After we all thought Omi was dead, Mirza the Snake became the most persistent of his circle who tried to share my mother’s grief with her. I remember him best from this period. One night, he walked up the driveway while my mother and I were sitting in Dad’s garden. She had been avoiding him — and everyone — for weeks.

He ambled up to her and said, ‘Push everyone else away, Samina — they’re fools for thinking they understand what you’ve lost — but this is me, Mirza. You’re the only person whose company I can bear right now and I suspect that’s not a one-way street.’ He held out his hand. ‘Let’s be each other’s companions in grief.’

I was terrified when he said that. Terrified she’d agree. This must have been soon enough after the news of the Poet’s death for me to believe I would have her to myself when the edge of grieving wore off. Before I knew that his death was the one thing with which I would never be able to compete.

But she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Let’s not pretend to be friends, Mirza. He loved me, and that’s one thing you can’t forgive me.’

He reached out his long fingers, took the cigarette from her hand and held it to his lips. ‘You burnt the only copies of his last poems,’ he said, and turned and walked out, listing slightly with the breeze.

Sixteen years later, the walk had changed. It was the walk now of a portly man able to bear all manner of buffeting. The kurta-shalwar was made of richer fabric now, the kind that didn’t wrinkle. And his features appeared to have had blotting paper held over them for a decade or more.

The Fata Morgana in the backseat of my car was gesturing for me to drive away. Mirza’s real talent, my mother used to say, was for finding a wound and driving a nail through it.

I gestured impatiently at the backseat, got out of the car and walked up to the café. Pushing open the wooden doors, I looked around the cosy space with its five tables of varying sizes, of which only the long table had customers seated at it. There was no sign of Mirza, but one of the waiters, seeing my eyes scan the room, pointed up the stairs. I climbed the steps set alongside a long window which had a tree outside festooned in twinkling fairy lights and it was with a mixture of satisfaction and panic that I saw Mirza was the only person in the small upstairs section, his girth almost spilling off the cushion of the wrought-iron chair.

XV

Mirza stood up when he saw me.

‘Aasmaani Inqalab, all grown up,’ he said. He moved forward, caught me by both shoulders and pressed his lips against my cheek. ‘Chand Raat Mubarak,’ he whispered, his mouth close to my ear, somehow managing to transform the greeting into something verging between intimacy and obscenity.

I pulled away and he smiled. ‘I see I still make you nervous.’ He sat down and gestured to the chair opposite him at the table which seemed incredibly small. Leaning forward, he almost entirely swallowed up the space between himself and the empty chair. ‘Have a seat. And don’t look so suspicious. You’re the one who proposed this rendezvous.’

I pulled the chair away from the table and sat down, legs crossed, one arm crooked on the back. ‘Sorry about the answering-machine message. I was researching something for STD — I work there now — and I had a pressing question I thought you could answer. I’m usually quite adept at hanging up before I start swearing.’

He reached into a bowl on the table and popped a pickled green chilli into his mouth. ‘What was the question?’

I waved my hand dismissively. ‘Something about the history of the ghazal. A minor matter really, for a five-minute segment of a show that never got made in the end — but the producer likes turning a feather into a flock of crows, so there are no minor matters, only minor pay-offs.’ I was moving unthinkingly between English and Urdu, as was he, and though that was common enough, it had been a while since my Urdu vocabulary and syntax heightened into that old, now-vanishing courtly Urdu in which Mirza and the Poet always spoke to each other. I have Omi’s voice in my mouth, I thought.

‘But here we are after all these years. Hardly a minor payoff I’d say.’

He was smiling pleasantly but even so I found myself looking down at my menu and pretending to read it intently just so that he wouldn’t see my unease. Somewhere beneath that mountain of flesh was the first man who had made me wish I wasn’t just a child. I used to fantasize about kissing him when I was too young to fantasize about anything beyond a kiss.

I felt slightly sick at the memory.

‘So,’ Mirza said, after the waiter had taken our orders — coffee for me, grilled chops for him—‘You’re a dogsbody at STD. Is that your Raisin of Death?’

It was an expression the Poet used to use. His version of raison d’être.

‘Is sycophancy your Raisin of Death, Mirza?’ His sporty car and expensive kurta-shalwar confirmed the truth of the rumours I’d been hearing for the last decade: soon after democracy returned to Pakistan in 1988, five months after my mother’s disappearance, Mirza became the unofficial Poet Laureate of Pakistan’s politicos. On birthdays, anniversaries, in the run-up to elections, on the passage of new constitutional amendments, Mirza produced verses to fit the occasion for anyone willing to pay the price, regardless of their political affiliation. When the military had returned to power in 1999 the demand for his sycophantic poetry had only increased among his former patrons; politicians, it seemed, had a greater need for adulation when power was far from their grasp than when they were occupying high office. And with the recent return to pseudo-democracy, he was probably up to his eyeballs in rhymes about both the victors and those who were cheated of their rightful victories.

Mirza the Snake tried not to look irritated, and failed. ‘Not all poets are fortunate enough to have rich mistresses,’ he said. ‘Being a kept man was the price your dear Omi had to pay for the integrity of his art. Face it, he was as much of a whore as I am.’ He bit down on the tip of his thumb and looked at me as though studying my reaction, learning from it whether he’d found the wound through which he could drive a nail.

I smiled at him, with all the superiority I could bring to bear on an upturned pair of lips. Not even close, Mirza. Strange how, in testing for wounds, we look first to find our own wounds on the bodies opposite us. Mirza with his unbridled jealousy of anyone with a claim on Omi’s affection — of course this would be the story he’d choose. And right then I saw how absurd it was — the notion that anything other than love had been at the very core of their relationship. Whatever else might have got mixed in, nothing could touch or diminish that core. That damned core which had always made it possible for them to fly away together, away from me and the world.

My smile was sagging, and Mirza’s eyes took on an air of triumph. I laughed. ‘That’s a convenient revision of history, Mirza. It discounts the fact that he loved her most, and serves as role model for your poetic prostitution. Two birds, one stone. You were always economical with language.’

He shook his head. ‘You were the most charming child, you know. And now — how hard you’ve grown. Or is it just brittle?’

The waiter appeared with my cup of coffee. I took a packet of sugar, tore the top off with my teeth, and measured out half a spoon. I was about to place the half-empty packet next to my cup after stirring in the sugar when I saw Mirza’s eyes on it. An old habit of his which always amused Omi came to mind. I skimmed a teaspoon just beneath the surface of the coffee, lifted it out and then sprinkled sugar into the spoon, watching the white grains settle, thinned, at the bottom of the liquid. Carefully, I handed the spoon to him. He took it in his fingers at the point where bowl meets stem and lifted it to his mouth. We seemed to be caught in a painting, an artist we couldn’t see drafting the lines of our bodies into positions of ritual that we didn’t quite understand but which automatically transferred us into another time.