‘The Poet? Not that much. I was so young when he died. And even before that, I always felt I would be disloyal to Dad if I went too often with you to your mother’s house when they were in Karachi.’ She shook her head. ‘He really is the only person I can think of who could get Dad so riled up. And I don’t even remember them having a single conversation, ever. But just the mention of his name and poof! Dad’s face would turn red like he’d heard some incantation to overturn mild-manneredness. Do you think we’ll ever hear the full details of the day your mother left him for the Poet?’

Domesticity or a dildo? To which of those horrors has this man driven you?

And Mama had laughed and said, ‘Both.’ What must it have taken for Dad to have agreed to allow her to move back into his house after the Poet died, with the memory of that ‘Both’ in his mind? And before that, what must it have taken for him to stand by and watch Beema and my mother become as close as they were without ever, to my knowledge, objecting? All because of me, I knew. Yet when I was growing up I only saw that he never allowed the Poet into his house, not even at my birthday parties, and that he barely spoke to Mama himself and always kept utterly quiet when Beema told me how much cause I had to be proud of my mother.

‘But I also used to resent him a lot,’ Rabia said. ‘The Poet, I mean. Him and your mother.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’d go into exile and take you away from me. Why is that funny?’

‘It’s not. It’s ironic. I used to resent how much I got left behind.’

‘Every summer and winter holiday, Aasmaani, you’d be gone. Colombia, Egypt, wherever. I was the only girl in school who hated the holidays.’

Eleven weeks a year. That’s all the time I had with my mother from the age of nine to twelve. She wasn’t there when I got my first period, had my first crush, bought my first music album. She wasn’t there for any of that. But I realized now that the time I spent with Mama, brief as it was, must have seemed immense to Rabia during those years. How old was she — only eight? — when they came back from the three-year exile? In those early years of her life I idolized my mother so completely and always yearned to be where she was — Rabia must have learned to fear that one day Mama would really take me with her, and then I would become a houseguest who occasionally flitted through my sister’s life while on holiday from schools in distant parts of the world.

‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head, suddenly brisk with that air she had when she decided it was time to get to the bottom of a mystery — whether that mystery was a choked drainpipe or some knotty part of my psyche. ‘What I want to know is when did it stop?’ She gathered up the plates and walked over to the sink. ‘Do you even know? When did you stop believing in all those things you were so passionate about? All those political ideals, notions of inspiration and activism and all that good stuff which you used to lecture me about in response to a question as seemingly apolitical as “Can I borrow your Walkman?” Was it when the Poet died or when your mother disappeared? I can’t remember.’

The precise moment when everything inside you breaks. ‘Neither. It was over a month after Mama left. It was 17 August, 1988.’

‘Why does that date ring a bell? Oh. Oh yes.’

In June that year, General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq dismissed the civilian government he had handpicked which, against expectations, was showing signs of independence. Amidst his grievances against the government, Zia included a lack of progress in the Islamization of the country and announced that henceforth sharia would be the supreme law of the land. This move towards theocracy sent violent tremors down the spine of the women’s movement, which knew that Zia’s Islam concerned itself primarily with striking down the rights of women and befriending fundamentalists. But when I heard the news, I felt that same impulse of joy that I relived just a few weeks before when the religious alliance won all those seats in the elections. Now Mama will return, I thought to myself, even though she hadn’t yet removed her physical presence from our midst. She’ll return to being herself. I wasn’t the only one to think so; more than one of her activist friends called up to say they were planning a massive protest rally in Lahore, and would she come? She refused to take any of their calls. When I found that out, I ran into her room.

‘You’re going, you’re going!’ I yelled at her. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll hate you for ever.’

‘You’re liable to do that in any case,’ she replied, and before I could respond she had drifted away though she remained standing just feet away from me.

Later that night she came into my room so late she must have thought I would be asleep. She sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair. ‘Mama, who will save the world if you don’t?’ I said, but though she wept a little my entreaties had no more effect on her than my anger. I kept trying, though — for the next couple of weeks I applied myself single-mindedly to convincing my mother to go to the rally. No manipulation, no cruelty was out of bounds. She put up with it for a couple of weeks and then, just days before the rally, she left.

But even when she was gone, I held on. To what, I don’t know. I had no name for it, but I had a clear picture of what it was. The picture was of a group of young soldiers, looking up at a sky bursting with stars, their expressions purely of longing. My mother had that picture framed by her bedside when she lived next door to the Poet. She said it expressed so clearly that our greatest desire was for contentment, that was the strongest pull of all. To sit under a starry sky with your friends and dream. That is what the human soul wants, that is humanity in repose. Whether we’re fighting unjust laws, or dictatorial governments, or the destruction of the mangrove swamps, Aasmaani, we’re ultimately fighting for the luxury of that repose.

Even after the Poet died and the picture disappeared from her bedside, even after she left, I continued to believe the essential truth of what that picture had told me. Humanity in repose ~ that was a phrase I loved. She would find her way back to that truth, back to the necessity of fighting for it, I knew, and all the strangeness of the previous two years would be replaced by a return to the woman she was when she believed it. And that woman would come home.

But, instead, on 17 August 1988, General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq boarded a plane in Bahawalpur, which exploded minutes after take-off.

When news reached me of his death, that was the moment I saw all my mother’s stories of contentment and repose as nothing more than fairy stories. Even if true, they counted for nothing. That was the moment I broke. All those years she had fought against Zia’s government — she and the Poet — with rallies and speeches and poems. And it had got them nowhere. It had got him tortured and killed; it had got her — well, there were no words for that, either. Those little victories they’d achieved, they were nothing but little. And that rally in Lahore, what had come of that? Nothing. Nothing. All those noble means of resisting came to nothing. But then someone — no one even knew who — put a bomb in a plane, and the General exploded, and already, within hours of his death, they were saying, there really might be elections now, real elections. There might be — oh God, I had been raised to whisper the word like a prayer — democracy. Because someone put a bomb on a plane. That is how things happen in the world. That is how you resist tyranny. By becoming it, by becoming it absolutely. It was the only effective way.

Everything you ever did, Mama, was nothing. All those years you fought, all those bruises, all the agonies I went through when you were imprisoned — for nothing. And you saw that, didn’t you, well before I did? When the Poet died — no words of his powerful enough to turn away a hammer or a fist — you saw the futility of that life you had lived so passionately. That’s why you made the choice you did, the one I started to understand that 17 August, though it would be a long time before I fully acknowledged it.