Awais Bhai was not a moulvi – he always insisted on this. He had never even looked like one, with his casual polo shirts and his cropped, jet-black hair dyed to perfection. His clean-shaven face, maintained day after day, was a continuous performance of his non-moulvi lifestyle. He had owned a Saeed Ghani franchise in a small shopping mall in Lahore South, before Lahore South was closed off to the inhabitants of the North twenty-five years ago. When desperate women called on his tiny Nokia 3310 – a phone he had bought specifically for this purpose – begging for help with matters of life and death, asking why the Shias had not been eradicated in this grand punishment that only the righteous were meant to survive, he would close his eyes and sigh.

“Bibi,” he would begin sternly – this was one of the few times he was ever stern – “I am not a moulvi, nor am I God. Seek your answers in your prayers. Khuda Hafiz.”

To put it simply, in his own words, Awais Bhai was a special man of God, Allah ka khaas banda. He had simply been chosen to have access to a certain type of knowledge; he was gifted in a way that most people were not. This is why he never charged for his “services.” People left what they could at his doorstep, but he never asked for anything in return. The older men in the neighborhood claimed he gave it all to charity at the end of each week.

God, at His most just, operates on the principles of love – this was another idea Awais bhai always insisted on. He believed that his undying, unshakeable love for Lahore moved God to show him the vision. He had never left. He had been born in Gari Shahu, had married in Garhi Shahu, had become a father in Garhi Shahu. He had watched his neighbors move to DHA or Bahria Town or Wapda Town or Model Town. He had watched Lahore expand, towards the horizon and the heavens, and finally, he had watched Lahore drown.

The now infamous dream had shown Awais Bhai the bifurcation of the city exactly as it had happened, into Lahore North and Lahore South, the fatal and the fortunate. It had also shown Awais Bhai exactly where the water would enter his neighborhood, whose house would flood first, how long it would take to find little Archana’s body in the debris.

It had been a hot and humid July afternoon in Lahore, the kind that bears mentioning in a mundane conversation in the kitchen but is ultimately unmemorable. Awais Bhai had taken the day off from work because he had been running a fever the night before. His wife, Jahaan, claims he had woken up screaming with such force that he had scared even himself. He had run into the neighborhood barefoot, his barrel stomach barely covered by the chaadar Jahaan had hastily thrown onto his shoulders during his haphazard explanation. He had begged everyone to move away from the area he knew would not survive. He had ushered the children in the streets into his home. Awais Bhai was a respected enough individual that people had begun to gather around his house, not because they believed him, but because they wanted to see a middle-aged man losing his grip on reality. It had only been raining for a day.

By midnight, as reports on City 42 began to communicate a certain urgency, there were about a hundred people in Awais Bhai’s small brown house. His daughter had been the first to hear the crash of Akram’s house collapsing in the distance – far, but not far enough. Over the next several days, everything happened exactly as he had foreseen. The wealthiest of Awais Bhai’s beloved Lahore were scooped away by gracious hands into the protection of the South, where everything, everything was better. Clean air and clean water could be bought and sold; flood management was a passion. Borders were set up between the two sides—nothing went in or out from one side to the other.

Awais Bhai had since become a sort of omniscient paternal figure. People would go to him in hopes of a premonition, a warning, scraps of divine guidance. Every evening of his life since the first vision, he welcomed people into his home to attempt to provide answers to and for their selected grievances. They waited hours for their turn in his sehen, sitting in plastic chairs and watching his lips move rapidly as he spoke to himself in barely audible whispers.

His visions had only become stronger over the last two decades since his first, and he could, most of the time, describe with great precision the who’s and what’s and why’s of certain situations, especially those related to Lahore. He knew when the tailor’s wife Sania’s cough had lasted for two whole months, that she would eventually lose her voice entirely, then a lung, then her life, because the air had become so deadly that year that this affliction would be named the ‘Epidemic of the North’. He also provided an estimate for when the leftover vaccines from the South would come to them, and how even after the vaccine, most of the afflicted would never truly sound like themselves again. In a few years, the easiest way to tell apart the South and North Lahoris was by the ever-present rasp, the sticky cough of the latter.

Despite everything, Awais Bhai was not the kind to present their tragic circumstances, or the burden of knowing them, as God’s wrath. He would never say that this was the price Lahore paid for its sins, Allah ka azaab. It was God’s mercy, this heaven and hell that had been created of Lahore. It was His way of dividing the pious and the perfidious. What a privilege, he said, to know in this life where one will fall in the next. Every human being that had been saved through Awais Bhai was evidence of God’s merciful nature.

“Allah zulm se paak hai – Allah is free from injustice,” he said when his mother’s body had to be kept in her bedroom for a week after her death because the graveyards had overflown, as if tipped over, during the third urban flood. He sang it like a lullaby to his daughter every time she cried out from the heat, or burned with a ceaseless fever that left Jahaan on her knees all night on the jayenamaz, begging for relief.

The desire to leave had wrapped itself around Jahaan’s tongue for years. She parroted it like a madwoman into his ears at night as they lay in a bed that had begun to reek of their despair. The futility of this was not lost on her, but she tried nonetheless, undeterred by what she had always known: that she was the mistress, and Lahore, the wife.

