But then Mirza said one word, the only word I could have hoped for: ‘Unrecognizable.’

I released a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. ‘So it might not have been him,’ I said before I could stop myself.

Mirza shook his head. ‘His wallet was in his pocket, stuffed with all those little scraps of paper he used to jot lines of poetry on. And you could still… the size, the shape of him. And his doctor had medical records. They did tests. It was him. Why wouldn’t it be him? Why would anyone fake a poet’s death?’

‘The doctor died just weeks later.’

Mirza finally looked at me. ‘Aasmaani, don’t you think your mother and I would have clung to any conspiracy theory that allowed us to believe he was alive if there seemed even the slightest chance?’ He looked at his hands, turning them back to front. ‘I saw him. I saw what they did to him. When the family went to get his body from the morgue — distant family, third cousins at best, to whom he meant nothing — I was there. I was there outside, and I told one of them that I was the Poet’s illegitimate son. He believed me. They’d heard all sorts of stories about him — they would have believed anything. So they let me go with them into the morgue.’ He was still looking at his hands. The first part of him I saw was his hand.’

I put my own hand on top of his and squeezed. If only I trusted him just a little bit, I’d have told him the truth.

‘I never told your mother what he looked like. I didn’t want her to imagine what I had to remember. What I still remember. I looked at that hand, swollen, discoloured…’

Omi. Oh God, Omi.

It wasn’t him. Breathe, Aasmaani. It wasn’t him.

‘…that hand which had written the sweetest words of the age, and I knew, right then, that I would never dare try to be the poet he believed I could be. And so here I am now, a middle-aged hack. And you, the closest thing he had to a child, who remembered more of his poetry in your head when you were fourteen than even he or I or your mother could, you’re a media underling without enough information about ghazals to fill a five-minute segment.’ He shifted sideways in his chair, stretched his legs in front of him and gazed disconsolately at his toes. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only one who learned the value of certain silences.’

If they come home, what will they see when they look at me? A failure, a coward, a small-hearted creature.

I pressed the palm of my hand against the cold edge of the table, and turned to Mirza. ‘And what happened to your love affair with all those poets in love with God?’

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘God has become the most dangerous subject of all. I don’t even think of Him any more.’

‘Leave him in the hands of the extremists, is that your plan?’

I hoped to irritate him out of despondency, but he only shook his head.

I ran my hands along the edge of the glass-topped table. ‘The Poet never said you had to write about God or politics to be a good poet. He said, to be a good poet…’

‘…you must write good poetry. That’s all.’

‘You must have the freedom, even in times of war and barbarity…”

‘…to write of first love, or the taste of mangoes, or the sight of a turtle gliding over the sand after she’s laid her eggs.’ He lowered his head into his hands. ‘But I don’t want to write about any of those things. I want to write about his death, and how it killed me, and I’m too afraid to do that, so I just go on being dead.’

My brother, I thought. My twin, my alter ego, my brother. I touched him on the sleeve and he looked up.

‘All this emotion.’ He brought his hands together in front of his face and traced a globe, his hands separating at the North Pole, meeting again at the South. ‘How am I supposed to know how to react when you’re sitting here looking so much like the girl you once were and also so much like the woman your mother was when I first knew her and the world was ours to shape?’ He dragged the palms of his hand slowly down his fleshy cheeks. ‘And I was beautiful then.’ He caught my hand, brought it to his face and pressed my fingers down, beneath the layers of muscle and tissue, to where his sharply angled cheekbones still resided. ‘I felt so breakable after I saw the Poet’s corpse.’

‘Tell me about the funeral. Who was there?’

Mirza made a gesture of not knowing. ‘It was all done so quickly and quietly. I only knew about it because I was there when the relatives came for his body. The government’s instructions, I suppose. They didn’t want his funeral to start a riot. I was the only one there who really knew him. Even the schoolmaster’s brother’s family in Karachi weren’t informed. And the schoolmaster and the aunt, the only two people in the village who ever meant anything to him, were dead. So I was the only one mourning. It was awful.’

‘And who burnt his poems?’

Mirza flinched. ‘I don’t know. Some government lackeys.’ Then he looked at me and I was startled by the greed in his eyes. ‘Do you remember them? Any of them? Fragments, even?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I’m sorry, Mirza. I wish I did. Mama and I, we both tried so hard to remember. But he only ever read them once or twice after he’d written them, so all we could remember was how it felt to hear him reciting those words with the ink still fresh on the pages.’

‘Yes. It’s the same with me. Your mother told me it was the same with her. You know it’s the one proof of God’s existence I find myself hoping for — words resurrected from ash.’

‘When did she tell you?’

‘Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. Sometime after the Poet’s death. I did keep trying, Aasmaani. You have to acknowledge that. I kept trying to pull her out of that listlessness she fell into. Usually she’d just hang up when she heard my voice or refuse to see me, but sometimes I’d get a sentence or two out of her.’ He shook his head. ‘What a waste.’

‘The burnt poems?’

‘Your mother.’ He touched his flabby cheeks again. ‘I always knew I was a coward. But there were all those people who were turned to flame by his death, who wrote and marched and resisted, above all, resisted all those tyrannies he’d fought against. And I would have sworn your mother would have been foremost among their ranks. But no. She and I, we were the two who loved him most and we were the two who failed him most spectacularly when he died.’

‘I loved him, too.’ At that moment I knew it to be true, however complicated that truth might have been, however mixed in with jealousy.

‘Yes. I suppose you must have. It was hard not to.’

‘What did you love about him?’

Mirza looked at me as though I were a child again, asking a question that revealed nothing so much as my ignorance. ‘I loved him. That’s all there is to it. I loved him the way I’ve never loved anyone else.’

I wiped the ring of coffee on the saucer, wiped the bottom of the coffee cup. ‘And who hated him, Mirza? Hated him enough to do what was done to him?’ Hated him enough to imprison him all these years?

A great weariness took over Mirza’s face. ‘That’s what we like to believe, isn’t it? That he had to die in such a brutal fashion because of some great reason. Some great fear. Some great hate. That’s the only way we can accept it, isn’t it? How often do you replay it in your mind, Aasmaani? How do you see it happening?’

I shook my head. ‘Replay what? See what?’

‘His death.’ He was whispering now. ‘I see it every day, even now. I see it as avoidable.’ He smoothed the tablecloth between us with his fingers which still retained something of their old elegance. ‘I see some low-ranked government lackeys picking him up, taking him for a drive, just to scare him. The way they do with journalists all the time. His new book of poems was nearly done. That wasn’t a secret. So some thugs pick him up just to have a talk. Just to scare him out of publishing. It had happened before. He’d got a few punches and a lot of threats and came home to write a poem about the whole thing. But this time, this time something happened differently.’ He kept smoothing the tablecloth though there was nothing to smooth. ‘He mocked them, that’s what I think. His tongue could be a scythe when his compassion didn’t get in the way. I think he mocked them. Mocked their clothes, their occupation, their car, their manhood. Mocked their looks. Mocked their attempts to frighten him. Mocked violence. And one of them picked up something heavy, something that could bludgeon, and hit him, just to shut him up. And then hit him again. And again. And kept on. And the thing about keeping on, Aasmaani — whether you keep on hitting or you keep on obsessing or keep on lying or keep on deceiving — at a point that’s all you can do. Keep on. Keep on. Sever his tongue, break each unbroken bone—’