As I stood in that room surrounded by murder stories, with the life of the city rumbling away beneath me on the bridge, it was obvious that in the absence of ultimate proof any story was possible, any belief was possible. The questions it came down to were these: did I believe that voice in the pages? Did I trust my ability to know Omi’s voice? Did I trust the core of that man — that bawdy, tender, humorous, no-nonsense man with the razor-sharp mind — to remain unchanged even through all these years, all those trials?

Yes.

Simply, yes.

‘Omi,’ I said, and the word hung in the air, white-gold and sturdy.

He was still alive. Oh dear God, he was still alive.

I found I was kneeling on the ground, though I didn’t know how I got there. Light streamed in through the window, almost liquid, almost tactile. The fist of muscle within my chest unfurled. With a great surge something molten shot through my veins — the sensation so unfamiliar, so overwhelming, that it took me a moment to recognize it as joy.

XIII

In the hours, and days, that followed, life progressed on an ordinary path. Sehri, work, siesta, iftar, television, dinner, night-cricket. That was the outline of my days. But within that outline I was at once weightless and held fast, as though embraced by an Omi-shaped dream somewhere far above the gravitational pull of the earth.

While waiting to bat, and between innings, during the games of night-cricket I’d lean back on my elbows in the grass and look up at the sky. Only in its distant mystery could I find the language for my emotions. A knot of gas, made increasingly dense — perhaps by the force of a wave passing through it — will start to contract in on itself, heating up its core until it sets off nuclear fusion and a star is born.

Does that knot of gas recognize in itself an incipient star? Does it yearn for the wave to pass through it? Of course not. But even if it could, even if it had that faculty of imagination, perhaps it would choose not to use it. Perhaps it would only be at that moment (if millions of years can be a moment) when the knot of gas coalesced into luminescence that it would realize how diffused it had been, and for how long.

I couldn’t speak of what was happening to me as I moved through the day with the outward semblance of a woman following routine. But whatever I did, this knowledge, this wave, was constantly making its way through me: he is alive, Omi is alive.

One evening, in my flat, I realized I had been looking out at the sea for hours without a single thought. That unthinking was the opposite of the deliberate, dark blankness I was driven to when the debris of facts could no longer fill my thoughts. It was the unthinking that came from being full with a certain knowledge, heavy with it. He was alive. That was not a thought, not something that came from the mind. It was knowledge in the form of sensation.

They noticed it, everyone around me — at work, during the cricket games, in the flat next door. They noticed it but couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, or what it was, and didn’t believe that I was being anything other than deliberately evasive when I just shook my head and smiled when questioned. How could I say, I cannot speak of it? This demands music, not language.

And it was music with which I filled my days. At the office, in the car, at home, I engulfed myself with the opera he had tried to teach me to love — here, here, he’d say, listen, and he’d make me sit through as much as I could bear of Carmen, The Ring Cycle, Otello, Madama Butterfly, or whatever else it was that he was listening to at the end of a session of writing. But what do the words mean, I would demand, and he’d shake his head. Never learn Italian, he warned me. Why do you think I prefer opera to qawaali? They both have the same degree of passion, but with qawaali I understand the words and that ruins it. As long as you don’t understand the words of opera you can believe they match the sublime quality of the music, you can believe words are as capable as music of echoing and creating feeling, and you need only search hard enough, long enough, for the right combinations to create that perfection. Before the babble of Babel, Aasmaani, people spoke music.

For four days or five, I remained in the state of quiet joy, unbothered equally by the deprivations of fasting, the phone which kept ringing at odd hours with no originating number showing up on caller ID, the questions and strange looks that came my way. But then one night, as I lay on my stomach in the grass, watching the spinning of a cricket ball illuminated by the headlights of the cars parked side by side in the driveway alongside the makeshift pitch, Rabia lay down beside me and said, ‘Does this have anything to do with your mother?’

The ball spun away from the bat’s trajectory and dislodged a bail from the stumps. The innings ended.

I opened my mouth to say, ‘No,’ but the word didn’t quite come out. Sensation distilled into thought, and the thought was: if there is such a thing as a core of being which remains unchanged, her core is her love for Omi. If she knows he’s alive, if she knows his words are making their way to Karachi, then she’ll return.

I put my head down, feeling blades of grass prickling my face. Rabia put her hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re so different these days, Aasmaani. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. You’re more locked up in yourself than ever. But in a peaceful way, it seems.’

An understanding that I had been too blind to see in all these years forced me to look up at her. ‘And you think, it can only be my mother who can bring me peace. My mother who left fourteen years ago, who used to leave so often before that, only my mother has that power in my life. You’re the one who’s always been my rock, you and Beema together the anchors who keep me moored to sanity. And you think you’re so much less in my life than her, don’t you?’

Rabia looked away, her fingers scratching at my shoulder in tiny circles. ‘It’s not a question of competition.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ I turned over on to my back, and she pirouetted her body round to rest her head against my stomach.

My Scrabble girls, our father used to call us when we were young and there was no pillow in the world which Rabia would rather rest against than some part of me — shoulder, stomach, thigh — her body always perpendicular to mine so there was only that single point of contact between us.

Shakeel walked up to us, laughed, and lay down, his head on Rabia’s leg. ‘Double word score,’ he announced.

‘No abbreviations allowed, skinny man!’ I said.

Someone had switched off the car headlights while everyone took a break between innings, and the stars were bright above us. I lay in silence for a while, looking up, listening to Rabia enumerate for Shakeel the different stars which made up the Orion constellation — Betelguese and Bellatrix at the Hunter’s shoulders, Rigel and Saiph twinkling at his knees — and remembered when I had taught her to look up to the sky and greet the distant points of light by name.

Rabia the Patient, daughter of Beema the Sane.

I had never really thought to question why she maintained that scrapbook about my mother, long after I had discarded it; never stopped to consider that in those two years when my mother lived with me in the upstairs portion of my father’s house, Rabia always kept a distance, not knowing how to react to that unfamiliar creature lurking beneath the shell of the woman she had once known; never wondered how much resentment Rabia felt towards Mama for being the strongest pull in my life. But now it was so clear.

I sat up, causing a reverse domino effect to take hold of my sister and brother-in-law.

‘You have that look of purpose in your eyes,’ Rabia said. ‘What’s that all about?’