The nineteenth-century Bengal Sultanate-built mosque saw at least a few dozen faithful who offered prayers five times a day. On Friday, however, the number swelled to over three hundred for the afternoon prayers. Apart from the regulars, who were mostly from the city, those found in attendance came from afar – from the neighbouring districts of Katihar and Araria. Some whispered there were faithful who came all the way from Nepal and Bangladesh. The charitable donations made to the mosque enabled the running of several social welfare projects, including a primary healthcare centre, a vocational training institute for girls and women and a madrasa.

The sixty-five-year-old Hashim Qasmi, his hair dyed orange, was the imam at the 155-year-old Jama Masjid Qudsia. The mosque, its walls and minarets decorated with intricate floral carvings, was located off Al-Husseini Road, the main street in Kishanganj, in northeast Bihar.

The mosque had spacious prayer halls. Their walls were painted green, while the ceilings were off-white and dotted with ceiling fans for the comfort of the believers. The floors were made of marble and buried under thick floral-patterned carpets.

Qasmi continued, ‘Today, let us talk about the power, the beauty of a good deed, and about what the performance of a good deed does for us.

‘All true believers must devote their lives to performing pious deeds that serve the cause of humanity and defeat the designs of evil. The Almighty rewards the pious with Paradise. He created Paradise for the virtuous believers. It is said that the bliss, the pleasures that Paradise provides to the righteous in his or her afterlife are so great that they cannot even be imagined. It is like being a child in the womb, who cannot imagine how big and magnificent the world outside is as he or she has not yet seen it.

‘The divine spirit, Gibreel, once tried to measure the length and breadth of Paradise. He flew over an area that can be covered by 30,000 years of flying but still came up short. He repeated the same exercise innumerable times, but it was still not enough. Then a houri approached Gibreel and asked him, “Why are you wasting your time? You have so far not crossed even my courtyard!”

‘Paradise does not know emptiness and sorrow. Old age and sickness do not exist there. There is absolute peace and contentment there,’ Qasmi said.

‘Excuse me, imam sahib, you are my elder and I respect you a lot, but I have two queries. Would you be kind enough to answer them?’ said a youth who was standing towards the back of the congregation.

The youth was around five feet and eleven inches tall, dark in complexion, with an aquiline nose and unblinking eyes behind black metal-rimmed spectacles. He was clad casually in a navy-blue T-shirt and black trousers. A white skullcap only partially covered his head.