Omi, if I could only believe you were still alive.

I made my way into Rabia’s flat and found her arm-wrestling her husband on the living-room floor. I stopped a moment, unnoticed, to watch them. They made an incongruous couple — Rabia, petite and full of energy, and Shakeel, tall and languid. They had met at his first solo exhibition — Rabia didn’t know who he was, just saw a skinny man with long eyelashes who seemed to be the only person not oohing and aahing over the paintings, and went over to him. Her opening remark to Shakeel was, ‘So this guy claims he’s not interested in being an artist for high-society ladies to collect and then he goes and paints such massive canvases that only really rich people with huge rooms will be able to hang up any of his paintings.’ They were married within a year.

Rabia, yelling in frustration, had Shakeel’s hand caught between both her hands. Shakeel was looking at her in adoration and making no attempt to win the struggle. Hearing me laugh, Shakeel looked up, and Rabia took that moment of distraction to slam his hand on to the floor and let out a cry of victory.

‘Well, so much for being the brawn,’ Shakeel said, standing up. He walked up to me and whispered, ‘Who was the gentleman caller I saw leaving your flat as we were returning last night, young lady?’

I slapped him lightly on the shoulder. Shakeel liked to make much of the three-week age gap between us. He and I had a relationship in which frivolous conversation combined with deep affection in a way that meant I would never tell him any of my secrets or worries but was always perfectly content for him to be in the room on those rare occasions when I talked to Rabia about the things that were on my mind.

‘If he turns out to be significant, I’ll let you know.’

Shakeel laughed as he walked towards his studio — for him Ramzan was an opportunity to start work early. ‘He walked down the stairs like a man who thinks he is significant.’

It hadn’t taken long after Ed left for me to regret reading the pages out to him, and to wonder what he really believed they meant. It was so sudden, his shift from disbelief to conviction, that I couldn’t help wonder if it was a change of heart or manipulation. But it was no more sudden, I had to admit, than my shifts in thinking about him. Just as I felt relieved that he was going to be leaving for a month I’d remember the promise and lack of insistence of his lips on mine and then I wanted nothing more than for Ed to stay.

Rabia called out my name and I followed her voice into the kitchen, where she had tea and French toast ready for us — a sisterly ritual for the first day of Ramzan that went back as long as I could remember.

‘I’m considering a boycott of Ramzan,’ I said. ‘To protest the rising power of the Machiavellian Mullah Alliance.’

‘If you boycott religion because of them you only strengthen their claim to being guardians and interpreters of that religion.’

‘Oh, shut up. I was being facetious.’ I opened the window to the sounds of people clanking around kitchens in surrounding flats. This was one of the chief joys of Ramzan — this evidence of everyone engaged in eating before daybreak, the transformation of that solitary hour into something communal.

Rabia pulled up two high stools to the kitchen counter and sat down to eat. ‘Day before yesterday, at seven a.m., I found biryani ingredients, chopped and ground, in your kitchen. They weren’t there at one a.m. the night before when I went to get a glass of water while you were on the balcony. Therefore,’ she pointed her finger at me, and I couldn’t tell if what was to follow was a punch-line or a verdict, ‘you were preparing a meal between one a.m. and seven a.m.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘Was there a spice curfew on during the night of which I’m unaware? Have I transgressed the unwritten laws of when a chicken can be chopped?’

Rabia crossed her arms. ‘I know what it means when you cook at strange hours. What was on your mind?’

‘Food, I imagine.’

‘That’s not even amusing.’

‘Do I detect an edge there, Rabia? Are you trying to get angry with me?’

‘Trying? You think I can’t get angry at you?’

‘You don’t get angry, Little, you get compassionate.’ I cut off a piece of French toast and held it in front of my eyes. There was nothing even remotely appealing about it.

‘I was angry when you joined the oil company,’ Rabia said. ‘I was bloody furious then.’ She attacked her French toast with knife and fork, cutting it into pieces with a concentration which suggested that the eating of the toast was an incidental afterthought. ‘I still am. What point were you trying to make?’

She had been asking me this question at regular intervals over the last three years and the demise of my corporate persona had done nothing to put it out of her head.

‘Some people, Rabia, have the luxury of doing things they love. Of knowing, this is what I want to spend my life in pursuit of, and then being in pursuit of it. Whether it’s Shakeel with his art, or you with your women’s uplifitment projects — though, honestly, Rabia, that sounds like you’re a plastic surgeon.’ She didn’t laugh, which was a bad sign. ‘You’re the lucky ones. You don’t have to spend the greater proportion of your life in an office somewhere, unable to remember quite why it is that you’re doing this particular thing rather than any of those other things out there, rather than any of those things you wanted to do when you were eleven years old. But we don’t all have that luck. Some of us just go to work and get through the day. Now will you cut my toast?’

‘No. Because impressive as that little speech is, it doesn’t answer “Why you, why the oil company?”’ She swapped plates with me, and began cutting my French toast.

Why the oil company, she wanted to know. Because why not, Rabia? Because it makes no difference. That was what I could throw at her if she made me just a little angrier.

But she sat across from me, cutting the toast according to an elaborate system of diagonals, and she was still my baby sister. ‘Why the oil company? For the same reason I’m not going to give you a straight answer: to irritate the life out of you.’ I reached across and made an incision in the toast which ruined the pattern she’d been carving.

She didn’t look at me. ‘You have no idea how hard it is to be your sister sometimes.’

There was silence for a few seconds as we both chewed on our toast. ‘Do I embarrass you?’ I said at length, more bothered by her comment than I was willing to admit. ‘Around all your NGO friends, when you have to admit that your sister used to work for the oil company, and now she’s moved on to a quiz show. Does that embarrass you? Is that why it’s hard being my sister?’

She looked at me in such surprise it made me want to weep. ‘All the sadness in my life has to do with you. That’s what’s hard. And please don’t tell me that you’re fine.’

I held my mug up to the side of my face, the porcelain burning against my cheek. ‘I get through the day, Rabia.’

‘Oh, Smaani.’ She pushed down on my wrist so the mug of tea came to rest on the kitchen counter. ‘When did that start being nearly enough?’

I lifted my shoulders and let them drop again. ‘So long ago I’m surprised you remember when it was different.’

She put her hand on mine. ‘Don’t you know how much I hero-worshipped you when I was a kid? You were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to me when I was ten. And when I told you that, you said my cultural references were the sign of a colonized mind.’

‘I didn’t! You mean I was that irritating, even at fourteen?’

‘You were that smart. That’s how I saw it. Particularly when you were around the Poet. You and he were always talking about things I couldn’t even begin to understand.’

There was nothing he ever believed I was too young to understand or discuss. Religion, politics, the tension that can be generated by the need for a rhyme. ‘What do you remember about him?’