Superman Elseworlds: 'In the Name of...'

Chapter 1: Arrival

No one knows quite how it happened, how Ishmail had climbed those stairs to the roof. Most probably, the door hadn't been shut properly. Naila screamed when she saw him on the roof. Almost everyone screamed when he fell to the ground. Thank God that Nadia was there. Imran had married a good woman, a doctor who loved to "come home". She rushed to Ishmail. Everyone was so quiet. Finally she said that he seemed fine and that his arm was broken but she took him to the hospital to have him checked over thoroughly. Imran told us not to worry about the medical bill. But how could we not? The Children had done so much for us, there was no way we could possibly repay them.

When he came home everyone doted on him. I was worried that he may be getting spoilt and I think the Children and, well, everyone, knew that that was what I was thinking because they all reassured me that just as we had helped bring up their children, they would help with ours and would also ensure that he grew up to be a fine member of the village.

But a mother worries, right?

And if seeing him fall off a building made my heart stop, I don't know what I would have done if I had seen what Yusuf had seen!

***

Yusuf

I must have aged twenty years in those few minutes.

 

One of the Children had passed away when Ishmail was five years old. He was an only child and his mother had passed away when he was eleven and his father when he turned twenty-one. He had been flying to Japan when the plane he was on suffered a fault of some kind and crashed. 114 lives were lost. I had helped look after his fields, his inheritance from his father, and I never dreamed he would leave it all to me. When the lawyer came to the village to tell me, I was shocked. Even after all these years, I didn't understand or see how much the Children loved us. We had been trying for a child for fourteen years before God granted our request.

That day…Ishmail was crossing through one of the grazing areas, he was coming back from school. He was wearing a bright red jacket and I still don't know why he was coming home alone. But he was alone…walking across the field in that jacket.

And the bull rushed him.

I thought I'd find his crushed body, feared I'd see his red blood mixed with the red of the jacket.

Instead, I found him sitting there in shock. The jacket was torn, as was his shalwar, and his hair was ruffled, but there was not a scratch on him!

I never told Asiyah about it until a few weeks later…when we saw just how strong our little boy was.

I gave one of the fields Amir had left to me to the masjid and we built a school there where the children could learn the Qur'an and about Islam. It wasn't just the children present at the village who attended. Some of the Children sent back their children to learn as well. Their ages varied, some were less than 10 years old whilst others were in their late teens and early twenties. It was quite heart warming seeing their eagerness. The experiences that the children from the West brought with them made them see things in quite a different light to those of the village and the older children were quite forthcoming in expressing their views.

Ishmail knew the Qur'an and hundreds of Hadith by heart by the time he was 8 years old. His knowledge astonished everyone and none were more astonished than Salman when he introduced him to the science of Biology. Ishmail would ask him hundreds of questions based on his own observations in his tender years and Salman had a hard time keeping up, even though he was student at a university in London and Biology was his "specialisation".

When he was introduced to other sciences, other schools of thought, Ishmail approached them all with the same vigour.

But then he stopped. He no longer got a hundred percent at school, sometimes he would incorrectly recall an Ahadith and he no longer played with the children.