As he put the spoon down, with a nod of gratitude that acknowledged the tableau we had so unexpectedly found ourselves in, he seemed suddenly avuncular. He was a man who had known me when my hair was in pigtails. Uncle Mirza, I used to call him. More than that, he was a man linked to those golden years when my mother and Omi lived in Karachi, the three-year exile over; a man who knew me before the brittleness set in. All I wanted was to freeze the tableau, and I saw that he wanted it, too. That old tableau in which our presence in the same space always meant the two of them were somewhere nearby.

I felt tears prickling at my eyelids. I wanted both of them somewhere nearby, I wanted it desperately. I rubbed my thumb across the scar on my palm. If I put down the worst I had ever thought of her in a letter, all my anger, all my accusations, it would be so much more vindictive and poisonous than all that Omi had written. Sixteen years locked away from her, how could I expect him never to lash out?

The Sufis were right — Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved.

Mirza first came to Omi’s attention with a poem he had written which drew its inspiration from the Sufi version of Lucifer and Adam’s expulsion from Eden. Iblis aur Aadam, it was called. A poem in rhyming couplets, creating a conversation between Iblis and Aadam, meeting thousands of years after Allah has banished both of them from heaven. It starts with recriminations and petty sniping, and moves on to Iblis challenging Aadam’s love for Allah.

I loved him more than you, Iblis says. That’s why being banished from his presence placed me in Hell, and you only in this middle ground of mud.

No, Aadam replies. My crime was merely disobedience; yours was pride. That is the reason for our differing punishments.

Our punishment is the same, says Iblis. Exile from his presence. We merely view that exile differently. But since you bring it up, your crime was far worse than mine. Yours arose from wilfulness, mine from love. I hated you because you supplanted me in my Beloved’s affection. And if that wasn’t pain enough, he asked me then to accept the falling-off of his love by bowing to you. He was unfair, Aadam, to both of us. He gave you curiosity, he gave me this faculty of eternal and undiminishing love — and then he turned those faculties against us. Admit it, we have been wronged.

Aadam replies, I cannot admit it. If I offend him further he may send me to where you are — to that place which is Hell precisely because it offers no hope of reprieve, no hope that I may return to Him in Heaven.

Soon, Aadam and Iblis are weeping in each other’s arms. Allah sees this and knows the time has come. He turns the sky to the red of stained leather. Aadam turns joyfully towards Heaven as Iblis begins to make his weary way back to Hell.

Iblis, the Lord speaks. Where are you going?

To the prison of eternal separation to which you have condemned me, Iblis answers.

And the Lord says, Beloved, have you forgotten? Of all my attributes the foremost are these: I am the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Omi had loved that. It is the first and the final love story, he would remind my mother. It is the story in which we all live. Moses and Changez Khan and Marilyn Monroe and you and me, my love, we are all just players in that great story. Iblis and Allah. Love makes us devils, love sends us to hell, love saves us.

I brushed a tear away from my eyes. All these years of watching bad television instead of reading his poetry — it had almost got me believing that love was not a thing that could draw in anger and pettiness. I should have been reading him all these years, I should have been reading early Mirza.

I looked up at Mirza who was rotating the spoon in his hands, catching his face turning convex and concave by turn. How young he must have been when he wrote Iblis aur Aadam. He first joined the Poet’s circle when he was still a student. The Poet used to refer to him as ‘the next generation’. He was all fire and passion, then, constantly telling the Poet what he should be writing about, where his responsibility lay.

‘They’re out there,’ he had railed once, walking up and down my mother’s dining room, waving his fìnger in the air. ‘They’re out there, those men of war and politics, shouting about their God, insisting everyone own up to their relationship with Him, declare your devotion down on your knees, in Arabic, for all to see. It’s an obscenity to make love so public.’

It’s an obscenity to make love so public. He had said that with my mother in the room. Was that before or after the caves at the beach? I felt almost embarrassed now to think of those lines — for the first time it seemed simply rude to read words Omi meant for my mother alone. I felt I’d been caught peeping through a keyhole, and I had only myself to blame if what I saw didn’t meet my expectations of what my mother and her lover should be saying and doing to each other behind closed doors.

‘Can I hear some poetry, Mirza? Please. For old times’ sake.’ He looked startled and I realized he was as lost in his thoughts about those days as I had been. ‘Go on. Recite a poem for me.’

‘All right.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ll do better than recite. I put this one to music myself.’ He plucked at the air as though searching out notes on a sitar, and then, softly, he began to sing.

I closed my eyes. How I had missed this. The Poet never sang his own verse — though he was unrestrained about belting out arias with much confidence and little talent — but sometimes my mother sang his words for him. She had an arresting voice, unashamed to use its own smokiness to haunting effect.

Mirza’s voice wasn’t arresting, but it was beautiful. Words leaped clear from his throat. ‘Subah kee shahadat…’ The martyrdom of morning? Absurdly self-indulgent poetic moment. I opened my eyes. He was weaving his hand through invisible air traffic, gaze fixed far ahead of him.

I leaned my head sideways against the wall, and settled in to listen to the words. It was a poem about childhood, about picking falsas off bushes with friends now dead. Nothing remarkable in most of it. Nostalgia, lyricism, imagery of red, round berries bursting with juices into young mouths, which added a sexual undercurrent that ran through the whole poem and — how obvious and how irritating — got picked up again, more strongly this time, in the inviting fruit with maggots at its core. But amidst the clichés were startling images — the acned boy imagining falsas swelling to ripeness under his skin; the youngest of the boys biting into the fruit to discover a tooth already embedded in a falsa; the boys stuffing falsas down their clothes and then clasping each other close, red stains spreading across the fronts of their white kameezes as they pulled away from the violent embrace.

Mirza stopped singing. ‘So what’s your verdict?’ he said.

‘You should have been a much better poet by now.’ I didn’t mean it unkindly and somehow he seemed to see that.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at his manicured fingernails. ‘I should have found a subject to replace all this content. There are some wonderful voices in Urdu poetry these days, despite everything. I’m not even in the second tier. You keep up with it at all? The world of Urdu versification?’

I shook my head. All that went out of my life when he did. I don’t even read his poetry any more, let alone anyone else’s.’

‘He.’ Mirza shook his head. ‘His fault. My failures, all his fault.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Mirza didn’t look at me. ‘I don’t deny he was the best teacher anyone could have hoped for. But his death, Aasmaani. His death taught me the price poets have to pay for their integrity. I saw that price up close, every shattered bone of it.’

‘You saw… you saw his body?’ This is what I had wanted to know from Mirza when I dialled his number, and now it was as though I were hearing the news of Omi’s death for the first time. In that instant it seemed possible — no, inescapable — that all those pages had been a hoax, and that ‘shattered beyond recognition’ had just been a turn of phrase to mean ‘badly injured’.