Somehow my hand was on the drawer-handle again. I moved it over to the telephone and phoned Shehnaz Saeed to thank her for lunch.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘My pleasure entirely. I don’t know why we haven’t been in touch all these years. You know, I was just going to call you myself to ask if you’d made any sense of that page of garbled letters.’

‘No, sorry. Haven’t had time to really look at it. But as a matter of interest, do you remember the postmark on the envelope?’

‘I did check,’ she said. ‘But some of the letters were smudged so I only know it started with “M” and ended with “AN”. Either Multan or Mardan, I suppose. The stamp was local.’

That really didn’t help, but it wasn’t as though I could think of any postmark that would have furnished a helpful clue about the origin of the letter.

I was going to end the call, but she said, ‘Aasmaani, can I ask you a personal question?’ Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow. But I merely made a noise of acquiescence, and Shehnaz Saeed asked, ‘Is there some kind of problem with you and Ed?’

I had heard his distinctive gait — one stride followed by three short steps — outside my office several times today. Each time he passed I thought of opening my door and calling out to him, but I remained unsettled about how my feelings towards him could swing so quickly and so arbitrarily from irritation to camaraderie to desire to disdain, and not knowing what I wanted from him made it impossible to know what to say to him.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I mentioned your name during dinner last night and he reacted strangely. Surly, in a way that was almost adolescent. And I’m not sure if it’s because of your name or because I’m mentioning it, if you see what I mean.’

‘Not really.’

‘No. No, I suppose you don’t. It’s just that — I’m going to be very frank now — I think he likes you. A lot. And he’s not going to want me befriending you, because then, you see, you’ll be my person and not his. That’s how he’ll think of it. It’s not easy, I suppose, having a mother like me.’

For a woman who had managed to maintain an air of secrecy around her private life for so long, she was surprisingly voluble.

‘You’re wondering why I’m telling you this?’ she said, and I couldn’t help laughing in embarrassment at being caught out. ‘It’s just that, my dear, when we were growing up no one taught us how to be mothers and something else at the same time. Motherhood was an all-or-nothing business. You can tell me, if anyone can, how should I be his mother and be famous? He’s thirty-five years old, Aasmaani, and I still don’t know what he wants me to be. When I acted, he hated that it took me away from him. When I stopped acting, he hated that I’d given up that part of myself. He kept hounding me to act again, and now that I’ve said yes, he’s even more moody than before.’

If she wasn’t going to be subtle, neither was I. ‘You’re trying to talk to me about my relationship with my mother, aren’t you?’

‘No, darling, I’m being much more self-involved than that.’

She was probably lying, but I liked her all the same. ‘I’m really not the person to talk to about Ed. I can’t even begin to fathom him. I’ll try not to be unpleasant to him, that’s as much as I can promise. But I’m trying for your sake, not his.’

She sighed then. ‘If he hears that he’ll say, you see, Ma, you’ve gone and done it again. And I suppose I have.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Oh, I hear him. He’s here for lunch. I’ll speak to you later.’ And she hung up.

What an odd household.

The thought had barely crossed my mind when I smiled at the irony. Who was I to talk of odd households, when between the ages of fifteen and seventeen I had lived under the same roof as a divorced couple, his second wife and their daughter? And before that I’d spent all those years shuttling between the picture-perfect normality of life with Dad, Beema and Rabia and the utter unconventionally of my mother’s house with its connecting door to her lover’s garden. How unremarkable those arrangements had seemed to me.

I put down the receiver and sent around an e-mail to a choice group of colleagues, enquiring, ‘Time for a breakout, Chinese style?’ and within minutes I’d assembled a group of three women and two men who were more than happy to join me at the nearest Chinese restaurant for lunch. (That was one of my carefully nurtured talents — the ability to enter a new workplace and almost instantly find people who would provide companionship to speed up the day without demanding anything so emotionally exhausting as friendship.)

Over chow mein, lemon chicken, egg-fried rice and beef chilli dry I brought the conversation around to Ed and everyone rolled their eyes or held up their chopsticks in gestures of confusion.

‘If he was a woman, the letters PMS would be attached to his name like it was a university degree,’ the news anchor asserted, picking off the little pieces of carrot from the egg-fried rice on her plate, and leaving everything else untouched.

‘Oh, he’s sweet enough. Leave him alone,’ said one of the women on the Boond team. ‘You can’t blame a guy for getting frustrated if he’s been working abroad and then has to come back and deal with goats in the budget.’

‘Sorry?’ I said between mouthfuls.

‘Don’t you know this?’ The news anchor leaned in. ‘Whenever there’s some major production in the works the budget includes the cost of several goats — the bigger the production, the more goats. That way, when something goes wrong, a goat gets sacrificed without disrupting the balance sheet. Two goats if the problem is major.’

‘Boond is a seven-goat production,’ the Boond woman said, not without pride. ‘But what with Bougainvillea dropping out, and then waiting to see if Shehnaz Saeed would agree to do it, we’re already four goats down and filming has hardly even begun.’

The conversation moved on from there and I could find no seamless way of bringing Ed back into it. That felt like failure. Later, in my office again, I found myself tracing widening circles on my desk and thinking of them as Eddies. Then, my mobile phone beeped to tell me it had been twenty-four hours since I left Shehnaz Saeed’s house.

It was with a sense of occasion bordering on the ritualistic that I pulled open my desk drawer and lifted out the covering letter. I set it down in front of me, an empty coffee jar filled with pens holding down one corner and the edge of my mouse pad holding down the corner diagonally across from it. It struck me instantly that the handwriting was too deliberately childish, the misspellings too obvious. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. Though. Perhaps. Might. Those were words you’d associate with someone who was more than just marginally literate. And a sentence structure that employed a sub-clause offset by commas — that required a certain level of sophistication.

I felt a moment of satisfaction mixed with contempt. Whoever had written this could have tried just a little harder to make the fiction convincing. And yet… I adjusted the neck of the desk lamp so the light shone on to the letter, and tried unsuccessfully to find a watermark or some other distinguishing feature. And yet, if the intention of the writer of this letter were merely to disguise his (or her) identity, then the plan had been successful. I continued to look at the letter for a few more minutes, but no amount of staring could force it to yield up any clues, so I turned my attention to the encrypted page.

The Minions came again today. That sounds like a beginning.

I held my hands in front of me, as though in prayer, as understanding dawned. Of course. It was written by someone who was trying to write something — the Poet trying to write a story for Rafael Gonzales, perhaps — except his mind was having trouble forming plot and sentences. So he wrote one line, and then he wrote, triumphantly, that it sounded like the start of something.