The Aftermath

I land in my dream, prepared to be utterly bored. I stare out the kitchen window, my hands absentmindedly soaping up a plate. The sky is blue, curling into gold, bruising its way to plum.

My eyes seek out Jupiter, which has been so bright since winter that I automatically plot the space around it now. 

There’s Pollux and Castor, there’s the Big Dipper to the right. And there’s the plane right next to Jupiter.

Wait a minute.

I know the twinkle of an airplane, but I have also never seen one so high up in the sky that it lines up with Jupiter. 

I shake my head. It’s probably a perspective thing, and my spatial awareness has never been the best, which is why I never even attempted to be an architect. 

I find another window to sigh beside. Outside, Jupiter is brighter still. But the airplane has now revealed itself to be not a plane, but an aircraft shaped like a stepped pyramid, and it is now somewhere between Jupiter and where I am. Weird. What is this thing anyway? A spaceship?

I lose time, as one does while dreaming, and return to stare at the sky once more. The aircraft is close enough that I can almost imagine reaching out and touching it, but again, that’s probably a perspective thing. It almost stares back at me, though I chalk it up to dream paranoia. 

Then it opens its wings at the bottom. 

My heart stops, just for a beat.

A great ball of fire escapes the craft and makes its way to the beach.

That much fire could surely dry up any sea.

The rain of fire doesn’t stop, and it is always aimed at Sea View, the local beach which technically is a few miles from where I am, but dreams don’t understand logic, maps, or Karachi traffic. 

I decide at some point to call my mother and tell her I’m coming to get her. If this is the end, I want her to be with me.

__________________________________________________________________________

Dreams are useless. I can tell you that from firsthand experience. Also, I can tell you while I cosplay as either of my parents. Dream of changing the world? Useless. How will you do it? What academic discipline teaches you how to do it? Where can you study it? Who will hire you? Why do you want to change the world anyway? It’s fine the way it is. 

Dream of becoming an artist? No point, beta. All artists are poor alcoholics. Your Khala went to art school, and she’s always sad. Who wants to marry a depressed, poor alcoholic? Not my parents, I can assure you.

But the other Dreams are fairly useless too, you know. At least mine are. And yes, I do mean Dreams with a capital D. Useless. 

Take mine, for example. My regular dreams are your garden variety taking-a-test, falling-from-a-bridge, drinking-Sprite-but-can’t-taste-it ones, but my Dreams with a capital D foretell the future. Or at least some part of it. And when I say some part of the future, I sincerely mean they foretell the most useless part of the future: the aftermath instead of the event. 

Future Dreams feel different, always. The texture of each Dream is so different from the normal ones. There is a grainy, I’m-living-this-moment quality to them that is hard to define. And anyway, after thirty-five years of having these dreams, I’ve become pretty good at spotting them.

But here’s the problem: my last Dream was the most useless one of all. Usually, the aftermath shows something benign like staring at a specific flower in regret, and thinking something lame but regretful like I can’t believe I did that. In the days and months, and in one instance, years that follow, the event preceding the aftermath occurs, and I will find myself in the exact same moment I dreamt of. 

Only this time, the aftermath, I’m about 91.9 percent sure, showed the end of the world.

____________________________________________________________________________

After the Dream, I am afraid of the sky for the first time in my life. Every time I’m outside, I find myself looking up and waiting for fire to descend. 

What terrifies me more than anything else is the following question: if the aftermath was so brutal, how bad was the actual event? 

Unlike the usual aftermaths my Dreams have traditionally revealed, this particular aftermath is literally bigger than me and my life choices. What had happened before some weird air-or-space-craft decided to bomb the Arabian Sea, at least in Pakistan? 

Also, why the sea? If we are all honest with ourselves, the Sea View Beach is basically a flowing and crashing garbage dump, and, between the oil spills and fast food chain waste, isn’t probably the best place to hang. However, hanging there costs nothing for locals, and some expats like looking at it briefly when they visit. So was the attack trying to deprive the already deprived people of Karachi of free entertainment and nostalgia?

That’s kind of petty, even for aliens, or some country trying to bomb us back into the Stone Age. These are the only two interested parties I can think of. 

