‘I never said that to Ed.’ The chihuahua’s front paws were scrabbling at my shins. ‘Director, basket!’ I ordered and the animal darted out of the door.

‘Your mother never liked chihuahuas either,’ Shehnaz said.

And once again, in her presence, it was impossible to feel anything but utterly at ease. I walked over to the sofa and sat down across from her. ‘So why did you do it? Imitate my mother?’

‘Why do you imitate your mother?’

‘When?’

‘All the time. You have all these gestures. Like now. The way you’re sitting. The way your arm is crooked on the back of the sofa and your head is resting on your hand. That. Right there.’

I moved my arm down to my side. ‘I’m not…’

‘No, of course not. You’re not imitating her. You’re just sitting. That’s how you sit. You may have learnt it from her. You may have copied her at one point in time, but now that’s just the way you sit.’

‘I don’t understand your point.’

‘Look, my character in Boond, she smokes. It’s a big plot point. She smokes a very particular imported brand of cigarette from Guatemala or Ecuador or some other place that exports bananas. She has always smoked that brand, ever since she was a college student. In episode three, someone she’s trying to hide from will know that she’s been in his office because he’ll find a stub of her cigarette in his waste-paper basket. So, she’s a smoker, always has been. When we were filming that flashback pregnancy scene, the director said, OK, no smoking in this scene because she’s pregnant. She said, Shehnaz, do that air cigarette thing you did in Nashaa to show us she’s trying to quit. Did you ever see Nashaa, Aasmaani?’

‘Yes.’ It was the last telefilm she acted in before she retired.

‘Yes. Here.’ She uncurled herself from the sofa and put a tape in the VCR. ‘I was thinking of sending this to you with my driver but I didn’t know if it would make things worse.’ She pressed ‘PLAY’, and there, on-screen, was a young Shehnaz Saeed smoking air cigarettes as my mother used to.

‘I got it from her, from Samina. When I did Nashaa, early on when I was still finding my way into the character’s skin, I was having dinner with Samina and she’d run out of cigarettes so she started air smoking. And I said, can I borrow that mannerism? Take it, she said, and continued to demonstrate it for me so that I’d get it right. But once I got it right it became mine. That’s how I smoke cigarettes that aren’t really there. I don’t think of it in terms of your mother any more than you think of her when you rest your arm on the back of a sofa. I learned gestures and expression from her, Aasmaani, turns of phrase and a way of squaring my shoulders when I don’t want to show that I’m intimidated. All these things and more, I learned from your mother. But in time you internalize all that you learn, and it becomes yours. I wasn’t imitating your mother in Boond.’ She gestured to the screen once more. ‘I was imitating myself imitating her all those years ago. I’m sorry that I didn’t stop to think that it would upset you. Believe me, that possibility didn’t even cross my mind.’

‘I see.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘You said, I have all these gestures which are hers.’

‘Gestures, cadences, entire sentences of speech.’

‘Like what? Tell me.’

‘It’ll only make you self-conscious. You are your own woman, Aasmaani. But it does make my breath stop sometimes, the way Samina peeps out from behind your eyes.’

There was something in her voice as she said my mother’s name for which I couldn’t quite find a word.

‘You should come for dinner next week,’ she said, her tone changing into briskness. ‘My husband will be back from Rome for a few days. I think you’d like him. Although, no, actually, let me retract that invitation until I check with Ed. The two of them alternate between being civil and pretending the other one doesn’t exist.’

I’d almost forgotten there was a husband. ‘Why does he spend so much time in Rome?’

‘His boyfriend lives there.’ ‘Oh.’

She cracked a peanut shell open with her teeth and looked remarkably pleased with herself. ‘That was almost exactly your mother’s reaction all those years ago. Don’t start giving me those pitying looks, darling. He’s a lovely man and he’s given me both unstinting friendship and stability.’ She gestured around the opulent room. ‘In exchange I’ve given him the freedom to be with the love of his life, his university sweetheart, who, being Jewish and male — a terrible combination, in these parts — was entirely unacceptable to his family, who threatened to disinherit him. Also, his mother kept having a stroke each time he said he would rather live without money than live a lie, and he’s a real mother’s boy. So, he married me. Made Mummy happy — and convinced her that homosexuality is cured with just a little bit of parental firmness and a friendly doctor who’s happy to misdiagnose heartburn. And after that, he could spend as much time as he wanted in Rome on “business trips” with David. Close your mouth, Aasmaani, you look undignified.’

‘But…’ I looked at her curled on the couch, unsure if she was playing another game with me as she had that first time we met. ‘But you’re Shehnaz Saeed. You could have found plenty of men who would have given you financial stability and also…’

‘Sex?’

‘In a nutshell.’

‘Yes, well, there’s the rub.’ She squared her shoulders.

And just like that, it was clear. The Others, Ed had called her various lovers, and it hadn’t occurred to me to think about the absence of gender in that term.

‘You and Mama. You were in love with her.’

She looked steadily at me. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ I leaned back in my sofa and tried to form a reaction to that. ‘When did that happen?’

‘Why?’ she demanded, with sudden force. ‘Does the timing of it alter the unnaturalness of the emotion?’

‘Unnaturalness? Is that what you think I think? Shehnaz — Aunty — my mother didn’t raise any bigoted children.’

At that she ducked her head and smiled, and I smiled back, my mother’s disdain for the sheer stupidity of narrow-mindedness filling the room around us.

When Shehnaz Saeed looked up again, there was almost palpable relief on her face. ‘It probably started the first time we met. At least that seems inevitable now. But I became aware of it a few months after the Poet died.’

‘And how did she…? Did she reciprocate?’

Shehnaz Saeed laughed. ‘It’s sweet of you to pretend to believe that’s a possibility.’

‘Well…” I spread my hands. ‘You’re a total babe. And I can’t pretend to know the range of my mother’s… interests.’

‘You really are so much like her. Her way of letting me down gently was to say, “My hormones are too inscribed with the habit of Him to consider anyone else. Of any gender.”’

‘And that didn’t stop you loving her?’

‘Oh no.’

For a little while we both sat where we were, looking straight ahead. Then I went over and sat down beside her. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

I leaned back and breathed in deeply. ‘For loving her unreservedly after Omi died. I’ve thought she didn’t have that from anyone.’

‘Oh, darling. She had it from you.’

‘We both know that isn’t true.’

Shehnaz Saeed sighed. ‘She understood. She said adolescence is horrible enough without having to deal with a mother unable to cope with the world and a father-figure brutally killed.’

‘She talked to you about me?’

‘Of course she did.’ She rested her palm on the top of my head. That was one of my mother’s gestures of affection, but somehow I knew this time that Shehnaz wasn’t imitating, merely replicating a gesture she’d learnt from my mother and made her own through using it unselfconsciously. ‘She talked to everyone about you. You were the world to her.’

‘The Poet was the world to her.’ Despite everything, that particular scar still bit down into my bones.