Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Twenty

‘Aliya!’ Younger Starch greeted me at her front door. ‘What an unexpected somersault of joy you’ve made my heart just do. Full triple lutz in my rib cage, I swear, at the sight of you. And what a lovely jora you’re wearing – such a nice change from all these other young girls today who always want to be in the height of fashion. I say a few inches here and there around your hemline isn’t worth the expense of a whole new wardrobe. Unless you’re like Kishoo, who has to look good all the time because she has a certain image, you know. And why haven’t we seen you at the dholkis? I think the Ali Shah boy is definitely interested.’

‘Oh, well, actually I know it’s time for you to go for your bridge game and I don’t want to hold you up. I was just stopping by to ask if you were free for lunch tomorrow.’ I knew she wasn’t, but the leap from discussing Taimur with Dadi to fending off matchmaking talk from a Starch was one I couldn’t make without falling into the gaping precipice of incivility, so it seemed best to terminate the conversation as quickly as possible.

‘Oh, I would have loved to, but Sunday brunch at the Club is a must. Must, must, must. Oh, now I’m so sad.’

‘Well, another time, then. But, since I’m here, I might as well say hello to Hibiscus-Eating Ayah.’

‘Who?’

‘Bua.’

‘Oh, Bua! Such names you have for people. I swear, sometimes I think you must have some private nickname for me. Of course, go and see her, but if she starts talking too much just say goodbye and walk out or she’ll go on and on and on and will not stop. What am I telling you this for? You know all there is to know about her. Okay, sweetie, must run. ‘Bye.’

She kissed the air around my cheeks and walked out. I heard her screeching for the driver outside as I walked towards her younger children’s bedroom.

Hibiscus-Eating Ayah had been my ayah, about fifteen years ago. She had come to work for us after her husband died, leaving her children to be brought up by her mother. She would go home to see them once a week, and on very rare occasions they’d come to visit her – two wide-eyed girls near my age who I recall playing with in the garden the first time we met. It was winter then. The next time I saw them it was summer and too hot to play outside, so I smiled hello and disappeared into my room. Technically speaking, it was also their mother’s room, inasmuch as there was a little mattress under the bed which she would pull out and sleep on at night, and there was a corner in my closet where she kept her belongings bundled up, but when you’re seven you know better than to pretend technicalities matter. I remember I asked Ami if I could invite them inside, but the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the memory is merely of something I considered doing. Even at that age, I knew about boundaries. No, let’s be honest. They gave the impression of being unwashed, and I didn’t want them to get fingerprints on my new, giant-sized, snow-white stuffed bunny. (And if I had invited them in? How could that have ended any way but badly? Would it have been the first time they really thought about all they couldn’t have?)

Hibiscus-Eating Ayah, known then simply as ‘Bua’, was a great improvement on her predecessor – a wizened woman who convinced me that my family would suffer not a whit if I regularly took a small amount of money from my father’s wallet and gave it to her for her supply of niswaar, that ghastly, green, tobacco-based concoction which she would spit out in my basin without properly swilling out the spatter afterwards. Her endeavours to lead me into a life of guilt-based crime did not lead to her dismissal, but her penchant for niswaar did. She spat in the wrong direction, and though Aba’s suede shoes bore no permanent mark he saw that as no reason to excuse her uncouthness. Truth is, we all disliked her and were just waiting for a reason to sack her.

Hibiscus-Eating Ayah’s good-natured youthfulness was such a pleasant contrast to Niswaar-Spitting Ayah that I would stay up at night, past my bedtime, whispering to her about the house I’d own one day when I was married. We’d draw up floor plans for the house, which varied from week to week in every detail but one: a little room for her, between my room and my children’s room, so that she could be on hand for whoever needed her to sing them to sleep.

But the plans went awry the day she ate the hibiscus.

I was in my room when I heard sounds of pandemonium in the garden, outside the dining room. On going to investigate I saw Mariam Apa, ashen, staring at Bua in disbelief, while Masood yelled. At first I didn’t know which of the two women he was yelling at, just that he was demanding, ‘What were you thinking? What have you done? What sort of bestiality is this?’ The thought that he could be addressing Mariam Apa in this manner made the blood rush to my head, until I realized, that’s impossible. He’d get fired for that. I moved closer to the dining-room window to look out, and saw that the red flowers of Mariam Apa’s hibiscus bush were lying on the grass, ripped apart. Moving closer still, I saw teeth marks in petals, saw red on Bua’s teeth when she opened her mouth to speak.