The situation is doubly troubling for me because I cannot think of a single person I’d like to tell about the Dream and my fears surrounding it. You know how it goes, right? It’s always a litany of stress, sleep, shaadi. Sometimes they will tell you to get off social media for two minutes and pray. Sometimes they will tell you they think you might have a brain tumor that makes you think such absurd thoughts.

What makes it the absolute worst is that they are mostly right.

I am stressed because I’m overworked and underpaid. I don’t sleep enough because what little time I get away from work, I like catching up on my shows and reading, and figure that I’ll just sleep when I’m dead. I’m not married yet, and while I am a liberated, independent woman who made the bold choice to move out of her parents’ home post-thirty, and have both reasonable standards and boundaries, I’d quite like some romance in my life and definitely, at least one child. 

The world cannot end till I have escaped the fluorescent-lit hell that is my office— and frankly, how dare it try? —for work that enriches my bank account and my soul.  Till I can have properly loved and been loved, till I have finally become a mother. Till I can say, yeah, I’ve figured it out.

____________________________________________________________________________

Because I am maybe running out of time, end-of-world-wise, I can’t be too picky, and decide to talk to my father. 

He is quiet for a very long time. Quieter than when I moved out. Quieter than when I did go to art school but didn’t study architecture which, as we all know, is the only respectable discipline within the studio arts. 

Exhaling two lungs worth of smoke, he speaks to me through the haze. “That is quite a dream,” he says, “not everyone has dreams like these.” Behind him, the sunlight streams gold through the window screen, dancing and disappearing within the smoke. 

I hold my breath, waiting for him to tell me that only utter idiots have such dreams. 

He holds out his pack of Rothmans. “Have one, this is a big conversation.”

I shake my head and push his hand away. There are some things you just don’t do. Smoking in front of your parents is one of them. 

“Abba, why do you think this is a big conversation? Do you think Khalil Chacha was right, and I have a brain tumor?” I ask him, biting back the more pressing query about the mental illnesses running on both sides of my family; Those the family only discusses through memes and ‘hilarious’ anecdotes, never bringing up unbecoming topics like therapy and medication. 

“You see, beta,” Abba begins, staring up another spiral of smoke. “There are others in our family that have similar dreams. We never talk about them, of course – not everyone understands such matters. 

“Some of us dream of the event. Some of us, the circumstances leading to the event. And you, my darling daughter,” he smiles at me with both love and distress, “dream of what comes next.”

“But what comes next doesn’t help, does it?” I literally wring my hands, because at this moment, there is nothing else to grasp on to. “Most of the time something very unpleasant has already occurred and I can’t stop it! I barely ever even know what the aftermath is about – it’s usually a very abstract moment after the event.”

Abba picks up his ancient, sturdy Nokia. 

“I’m going to make a few calls,” he says. 

____________________________________________________________________________

The conversation begins as all conversations in my family do: around a trolley laden with chai and samosas, a bowl of dry fruit, and tiny spring rolls.

“The good news is that you saw something concrete: an attack by a strange aircraft that could take out at least most of Pakistan,” Khalil Chacha, he of the brain tumor accusations, says. “By what you have told us about the nature of your Dreams, you usually see the impact of an earlier event.”

“Which means,” my cousin Maryam interjects, twisting one of her long curls around a finger, “that if we figure out what the event was, we could… I don’t know, what can we do?”  She turns to my father. “If the event is so large-scale that it’s led to alien-or-foreign fire over Sea View, do we even have the resources to do a single thing about it?”

Abba takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. Khalil Chacha coughs and cracks his fingers, a nervous habit we have had the pleasure of being annoyed by for as long as each of us has been alive. I look at Maryam and grin.

“Maybe we should sleep on it,” I tell her. 

Zain, Khalil Chacha’s youngest, shifts in his chair uncomfortably, pushing his hands through his long, dark hair, as he does when he is annoyed with the adults in his life. 

“I don’t understand how we can stop this,” he says. His voice has only recently husked into maturity. He stands up, and I marvel at how this baby I babysat now towers a whole foot-and-a-half over me. 

“I have dreamt the precursor to the event, I think,” he says. “And it is literally that someone made a comic about everyone but Pakistanis ascending to heaven because all their tax money was spent on ‘national botox’ instead of national debt, and the tech billionaires ascending away are laughing as they rise, because they were frontrunners of the new space race.

