The Minions came in and found my words, remarkable words, the best I ever wrote, on every surface of the room. They filled buckets and drowned each image. Then they broke all my fingers, and left. This sort of thing went on for a while, though the first stands out in my memory most clearly.

Those were the early Minions. They’ve become more civilized since. Or perhaps I’m just too neutered to pose a threat.

You must have aged. In all the time I knew you, you only grew more beautiful.

Here is a memory of you that always makes me laugh:

It is 1971. I wrap around my shoulders that grey shawl you love. I haven’t seen you in nearly four months, not since just before your wedding, haven’t spoken to you since the day of the nikah when I phoned you to say I wasn’t going to be dramatic and whisk you away on my white charger just seconds before you inked your contract and joined yourself in legitimate union to that weedy man, so you’d have to get out of the wedding on your own if you had the intelligence and courage to do it. I knew that would make you go through with the wedding which otherwise (I’m sure, though you always denied it) you were going to back out of at the last minute. I thought that was the surest way to win you back. I thought you’d last three days and then appear on my doorstep, humbled.

I underestimated your stubbornness.

In the end I had to make all the moves. I wrote Laila for you. Not the most conventional wooing poem ever written, but you knew it meant I was going insane with missing you. I alluded to you in an interview for a magazine to which I knew you subscribed. I flaunted my affairs in public, all with women you knew were not in any way to my taste. None of this was enough for you. You were silent, then more silent, and then, as though it were nothing, you announced to your friends who were also my friends that you were pregnant.

I still haven’t entirely forgiven you for that.

So I wrap the grey shawl around my shoulders, let myself in through your gate and ring your door-bell. The Weed answers, and I think he or I would have put a knife through the other’s heart if you hadn’t been standing behind him asking who it was. He steps aside, and then I see you: your pregnancy still invisible to everyone including him, but to someone who knows your body as well as I do it is instantly obvious. You are holding a cookbook in one hand, a courgette in the other. I laugh so hard I have to lean against the door frame for support. ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?’ I ask. ‘Which of the two has this man driven you to?’

And bless you, you laugh with me.

‘Both,’ you say, and I know you are mine for ever.

This is why it’s best not to write. Not even English. It jolts the memory. I had to put aside this page for days after writing that previous paragraph. I’ll talk now only of my time in here, the years without you.

One day I just decided to stop. Stop trying to find ways to write in secret, stop writing in my head, stop remembering how it felt in those sweet moments when language obliterated me. You were so entwined in every word I wrote that I had to banish you too, though you did nothing to make that easy for me.

Then one day the Minions arrived with a book. A book! Not just any book, my love, but Shakespeare. The Complete Works of. That memory I wrote of earlier, the one from 1971, even that turns pale compared to this one. I kept thinking it meant they were going to kill me. Shakespeare as last meal. I didn’t care. I held that book to my heart — black binding, faded gold lettering — and I wept. Huge great sobs from a place so far inside I didn’t know it existed.

What I remembered then was Orwell. In 1984, two years before they brought me here. Winston sometimes dreams of a world beyond the world of grey order, a world of green fields in which a woman takes her clothes off in a careless gesture that defies all authority. Without understanding why, Winston wakes up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.

I told you once I would rather have written in English, despite its absence of curves. It was my politics that made me choose Urdu, more accessible to the public, less colonized. You rolled your eyes at me, but I was speaking the truth. I would rather have written English, purely because of Shakespeare. My first — and, it appears, most enduring — love. Another lie. The first love was Rashida, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who was the only reason I went to his house for extra classes after school. Her hips, even at thirteen! And while I’m confessing lies, let me admit the choice of Urdu had nothing to do with public accessibility and everything to do with the fact that the grandeur of Shakespeare’s language has gone out of English — it’s a language that learned to use a knife and fork, though once it ripped chickens apart with its bare hands. Urdu still allows for lushness.

My favourite word in the English language: intrinsicate.

Shakespeare uses it to describe the bond between Antony and Cleopatra. The knot intrinsicate. He had the advantage, had Will, of living before dictionaries. He could do what he wanted with words and no one would use the awful phrase ‘experimental’, with all its connotations of impending failure. Intrinsicate. Both intricate and intrinsic.

My favourite definition in the English language: frass. It means ‘excrement of boring larvae’. I choose to read ‘boring’ as a comment on personality. Is there any greater insult that you can think of? You frass! Not just excrement, not just excrement of larvae, but excrement of boring larvae. I yell it at the Minions sometimes. Frass! Frass! They continue to look impassive.

Did I always ramble this much?

They didn’t kill me. (The Minions, I mean — keep up! — when they gave me Shakespeare.) They might even have looked amused. Since then, from time to time, they’ve added on to my library. I have to commend them on their tastes. Or on their knowledge of my tastes, perhaps. Or no, they are merely the delivery boys. For whom? There is the question to which I have no answer, though I’ve given it more than a little thought these last sixteen years.

Oh, and there you were, just as I wrote that last line, your eyebrows rising to impossible heights and your voice that extraordinary mix of sarcasm and tenderness: ‘You always have an answer, sweetheart. It’s just not always the right one.’

I’m beginning to miss you now, and I can’t allow that to happen.

IX

It had to be a hoax. It could only be a hoax.

Yes, a hoax. That’s what it was. The Poet was dead.

But even if it was a hoax — no ‘even if’, Aasmaani, it is a hoax — who could have written it?

I thought I was the only person left in the world who knew it, but it seems there are two of us now.

My mother had said that the day I told her I still knew the code. If she was right, the only person who could have forged that communication and pretended it came from the Poet was her. Could my mother have tried to become the Poet just as Laila became Qais? I could feel myself falling into the strangeness of that thought, began picturing my mother running into barbed wire, and then I pulled my mind sharply out. It was an absurd idea, both too far-fetched and too neatly symmetrical — life never imitated art in quite that way — to be anything but false.

But if only three people ever knew the code and I could rule out my mother and myself as writers of that piece, what conclusion was left?

Someone else had to have known the code.

And yet it sounded so much like him.

Too much like him. It sounded too much like him. No, that wasn’t true. There was a resignation to that tone which was never part of his voice.

So then it’s proof he didn’t write it.

But in sixteen years of course he would have changed.