‘Look at her,’ she said, and pointed at Mariam. ‘Look at that look on her face. She shows more emotion over these flowers than over anything else. Why can’t you see that? She’s a mad woman, deranged.’

‘Aliya!’ Just as things got interesting Ami appeared, on cue, and whisked me away. That day, Bua earned a nickname and lost a job. And gained another, because Younger Starch, driving to our house, saw Hibiscus-Eating Ayah leaving and hired her on the spot. No one quite understood why Younger Starch did that until a few months later, when she announced she was pregnant. She said, ‘I told him I’m not having children until I know I have the right kind of help for those horrible first months of a child’s life, but once I found Bua I said, “Hubby, let’s go.” ’

I thought I would never forgive Hibiscus-Eating Ayah for the things she said about Mariam Apa, but Mariam was in such a good mood in the days following the insults that I concluded she hadn’t minded them at all, and I was free to continue to feel affection for my old ayah. In the fifteen years since, my affection had never died, but it had become something I never thought about unless I saw her face to face.

I opened the door to the children’s bedroom.

‘Arré, Aliya!’ Hibiscus-Eating Ayah was folding my young cousins’ clothes, but when she saw me she dropped a T-shirt on to the bed and came over to hug me and whisper prayers over my head. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me leave without coming to say goodbye.’

‘Goodbye? Why?’

‘Didn’t anyone tell you? I’m leaving. Going to work for the Shaikh family who live near the KESC building. Three children, ages five to nine, and none of them as sweet as you were at that age.’

‘But, you mean, my aunt’s decided she doesn’t need an ayah any more? How can that be? Imdi’s only eight. How can she do this to you?’

‘Aren’t you listening? I’m leaving. She doesn’t want me to go, but she doesn’t want to pay me as much as the Shaikhs are offering either.’

‘You’re leaving only because of money? Bua, you’ve raised these children. All four, since the day they were born.’

‘Leh!’ she said, pointing at me as though I were a sideshow freak and she was directing the assembled gawkers’ attention to me. ‘Only because of money! I have two granddaughters. Their stepfather is a waster; he just wants to get them married off when they reach puberty, and my daughter – you know Khadija – has always been spineless. She said, “What can I say to him? He doesn’t want to bear the expense.” So I said, “Then I’ll bear the expense. I’ll send them to school.” The eldest is so smart, and there’s a school near where they live where they teach English and they even have computers. Ye-es. You think I’m joking? Some rich man donated all these computers to them. Only money! You think I’m going to let my grandchildren grow up to be servants?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’

She waved me quiet. ‘Oh, I’m only this upset because I feel bad about leaving here. You said it yourself. I raised these children.’

Something she had said earlier had caught my attention. ‘You said stepfather? What happened to Khadija’s first husband? Divorce?’

‘Two years ago it happened. No one told you? He was killed in police custody. Where he used to live – it’s a poor part of town, not like this – at least one person per family is killed in police custody. Allah, take pity on us.’

‘On all of us,’ I said. On my way to school, during my A levels, I used to see Khadija’s husband playing cricket on the streets. He’d raise his bat in greeting as my car went by. When my American friends said arranged marriages were a horrific notion I always thought of the way Khadija leant against her young husband’s shoulder when I saw them together visiting her mother at Younger Starch’s. He was, he would have been, Sameer’s age.

I felt too sick to ask Hibiscus-Eating Ayah anything else. What could she tell me, in any case? ‘I have to go. Come and visit me. The Shaikhs don’t live so far away.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s been a long time since there was a reason to stay away from your house.’

She looked squarely at me and I saw I was not the only one with questions.

‘We haven’t heard from either of them since they left.’

She nodded. ‘I didn’t think she’d ever do it. That’s what made me angry all those years ago. Not that he stopped noticing me as soon as she walked into the kitchen, but that she knew it and yet she wasn’t willing to stop walking in or to tell him to stop looking. The third thing, the thing she finally did, that I didn’t think she’d ever do. But, after the shock when I first heard of it, I wasn’t that surprised. The way Masood had of looking at her … How could you ever give up being looked at like that?’

