All those years, when I stayed with my mother, she made the Poet sleep next door. Even when they were in Colombia and Egypt he’d have his own room. Such strange nods to social convention. As if I would have cared. I thought it was a tiny thing, for them to sleep apart. But now, as Ed shifted and his mouth touched my shoulder, I thought, Omi, I’m sorry. Mama, you didn’t need to.

I looked at my watch. Rabia would have flown back from Islamabad by now and it was well past the hour when I usually called to tell her not to worry if I was staying out late. The trappings of family. I eased myself out of Ed’s arms, dressed, and picked his cordless phone off the receiver. I’d left my mobile in Shakeel’s car. Another reason for Rabia to worry. I stepped outside into the hallway. It was eerily quiet. The window shutters threw shadows in front of me. If I stepped into the shadows I would be caught between slats.

I dialled Rabia’s mobile, and she answered on the first ring.

Aasmaani, where are you?’

‘Sorry. Just lost track of time. I’m at Ed’s.’

There was silence on the other end, and then Rabia pushed aside whatever questions came to mind and said, ‘Are you going to be there much longer?’

For a moment I wanted to laugh. Shehnaz Saeed may have told me she’d been in love with my mother, but she would still consider it a terrible breach of etiquette if I came down for breakfast with Ed in the morning. I’d probably be too embarrassed to speak myself.

‘I don’t have a car here.’

‘You wouldn’t be driving alone at this hour in any case,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that Ed of yours going to drop you home?’

‘He’s sleeping.’

There was another pause. Then she said, ‘OK, we’re on our way home from the airport.’ Now I could make out the intermittent sound of late-night traffic in the background. ‘We’re coming to get you. Should I call this number when we get there?’

‘You’ll wake up the whole house. Tell me how long it’ll take you to get here and I’ll come down.’

She told me three minutes. I ended the call and went back into the bedroom.

‘Ginkgo Biloba,’ I whispered next to Ed’s ear as I bent down to kiss his neck.

I looked around for a pen to write him a note and found, instead, his laptop on the desk at the far end of his room. I lifted the lid, pressed the space bar, and the computer hummed to life. He’d been using the word processor and hadn’t exited the program, so as soon as the computer retreated out of its hibernation a blue screen appeared, awaiting white letters to fill it up.

I turned to look at Ed, my fingers moving across the keyboard as I watched him sleep.

Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

Pithy, but to the point.

I looked back at the screen.

It said: Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?

XXIII

Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?

Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

I kept looking at the sentence, my brain too attuned to decrypting the code to doubt what I was reading, yet knowing that it was impossible, what I thought I was seeing was impossible.

Mama, I wrote.

Afaf, the word appeared.

The Minions came again today, I wrote.

Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb, the screen spat back at me.

My ex calls

Ab ed efggh

I jerked my hands off the keyboard. Now it was only my own breath I could hear, ragged.

The light from the street lamps outside made everything around me part visible. I looked at the bookshelf along the wall, and certain books seemed to draw my eyes to them. Morte d’Arthur. Urdu Poetry: A Study. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—gold letters, black binding.

My hands were poised in the air, halfway between the keyboard and my eyes. I brought them down — this required great concentration — on to the desk, one on either side of the laptop. My index finger touched a pen, half-hidden under a piece of paper. I lifted it up, unscrewed the top. A calligraphy pen. I remembered the scrawl of Omi’s handwriting in that postcard he’d sent my mother from Colombia. No curves, no loops. For him the aesthetic of language was in its sound, not its visual appearance.

‘I don’t understand,’ I whispered.

In the quiet of the room, the words carried. Ed shifted. I turned to look at him. He reached out for me, found I wasn’t next to him, and sat up in bed.

‘Oh,’ he said, smiling a beautiful half-asleep smile. ‘There you are.’

‘I was going to tell you something, Ed, but I think you already know.’

He smiled again, lay down and closed his eyes. ‘I love you too, Aasmaani.’

‘I was going to tell you, Ed, that my ex calls the ochre winter autumn as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.’

For a moment he didn’t move and then he was throwing the covers off, running across the room, absurdly naked, his hand reaching out for the laptop and slamming the lid shut.

‘A bit late for that, I think.’ I stood up, my face inches away from his. ‘I don’t… I can’t quite understand this, Ed, but I think you need to tell me the truth and I think I’ll know if you’re lying.’

‘Oh God, Aasmaani.’ He cupped my face in his hand, gently stroking my jaw-line with his thumb. ‘Why did you have to do that?’

I didn’t know how to answer except literally. ‘I wanted to leave you a note. I saw the computer before I saw the pen.’ I frowned, trying to make some sense of things, pulled away from him. ‘Are you one of the Minions?’

But he only looked at me more sadly.

‘No, of course not. That wouldn’t make sense.’

If the people we’ve buried walked back into our lives would we recognize them or would our brain be so assured of their deaths, and of death’s insistence on obliterating our corporeal selves, that it would make us glance at their faces and then turn away, thinking, I cannot look at this person who reminds me of what I have lost? As I stood there with Ed — the computer screen, the pen, the books all at the edges of my vision — I did not allow myself to see what I was seeing, I did not allow that information to overturn the certainty that had built up in my mind these last weeks. I think I would have believed any lie Ed told me, if it seemed even partially plausible.

He said, ‘All those encrypted pages you read, I wrote them.’

I waited for him to laugh. I waited for him to say, ‘And if you believe that one I’ve got a cloud to sell you.’ I waited, and while I waited I knew that I might not survive the inescapable truth that he wasn’t lying.

‘Please don’t do this.’ My voice was not something I recognized.

‘I love you, Aasmaani. This is all because I love you.’

‘What are you saying, Ed? I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

His hands dropped away from me. ‘You weren’t even supposed to see it, that’s the ridiculous part. That first message. The Minions came again today. You weren’t supposed to see it. I didn’t even know you when I wrote it. I wrote it for my mother.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I knew the code, Aasmaani. There was no need for your mother to keep it a secret in the end. One night she was here for dinner, and I was here, too. I was at university at the time, I didn’t live here, but…’

‘Ed. Please. I don’t need domestic details.’

‘She explained the code. She gave us the sentence. The jazz fugues sentence. I went away and wrote it down. Kept it all these years. I was sure my mother would do the same. There was no distinction in my ideas of love and obsession until you.’ He lifted a hand to touch me and then dropped it again. I could still smell him on me.

‘Put some clothes on, Ed.’

He walked past me to the wardrobe, and I watched in silence as he put on jeans and a T-shirt.

‘So why did you write it?’ I said at last.

‘For years I’d been wanting my mother to act again. I knew she wanted to, only she was scared to take that first step. So I thought, OK, she needs a reason to say yes after all those years she’s been saying no. So I got a job at STD, and I came home and said, Amma, enough of this retirement stuff, OK? And she said no.’ He pulled some tiny clinging thing off his shirt. ‘I was so angry. All these years everyone thought she stopped acting because of motherhood. She didn’t. She stopped because of Samina.’