“So, of course, everyone got offended. Religious communities everywhere were offended, Pakistanis were offended, our friends across the border laughed at us, we struck back, the global tech billionaire community was enraged, and the internet was shut down across the world because a shark supposedly gave birth on a major internet cable. But everyone knows the tech guys were mad that people were making jokes about them.”

All of us stare at Zain, at a loss for words, because he usually doesn’t mumble more than one greeting per visit to us, and wears his earphones through all family events. This is the most we have heard him speak in at least six years.

“I always knew memes would be the end of us,” Maryam grumbles. “People just don’t know when a joke’s gone too far.

“Incidentally, I dreamt of the meeting that happened after the comic went viral. But as far as I remember, the tech dudes were only raging about disrespect and showing ‘the great unwashed’ how much their lives depend on the people they make fun of. The worst that was discussed was a global internet blackout.”

I look at Abba and Khalil Chacha. 

“So what’s the missing link?”

Khalil Chacha responds in five crisp cracks of his fingers. He coughs. He takes a timid sip of water.

“I know we’re already in unusual terrain,” he begins, then stops to light a cigarette and turns to his son. “Zain, I’m not just being weird, okay?”

Zain nods.

“I usually witness the outside influences on world events in my Dreams,” Khalil Chaha continues. “By outside, I mean, I will see the planetary movements that are enhancing a particular situation, or a universal law that impacts an outcome. This time—” his voice cracks a little. “This time I saw— for the first time, I promise— I saw these beings, these bright orbs of light circling around Earth.

“They were sentient, and they noticed me. They communicated that too much of Earth was being populated by people who were either distracted by superfluous things, or the ones creating the distractions,” Khalil Chacha paused. His eyes glistened with tears. I couldn’t tell if he was scared or sad. 

“They showed me that it was time for a clean slate. But I refuse!” Khalil Chacha stands up abruptly and goes to Zain, gripping him in a tight embrace. “My son hasn’t lived properly yet. How can it all just end already?”

I glance at Abba and notice him studying me. He smiles faintly at me in acknowledgment of my similarly unlived life. “The role of the observer,” he begins, “is often the hardest. You note, you gather, you record. You cannot interfere.

“Our family has been Dreaming for centuries, and we are only to gather and puzzle our Dreams together when a Dream has been particularly alarming. Sila came to me before I could get us together.”

Maryam is pensive. “What are we supposed to be doing together, though?” she asks.

Khalil Chacha, one arm still around his son, smiles, “I think it’s time to Dream big.”

____________________________________________________________________________

To prepare for this Dream to end all dreams, we have to all fall asleep and dream together. For that, we have to stay awake till around 2 A.M., which I do regularly, so it’s really no big deal. After all, when else am I going to doomscroll and enjoy nighttime anxiety?

Maryam, on the other hand, is having a tough time keeping her eyes open. 

“I don’t understand how you don’t  sleep all the time since you live by yourself,” she says as we sprawl on our grandmother’s old bed, like we used to at every single Eid dinner in our childhoods. “If I had an empty home, I would do nothing but lie in bed and sleep as much as I wanted.”

Maryam’s children, who are two of the most well-behaved kids I have ever met, hardly seem like sleep blockers. I make vague sympathetic sounds, smile, and try to decide if I have enough time to watch some Netflix.

Maryam yawns, “You don’t get it, Sila, it’s one thing after another. Get up for school, rush to get dressed, come home and get stuff done, rush to pick them up, then it’s enrichment class this, and sports activity that, playdates and birthdays— all I ever do is run from one place to another.

“I can’t believe Akram Mamu is making us stay up!” she yawns again. “Stop looking at your phone, Sila! Are you talking to a boy?” She sits up, suddenly interested, “Is there a boy?”

I show her my screen. “There hasn’t been a boy for years, and I don’t have time between work and trying to take care of Ammi and Abba.”

She isn’t happy about this.

“Your work takes advantage of you,” she informs me. “You work 12 hours a day? They don’t pay you enough. You should really start painting again.”

