‘Get your hand off her,’ Ed said, his voice still icy. ‘Otherwise I’ll tell her all those things you don’t want told, and she’ll push you off herself.’

‘Ed, enough with the Jekyll and Hyde bit,’ I said.

At that, Shehnaz Saeed dropped her hand from my arm and turned to her son again. ‘You’d be a fool to let me get between you and her. I can’t undo what I’ve done, or who I am. Tell her. Go on. I don’t mind. I’m not ashamed of it. And I won’t have your shame over it — over me — wreck your own chance of happiness.’

All of a sudden, Ed looked as though he was going to weep. ‘I’m sorry, Amma.’ He came up to her and leaned his head on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘My boy,’ she said, stroking his hair. ‘My baby boy.’

I stood to one side, wishing they weren’t between the door and me so that I could simply slip away. My God, Ed, have you any idea how lucky you are that she’s still here to forgive you? Let her do that. Do yourself a favour, and let her forgive you for everything. For all the accusations, all the hurt, all the betrayals, all the ways in which you weren’t enough.

‘Aasmaani?’ Shehnaz Saeed held a hand out to me. ‘The horribly awkward moment is over. Come on, let’s go into the lounge.’

We walked into the hallway together, all three of us, and in that magical way in which families can be restored to good humour seconds after they’ve all but cut out one another’s hearts, Ed and his mother had their arms around each other, their voices as they spoke consisting of nothing but lightness.

‘Have you told Aasmaani about the dictionary man?’ Shehnaz Saeed said. ‘Aasmaani, did you hear about the dictionary man in Multan?’

I shook my head, and Ed and his mother laughed.

‘You tell her, Amma. You tell it better than me.’

‘I wasn’t even there when it happened.’

‘Never mind. You tell it.’

Shehnaz Saeed stopped walking and put a hand on my wrist. ‘So Ed’s in Multan last week, filming the Ramzan special. And at the end of a long day he’s relaxing in the coffee shop of his hotel…”

‘Drinking instant coffee.’

‘Drinking instant coffee. And in walks this irate man with jowls so droopy they could carry him away in a strong wind. And he’s got a book in his hand which he starts waving at Ed like a fanatic holding the Word of God, ready to produce the black-and-white evidence that drinking anything other than percolated coffee is an unpardonable sin.’

‘And he comes up to me and slams the book down on the table in front of me, flipping it open to a page which his thumb had been marking. And I see it’s an Urdu dictionary he’s holding. And he says — Amma, tell her.’

‘He says,’ her voice turned squeaky, its rhythms truncated, ‘“I’ve found your dirty secret. You TV people with your loose morals. Why Boond of all names, I wondered. Why a drop of rain? What sort of title is this? And now I see you’re having your vulgar jokes at the country’s expense.’ And he points to the definition of Boond and — even I didn’t know this, Aasmaani. In addition to rain or blood, which is what Kiran had in mind when she came up with the title, it also means—’

‘Semen,’ I finished.

‘You knew?’ Ed laughed.

‘Of course. One of the Poet’s early ghazals has “boond” as the radif. It also means spotted silk, by the way.’

‘We must talk about his poetry one day,’ Shehnaz Saeed said. ‘It would be such a pleasure to discuss it with you.’

As she said it, I imagined calling her up to say I was coming over to discuss poetry, and then leading Omi into this house with me. The look on Shehnaz Saeed’s face.

She had walked ahead of us into the lounge, and Ed was about to follow when I caught hold of his hand and squeezed it. He looked away as though he couldn’t bear my hopefulness. He didn’t quite believe Omi could still be alive and I knew, as though he’d whispered it into my ear one night so that it made its way into my dreams, that he couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to me if I had to face Omi’s death again. The sweetness of Shehnaz Saeed’s character resided in Ed, too, but in a concentrate at his very core. I rubbed my thumb along the back of his palm and he looked at me, eyes grave.

For a moment I thought he was going to say something and then he shook his head and we walked through the doorway into the room of Bukhara rug, Gandhara Buddhas and muted elegance which I had seen through the partially open door my first time in this house. On the walls were prints of Indian landscapes and monuments etched by English artists from the colonial era.

Shehnaz Saeed switched on the television, and put it on mute. There were only a few minutes to go before the start of Boond. ‘I’m so nervous I might throw up,’ she said, sitting down on a plush cream sofa. ‘I never used to be this nervous about watching myself.’

‘You’ll be fabulous.’ Ed sat down next to her. ‘You are Shehnaz Saeed. How could you not be fabulous?’

She looked up at him in surprised gratitude.

He can do and say anything he wants, I thought, and she won’t stop loving him. He’ll always be her baby boy. For all his faults, she’ll blame herself; not him. That knowledge made me tired, and again I thought of leaving. But Ed reached out and caught hold of my hand, right there with his mother watching, as though to say, no backing out now. We’re official.

Difficult, but worth it — that’s how my mother had once described life with Omi. I could see myself saying that about Ed.

As I sat down, still holding Ed’s hand, I caught Shehnaz Saeed looking over at us, and I thought I saw some wistfulness there, but not unhappiness. I wondered if she’d been in love with any of those other men Ed had talked about.

‘So you want to hear about the travails of my month?’ Ed asked. ‘Dictionary man aside. My mother’s already sat through part of the story.’

‘Oh, I’m more than happy to hear it again. Go bring the camera so Aasmaani can see the pictures.’

Ed nodded and left the room.

‘Now, I’m not one of those mothers who interferes in her son’s relationships,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, leaning over to me and lowering her voice. ‘So I’ll say only this. I’m glad it’s you. I’m glad enough to give you this piece of advice: what you did back there — standing up for me when he started to attack me — don’t do that again.’

‘I wasn’t standing up for you. I was objecting to his bad manners.’

‘Whatever it was. I’ve been the stumbling block in every relationship he’s had. Don’t stumble over me, Aasmaani. Kick me out of the way if you must, but don’t stumble over me. I’m so tired of being the reason for his loneliness.’

‘You feel guilty about him, don’t you?’

‘I wasn’t the mother I should have been.’

‘You could have done what my mother did. Sent him away to be raised by someone more fitting.’

Shehnaz straightened up, almost offended, it seemed. ‘Samina loved you.’

‘Abstractly.’

‘Relentlessly.’

‘For her, loving the Poet was addictive. Loving me was merely habit-forming.’

‘What is it with you children? Don’t you understand that lovers can never be to us what you are? You don’t occupy the same space.’ She stopped and raised her eyebrows. ‘That sounded really vulgar, didn’t it?’

‘I wasn’t going to be the one to mention it.’ I laughed and pointed to the clock. ‘The show’s about to begin.’

Ed came back into the room, carrying a digital camera. He had just started to cycle through the pictures, sitting next to me, his arm around my shoulder, when there was a cry of expectation from Shehnaz Saeed. Ed raised the volume. Shehnaz Saeed’s come-back began.

Within the first few minutes it was obvious that Boond would not send critics scrambling for their thesauruses, as had happened with Kiran and Shehnaz’s first collaboration, nearly two years ago, which the newspapers proclaimed ‘a miracle, a revelation and possibly a hallucination’.