‘It’s none of my business, but, you know, she didn’t stop being a woman because she became a mother.’ Wasn’t that really, ultimately, what I had wanted of Mama? That she be my mother to the exclusion of all else? Is that why I remembered all the days and weeks and months she went with the Poet, and never the ones during which she stayed with me? She was twenty-six when I was born. Twenty-six years old: a mother and a woman desperately in love — could she have known right away that she would, at so many times in her life, be forced to choose between those two incarnations? If yes, then the wonder of it is that she didn’t choose that moment to disappear, to step right out of the heart-cleaving complication that her life became the moment I was born.

‘Think about it, Ed, she wasn’t even twenty-five when your father left. What did you want her to do? Take a vow of celibacy for your sake? Would you, at twenty-five, have sworn off sex for ever, under any circumstances?’

‘Please. You can’t compare…’

‘What? Can’t compare the needs of men to the needs of women? Ed, try not to be an insufferable bastard.’

‘Why are the things you can’t get past any more acceptable than the things I can’t get past?’ he demanded.

‘Oh, don’t even try that. You didn’t want your mother to have anyone in her life other than you. I never demanded anything quite so selfish.’ No, I didn’t want her to have no one else. I just wanted to always be first. And why shouldn’t I? I was her child, I was the defenceless one. But I couldn’t even pretend to believe that. In the sanctuary of Beema and Dad’s house the only thing I needed defending against was my mother’s absence.

He looked down at the carpet, the toe of his shoe tracing over the intricate paisley pattern, and when he spoke his voice was very soft. ‘But I didn’t have anyone in my life other than her. No father who cared to know me, no siblings, no cousins, no real friends.’ He looked up. ‘Don’t you have any idea how lucky you are, how fortunate your life has been? I have every right to be obsessive. You have none. Why are you wasting your life being obsessed? Don’t you have any idea how wonderful you could be if you just gave yourself the chance?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know who you see when you look at me.’

He leaned back against the desk, giving himself the extra distance to see me in my entirety. I couldn’t help pushing my hair off my face. ‘A woman no one could ever choose to leave.’ He took a step closer to me. ‘So don’t run away to pre-empt a move I’m never going to make.’

‘You’re not the first man to be fascinated by the enigma that is Aasmaani, Ed. And you won’t be the first to—’

‘You aren’t even remotely enigmatic. I’ve never met anyone less opaque. Are you fashioned of different material to everyone else in the world, Aasmaani, and is it possible that I’m the superhero whose only talent — whose unparalleled talent — it is to see you clearly, down to the atoms of the stuff of which you’re made? I’ll take that superpower over all others in the world, even if I’m promised nothing more than just the seeing.’

Memory prickled the back of my neck. Omi had spoken of my mother in those terms. Mirza had once asked him whether he thought that by marrying my mother the mystery would go out of their relationship, and Omi had said, ‘There is no mystery — that’s the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.’

The paisleys were a bridge between us across the blue sea of the carpet, each one the footprint of a god as he searched for his Beloved.

‘Are you going to start wearing a cape and spandex leggings, SuperEd?’

‘Whatever works,’ he smiled back. I started to move towards him and he held up a hand. ‘First promise me something. Promise you won’t go asking more questions about the Poet. Promise you’ll keep yourself safe.’

‘I don’t even know where to go looking…’

‘Promise me. Promise me you won’t ask questions. Promise me that.’

‘Ed, I have to find him. However I can.’

‘Then rely on him. Rely on his letters. If you start asking questions—’ He looked around as though something in the room might end his sentence for him. When nothing did, he settled for, ‘I don’t want to think about what they could do to you.’

‘I have to be willing to risk something. You have to be willing to risk some things when the stakes are high enough. Don’t you see that?’ There was my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth, her very words.

‘But what if you alert them?’ He came up to me and took me by the hands. ‘What if your questions arouse their suspicions and they find out about the letters?’

‘I don’t know how not to fight for this.’ Mama, how long have you been hiding inside me? ‘Don’t talk to me as though there’s a choice involved. I must do whatever I can.’

His grip on my hands was almost painful. ‘If you won’t protect yourself, protect him. Secrecy is your ally here. If anyone knows you’ve discovered he’s still alive…’

I leaned my head on to his chest. His heart was like a piston. I was no threat, but Omi was. If anyone started to wonder why I was asking questions and traced the encrypted letters back to him…

‘Yes.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘You’re right.’

He exhaled and kissed the top of my head.

‘This doesn’t mean I’m giving up, Ed. I’m just going to have to think through my next move carefully.’

‘Can I think with you?’

‘It’s really not your mind I’m interested in, spandex boy.’

He put his arms around me and laughed. ‘Ditto, darling.’

There was no gloom any more in the shadowed room; the dull light was a softness of colour against which I could close my eyes to transmigrate into that darkness in which all discovery occurs through touch and smell and taste. Sea-blown citrus, and the sliver of skin at the borderland of stubble and lip.

And sound. There was also sound. A hand jiggling the doorknob.

Ed and I pulled apart, each of us stepping backward along the paisleyed bridge as the door opened and Shehnaz Saeed entered.

XVII

In her chiffon sari, with a diamond bracelet around her wrist, Shehnaz Saeed looked so utterly the part of the star that it was possible to believe the rectangle of illumination she stood in hadn’t been thrown by the bright lights of the hallway but simply followed her everywhere she went.

‘Oh, there you are. I thought I heard you drive up. Eid Mubarak, Aasmaani.’ She walked over and kissed me on the cheek, then looked at Ed and raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I interrupting something?’ she said low into my ear.

‘You don’t have to whisper.’ Ed’s voice was cold, even more so than it had been when I first walked in. I glanced at him, wondering what I had missed. I was suddenly very conscious that this was the first time I was seeing the two of them together.

‘And you don’t have to be so edgy,’ Shehnaz Saeed said in that not-in-front-of-the-guest tone which I had often given Beema reason to employ during my adolescence.

Ed picked up the paperweight again and tossed it from palm to palm with affected casualness. ‘You should have walked in a few minutes ago. We were having a conversation I’m sure you could have added a lot to.’

‘Oh?’ She seemed not to see that he was baiting her. ‘What about?’

‘Mothers and sex.’

‘Ed!’ I couldn’t believe he’d actually said it.

Shehnaz Saeed looked from him to me, her cheeks colouring. ‘What has he been saying to you?’

I shook my head, mute with horror at the impropriety of it all.

‘I haven’t said anything, Mother.’

She continued to look at me, and I shook my head again, this time to indicate no, he hasn’t said anything.

At last she turned back to him and said with simple dignity, ‘Aasmaani and I will be in the lounge. Join us when you’ve had time to grow up.’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘Come on, darling.’