In the cool dawn air, I was sweating. What I felt was anything but hope.

And it was time for the morning prayer. Every prayer of mine for the last fourteen years had been one single word: Mama.

Every prayer and every curse.

Without her here, I didn’t know how to create for myself any story but that of the daughter she deserted, time and again; the one who never gave her a reason to stay. The one who now gave her no reason to return.

XI

But surely, I thought a few hours later, my neck weaving in search of an opening in the short kurta tented over my head, surely our understanding of hope is entirely informed by a misreading of the Pandora myth. When she opens the box everything evil escapes into the world and only Hope remains for humanity, to comfort and lead us through misfortune. So the story goes. But what, I wondered as my head emerged out of the bright yellow fabric, was Hope doing mingled with all that evil? Why wasn’t she off somewhere else with love and charity and friendship? Because her rightful place is amidst plague and sorrow, that’s why. Hope stays in the box because she knows she can work her destruction best from within, in the form of a friend and a guide. Hope’s crimes can only be successful if they are inside jobs.

I bunched up my hair at the nape of my neck, and twisted a band on to it. Hope was Zeus’s ultimate revenge on humanity for Prometheus’s theft of fire. And in what strange forms Hope comes to us — missives from the dead, lost languages brought to life, men bearing wine in paper bags.

I wasn’t due at the office for another hour, but I picked up my car-keys and went straight there all the same.

Already, just a few hours into Ramzan, there was that feeling of something different in the air at STD. The kitchen was empty except for a pregnant woman who had the slightly guilty air of one who is so used to fasting in Ramzan that she feels she’s betraying herself by brewing a cup of tea. In every other part of the studio, there was a sense of simultaneous deprivation and purpose. You could see it particularly with the chain-smokers who were constantly twirling pens in their fingers or fidgeting with paper clips. On the television mounted in the hallway, tea and biscuit commercials were replaced by washing powder and water cooler ads.

I went up the stairs — bypassing a group arguing heatedly about where the best jalaibees in the city could be found — and when I reached my office I found a piece of paper stuck on the door. There was no message, only a cartoon, expertly drawn, of a man handing a bottle to a woman, a smarmy smile on his face. The label on the bottle said VINEGAR in bright red letters, but the last three letters had been crossed out and the V turned into a W with a green marker. The woman’s face was impassive.

I carefully peeled the cartoon off the door and walked down the hall to Ed’s office. His door was ajar and I could hear his voice coming through, cold with fury.

‘Well then, I’ll be happy to treat your pay cheque as “just a little thing”. Now get out.’

A man whom I recognized as a well-respected photographer, best known for his fashion shoots, walked out of the office and, seeing me, pointed back towards Ed’s office and made a strangling motion with his hands before walking on.

I considered going back to my office, but Ed’s voice called out, ‘Is someone there?’ so I pushed through the door and walked in.

His office was much larger than mine, and brighter. Sunlight angled in from the windows in two adjacent walls and converged on his desk, which was covered with black-and-white pictures. He was looking fixedly at the pictures when I walked in, but when I said his name he raised his head and smiled such a smile it made me feel I was a teenager again.

‘Are those the reason you were chewing that poor man’s head off?’ I asked, pointing to the photographs. They were all pictures of Shehnaz Saeed, standing at a window, looking out, one hand resting on the curtain. It was the hallmark Shehnaz Saeed photograph, taken during the filming of Aik Ajnabi aur Mehbooba, her first collaboration with Kiran Hilal, over two decades ago. The actor I’d dubbed Once-Leading-Now-Trailing man had played the man she loved, and in the scene during which this photograph was taken she is watching him leave her house after she’s told him she can never marry him. How the entire nation had wept during that scene!

At second glance, I realized I wasn’t looking at the old photograph but more recent pictures re-creating that scene.

‘Bloody fool,’ Ed grumbled. ‘We need these for print ads that are supposed to start running next week for Boond, but just look at them.’ He gestured angrily, and now I saw that the photographs weren’t reproductions of a single image, but a series of shots nearly indistinguishable from one another.

‘They look fine to me.’

‘They’re not fine at all. Look here, at this shadow, and here, there’s too much curtain, and here, her hands just look old—’ He stopped and looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry. I seem obsessive, I know. It’s all those years of working in advertising in New York. I’ve developed an eye for detail that is going to drive me crazy here.’ He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes for an instant longer than a blink. ‘God, I miss it. New York. That damn city.’

At a student art exhibition I had once seen an installation called ‘Shehnaz Saeed’s Voice’. It was a replica larynx, with a pinhole at one end. When you placed your eye against the pinhole, some process of magnification allowed you to read a series of words inside the larynx, arranged in the space between two vocal cords — each word apparently written using the materials that the words themselves signified. Honey. Feather. Gravel. Velvet. Tears. Broken glass. As Ed spoke of New York, I almost believed that if I could direct a ray of sunlight towards his larynx it would shine through a pinhole and show me the proof that he was wholly his mother’s son.

It was to continue hearing that timbre of voice that I asked, ‘What do you miss about it?’ as I sat down across from him.

He leaned forward and gathered up the photographs into a pile. ‘What do I miss? Sushi.’ He smiled and shrugged, as though to say the question could only be answered entirely unsatisfactorily. But I gave him a look to say, keep going. ‘Pizza,’ he offered. Then he exhaled and lifted his shoulders. ‘The brunch scene. The cabs you can find everywhere, except when it rains. I miss talking politics in Urdu with cab drivers who are always left wing, and I miss being able to have anything delivered, free of charge — from dry-cleaning and saline solution to food from any part of the world. The Korean deli round the corner from me, particularly, which delivers ice-cream at four in the morning. What else? So much. Knicks games, and that New York attitude, and the way neighbourhoods keep changing. The Trinidadian steel drummer at the 42nd Street subway station, and the Bangladeshi corner cigar-ettewalla who calls to me in the early morning as I pass by him on my way home from a night on the town. And the way the city clears out on long weekends. I miss snow in the West Village, and summers, New York summers, I miss those maybe most of all.’

As he was speaking, I thought at first that his look of pain resembled that of a man considering the end of a passionate love affair and then I realized, no, this is how the survivors of lost lands must look when they recall their former homes — Pompeii in ashes, Atlantis under the sea. ‘Why leave, Ed? Really. Were the inconveniences so great that you couldn’t live around them? I mean, there are inconveniences aplenty round here, though of a different variety. And surely your yuppie persona protected you somewhat?’

‘I was made to feel powerless,’ he said flatly.