The Travancoris had of course founded a Buddhist monastery school there, as they had in every city and town on Earth, it seemed, with all the most modern departments and laboratories, right next to the old madressa and the mosque, still operating much as they had been since the 900s. The Buddhist monks and teachers made the clerics of the madressa look very ignorant and provincial, Idelba said, but they were always courteous to Muslim practices, very unobtrusive and respectful, and over time a number of sufi teachers and reformist clerics had eventually built laboratories of their own, and had taken classes at the monastery schools to prepare to work on questions of natural law in their own establishments. 'They gave us time to swallow and digest the bitter pill of our defeat,' Idelba said of these Buddhists. 'The Chinese were smart to stay away and let these people be their emissaries. That way we never really see how ruthless the Chinese are. We think the Travancoris are the whole story.'

But it seemed to Budur that the Chinese were not so hard as they could have been. The reparation payments were within the realm of the possible, Father admitted, or if they were not, the debts were always being forgiven, or put off. And in Firanja, at least, the Buddhist monastery schools and hospitals were the only signs of the victors of the war imposing their will – almost; that dark part, the shadow of the conquerors, opium, was becoming more and more common in Firanji cities, and Father declared angrily after reading the newspapers that as it all came from Afghanistan and Burma, its shipment to Firanja was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese. Even in Turi one saw the poor souls in the working district cafes downriver, stupefied by the oddsmelling smoke, and in Nsara Idelba said the drug was widespread, like any other world city in that regard, even though it was Islam's world city, the only Islamic capital not destroyed by the war; Konstantiniyye, Cairo, Moscow, Teheran, Zanzibar, Damascus and Baghdad had been firebombed, and not yet completely rebuilt.

Nsara had survived, however, and now it was the sufis' city, the scientists' city, Idelba's city; she had gone to it after a childhood in Turi and at the family farm in the Alps, she had gone to school there, and mathematical formulations had spoken to her as if speaking aloud from the page; she understood them, she spoke that strange alchemical language. Old men explained its rules of grammar to her, and she followed them and did the work, learned more, made her mark in theoretical specu lations about the nature of microscopic matter when she was only twenty years old. 'Young minds are often the strongest in maths,' she said later already outside the experience itself. Into the labs of Nsara, then, helping the famous Lisbi and his team to bolt a cyclic accelerator together, getting married, then getting divorced, then, apparently very quickly, rather mysteriously, Budur thought, getting remarried, which was almost unheard of in Turi; working again with her second husband, very happily, then his unexpected death; and her again mysterious return to Turi, her retreat.

Budur asked once, 'Did you wear the veil there?'

'Sometimes,' Idelba said. 'It depended on the situation. The veil has a kind of power, in certain situations. All such signs stand for other things; they are sentences spoken in matter. The hijab can say to strangers, 'I am Islamic and in solidarity with my men, against you and all the world.' To Islamic men it can say, 'I will play this foolish game, this fantasy of yours, but only if in return you do everything I tell you to. For some men this trade, this capitulation to love, is a kind of release from the craziness of being a man. So the veil can be like putting on a magician queen's cape.' But seeing Budur's hopeful expression she added, 'Or it can be like putting on a slave's collar, certainly.'

'So sometimes you didn't wear one?'

'Usually I did not. In the lab it would have been silly. I wore a lab jellabah, like the men. We were there to study atoms, to study nature. That is the greatest godliness! And without gender. That simply isn't what it's about. So, the people you are working with, you see them face to face, soul to soul.' Eyes shining, she quoted from some old poem: Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder. – This had been the way of it for Idelba in her youth; and now she sat in her brother's little middle class harem, 'protected' by him in a way that gave her frequent attacks of hem, that in truth made her a fairly volatile person, like a Yasmina with a bent towards secrecy rather than garrulousness. Alone with Budur, pinning up laundry on the terrace, she would look at the treetops sticking over the walls and sigh. 'If only I could walk again at dawn through the empty streets of the city! Blue, then pink – to deny one that is absurd. To deny one the world, on one's own terms – it's archaic! It's unacceptable.'