“Painting doesn’t pay the bills,” I tell her as I check the time again. It’s almost two. “There isn’t enough time to both have a life and pay for the life. I guess the end of this world will take care of that! Let’s go? It’s time.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Abba has put mattresses around the drawing room and turned the A.C. on. He passes around a bag of my Dadi’s old, decorative pinecones.

“So you will hold these while you fall asleep and remember to check for them in the hands of the people you encounter in the Dream – if it’s one of us, we will be holding one. 

“When you come across one of the precursors to the event, or one of our light-orb friends, stop and think about if you can do anything to change the course ahead. I will be observing this, but won’t be an active part of the process. What is it, Khalil?” He turns to Khalil Chacha, who is tapping him on the shoulder with his pinecone.

“I just wanted to remind you that Ammi never took these out except on very special occasions,” Khalil Chacha says.

“Trying to save the world is something of a special event; I think she would be fine,” Abba tells him. “Now shush!”

Abba turns to us, looking solemn.

“None of us has ever intervened in a Dream event or aftermath before,” he says. “Like all unprecedented things, this too might be unpleasant and scary. Once you’re there, you will naturally find the point at which you can intercede, because you will enter the dream at that point.

“And there is no guarantee that anything will change,” a smile flickers on his lips and disappears immediately. “It could be that you simply have to accept what happens.”

“Can we please start, Akram Mamu?” Maryam is close to tears. “I haven’t slept properly in days. Both kids had a cold and were alternating throwing up at bedtime,” she turns and tells me.

Safely ensconced in old quilts, feeling the breeze from an ancient window A.C. on our faces, sleep comes quickly.

____________________________________________________________________________

I’m back in my kitchen, staring out the window. Jupiter is high in the sky, brighter than it has ever been. I try to run a soapy sponge across the damp plate I’m holding, but hear a screech as I do so.

Startled, I look down and see the pinecone in my hand scraping across the plate. 

I have to find the others. 

This time, instead of whiling the hours away, I walk out my door and then keep walking. If all of us have successfully anchored to the pinecones, we should all be here. I wonder what I could have changed had I walked out the door in the Dream the first time. If I hadn’t somehow sped up the end of the world simply by looking out of windows and contemplating life, even if just in a dream. 

This time, I was going to get it right.

Cars line up like sentries on either side of me while I walk down my street. In Karachi, we build homes, but never adequate parking space. I marvel at the fact that even in the midst of a surreal cosmic event, I can find the space in my mind to be mad about terrible urban development.

A little further, I find Khalil Chacha and Zain waiting by the gate of what is at once the neighborhood children’s park, mosque, and gym, with its one swing-set, one horizontal bar, and one row of prayer mats. 

“I can take you online and show you the comic,” Zain says, “is that a good place to start?” 

Above us, the gold and plum sky deepens into a sober orange and blue. A gentle breeze lifts my hair off my shoulders slightly, and I wonder if it’s still the A.C. in the drawing room I’m feeling.

“Wouldn’t a good place to start be past the triggering comic, and nearer the lit-up orbs?” I ask Khalil Chacha. 

He thinks for a second and says, “Yes and no. We’ve actually landed in the dream after the comic, the internet outage, but right before the light-beings showed up,” Khalil Chacha looks at me and thinks for a second. “We’re in the aftermath.”

“I think it might be worth it to just skip to the end,” Maryam says from behind our huddled group. “Because Zain and I can probably tell you exactly what the event and its precursor are— but the actual decisions are kind of being made outside the realm of space, or any kind of reality I can logically understand.”

Khalil Chacha appears thoughtful, which I note, is a real first. 

“We are at the point in the chain of events where fire falls on Sea View. What we need to do is go to that spot and observe,” he says, “I also believe that is where I encountered the light orbs. I have zero experience negotiating with non-human, celestial beings, but we could try.”

We chew on this for a few seconds. Finally, I take a deep breath and say, “Let’s go.”

Zain is worried. “What if this doesn’t work?”

The time for waiting and worrying has passed. I grab Zain by the elbow and start walking towards Jupiter.

____________________________________________________________________________

Five years from now— heck, five days, maybe— I probably won’t be able to recall how long the walk took, but right now it feels like our feet are making a slow march to our own deaths. The fact that we don’t know exactly what we will find when we get there, and my father’s physical absence didn’t help my spirit.

