He’s dead, Aasmaani.

Yes, of course he’s dead, but all I’m saying is…

Is what?

That it sounds so much like the way it would sound if it were true.

All right. List them. List the ways in which it sounds like him, and the ways it doesn’t, and in those lists you’ll find the flaw, the lie which will blow down that elaborate edifice.

And if I don’t find the flaw?

You’ll find it.

But if I don’t?

Make the lists!

All right. All right.

The ways it doesn’t sound like him: Resignation. Giving up poetry and my mother. (But he explains that. And the explanation makes sense. And he doesn’t really give her up, does he, because he’s writing to her.) Becoming an enthusiastic cook. The story of the courgette. There — that’s the lie. That isn’t how it happened.

See, I told you.

But…

What?

If it had happened that way, Mama would never have told me. We’re talking about the moment she left my father. How could she tell me such a line as ‘Domesticity or a dildo’? No, she would not tell me that. But I could imagine him — the Poet — I could imagine him saying it. There was that bawdy streak in him, and she loved it, though she pretended not to.

Keep going, then. Keep going with the list of all the ways it doesn’t sound like the Poet.

That’s it. That’s the list. He’s learnt resignation, he’s given up poetry and he’s become an enthusiastic cook.

So then, it isn’t him.

But I’ve done all those things in the last sixteen years, though it seemed inconceivable when I was fourteen and he was alive.

The other list, then. All the ways in which it sounds like him.

Everything. The voice. What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this? That was a sentence structure he liked to use. What will you become, you with the eclectic mind? He wrote that on a card for me, on my thirteenth birthday. You were silent, then more silent. That’s an echo of something he said when he described to me the first time he saw my mother. She was beautiful, then more beautiful.

But he’s a poet. Of course he has a distinctive voice. It only means it’s more easily imitated.

In Urdu. It’s easily imitated in Urdu, not in English. Urdu was his public language. And then, there are all those detáils. The peach allergy. The schoolmaster’s daughter and her hips. The grey shawl. Shakespeare. Yes, that particularly. I was there when he told my mother he would rather have written in English. That entire conversation. It was him and me and her. I was studying Julius Caesar for an exam. That’s what started it. Just weeks before he died. There was no one there but the three of us.

He doesn’t mention you. Doesn’t that prove something?

No. Nothing.

But one of them could have told someone else about the conversation.

Gue.

Yes. I thought of that. Gue.

He loved finding oddball definitions in dictionaries. One day he called me up from Colombia, sat by the phone for hours waiting for the trunk call to be put through, so he could say, ‘Look up “gue” in the dictionary, Aasmaani.’ He and I had the same dictionary; he gave it to me as a present precisely so we could play this game. Gue is ‘a kind of rude violin’. He loved that. He would love Frass. It is exactly the sort of thing he would love.

But it’s impossible.

It’s extremely improbable.

You can’t allow yourself to start believing this.

But no matter how hard I looked for a sign that would prove, incontrovertibly, that is wasn’t him, I couldn’t find it. Hours went by, in which I first read and reread the pages, then wrote them out in plain English, just to have some different way of approaching them. When that proved fruitless I tried to impose order: start with paragraph one, I told myself, reread it and consider what it means. Why would someone put down that information rather than any other? Find the mind behind the words. But the only mind I encountered was the Poet’s.

I heard Rabia come home. I wanted to call out to her, but then I imagined her look of panic if I told her what had happened, imagined her tearing up the pages, saying, someone’s just playing a sick game with you, I’m calling Beema and Dad. And if I showed anything but utter willingness to agree with her and accept it as a hoax then it would all return to the days just after Mama left when I used to ask operators to trace calls, and searched everywhere for clues and conspiracies. In those days, Dad, Beema and Rabia were constantly accumulating and weighing evidence about whether I was getting better or not, watching me at all times, suggesting we ‘talk’ about ‘feelings’, forcing me to lie more and more convincingly just so that they would stop watching, stop gathering evidence, think I was improving. Sometimes I managed to fool Dad and Rabia, but never Beema. But now Beema had a dying mother, and the least I could do for her was allow that to be the centre of her world.

I heard Rabia and Shakeel go out. They knocked on the connecting door first but I stayed utterly still and didn’t answer. It was only when they were gone that I wanted to take the letters to Rabia and tell her what they said.

Peaches. Broken fingers. My mother’s kisses. Hikmet. The Poet alive. Someone trying to convince me — no, Shehnaz Saeed — that the Poet was alive. Why Shehnaz? The words were not my mother’s. This wasn’t the sign from her I’d been waiting for. I was no closer. And yet, the Poet alive. Not true. Domesticity or a dildo. Larvae. Her unforgivable pregnancy. I couldn’t piece any of it together, couldn’t hold on to one thought long enough to produce a reaction before another thought barrelled around the corner and derailed the first one.

At length, I stopped trying. I lay on my sofa, looking at the sun setting fiercely into the sea, individual words and phrases littered round my head like crumbs that can never be reconstituted into a slice of sense.

There was a cobweb in a corner of the room, so delicate my breath could send each thread spiralling into the darkness. Prufrock. Intrinsicate. Left to right. Right to left. Frass, Shakespeare, the grey shawl, no mention of me.

A shadow of an explanation swerved into my mind, and then swerved away again. I almost had it. A way out of here. That missing piece which would reveal the face of the mystery. But I would never have that missing piece — that was the torture of this near-delirium of overwrought thinking. I would only repeat the leaps from one thought to the other, each leap pushing the words further away from meaning. But I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t do anything but leap.

Someone was ringing the door-bell. Door-bells don’t ring for ever. You just need the patience to wait them out. But this one kept on, an insistently merry ‘ding’ that soon grew frenzied, its cheer transmuting into increasing hysteria the longer I ignored it. Then the phone started ringing. At the same moment, my mobile beeped to announce a text message. The mobile was next to me. I raised a hand, pressed down on the keypad. Whose number was that? I pressed again and a message appeared: PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR. ED

Ed. Go away.

But then I sat up. He would prove it to me. I would read him the decrypted message, and he would tell me that it was impossible. He would tell me why it was impossible. My mind was too desperate for hope. I must be missing something, something obvious. But Ed would see it. Ed was smart. Ed would release me from this.

I was on my feet, running to the door. I opened it, and there he stood, holding up a brown bag moulded in the shape of a bottle, in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty.

‘I’ve brought a bottle of wine and an amusing anecdote as peace offerings.’

‘Wine here tastes like vinegar.’ I turned to walk back into the flat. There was a slight pause, and then I heard him following me in.