He scrolled further.

It was late. The house was silent except for the ceiling fan’s creak. His cousin’s wedding was in three days, and everyone expected him to perform the naat —the devotional poem—flawlessly. But his voice cracked at the high notes, and his memory failed at the middle verse. A ringtone, he thought, could drill the melody into his bones. He could listen a hundred times, memorize the rise and fall of each word: Ya Nabi, Ya Muhammad, Ya Nabina.

The old man didn’t laugh. He didn’t scold. He just said: “The Prophet’s name is not a sound file, beta. It is a rope. You don’t download a rope. You hold it.”

He closed the laptop. The room felt smaller. He picked up his phone, opened the settings, and scrolled through his own ringtones: generic chimes, a pop song from three years ago, the default buzz. His thumb paused over the search bar in the ringtone store. He could still do it. One tap. Three dollars. The naat would pour from his speaker every time his boss called, every time a spam risk number rang.

He pressed search.

The next morning, he went to the old madrassa in the corner of his neighborhood. The qari sat cross-legged on the floor, fingers tracing Qur'anic script. Faizan told him about the ringtone.

Instead, he locked the phone.