Why did none of us see what Hibiscus-Eating Ayah saw? The question nagged me for days. And then Meher Dadi dropped a chance remark to Sameer, about ghosts. ‘I’ve seen them. Of course I’ve seen them. Not often, but every now and then. You say that, because I believe they exist, I allow my mind to play tricks and create them, but, dear boy, perhaps you don’t see them because you’re unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that they might exist.’

Of course.

But what made Mariam Apa so different? What made her able to acknowledge possibilities more unlikely than ghosts? Did Taimur really become a servant – while we’re admitting possibilities, why not admit that? Was Mariam’s mother far beneath the Dard-e-Dils on the social ladder, as Dadi believed? Or might there be a possibility unrelated to her parents?

The only clue we had to Mariam Apa’s life before Karachi was the letter which had arrived at our house, twenty-two years ago, just minutes before she did. If only Ami had saved the envelope we might have known where it came from. I only want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never.

Someone had loved Mariam Apa before Karachi. Someone who might not have been literate – the letter, Aba insisted, sounded like an oral message transcribed. But Mariam Apa had not loved this man, had not even allowed him to think that maybe one day she would. What made him so convinced that he was waiting ‘for what is never’? Who was this man? He was from Dard-e-Dil or the regions around it, else why would he have started the letter with the formal greeting and respectful address: Huzoor! Aadaab! Unless Taimur taught him that …

Perhaps he was Taimur’s servant.

‘Servant?’ Sameer said, when I propounded this theory to him a few evenings later. He had picked me up on his way home from the bank and we’d driven the five minutes from my house to Clifton beach to sit on the sea wall and eat roasted corn sprinkled with red-chilli powder and lemon juice, and to watch the grey, wind-whipped waves of the monsoon season leap at the seagulls in the distance. ‘Look around you.’ Sameer pointed to the crowds around the sea wall. A large section of Karachi had been hit by a power failure and the beach was the best place to escape from the heat. Whole families were out; vans that should have held no more than nine people were disgorging groups of fifteen or sixteen on to the cement pavement where, in addition to the bhutawallah whom Sameer and I had come to patronize, there were cold-drink sellers and chaatwallahs and a man with a tray of sweets hanging around his neck, who chanted, ‘Cheeng-gum, chaaklait, bubbly-gum.’ Other than the families, there were men strolling hand in hand, young couples sitting close together but not touching, and a woman in sneakers and a shalwar-kameez, walking at a great pace which she broke off every couple of minutes to untangle the wires of her Walkman’s headset. Between my jeans and the black burkha of the woman climbing gingerly down the rocks to the sand beneath, between Sameer’s pin-striped shirt with French cuffs and the bright pink kameez of the man selling kites, there was a whole range of styles and colours and materials.

‘You need to join the working world. Escape from your cocoon of Us and Them and the gaping hole between. How do you know he was a servant? He could have been a clerk. A tailor. A shopkeeper. An anything.’

‘But not a social equal.’ I took the letter out of my back pocket and passed it to Sameer.

He read it and handed it back. ‘No, not a social equal. What great conclusion have you reached from that?’

A young boy came round selling plastic combs and spools of elastic. Sameer said we wanted neither but he’d give the boy ten rupees for getting us Cokes from the drinkwallah. I changed the order to one Coke and one Apple Sidra.

‘We know this man was in love with Mariam. We know, we can at least surmise, she gave him no encouragement.’

‘So far you’re on solid ground, but I sense a swamp approaching.’

‘What if it was his social status that stood in the way? What if, because of his social status, Mariam never even considered him a possibility?’

‘Possible. Shaabaash, chotoo.’ Sameer took the drinks from the young boy and handed him a ten-rupee note. A beggar saw Sameer’s wallet and came over to us, palm outstretched. Sameer waved him away.

‘But then, as she was planning to leave for Karachi, the fact that she was leaving allowed this man to say something to her. Maybe something said in hope. Maybe something said as a reprimand. At any rate, it was something that made Mariam see—’

‘Allah bless your union,’ the beggar said, circling back after an unsuccessful foray to the group beside us.

‘Something that made Mariam see everything she had never seen, every possibility she had never even considered considering.’

