He nodded, and stood up. I held out my hand to him, unable to move out of formality or to find some way to ask him to stay and talk to me of other things. He took my hand. Outside there was gunfire, rapid bursts of it into the sky. His fingers pressed down on mine in surprise and I remembered that he’d been away for years.

‘It’s just celebration,’ I said. ‘The Ruhat-e-Hilal committee must have seen the new moon. Ramzan starts tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ he said, still holding my hand.

‘I suppose that means you’ll be heading off to film that Ramzan special. Guess I’ll see you in another month. Hope it goes well.’

I tried to pull my hand out of his but he held on, rotated his wrist so that his hand was covering mine, clasping it. ‘What would it mean to you?’ he said. ‘If I said, no, it’s not absurd. Believing those pages might be genuine. It’s not necessarily absurd.’

‘How can it not be absurd?’ My voice a whisper.

He smiled. ‘Oh, you urban girl in your modern world. Have you no idea of the kinds of things that go on in secret, for generation after generation, in parts of the country that exist outside the reach of the law? When people have power, land, opportunity and no one to say no to them, the only limits on what they can do is the limit of their own imaginations. Years of secret imprisonment may be absurd, but it’s possible.’

‘Sixteen years, Ed!’ I pulled my hand out of his.

‘Sixteen days, sixteen years. What difference does it make? Ask this question—’ All at once he was fired up. ‘Why would someone imprison a man, and make his family believe he was dead?’

I stepped back and crossed my arms. It was as though we were in the office, talking about storylines for a proposed drama. ‘You make them believe he’s dead so no one comes looking for him. That’s easy. You imprison him, I don’t know. For hatred, fear, vengeance. Any unpleasant motive will do.’

‘And how many people had cause to hate him, to fear him!’ Ed said. ‘Think about that. God, he spat on the powerful with impunity. He was fearless, utterly.’

No. If he was fearless, he wouldn’t have left all those times, taking my mother with him.

She left. She chose to go. He didn’t force her, he never once forced her.

‘Once you imprison him and make the world believe he’s dead, then what? You can’t just let him go when you’ve had fun with the game. If you let him go, there’ll be an investigation, there could be complications. He’s too famous for there not to be complications. And really, why should you want to let him go? Once you’ve set everything up — set up the place you keep him, set up the loyal or terrified underlings who attend to him — you can just leave him there to rot. Leave him there, hidden away somewhere in your vast land holdings, until he dies.’

‘So you think it’s a landowner who’s behind all this?’ I couldn’t stop myself.

Ed held up his palms to the ceiling in a gesture that encompassed all the strangeness of the universe. ‘It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s possible. Stranger things go on around here every day. There are vast parts of this country, Aasmaani, which are still mediaeval in both their mindsets and their rules. And if these pages aren’t some kind of forgery or game, well then, his jailer could be anyone, really, with enough money to pull it off. Can you pinpoint a location it’s coming from? Postmarks?’

‘The first from Multan or Mardan. The second from Quetta. And, anyway, the cover letter, I don’t know, it…’

‘Seems false. Yes. And why would someone send all that to my mother in the first place?’ He looked suddenly unconvinced.

‘I don’t know. But there are things in there which sound so much like him, Ed, that it would be uncanny for someone to have made it up.’

There was a moment of silence in which we simply looked at each other.

‘Aasmaani, do you really think it’s him?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s too often, Ed, I’ve slipped into believing things only to find they weren’t true. I can’t keep doing it. And yet. If it is true…’ I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall.

I felt his hand brush my cheek. ‘What can I do?’

I shook my head, my eyes still closed. ‘Will you be offended if I ask you to leave?’

‘Don’t be silly. How could I be offended at anything you might choose to say right now?’ My eyes were still closed, and I felt his breath on my mouth before his lips followed. I put my arm around his neck, and for a few seconds we stayed like that, our lips just resting on each other, the only movement my fingers stroking the nape of his neck.

When we moved apart, he said, ‘I don’t have to leave until tomorrow afternoon. So I’ll see you in the morning, OK? Come and find me when you get to work.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

As soon as I heard the door close behind him, my body slid down to the ground. I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.

The Poet — my almost-stepfather — was being imprisoned somewhere by an unknown captor. He had been there sixteen, nearly seventeen, years. Sixteen years during which he’d had no human contact except for his captor’s lackeys who broke his fingers and erased his poems. He’d been told my mother was dead. He’d lost the ability to write Urdu. But he was alive. Omi was alive.

For a moment I felt something surge up inside and I had to clasp my hands against my chest as though that could push it down. I would not do this again. I would not move back into that seductive place which promised answers, that place which could only lead to despair each time an expected resolution revealed itself to only be a mirage. The Poet was dead. Omi was dead. Somewhere in the world there was proof. Where? Who knew the details of his death, who could give me the proof I had never before felt the need to search out?

Mirza the Snake. He went to the morgue and then to the funeral. He would have seen the body. Yes, he had the proof. Mirza had the proof. Whoever was playing this sick game with Shehnaz Saeed, and for whatever purpose, it had nothing to do with me.

I carried the pages to the bookshelf, paying no attention to the Fata Morgana shaking its head behind me as I placed them between the covers of War and Peace, two-thirds of the way through the book, and knelt on the ground to push the tome into an empty space on the bottom shelf.

X

When the phone rang at five the following morning and woke me out of a dream about dreaming I thought it could only mean someone must have died.

‘Are you coming over for sehri, or what?’ Rabia said when I answered, panicked.

‘Oh, bugger.’

Rabia laughed. ‘It’s the Holy Month. Be good. No abuse.’

I rolled out of bed and when my feet hit the bare ground in the space between my bed and the rug there was a thrilling sensation of cold. That promised winter had arrived, though it would probably be gone by dawn. I pulled on my dressing-gown, opened the window and leaned out. Over the loudspeaker of the nearby mosque came the impassioned chanting of Arabic. I felt a moment of irritation on behalf of the non-fasters who would have to put up with a sustained guilt trip for the next four weeks. Ramzan was a month when the holier-than-thous were in their element. We used to have one of them as a neighbour, and every year she’d make a list of people who weren’t fasting, and every day of the month before daybreak she’d call someone on the list and recite Qur’ānic verses down the phone, hoping to affect a change of heart. She made the mistake of calling the Poet once and, with his limited knowledge of Arabic, he realized she was reading, at random, a verse about inheritance laws: being well aware of both the woman’s identity and her family scandals, he responded by pointing out that under the God-ordained laws she had just read out she and her husband had cheated her sister-in-law of her rightful share of the family fortune.