raised her eyelids to look at him. He approached and grabbed her by the hair and, lifting his free hand as high as he could, he struck her face.

The minutes-old baby on the bed was a girl.

N
ever ever has a girl been born in this family,’ Razia said, an hour after the birth, tears running down her cheeks.

No verification was required, as it was a fact known throughout the province. Nevertheless, and half-heartedly, because a part of her was unable to accept the calamity that had befallen her son, she opened her Quran and scrutinized the family tree inscribed on the endpapers. The book was once owned by the founder of the dynasty, who was believed to have arrived in the region in the train of Emperor Babur. Along with the ancient dagger with which the umbilical cord was traditionally cut, she had kept the Quran within reach in anticipation of Timur’s son, for his name and date of birth to be added on to the tree, in royal-blue ink if born during the day, in black if during the night.

Razia knew her son would inevitably vent his grief at Leila for daring to transform his seed into a female child. She had to make sure it was not excessive: for a few minutes, while he was in there with Leila, she stood outside the door with an implacable expression on her face, her heart breaking at his immense sorrow, and then she went in. Timur’s temper when roused was ungovernable, but he always maintained the careful good manners of a son in the presence of his mother. ‘She has learned her lesson, I am sure,’ she said, shielding Leila from him. ‘Forgive her now.’

Timur left the room and paced the grounds of the mansion until midnight, the moon and stars motionless above him. His mobile phone sounded three times in quick succession: twice it was friends calling from the celebrations wondering where he’d got to, and the third time one of those unsolicited texts reading:
The prisoners of Guantanamo are crying out for a saviour, forward this SMS to 10 others
. The air was briefly scored with a luminous arc as he hurled the instrument against a tree trunk. His child, his firstborn, was a female. His breast seethed with the fact, and he felt upon him the contempt and ridicule of his ancestors, of his friends and companions. Of the entire male population of the province, and of the women too. Sunk in darkest despair, he sat on the steps of a pavilion with his head held tightly in his hands. Lowering himself on to the pavilion floor, Timur fell asleep, waking up several hours later covered in dew. As one possessed of a sudden realization, he stood up with a jolt and went towards the house in long strides.

His mother was on a balcony, facing the direction of the miraculous mosque and mouthing a prayer. She had hung her thousand-bead rosary around her neck, looping the length of it on to her right wrist several times. She heard him come into the room behind her. But when she went in she only caught a glimpse of him leaving: the gun cabinet was open, the glass doors swinging on their hinges. She shouted his name in alarmed distress, and although Timur heard her he did not stop as he hurried towards Leila’s room, taking the stairs two at a time.

Leila, half asleep on the bed, tried to sit up when she saw her husband enter.

‘Who is he?’ he asked her, approaching and pressing the barrel of the gun under her jaw. ‘The child can’t be mine. The only explanation is that you have another man, someone inferior.’ He lifted the gun to the wall behind her and pulled the trigger, bringing the barrel back on to her after the explosion of stone-dust. ‘Who is he?’

Just then Razia entered, out of breath, and she grabbed the barrel, pulling it off Leila’s neck. ‘She is at fault but you must stop behaving like a madman,’ she said as she led Timur towards the door. ‘She has wronged you, but you can win merit from Allah by forgiving her. And I know just the remedies that will correct her internal mechanisms. There are a hundred ways to make her insides obey you.’

‘I remember a story that there was a tunnel under this house, so its inhabitants could escape in case of enemy attack,’ Timur said, almost to himself. ‘He could have got in that way.’

They were nearly out of the room when Leila asked in a hollow voice, ‘Where is she?’

Timur didn’t turn round. It was his mother who spoke.

‘Where is who?’

Leila placed an arm across her eyes and began to weep.

Razia – staying Timur with a touch of her hand – told her in a reasonable tone, ‘The bloodline has never seen an affront of this nature. It has been decided that the child cannot be accepted into the family. She has been sent away. It’s the best thing for all concerned.’

Leila seemed unable to stop weeping. Razia sat down and took her into her arms. She waved a hand towards Timur who was staring at Leila with vehement hatred. ‘Leave us now. She will make it up to you within ten months.’

At dawn a public declaration let everyone know that Timur’s son was born dead, and a period of mourning was declared throughout the 687 villages and hamlets owned by the family.

The tragedy had been thoroughly unforeseen. It was only in the morning that Razia remembered the midwife and servant girls who had been present at the birth, and how they could not be allowed to reveal the abomination. They had to be intimidated into silence. But their own fears were even greater, because they all seemed to disappear from their homes.

