‘And made you give it to me.’

‘Yes. I was sick with guilt, again. That’s why I went over to your place that evening. To tell you. To explain. And then I got there, and I just couldn’t. Because it would have meant saying goodbye to you.’

We were both silent, thinking back to that evening.

‘I couldn’t tell you the truth. I couldn’t even tell you it was impossible that he was writing the pages. I just couldn’t. It just kept going from there.’

‘Things keep on and keep on.’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long were you planning to keep it going, Ed?’

‘Today’s was to be the last. I thought maybe — I hadn’t thought it through properly — but maybe I’d send you a final letter from one of the Minions to say the Poet had died peacefully in his sleep.’

‘You were going to make me lose him again?’

‘I would have helped you get through it. I’m sorry, Aasmaani. It got beyond my control. I couldn’t continue lying to you any more than I could tell you the truth.’

‘One letter from the Minions and it would have been over? You really believed that?’

He lifted his hand in a gesture of futility. ‘I knew I had to find a way to make it stop. I just didn’t quite know how.’

‘The crosswords. Why, Ed? Why intensify the fantasy by making me believe I could speak to him?’

‘I had to. For your sake. How else could I keep you from continuing your public enquiries about what happened to him? God, you terrified me when you said you were doing that.’ He took my hand, finally. ‘I loved you almost from the first moment we met. I knew instantly that something was happening between us, something that I couldn’t control or stop. You knew my heart, Aasmaani. You had my heart, it was beating in your chest, my damaged, obsessive heart.’

I gripped his hand more tightly. I wanted to kiss him quiet, kiss him wordless, but he was looking at me so intensely that I couldn’t move.

‘And those letters, they were the only way you’d let me into your life. As the delivery boy.’

‘You didn’t have to be the delivery boy. You were you, that’s enough. You don’t have to jump off a tree and break your leg to make someone stay with you, don’t you know that?’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had become so adept at walking away from people. Ed was here with me now because he’d found the one chink, the one part of me which was wound instead of armour.

‘Let’s be honest. The only way I could get into your life was as Merlin, possessing the information you needed. I’m sorry about that letter — the one about your mother’s perversions. I was so angry when I wrote that one. But all the others, all the others, Aasmaani, they weren’t cruel, were they? When I saw all that unhappiness in your life, I knew I could use the letters to make it better. I only wanted to make you happy in the end. I couldn’t do it on my own. But in the Poet’s voice, I could. This one today, it was to be the final letter. The one you could go back to and know that he and your mother had something together which no one could take away from them. I didn’t know that myself until I met you. Isn’t that strange? Between you and the letters, you rewrote me. Turned me into someone who could understand love, and what a blessing it is. Two nights ago after we saw Boond together, when you fell asleep in my arms, I knew I couldn’t continue the deception any longer. I had to put an end to it. I realized that as you slept. I started working out the contents of that letter in my head as you slept — your breath my only metronome.’

I smiled. ‘It was the first detail you got wrong, as far as I know. I would have realized it if I’d had time to think it over. He didn’t write when she slept. He wrote in the mornings after they’d had breakfast together.’ I said that, and then I saw Omi, bent over his desk. I saw him, because I was in the room with him. I was the only person in the world he allowed into his study when he wrote. I’d sit there, and read one of the books from his library — Elizabeth Bishop and Mir were two of our joint favourites — learning to love their word combinations before I really understood what they meant.

I pulled my hand out of Ed’s grasp.

All the while he’d been talking, I had followed along his story, Ed the conflicted hero at the heart of it. It was his story I was listening to and concentrating on, the camera was on him alone. How could it have taken so long to think what I should have thought instantly?

‘Omi died sixteen years ago.’ I stepped away from him.

‘Aasmaani?’

A hammer smashed down, all the weight of a grown man’s body behind it. A bone split in two. Omi called out, ‘Samina!’ The hammer lifted again, smashed down again. Another bone split. They pulled his teeth out, one by one. Took the hammer to his bones again. His body becoming pulp. ‘Samina. Samina.’ My mother every day after his death had to imagine this. Every single day she could not help but imagine this. They cut out his tongue. He continued to mouth her name. Samina. Their fists on his face, his nose, his cheekbones. Bruises spreading across his face like rivers melting through ice, crawling together into a mass of blue. The only thing recognizable in him any more the shape his mouth kept forming. Samina. My love. Samina.

I was down on my knees. Ed was crouching next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him through the screams. And then the door was flung open, and Beema ran to me, Rabia and Shakeel and Shehnaz Saeed behind her. Beema put her arms around me, pulling me close to her, never letting go until there was no voice left in me and then Shakeel lifted me in his arms, and they thought I had stopped screaming as he carried me down the stairs and into the car, but I hadn’t. I didn’t stop screaming for a very long time.

XXIV

They have it easy, the ones who can mourn the dead.

I sat hunched over in bed, in the spare bedroom of Dad and Beema’s Islamabad house, staring into the red bars of the electric heater. If I looked long enough that image would sear itself on to my retina and when I shut my eyes those bars would be all I’d see. Not Omi, not rivers melting through ice, not my mother drowning in the thought of those rivers.

I had never properly mourned Omi. I realized as much the day Beema packed my clothes and took me away from Karachi and Ed and Shehnaz Saeed, into the green, unreal calm of Islamabad. That he had left my life, yes, I mourned that, but never the manner of his dying. And now that I tried to complete the process of grief, the man I mourned was the Omi of the encrypted pages. The man who shouted, ‘Frass! Frass!’ to the Minions, who wanted to grow maudlin in the moonlight with Shehnaz Saeed discussing the woman they both loved, who spoke of my mother’s ‘peachjuicemouth’, who wondered if I had overshadowed him yet. I mourned him and, while mourning, remembered that the man I was crying for had never even existed, and I had no language then to articulate my loss.

And Ed. I tried to tell myself that the Ed I loved had never really existed either, but I knew that wasn’t true. I had loved Ed most for the pain he carried around, and the secrets which he revealed that night in his room did nothing to lessen the pain — quite the contrary. And also, that voice in the pages, the voice I thought was Omi’s, the voice I had loved, that was Ed’s voice, too.

A shadow fell across the red bars. I looked up and saw Beema standing in the doorway.

‘Do you ever sleep?’ she said.

‘I suppose I must. There are lost hours of almost every day, these days. Do you?’

She partway lifted her shoulders, and then dropped them before the gesture could become a shrug. The doctors had said there was nothing more they could do for Beema’s mother, so we’d brought her home to die. Beema spent hours at a stretch sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, moving only when someone opened the door to let in a draught — then she’d smooth down the goosebumps that appeared on her mother’s skin, though the old lady was well past being aware of such things. Watching her, I sometimes felt envy.