Her hand slipped off my head. ‘They were mythic,’ she said. ‘The Poet and the Activist. They walked into a room and crowds parted for them. The sea itself would have parted for them if they’d so demanded. That’s how we felt, all of us who were their audience.’ She looked down at her finger nails, and pushed a cuticle back to reveal a tiny sliver of a half-moon between her nail polish and skin.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her. Tell me about you and her.’

‘You sure this doesn’t make you uncomfortable?’

‘Why should it?’ And then I knew: Ed. The Others, he had spat out. ‘It’s your son, isn’t it? He’s the one who called it unnaturalness?’

‘Don’t think badly of him for it. If there’d been other men in my life he wouldn’t have been any happier. Oh, and I dealt so badly with it. It wasn’t until several years after my divorce that I was able to face the truth about myself, and then I was ashamed, Aasmaani, of who I was. Ed was such a sensitive child. I think he picked up that feeling of shame from me. And of course I wasn’t going to tell him outright. So I lied and sneaked around. Made him spend the night at the homes of cousins he didn’t like. I don’t even know when or how he found out — but one day in his adolescence he hurled it at me. You’re not a real woman, he said.’

I could see him saying it. And I could see him hating himself for saying it afterwards.

‘He was angriest about your mother. He thought we were having an affair and I never denied it.’

‘Why let him think something that would make him so angry if it wasn’t true?’

‘Because it wasn’t any of his business. That’s what Samina taught me — that it wasn’t anyone’s business and no one had a right to question me about it and demand answers. She was, you know, the person who finally made me dispense with all feelings of shame. My husband was largely responsible, too, but it was Samina who took that final filament of shame off my skin and just blew it away.’

‘How?’

‘I delivered some tortured monologue to her one evening. About desire and identity and what we admit to ourselves and what we admit to others and how do we know when reining in desire is repression and when it’s just good manners? I went on and on about this. And when I finally stopped to draw breath, Samina shrugged and said, “I’ve never liked mangoes. People say it means I’m not a true Pakistani, but I’ve never liked mangoes. Nothing to be done about it, and frankly I don’t see why I should bother to try. The way I see it I’m just expanding people’s notions of what it means to be Pakistani.” And that was the entire conversation for her, right there.’

Mama. Always a woman who could cut to the quick of things.

‘I do wonder sometimes,’ Shehnaz Saeed went on. ‘Did I love her enough to love her unselfishly, really unselfishly? If she’d pulled out of her depression and found herself in a frame of mind to consider being with someone else, and that someone else wasn’t me, would I have been able to accept it?’

‘We’re back to the depression storyline, are we? The one which meets with such high viewer approval it’s going to keep running for ever.’

‘You don’t accept that she suffered depression?’ She was looking at me as though I’d just told her the world was flat.

I shrugged. ‘She stepped out of her character.’

‘She did what?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. Forget it.’

‘Stepped out of her character?’ I didn’t know if she was ignoring me or if I hadn’t actually spoken aloud. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it, I suppose. Though it’s more a question of your character stepping out of you, isn’t it? Or of the different parts not holding together, or one part overwhelming the rest. There’s still so little we understand about it, isn’t there, for all the strides science has made in the last decade and a half?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Shehnaz Saeed walked over to her bookshelf and pulled out an armload of books. ‘Here. Take these home. Read them.’ She opened her arms and the books fell on to the sofa with a thomp! which released a spray of dust from the sofa cushions. I looked at the titles. Living With Depression. Brain Chemistry. What Can We Do? Virginia Woolf: Diaries and Letters.

I looked up at her, my eyebrow arching. ‘Virginia Woolf? Oh, come on.’

She sat down again. ‘Sometimes, near the end, I didn’t see her for days or weeks because she couldn’t even come to the phone or get out of bed. I used to go to your house in the morning, while you were at school, and just sit by her bedside talking to her, or not talking, just sitting there. Some days she’d come over and all she’d do was weep. Your stepmother and I, we convinced Samina she should get professional help. But we were both so clueless. We just saw a sign outside a clinic saying “PSYCHOTHERAPIST” and we took her there. Without a single reference. The man was a complete nightmare. He told her that what she was experiencing was delayed guilt about having an extra-marital relationship for all those years. She said — it was one of her stronger days — she said, “Doctor, then I’m afraid things are going to get much worse for me. Because I think I might do it again, and this time it might even be with a woman.”’

‘There you go. She was making fun of him. And of the whole process. Because she knew it wasn’t depression. She knew she didn’t need to seek out professional help.’

‘It was one of her periods of reprieve. That’s what she called them. She always knew they wouldn’t last very long.’

I hated those periods most of all. Those moments, those days, sometimes weeks, when she reverted to her old self and became the Samina of grazia again. I didn’t understand then what she was doing, what was happening to her, what she was making happen. And so those days were just reminders of what I’d lose when she retreated into her self-imposed darkness again.

Incandescent. Aflame. Those were the words we all used about her. She was supposed to be the Olympic torch, the fire that never burnt out. I would have thrown myself into that fire to keep it alight, but that power was never mine. So all I could do in those last two years was watch with dread each time she emerged into brilliance.

‘That was the cruellest thing she did. Remind us what she used to be like, what she could be like.’

Shehnaz Saeed closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘It was like watching beautiful, fragile butterfly wings exploding out of a chrysalis. It could never be anything but short-lived.’

Stay believing that, I thought. Keep loving her without anger. I won’t be the one to tell you the truth.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything.’

‘Why did you stop acting? It wasn’t because you were planning to have more children, was it?’

‘I don’t know how that story got started. I never publicly gave any reason. Well, I suppose that is how the story got started. People need reasons, don’t they? If you don’t give them one, they’ll pick one for you. I just stopped. That’s it.’

‘So it’s just coincidence that it happened just a few months after the Poet died? No correlation there?’

She stood up and walked towards the windows. It was dark now. She drew the heavy silk curtains. ‘I was offered a part which would have required being away from Karachi for several weeks. I didn’t want to leave her. And I was recently married — he’d put this house in my name — so my bank account didn’t require me to work any more. Things snowballed in my mind after that.’

‘You quit acting so that you could be around for my mother at all times?’

‘Yes. But don’t think of it as a sacrifice. It was entirely self-serving.’

‘Tell me another. I know how difficult it was to be around her in those days.’

‘What was difficult was the jealousy, in the beginning. Before I understood the way depression works. What was difficult was the period in which I’d think, why can’t I make you stop going mad with grief over him? Why does he have such complete power over you, even in death?’