Over the next month Razia supervised Leila’s diet with the greatest of care, hastening the day the girl would be robust enough to begin receiving nightly visits from Timur.

‘It takes one hundred drops of milk to make one drop of blood,’ she told Leila. ‘And it takes one hundred drops of blood to make one drop of semen. So you must not waste or misuse again something that takes so much out of my son.’

She asked Timur to concentrate solely on the glorification of the mosque. ‘I heard that Nadir Shah’s men have scuffled with ours.’

Timur nodded. ‘He says it was all my doing. That the miracle isn’t genuine.’

‘What have we to do with the mosque?’ Razia asked in indignation. ‘He thinks we are out to swindle him at every turn, but to doubt a happening as hallowed as this, to reduce Allah’s work to human battles, makes him an infidel.’

She didn’t know that the imam and his aides, and every other mosque attendant, were Timur’s men and employees.

He said, ‘According to him the angels would have built a more perfect structure. Not just one small, rudimentary room with a dome and minaret.’

Razia read a verse against the influence of Satan, and said, ‘Praise be to Allah that my son, unlike Nadir Shah, recognizes holy signs.’

‘I am encouraging more and more people to come, and I will be expanding the mosque. Bringing in boats for an easier crossing. Tents. Free food. Building shops on the riverbank.’

And they were arriving in number: along the roads, the bridges, the streets, came the lepers and the terminally ill, the destitute and the helpless, the lame and the blind and the mute, asking the mosque to end their ordeals as they kissed its walls and floors for minutes at a time.

Every few days one of the new arrivals would detach himself from the crowd moving towards the mosque and make his way towards Timur’s mansion. This person would be in possession of a jar containing dried leaves or blossoms. Others brought sacred pebbles, or butter churned from the milk of cows pastured in Paradise, or handwritten manuscripts of magic spells dictated by the djinns of Mount Kaaf. All these Razia had summoned from the farthest reaches of the province to ensure that Leila’s next child would be a boy. She pretended that these remedies were either for a distant relative or were to darken the unsettling grey colour of Leila’s eyes.

One treatment required Leila’s entire upper body to be covered in gold leaf for a day. She looked as though she had acquired the torso of an idol. A goddess in a breastplate. Later, as the servant girls were gently rubbing off the thin metal, the skin above her heart refused to let go of it. An oval patch on her left breast would not come off no matter how hard they tried – Razia gasped in disbelief. One of the girls then revealed that whenever she had bathed Leila, her bangle had become lightly magnetized to Leila’s heart and would have to be pulled free of the attraction. She was made to demonstrate it and the bangle fastened on to the gold-covered patch on Leila’s skin.

‘I was right,’ Timur said, when he was called urgently by his mother. ‘She is thinking of someone.’

Razia nodded. ‘It does seem like longing. She’s summoning someone.’

But there was no reaction from Leila, no matter how firmly they questioned her.

‘Maybe it’s nothing at all,’ Razia said eventually. ‘Just a side effect of all the medicines.’ She led Timur out of the room. ‘We have to wait and see.’ Outside the door were the servant girls, who had been sent out so they could speak privately. As they made their way down the stairs, Razia asked about the mosque. Timur told her that Nadir Shah was trying to get the government involved, hoping the mosque would be declared officially illegal.

‘The government would do it gladly, of course,’ Razia said, ‘to prove their enlightenment to their Western masters.’ She gave a sigh. ‘My Allah, to think that mosques are being torn down in a Muslim country.’

‘He won’t succeed. We too have influence in the government.’

‘Find a way to get the Saudi Arabians involved,’ Razia advised. ‘Win the patronage of an Arab prince for the mosque. They are a blessed race.’

T
he months passed and the longed-for day arrived. The Flower of Mary opened in the bowl of water once again, to float there like a wooden snowflake. Talismans obtained from the mausoleums of various saints were tied with different coloured strings around Leila’s thighs. But the umbilical cord still hadn’t been cut when Razia locked her bony fingers around Leila’s throat. ‘You little witch! Why must you ridicule and torment my son like this?’

Timur had taken precautions this time: three stern giant-like figures appeared outside the room, materializing as though out of the shadows, to intercept the midwife and the servant girls. One of the girls attempted to run away but a blow lifted her off her feet and threw her against a wall. ‘Come with us,’ they were told firmly. Downstairs, the women were made to watch as one of their number was beaten senseless, and then their entire families were banished from the province and their homes razed to the ground.