After my mother disappeared I used to see her everywhere — not just in the form of other women but in empty spaces, too. She seemed lodged, like a tear, in the corner of my eye, evaporating in the instant I turned to look at her. I knew what hallucinations were, I knew what mirages brought on by psychological aberrations were, but somehow that seemed too prosaic — too predictable — to explain away my imagined seeing, even when I realized it was entirely imagined. Easier to think in terms of Orpheus and Eurydice — every time I turned to check that it was really her, I lost her. But with that explanation I was attempting to step into a story that wasn’t mine. It was a story that fascinated my mother, but even when she first told it to me, I heard her unasked question, ‘Would my Poet journey to Hades in search of me?’ and though I had wanted to reply, ‘I would, Mama,’ I knew that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. So when she placed herself in that borderland between seeing and imagining, I knew I would have to find something other than a Greek myth in which I didn’t belong to explain her away. Quite by chance, I found mention of ‘the Fata Morgana’ in some piece of writing by Conrad, and when I looked it up and discovered it was ‘a mirage of the looming effect’ I knew I had finally found a name by which I could refer to those images of my mother. I still saw her continuously, but I now knew it wasn’t her, just a Fata Morgana, and I would no more think to turn and look closer than I would think to worry about splashing a passer-by when I drove through the mirage of water.

I stopped at a red light and looked out of the car window at a grey sparrow swooping down on to the footprinted dust between the car and a boundary wall sprayed with political graffiti. As a child I used to believe the sparrow itself was layered with dust, and that if I ever got close enough to one to stroke its feathers with my thumb I’d erase the dust to reveal the colours — emerald-green, electric-blue, pomegranate-red — that were the bird’s natural inheritance. My thumb still twitched, now and then, at the sight of a sparrow.

Someone rapped on the passenger-side window. I looked up and there was a man on a motorbike gesturing towards the traffic light, which turned from green back to red almost as soon as I looked up at it. The man on the motorbike gave me a look which said ‘Women drivers’ as he sped through the intersection, swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic.

I was left waiting for the light to change again. I reached into my handbag for a mint, and my hand touched my mobile phone. I wished I could call Rabia, or Beema, just to talk about the strangeness of Ed, the charm of Shehnaz Saeed. But Rabia was at the inauguration of yet another women’s shelter her NGO had set up, and Beema would be taking her afternoon nap before heading back to the hospital to relieve her sister at their mother’s bedside. My father — I could call my father. Since he and Beema had left Karachi, she had been the conduit of information between him and me, telling me how much he was enjoying his leave from the bank, telling him about my bouts of cooking and my new-found fascination with plants. It wasn’t that he and I avoided speaking to each other, just that it was easier for both of us to speak to Beema and Rabia. But it would be a comfort now to hear his soft voice, its thoughtful quality equally in evidence if we talked about the phenomenon of mirages, the current form of the Pakistan cricket team or the significance of isotope decay in the dating of fossils.

I pulled over to the side of the road and dialled his number. He sounded glad to hear my voice, but our conversation merely skated from small talk to small talk — hospital food, STD coffee, my forward-leaning bookshelf, the light fixtures in his bedroom. Almost from the very start of our conversation I knew I wouldn’t talk to him of Ed and Shehnaz Saeed. Unconventional mothers and their children — that was a subject that made Dad choke on his attempt to be honest without sounding chauvinistic. Which I knew he wasn’t — particularly. Certainly Rabia and I had no cause to complain about his attitudes towards women. He was more than proud of Rabia’s NGO work, and had never done anything other than champion my right to be single, even at the grand old age of thirty-one. But if a woman was a mother, Dad was simply unable to view her life in any way except as it might relate to the well-being of her child.

‘And what about fathers?’ I had challenged him once. ‘Why are they allowed to be irresponsible?’

‘It’s not that we’re allowed. It’s just that we’re less significant, and so less capable of doing damage,’ he had replied, turning away before the sentence was finished.

When he’d exhausted the subject of light fixtures I said I had to go, and hung up. But more than before, I felt the need to call someone and talk, just talk. I scrolled down the names in my mobile phone, considered calling my brother-in-law, but knew he would be entirely uncommunicative during the middle of his work day. I put down the phone, ran my fingers over the steering wheel and, for a moment, had a memory — no, not a memory, a reliving — of sitting behind the wheel and learning to drive at the age of fourteen. I needed to speak to a friend, simple as that — and not just one of my ex-colleagues from teaching or human resources or the cricket magazine, who served so well as dinner or beach companions. A friend who had known me long enough to know me, that was what I needed. A childhood friend. Someone who had changed gears while I held the wheel and pressed the clutch because doing all three things at the same time had seemed a task too complicated even to attempt.

I shifted gears from neutral to first. A few months after my mother’s disappearance, soon after I had stopped my blinding search for clues and conspiracies and waited, instead, simply for her to call or return, my closest schoolfriends had come over to my house, sat me down and said it was time to accept facts. They weren’t going to collude in my delusions any more, they said, it was too painful for them and too harmful for me. Better to face that she’s not coming back, and look, here are our shoulders. Cry on them.

It was their mothers’ voices speaking through them, I knew. All those mothers in whose houses I had done so much of my growing up; those mothers who, even more than their children, had wrapped such a tight, protective circle around me when my mother disappeared that I had hardly been able to breathe in their presences. I stood up in front of all my friends and, one by one, reeled off a litany of complaints about those mothers. The mother who tried too hard. The mother who stifled her children. The mother who was holier-than-thou. The mother with her absurdly bleached hair. And finally I turned to the closest of my friends, the one whose mother had been most like an aunt to me and, unable to come up with any complaint about or accusation against that sweetest of women, I said, ‘And your mother with her arranged marriage. She’d hardly even met your father before the wedding. That means she did it with a stranger. Like a prostitute.’

I knew exactly what I was doing. Mothers were sacred in all our lives, and even while our faith in their worthiness as objects of veneration might falter, it was not something we would ever dream of saying in public. To complain about your own mother was taboo; to insult someone else’s mother was unthinkable. And so, my friends turned and left my room. The following day, in school, my closest friend walked past me in the schoolyard, alone, three times, giving me all the opportunity I needed to call out an apology. But I didn’t, and we hadn’t spoken since.

In the weeks after my betrayal of my friends, I kept waiting for the moment when one of them, or more, would reveal to the world the reasons for their refusal to associate with me, and then, I knew, I would be shunned by everyone in the tiny circles in which I conducted most of my life. But that moment never came, and I knew their silence was a final mark of friendship which all of them handed to me, across that line which now separated us, before retreating from my life.