‘I’ll pray that you pass your exams,’ the beggar said.

‘And so she arrived in Karachi ready to consider the possibility of loving a cook?’ Sameer said.

‘More than ready. Determined to prove that she was capable of doing so. She always had the strangest stubborn streak. Remember Dr Tahir and the sari?’

‘In the name of Allah …’

‘So her silence was subversion.’ For once Sameer was paying attention and not laughing. ‘We look at this guy’s letter and we decide his social status. You think Mariam’s silence was a protest against the prejudice built into language? That’s why even when she did speak it wasn’t to the élite. She only spoke to Masood to order meals and even then – Did you ever notice this? – she spoke in questions not in imperatives. She’d say, “Bhujia? Koftas? Pulao?” Basically, she was undercutting the whole employer-servant paradigm.’

I thought of all I couldn’t say to Masood’s brother. ‘Maybe. Yes, maybe. Why not?’

‘And the ultimate test of her ability to look beyond class was the act of eloping?’

‘Let’s not get carried away.’ I looked suspiciously at Sameer. Was he trying to out-Aliya me with these leaps? But he looked quite serious. ‘By that point she loved him, I’m sure. But only because she first acknowledged that it was possible to do so. Do you think that’s part of the reason society was so outraged? Because by eloping with Masood she made eloping with a servant possible?’

‘May Allah give you many many sons.’

‘Well, I heard of more than one servant being fired straight after the elopement. For looking. For daydreaming. Did you know daydreaming is to be discouraged among servants? I read that somewhere. And Bachelor Uncle sacked his driver because he caught his neighbour’s daughter staring at the driver’s bare chest one day.’ Sameer handed the empty bottles to the beggar and told him he could collect the bottle deposit from the drinkwallah. The beggar made an expression of disgust. What good was a couple of rupees to him?

‘I can get you a job,’ Sameer said, standing up and brushing down his trousers.

‘This is my job,’ the beggar said, and walked away.

‘Works every time,’ Sameer laughed, unlocking the car door for me. As we drove away from the bright redness of the setting sun he said, ‘Is that what’s going on with this guy, Khaleel? You want to prove something to yourself just as Mariam did?’

Chapter Twenty-One

It had nothing to do with the weather, but Mohommed still insisted on saying, ‘I told her so,’ when Dadi slipped and hit her head and had to be taken to the hospital. The doctor – Great-Aunt One-Liner’s son – said she was fine, no damage done, but no harm, either, in staying in hospital overnight.

I offered to be the one to stay with her, and my parents agreed, but Meher Dadi said her sister had nursed her through measles when they were children so the least she could do in return was sit in the hospital room until Dadi fell asleep. Technically, only one of us should have been allowed to stay after visiting hours, but the nurses and orderlies were no match for the stubbornness of Dadi and her sister. After much wrangling, the nurse on duty finally pretended to believe Dadi’s claim that I had left and gone home, even though I yelped quite loudly when the nurse stepped on my hand as I lay in my hiding place under the bed.

‘And knock before you enter,’ Meher Dadi said to the nurse. ‘Sometimes at night I dance around naked and I don’t want anyone barging in on me when I’m in that state. Not the way my breasts look now. What were once melons are now half-empty bladders.’

Older Starch was more brazen in her manner of ignoring hospital rules. ‘Hello, hello, Abida Khala. What a terrible thing this is.’ She sailed in with arms outstretched. ‘Couldn’t make it for visiting hours so I told the nurse outside of my connection to several trustees of the hospital and here I am with Maliha.’ Her daughter kissed Dadi and Meher Dadi and shot in my direction a look that conveyed all the embarrassment a twelve-year-old can feel at the hands of a parent.

‘There are visiting hours in the morning,’ Dadi said.

‘That’s all the way tomorrow. Can’t let you fall asleep thinking I didn’t look in on you. Besides, Maliha has to be taken for waxing in the morning and it’s her first time so I’m going along to hold her hand.’

‘It’ll hurt, won’t it, Aliya Apa?’ Maliha said.