Zain hops up on the low wall dividing the beach from the city. I sit down beside him.

Khalil Chacha catches up with me and Zain. Maryam walks at a relaxed pace, taking in the familiar scenes we saw almost every day, now distinctly unfamiliar simply by virtue of the mission we were on.

Khalil Chacha points to an empty parking spot, “That’s where I met the orbs.”

“So we wait? I’m okay with that,” Maryam hops up on the trunk of a white car. 

Waiting isn’t enough, I think. 

“Can’t we like, pray or meditate or focus or just call out or something?” I ask the group.

Khalil Chacha looks at me with sympathetic bewilderment. “We can try,” he says.

“That’s your problem, you know,” The volume and cadence of Zain’s voice surprise me.

“Hey, what did I do?” 

“You don’t always have to be in motion for things to happen, Sila Apa,” his voice cracks slightly. “Sometimes you need to stop and figure out if you even want to do the thing you’re sweating and bleeding through. If it’s even right for you. 

“Everyone’s always talking about how hard you hustle and what a good job you do, but taking action is not the same as doing the right thing!”

Honestly, I’m at a loss for words— so I just stare at him, bemused.

“Just sit down and wait for a second. You might be surprised what actually taking a whole breath can do for you,” he says.

I look at Zain incredulously. Is this little-not-little chit of a boy giving me life advice? Zain stares back at me, his eyes intense. 

“Just try it once,” he says.

I have nothing to lose, and maybe something to gain by taking the advice of someone other than my own racing thoughts. I drop to the ground and sit down cross-legged. “Now what?”

“Now,” says Zain, “we wait.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Too much time passes without anything happening, or any of us making something happen. Who knew saving the world could be such a snoozefest?  I’m about to suggest a meditative scream into the abyss, when Khalil Chacha points to the sky. 

 “Look.”

Tiny stars cluster around Jupiter. Slowly, they become bigger and brighter, and I realize that they are descending towards us.

Maryam looks upon them in awe, “They are so beautiful.” She squeezes my hand. “And hey, don’t worry about what Zain said. But think about what he said.”

Bathed in calm, white light, I can’t help but think that the end of the world might be more benevolent than I had imagined.

I feel the light seep into every pore, every cell of my body. Maryam’s eyes are closed now, but she’s still holding on to my hand. Khalil Chacha and Zain are leaning on each other, but look peaceful.

I take a deep breath. 

____________________________________________________________________________

I will be the first to admit it takes me time to understand new concepts. Math. How to measure things. How to tie shoelaces. When I was around five; running. I just couldn’t understand how to make my legs move so they could do that. 

But once I understood any one thing, I felt like I could do anything.

Being immersed in the white light is like understanding, finally, not just how to run, but how to win the race, while doing mental math, with my shoelaces tied perfectly.

I glance at the others and wonder if they feel the same way. Their eyes are still closed, but they look peaceful.

The light is a part of me, and I am part of it. And a part of everything, I guess. When you’re a part of everything, how could anything ever end? And even if everything did end, you’d be a part of it again when it comes back around.

____________________________________________________________________________

We wake up together, not with a start, but gently. No one speaks for a while.

Finally, Maryam breaks the silence.

“So it is going to happen – we just don’t know when.”

Abba walks to his favorite chair and settles in.

“So if the world has to end either way, and all of us know our exact roles while it’s still there…”

“The only thing to do is, do the job, I think,” I say. 

Zain snorts. “Wow, Sila Apa thinks she needs to check something off her to-do list, ow! What the hell, Dad?! Are you trying to crack my skull open?”

Khalil Chacha grins. “Maybe your job is to be nicer to people, Zain. Now, please give me my mother’s pinecone back, or she will haunt all your dreams.”

____________________________________________________________________________

I sit at my laptop and re-read the document open on it. You can always take yourself by surprise, even if the world, its people, or cosmic events can’t.

If there are between a week to a billion years of this world left, then I have to start shaping my life into what I want it to be, now. 

There is never enough time to do everything you want, to save the world, or even have a haircut you’re truly happy with, but you better believe that I am going to die trying.

I press ‘send’ on my letter of resignation, and look out the window. Jupiter looks back at me.

____________________________________________________________________________