TWELVE

'Yes,' Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the cafe they were sitting in that day, 'they may be the hope of all humanity. But I don't think we understand them well enough to say for sure. When they have completed their takeover of the world, then we will learn more.'

'Studying history has made you cynical,' Budur noted. Kirana's knee was pressed against hers again. Budur let her do it without ever responding one way or the other. 'Or, to put it more accurately, what you have seen in your travels and teaching have made you a pessimist.' To be fair.

'Not at all,' Kirana said, lighting a cigarette. She gestured at it and said parenthetically, 'You see how they already have us enslaved to their weed. Anyway, I am not a pessimist. A realist only. Full of hope, ha ha. But you can see the odds if you dare to look.' She grimaced and took a long drag on the cigarette. 'Sorry – cramps. Ha. History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over again.'

Budur laughed, shocked and amused. It was not a thought that had ever occurred to her.

Kirana smiled slyly, seeing this. 'The red egg,' she said. 'Blood and life.' Her knee pressed hard against Budur's. 'The question is, will the hordes of sperm ever find the egg? Will one slip ahead, fructify the seed within, and the world become pregnant? Will a true civilization ever be born? Or is history doomed always to be a sterile spinster!'

They laughed together, Budur uncomfortable in several different ways. 'It has to pick the right partner,' she ventured.

'Yes,' Kirana said with her sly emphasis, the corners of her mouth lifted just the tiniest bit. 'The Martians, perhaps.'

Budur recalled cousin Yasmina's 'practice kissing'. Women loving women; making love to women; it was common in the zawiyya, and presumably elsewhere; there were, after all, many more women than men in Nsara, as in the whole world. One saw hardly any men in their thirties or forties on the streets or in the cafes of Nsara, and the few one did see often seemed haunted or furtive, lost in an opium haze, aware they had somehow escaped a fate. No – that whole generation had been wiped out. And so one saw everywhere women in couples, hand in hand, living together in walk ups or zawiyyas. More than once Budur had heard them in her own zawiyya, in the baths or bedrooms, or walking down the halls late at night. It was simply part of life, no matter what anyone said. And she had once or twice taken part in Yasmina's games in the harem, Yasmina would read aloud from her romance novels and listen to her wireless shows, the plaintive songs flying in from Venizia, and afterwards she would walk around their courtyard singing at the moon, wishing to have a man spying on her in these moments, or leaping over the wall and taking her in his arms, but there were no men around to do it. Let's practise how it would be, she would mutter huskily in Budur's car, so we will know what to do she always said the same thing – and then she would kiss Budur passionately on the mouth, and press herself against her, and after Budur got over the surprise of it she felt the passion passed into her mouth by a kind of qi transference, and she kissed back thinking, Will the real thing ever make my pulse beat this hard? Could it?

And cousin Rima was even more skilful, though less passionate, than Yasmina, as like Idelba she had once been married, and later lived in a zawiyya in Roma, and she would observe them and say coolly, no, like this, straddle the leg of the man you are kissing, press your pubic bone hard against his thigh, it will drive him completely crazy, it makes a full circuit then, the qi circles around in the two of you as in a dynamo. And when they tried it they found it was true. After such a moment Yasmina would be pink cheeked, would cry unconvincingly Oh we're bad, we're bad, and Rima would snort and say, it's like this in every harem there has ever been in the world. That's how stupid men are. That's how the world has got on.

Now, in the dregs of the night in this Nsarene cafe, Budur pressed back slightly against Kirana's knee, in a knowing manner, friendly but neutral. For now, she kept arranging always to leave with some of the other students, not meeting Kirana's eye when it counted stringing her along, perhaps, because she was not sure what it would mean to her studies or to her life more generally, if she were to respond more positively and fall into it, whatever it might be, beyond the kissing and fondling. Sex she knew about, that would be the straightforward part, but what about the rest of it? She was not sure she wanted to get involved with this intense older woman, her teacher, still in some senses a stranger. But until you took the plunge, did not everyone remain a stranger for ever?

THIRTEEN

They stood together, Budur and Kirana, at a garden party on a crowded patio overlooking the Liwaya River before it opened into its estuary, their upper arms just barely touching, as if by accident, as if the crush around the wealthy patron of the arts and philosopher, Tahar Labid, was so great that they had to do it to catch the beautiful pearls dropping from his lips; although in truth he was a terrible and obvious blowhard, a man who said your name over and over in conversation, almost every time he addressed you, so that it became very off putting, as if he were trying to take you over, or simply to remember in his solipsism who he was talking to, never noticing that it made people want to escape him at all costs.

After a bit of this Kirana shuddered, at his self absorption perhaps, too like hers to make her at all comfortable, and she led Budur away. She lifted Budur's hand, all bleached and cracked from her constant cleaning, and said, 'You should wear rubber gloves. I should think they would make you at the lab.'

'Wearing gloves make it hard to hold onto things.'

'Nevertheless.'

This gruff concern for the health of her hands, from the great intellectual, the teacher – suddenly surrounded by an audience of her own, asking her what she thought of certain Chinese feminists… Budur watched her reply immediately and at length about their origins among Muslim Chinese, particularly Kang Tongbi, who, with the encouragement of her husband the Sino Muslim scholar Ibrahim al Lanzhou, set out the theoretical groundwork for a feminism later elaborated in the Chinese heartland by generations of late Qing women – much of their progress contested by the imperial bureaucracy, of course – until the Long War dissolved all previous codes of conduct in the pure rationality of total war, and women's brigades and factory crews established a position in the world that could never be retracted, no matter how hard the Chinese bureaucrats tried. Kirana could recite by memory the wartime list of demands made by the Chinese Women's Industrial Workers' Council, and now she did just that: 'Equal rights for men and women, spread of women's education and facilities for it, improvement in position of women in the home, monogamy, freedom of marriage, encouragement of careers, a ban on concubines and the buying and selling of women, and on physical mutilation, improved political position, reform of prostitution.' It was a most strange sounding song, or chant, or prayer.

'But you see, the Chinese feminists claimed women had it better in Yingzhou and Travancore, and in Travancore the feminists claimed to have learned it from the Sikhs, who learned it from the Quran. And here we focus on the Chinese. So that you see it has been a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, each imagining that it is better in a different country, and that we should fight to equal the others…' On she talked, weaving the last three centuries together most brilliantly, and all the while Budur clenched her cracked white hands, thinking, She wants you, she wants your hands healthy because if she has her way, they will be touching her.