Sulaiman and his friend Omar were rummaging through dolls at a doll store looking to buy a perfect doll for Sulaiman’s five-year-old niece, Hamza.

“Where is this promised land I keep hearing about all around me? What sort of a place is this?” Sulaiman asked.

Omar looked at him and shrugged.

They searched through a selection of all kinds of dolls, in minis, middies and long flowing skirts, hijab, and without. Through blonds, brunettes, black hair, and white. None would satisfy.

“What kind of doll does she like?” Omar asked. “Perhaps, that could give us some directions, rather than this clueless search for the perfect doll.”

“I don’t know, the kind that wouldn’t melt in a desert sun,” Sulaiman laughed. “the last one I bought her melted in the dune by the time I gave it to her.”

“How did that happen?” Omar asked.

“I was stuck in a desert storm with the doll in my sack.”

“Pity! What a pity?” Omar chuckled.

“In that moment, I also had a strange vision that my mother’s dehydrated dead body had been submerged in a fountain of youth. When her body was hydrated enough, it was taken out, and the water shook off, it transformed into the body of a teenager; new life was infused into her. She became a young woman, full of life. Perfect, but in the form of a doll—a living doll.”

“Could she speak, dance, and skip?” Omar asked.

“Yes, she could do all those again, and more. This life was forever, But it was doll-like, somewhat.” Sulaiman answered.

“What do you mean, “doll-like?” Omar asked.

“As I recall, I had called her in my vision. It was a long-distance trunk call. I felt a trepidation inside—a mad rush to see her,” Sulaiman said.

“What did she tell you, though?” Omar asked.

“She said that I couldn’t, because she was in the land of the dolls where she lived and breathed, but she was also tied to a visible string. I wasn’t allowed here. The vision was strange.”

“I’d say,” Omar said, who didn’t understand either.

In the doll store, the two friends sat abreast on a bench before all the beautiful dolls in the world before them. They held several of them in their hands too, both tall and short, blue, brown, and black-eyed dolls in blue tight slacks. But they bought nothing. Eventually, they rose and stepped out of the store. Sulaiman looked concerned that he couldn’t find the perfect doll for his niece.

 

His camel dug its lanky legs into the deep sand grains; a black storm rose in the desert, gusts blew clouds of dust around, and sands rolled in; they covered the sky. The doll was in a sack on the camel’s back, melting even as we spoke. He, sitting here watching the dense storm; his head and face were covered with a long, checked scarf. In the thick of it, his vision of his mother returning to life but as a puppet was clear. When the storm passed, the dunes were back to their undeterred, seamless state. But the plastic doll he had bought for his niece had melted: sunken eyes, sagging cheeks, crooked nose, lopsided lips; colours dripping down its shrinking feet. A liquid mass of plastic; not a single drop of water in the desert. The storm lasted long; he couldn’t gauge the exact time.

 

He performed his prayers in the dune as some sands slid sideways. The sun was setting down over a high sandy horizon; a southern star blinked; he took a leaching date from one of his pant pockets, chewed it, and spitted out the pit on his palm which he then shoved back into the pocket. Back up on his camel, he rode for another quarter of an hour; the camel’s footprints littered and dimpled up a marked dune track. It stopped after a while at a red, mud-door house with a red dome roof up against a hill. He heard women’s voices indoors and footsteps scurrying up and down. Until they came out. Some stood at the door; others stood outside. They greeted him with ululation. He got off his camel; they came forward to kiss him on his cheeks, then led him inside.

 

Sulaiman didn’t know that the doll had been pulverised. However, when he went inside and sat down on the cushioned carpet in the living room, he finally opened his bag. To his and everyone’s dismay, they found that he was holding a liquid doll. Hamza was sitting close by, looking eagerly, but shrieked in fear and broke down in tears at the decapitated doll before her; her longing for dolls, dissipating. Everyone tried to calm her down. But Hamza was inconsolable. Lambs, too began to bleat frantically outside the mud walls. Sulaiman told her that he was sorry, but it wasn’t over. All this happened because of the long wait in the hot sun and a dusty, desert storm. These things happened in life, noting that nothing was set in stone.

The lambs were still bleating in his mind as he sat with his friend Omar outside a glassed cubicle at the doll store. Where was this promised land? One melted doll in the high desert sun. Mother was old when she died. But she rose again and became a laughing, walking, talking living doll, even loving like a sweet sixteen in one of the allies. Here he was with his friend, Omar, to buy another doll. That would’ve been pleasing if he could, yet he could not choose one.

Satin sands slipped through his fingers in the storm. Heavenly bodies moved on the far side of the dunes; the sun dropped and the moon rose. A sun also dropped in the doll land. But more benign than the sun which melted Hamza’s liquid doll. A persuasive sun that rejuvenated dolls.

Couldn’t he buy her another doll from the store? Couldn’t he keep his promise? He was wrong. Wrong all along, some things were set in stone in these strictly parametric worlds.