‘Isn’t this getting a little too cloak and dagger?’

‘Oh, and black magic on the internet is so down-to-earth.’

Kiran Hilal raised her hands, and everyone fell silent. ‘What’s the secret?’ she asked.

What’s the secret? What could be the secret? What could keep her away for so long?

Bony Fingers shook his head. I looked down at the scratched wood of the table.

‘OK,’ Kiran said. ‘Never mind. I like that idea. We can work it in with either the industrialist slash criminal world story, or the black magic story. And it might just save the daughter from the Hole of Abject Boredom we’ve been digging for her.’ She smiled at me in a way that meant thank you, you can go now.

The room was silent as I stood up and made my way out, but just as I closed the door behind me — in the instant before the latch actually clicked — I heard someone in the room exaggeratedly release a breath.

There was something unbearable about appearing transparent to people who thought up story lines about black magic on the internet. Get yourself an on-line exorcism, go! I wanted to say to them through the closed door, but that just sounded silly, so I turned towards my office instead. My footsteps echoed in the quiet hallway. Ed stuck his head out of his own office and called out my name.

‘Aasmaani, listen!’ He started to make his way down the corridor towards me. He was walking like a man who would rather be running, but is trying to affect casualness. It made him seem insincere.

‘Hi,’ he said, coming to a stop as both of us reached my office door at the same time. He put his hand up to the door-handle and started fidgeting with it. It may have been a sign of nerves — what was he about to propose that was making him nervous? — but it also effectively barred me from entering my own office without physically pushing past him. ‘I just wondered. After work. How about getting a real cup of coffee? With me. I mean, us. Both. Going for coffee. Wait. Let’s start again. Aasmaani, would you care to accompany me to Café Aylanto for a coffee?’

I had thought he couldn’t appear boyish. I was wrong. Here he was, an awkward teenager in a man’s body, with nothing even remotely appealing about him.

‘I think it would be best to just keep things professional, Ed.’

‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ he said, moving a little bit closer.

‘Lizards. Snakes. Many sentences which start with the word “actually”.’

‘Come on, Aasmaani. No games, no masks. Just you and me and two cups of coffee. Would that be so terrible?’

‘Actually, yes. Now, could you move your hand? I have work to do.’

His hand lifted abruptly off the door-handle, and he turned on his heels and strode away. I pushed open the door, switched on the fan, and sat down at my computer to work on quiz show questions.

What’s the secret which made the mother leave?

a) a really bad nose job which can’t be fixed

b) she exchanged her legs for a scaled tail and went to live with her merman beneath the sea

c) she died. Someone who looks like her took her place, and finally grew sick of the deception

d) she doesn’t love her daughter any more

Answer:

The cursor blinked at me with steady patience, but I just sat there, unutterably weary, with no strength in my fingers even to press down on any one of the keys they were resting on. I sat there, watching the vertical line appear and disappear on the screen until time swallowed itself up in that repetitive motion and there was nothing in my mind but darkness.

VII

Far enough into the darkness, I ceased to exist. I was a body, yes, but a body freed of everything that is other than corporeal. Sometimes the only way to be is to remove yourself from yourself. It cannot be done, of course. But illusions — no, delusions — are so much more effective than people give them credit for. I could live for longer than anyone imagined in the delusion that I was just the body of Aasmaani, with nothing within it.

There was an art to this, of course, a patiently learnt art. Or perhaps a talent. It bore some relationship to sitting in a classroom, with a look that signified attentiveness while the mind skated through every topic except precisely that with which it was supposed to be concerned. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to enter the darkness without my face transforming into blankness, alerting all those around me to what was going on. But now, now I could smile and nod my head, follow key phrases in conversations, occasionally add necessary interjections, while all along I wasn’t really there.

I was, instead, in that blank space where nothing could touch me. For hours, sometimes, blessed hours of silence.

And here was the CEO stepping into my office, a female co-worker I recognized but didn’t know behind him.

‘Got any gum?’ he said.

I automatically reached into my handbag and passed him a mint. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He sat down across from me and pulled the telephone closer to him.

‘Phones downstairs aren’t working,’ the woman explained to me, as though it were necessary.

The CEO punched in some numbers and sat with the phone to his ear. The woman compressed her features — lips squished together, eyebrows drawing close, nostrils constricted — as though putting on a battle-mask. The CEO turned towards me and raised his eyebrows in mock-alarm. I managed an upward flicker of my lips in response.

‘My only point,’ the woman said, ‘is that a medical show should cover important medical issues.’ And now the tiny part of my brain which continued to concern itself with such things recognized her as the presenter of one of the more boring of STD’s educational programmes.

‘BHS is not a medical condition,’ the CEO said, before barking into the phone: ‘Get Tahir.’

‘BHS? No, I’m talking about depression.’

‘Bored Housewife Syndrome,’ the CEO said. His lips were startlingly red.

The woman put her hands on her hips. ‘Seven out of ten people in Pakistan suffer some form of depressive disorder in their lifetime. In six per cent it’s serious enough to…’

‘Well, all the more reason to shut up about it. If they don’t know they’re sick they won’t expect to be treated like they’re sick. Too much damn whining in this country as it is. Tahir, round of golf?…I’m leaving now.’

He hung up and pushed himself out of the chair with no inconsiderable effort.

Leave. Go.

But in the doorway he turned back to me. ‘You, what’s the story with you and the Poet?’

I blinked. Two times, three, and then I was in my skin again. ‘I’m sorry? What do you mean?’

‘It’s his seventieth birthday next year. We’re going to do some grand programme about it.’

Seventy!

‘Tributes, readings, homages, bla bla. It’s going up on our website as a coming attraction for the new year. Someone somewhere in this building thinks it’s a good idea to have a link on the website to a bio of him. And we’ve found one, a bio, on some other website which we’re going to shamelessly steal, just tweak a sentence here and there. But maybe we should check the facts because who knows where that other website gets its information. Last time we stole information off a site without checking it we ended up informing people that the game of cricket got its name because the sound of ball on willow was like the death-cry of the insect of that name. And you know, you’re the research girl so we might as well give you some work. But if you’ve got some trauma associated with him, I’ll tell someone else. Otherwise I’ll be accused of causing depression in my employees, and you’ll take medical leave.’