But she did not run away. Budur did not fully understand why. Surely Aunt Idelba was capable of tramming down the hill to the railway station, and taking a train to Nsara, and finding lodgings there somewhere – and getting a job that would support her somehow? And if not her, then whom? What woman could do it? None of good repute; not if Idelba couldn't. The only time Budur dared to ask her about it, she only shook her head brusquely and said, 'There are other reasons too. I can't talk about it.'

So there was something quite frightening to Budur about Idelba's presence in their home, a daily reminder that a woman's life could crash like an aeroplane out of the sky. The longer it went on the more disturbing Budur found it, and she noticed that Idelba too grew more agitated, wandering from room to room reading and muttering, or working over her papers with a big mathematical calculator, a net of strings holding beads of different colours. She wrote for hours on her blackboard, and the chalk squeaked and clicked and sometimes snapped off in her fingers. She talked on the phone down in the courtyard, sounding upset sometimes, pleased at others; doubting, or excited – and all about numbers, letters, the value of this and that, strengths and weaknesses, forces of microscopic things that no one would ever see. She said to Budur once, staring at her equations, 'You know Budur, there is a very great deal of energy locked into things. The Travancori Chandaala was the deepest thinker we ever have had on this Earth; you could say the Long War was a catastrophe just because of his death alone. But he left us a lot, and the energy mass equivalence – look – a mass, that's just a measure for a certain weight, say – you multiply it by the speed o ig t, and square the result – multiply it by half a million li per second, think of that! then take the square of that, so – see enormous numbers result, for even a little pinch of matter. That's the qi energy locked up in it. A strand of your hair has more energy in it than a locomotive.'

'No wonder it's so hard to get a brush through it,' Budur said uneasily, and Idelba laughed.

'But there's something wrong?' Budur asked.

At first Idelba did not answer. She was thinking, and lost to all around her. Then she stared at Budur.

'Something is wrong if we make it wrong. As always. Nothing in nature is wrong in itself.'

Budur wasn't so sure of that. Nature made men and women, nature made flesh and blood, hearts, periods, bitter feelings… sometimes it all seemed wrong to Budur, as if happiness were a stale scrap of bread, and all the swans of her heart were fighting for it, starving for it.

The roof of the house was forbidden to the women; it was a place where they might be observed from the roof terraces higher up Turi's Eastern Hill. And yet the men never used it, and it was the perfect place to get above the street's treetops, and have a view of the Alps to the south of Lake Turi. So, when the men were all gone, and Ahmet asleep in his chair by the gate, Aunt Idelba and cousin Yasmina would use the laundry drying posts as the legs of a ladder, placing them in olive jars and lashing them together, so that they could climb the lashings very gingerly, with the girls below and Idelba above holding the posts. Up they would go until they were all on the roof, in the dark, under the stars, in the wind, whispering so that Ahmet would not hear them, whispering so that they would not shout at the top of their lungs. The Alps in full moonlight stood there like white cardboard cut outs at the back of a puppet stage, perfectly vertical, the very image of what mountains should look like. Yasmina brought up her candles and powders to say the magic spells that would drive her male admirers to distraction – as if they weren't already – but Yasmina had an insatiable desire for men's regard, sharpened no doubt by the lack of access to it in the harem. Her Travancori incense would swirl up into the night, sandalwood, musk, saffron, nagi, and with their exotic scents filling her head it would seem to Budur a different world, vaster, more mysteriously meaningful things suffused with their meanings as if with a liquid, right to the limits of surface tension, everything become a symbol of itself, the moon the symbol of moon, the sky the symbol of sky, the mountains the symbol of mountains, all bathed in a dark blue sea of longing. Longing the very essence of longing, painful and beautiful, bigger than the world itself.