Older Starch turned to her. ‘Hurt? What’s hurt? Do any of us live without it? But, Maliha, you’ve heard the story of Sameer Bhai and the lizard in the bathroom. It was the same colour as speed and it leapt on to his leg. Real acrobat it was. Just one chalaang from the floor and on to his shin. Shorts he was wearing, shorts! You think he didn’t try to kick it off? Of course he tried. But his legs are so hairy that the lizard gripped on with its claws and climbed, one claw at a time, climb climb climb, up his shin, over his knee, up to his thigh and we don’t even want to think about what would have happened next if that reptile hadn’t hit a bald spot around a scar and lost its grip. Aliya, Aunts, I ask you: would this trauma have occurred if he had waxed his legs?’

I don’t know what we would have said if Great-Aunt One-Liner’s son, alerted by the nurses, hadn’t walked in and ordered Older Starch and her daughter out of the room. He pretended I was just a pile of clothes, even though Older Starch said, ‘But, Aliya.’

‘Every story has a moral,’ Meher Dadi said when the door closed, and then she and Dadi clutched each other and laughed so hard they knocked heads.

I was quiet through the evening, allowing them to talk as only sisters can. The talk meandered through nearly eight decades of memories, their word associations too far removed from logic to make much sense to me and I thought, For all the talking we’ve ever done together there’s still so much I’ll never know. I knew I was capturing a memory as I watched them, both lying on the bed now, so oblivious to my presence it was as though I were not yet born. They spoke of the living with nostalgia, and of the dead with mirth, and I wondered at my earlier inability to see how remarkable were the women of their generation, who spoke so rarely with regret, though they had seen so much turn to dust.

At one point I thought they were both asleep, until Dadi said, ‘Remember what the old boy said on the eleventh?’ and I knew ‘the old boy’ was Mohommed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, the Great Leader, whom even my generation with all our cynicism could refer to by that title without irony. And ‘the eleventh’ must have been 11 August 1947, three days before Independence.

‘Of course I remember,’ Meher Dadi said, and she quoted, as though the words were still fresh, ‘You are free. You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination – no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.’

Dadi nodded, and when she spoke I knew she had remembered me again. ‘Perhaps we did not pay enough attention to that part about “any caste”. We thought that was merely a religious term that didn’t apply to us. Perhaps we did not pay enough attention at a time when our attention was worth something.’

It was the first time the word ‘liberal’ came to mind regarding Dadi. Her grandmother had lived and died in purdah, unseen by men who were not of the family, her life a life unconcerned with the world outside the palace, her principle interest the matter of marriage. And then, just two generations later, there was her granddaughter: Abida who went to college, Abida who rode on donkey-carts to the refugee camps in 1947 to help those who needed it, Abida who told me I had to learn to be independent because she didn’t want me to become one of those women who relied on their husbands for everything. How her grandmother must have despaired of her! How the young Abida must have chafed against the rules and regulations her grandmother wanted her to follow. When she sighed sometimes and said she wished I was more like her she meant not that I should share her particular attitudes but that, like her, I should step away from those attitudes of my grandmother which badly needed stepping away from.

Dadi finally went to sleep a little after ten, and Meher Dadi came to sit by me on the window seat.

‘I’m glad the two of you have resolved your differences,’ she said. ‘She can be a harridan, but there’s no one more remarkable in the world.’

‘Oh, I think it’s down to a penalty shoot-out between the two of you.’

She hugged me fiercely. ‘I miss my family. You all drive me mad, but coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.’

‘Do you know any Pakistanis in Greece?’

‘Oh yes. There are desis in every corner of the globe. There’s even a chap from Dard-e-Dil who comes to visit me. Haven’t I told you about him?’

‘No.’

Meher Dadi laughed. ‘First time I saw him I thought, Oh God! Funny looking, bearded chap, clearly not Mediterranean, who cycled up my path and knocked on the door just months after I’d left Karachi. He said he was a mechanic, had lived in Turkey all his life, but his parents were from India. He married a local who was half Greek, half Turkish, so they’d hop across the border every so often. I’ll never forget this; he said to me a few years ago, “My father moved here at the time of the Khilafat Movement. First World War, that was. So we missed Partition, but somehow it was my destiny to live between two neighbouring countries who are enemies.” The first time we met I asked him where in India his parents were from and he said, “Same as your parents. Dard-e-Dil.” I wasn’t surprised he knew. I’d already met a couple of Pakistanis there, so I knew word would spread through the community. But it was a joy to meet someone who … Well, it’s an ego thing, isn’t it? Even though he’d never lived in Dard-e-Dil, I was his royal family. And not just in some distant way. His father found his first job in Istanbul via that Dard-e-Dil relative of ours who went to Turkey and learnt the language. So we were, in a very real sense, the mechanic’s father’s patrons.’ She laughed again. ‘I told him we were living in a democratic age, but it took several visits before he and I were comfortable with him coming into my drawing room and sitting down for a cup of tea.’