She was aware of the large sums of money and opportunities that Awais Bhai had been presented to leave, time and time again, by his admirers. The rich and miserable of the South were endlessly fascinated by him and had tried to lure them into moving there from the very beginning. The wife of a bureaucrat had offered him a house in the South, along with a car and a monthly allowance in exchange for details regarding her husband’s extramarital affairs. He was offered a horrifyingly overpaid position as a fake palmist for a ‘morning show’ on a network that was infamous for its censorship of news from the North. Every week, someone from a mosque or religious institution wrote to him, promising him the status of a Messiah and a prophet in the South.

“People will pay to breathe your air, Awais Bhai” was a sentence he heard, and Jahaan overheard, repeatedly and to no avail.

When they got no response from him, they would even reach out to Jahaan with their requests and laments. But even at her most anguished, she had never been enticed by it. What she wanted was — for once in her life — to not smell the scent of her lover’s lover on his collar; she wanted to never breathe Lahore’s air again.

Her final attempt to convince him was when the water crisis in Gari Shahu became so perilous that their daughter, having washed her face with contaminated water from their rusty taps, almost lost vision in her right eye. Jahaan confronted him after his routine evening gathering in the sehen, after which he was so emotionally drained that he only ever responded in one word sentences. She hoped, however, that she was a mother and she could appeal to his fatherhood. As he took his shoes off, she told him she wanted to talk to him.

She began in the same way she always did, with gentle pleading that quickly turned into thunderous sobs that she was certain everyone in the neighborhood could hear. Awais Bhai responded in his usual resigned tone, with his usual dispassionate responses: “My life is here, Jahaan” and “Not again, Jahaan.”

This time, however, she was determined to try everything.

“And what about my life, your daughter’s life?”

He remained silent. Every time she talked to him now, he constantly had the far off look of someone eavesdropping on another conversation. She moved closer to him.

“Khuda ke liye, will you look at me?”

He dragged his gaze towards her with great effort, but his eyes were still unfocused.

“God does not need you to do this. You are answerable for what happens to us. You are supposed to take care of us first. You are sacrificing us to this city.”

He nodded.

“What kind of obsession is this? Yeh kesa pyaar hai? Who is this for? This is madness, Awais. Lahore cannot love you back! You think you know everything, but you know nothing. We are going to die here. We are already dying here. There is nothing this place can give you. All of these people are parasites. They are taking advantage of you. I cannot stand the smell anymore, these people, this zameen. When are you going to look at us? When are you going to look around?”

Jahaan was no longer crying; she was defiant. Awais bhai knew he would have to tell her something more definitive this time. He would have to make her quit. He was a gentle person and had always avoided confrontation, especially with Jahaan. He loved her, wanted nothing more than to release her from the prison their life had become, but he could not leave. His feet simply would not move in that direction. He was afraid he would disintegrate if he left Lahore now—the loss would be so unbearable that his body would not survive it.

“You won’t,” he whispered.

“What?”

“You are not going to die.”

Jahaan looked at him for a long time, dumbstruck, and he watched her slowly sit down on the floor in front of him. She closed her eyes.

In praying against a prayer, one often attains victory over the other. Awais Bhai won against his wife, due to his gift, or his spiritual proximity to God, or his unconditional love. He had been born there, he had married there, become a father there, and it is there that he would die.

The year that Awais Bhai became ill, twenty-six years after the first vision, he spent his days telling Jahaan about how much he missed the birds, most of which had disappeared from the North because of its traitorous environment. He could not remember the last time he had heard a chirp outside his window. He told Jahaan about his college friend, Akhtar, who used to write poems about Lahore’s gardens, and who loved to identify birds from their song on their evening walks in Nasir Bagh.

There were other things he missed, but those he kept to himself: teenage evenings spent following the aroma of samosas being deep-fried, his calloused feet moving of their own volition, from his house to the bazaar; the the slap of his mother’s chappal against the ground as she dragged him through Anarkali; sticking his tongue out underneath a welcoming sky and tasting the cold, fresh droplets—before rain was a catastrophe, before it became the beginning of a very slow end.

Once when his daughter was young, still learning to count on her fingers, craning her neck up all the way to look at him, he had carried her to their roof on his shoulders to show her the grey clouds that had been congregating in the sky all afternoon. His mother had told him that rain arrives faster when children pray for it, and so Awais Bhai wondered whose answered prayer it was every time it did. Lahore, he taught her, was the city of senses, like any good city should be. You can see it and smell it, taste it and hear it, touch it and feel it all the time, everywhere.

Now this was no longer true: Lahore had abandoned his senses. The air smelled constantly of burnt hair, but there was also a thick, sickly sweet scent like a light blanket on top of it. In his conversations with Jahaan, he would say it as if someone had tried to mask the original stench with a half-hearted spritz of expensive perfume.

Before his death, he expressed his fear at his home being made into a shrine for his admirers after his passing — which he implored Jahaan to prevent — because he was, till his final breath, not a moulvi.

Everyone believed Awais Bhai knew when he would leave them. They were less sure of it a week after his death, when the Chief Minister of Punjab announced that they had developed the technology to project images of birds onto North Lahore’s sky for two hours everyday. Jahaan was convinced that their roof, the courage for which her lungs no longer had, had the best view.