I could almost hear bells going off in my head. Turkey again, and now it appeared there was actually someone there who might be able to find out if Taimur had ever lived there. ‘He comes often to visit you?’

‘Oh, no. Once, maybe twice a year. For the first few years I knew hardly anything about him. He just wanted me to tell him tales of Dard-e-Dil, and I was so pleased to have someone around for whom all those names had meaning that I rattled off all sorts of indiscreet things. When Samia came to visit she was amazed at how much he knew about her. And he’s so involved in our lives, because of those stories. I remember when I told him Akbar had died – I thought he was going to cry. And Mariam he used to be quite fascinated by. Who wouldn’t be? Although he hasn’t asked anything about her since the elopement. I think he thinks I’m embarrassed by it.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not, you know. Just in case you were wondering.’

‘He sounds like someone whose company you value.’ I was holding myself in, almost unable to breathe, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why exactly that was.

‘Oh, yes. He has all sorts of tales about Dard-e-Dil himself. His parents kept in touch with their relatives there, and every so often he’ll mention some lovely detail he found in his father’s letters. And he and Apollo get on wonderfully. As do his wife and I. Now when he visits he brings her along. Sometimes the children and the grandchildren, but I’m afraid they regard me as a foreign relic’

‘Do you cook vats of your murgh mussalum to give him a taste of Dard-e-Dil?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes. But the last time he came to see me, just a few months ago, he brought over, oh my mouth waters at the thought of it, shami kebabs that were positively Masoodian.’

‘Impossible.’

‘I’m not joking. He said they were from a new restaurant in Istanbul that is driving everyone mad! Apollo tasted them and suggested we move to Turkey.’

I was trying very hard not to clutch at straws and pull them together as though they were jigsaw pieces which would form a clear picture if I just got the edges right. I was trying very hard.

‘What’s the name of the restaurant?’

Meher Dadi shrugged and stood up. ‘Don’t know. Suppose I could find out.’

‘Please.’

She looked at me sharply. ‘Why?’

‘Please.’ I thought my heart might explode.

‘All right. If you insist.’

I handed her Dadi’s mobile phone.

‘Now? And on a mobile? That’ll cost absurd amounts of money.’

‘Bonnets. Bees. What can one do? I’ll reimburse Dadi.’

She checked her watch and calculated the time difference, took the phone and dialled. ‘Apollo?’ she said, and reeled off strange syllables. For some reason I’d always imagined they spoke English to each other.

Why is it that when people speak in a language you can’t understand they think all meaning is lost on you? If she’d been speaking in English she’d have lowered her voice, kept it steady, but in Greek she allowed all emotions to write themselves across her face and in her tone. That she missed him, that Dadi’s fall had given her a fright, that she and Dadi had spent the evening reminiscing with tears and with laughter, that I had some strange notion in my head which required him to find out the name of a restaurant – all this I heard without understanding a word.

She said goodbye, repeated how much she missed him, and handed the phone to me.

‘He’ll make enquiries. But in return he wants you to promise to come and visit.’

‘Definitely.’

She kissed me on the cheek and left me alone with Dadi. I tried not to think absurd thoughts. It didn’t work. I enumerated all the reasons why I shouldn’t pole-vault to the conclusion which suggested itself to me, but that entailed thinking about the conclusion, and my heart couldn’t bear it. I walked around, hummed, tried to remember as many songs from the eighties as possible, took out pencil and paper to help me work out which movie I knew more lines from: The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. Oz won hands down, even after I excluded all the musical numbers.

And just as I was about to give up and allow myself to see that jigsaw picture, the door opened.

An old, slightly stooped man walked in. His hair was white, but thick; his face was a mass of wrinkles, though his jowls were only beginning to droop. His sherwani was exquisitely cut and, together with the silver-handled walking stick in his hand, conferred on him an air of great dignity.