She moved towards the heater, and held her hands inches from the red bars, her back towards me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t give up on yourself. You shouldn’t just decide you’ll never be OK again.’

I didn’t respond and a little while later she said, ‘What he did to you was unspeakable, and if I ever see him again I’ll probably draw blood. But there’s a part of me that’s almost grateful to him.’

‘To Ed?’

‘You’d been slipping, Aasmaani, away from us and from yourself for so long now. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about you. And you’d just say, I’m fine, I’m fine.’

‘So now I know I’m not fine, and how does that help me?’

She straightened up and turned towards me. ‘Fight for yourself. My God, child, what you’ve been through, from such a young age. It’s a wonder you’re still standing. My guess is, you’re stronger than all of us.’

Strong? I could barely get out of bed any more.

It might have been two minutes or two hours later that Beema left the room. I heard her whispering something to someone outside, and then my father’s voice, carrying clearly through the night’s silence, said, ‘You have to allow her this.’

‘That’s what we said about Samina.’ Beema’s voice was fierce with anger. ‘For God’s sake do something. I don’t know if I can bear this any longer.’ And then I heard something from her that I hadn’t heard in all the hours I watched her sit by her mother — weeping. I tried to feel some sympathy, some shame, but there was nothing in me to give, however hard I tried to locate it.

I suppose I slept at some point that night. It was something my body did while my mind proceeded relentlessly with its continuous feed of images — hammers and rivers and a thread of blood on Omi’s tongue as the razor cut through it. Or maybe I didn’t sleep. Maybe I just closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them there was daylight and my father stood beside my bed with a book in his hands.

‘This was your mother’s,’ he said, and placed the book beside me before leaving the room.

It was the Poet’s collected works. The book that lay on her bedside in the years after his death, which I was unable to pick up without picking up her grief along with it. Or my own grief, perhaps.

I opened the front cover. Turned to the table of contents. Turned past that. Kept going.

And there he was, rising out of the pages.

So many of the poems carried memories of Omi reciting them, Omi listening to my mother sing them, Omi talking about them. Here he was bawdy, here funny, here tender, here impassioned. In some places he sounded exactly like the man who had written about frass and minions, and in other places he sounded like someone else entirely, a voice that could never be imitated. It was mostly in his poems about my mother that I heard that inimitable voice. What struck me most about his poems — what I had quite forgotten — was not his mastery of form, or the complexity and concision of his thinking, or even his extraordinary sensitivity to the sound of each syllable. What struck me most was, simply, the greatness of his heart. Here was a man who faced exile, imprisonment, betrayal and deprivation without losing his sense of wonder. In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.

As I read I found with surprise how many of the poems were still stored in my brain, allowing me to anticipate the line ahead when I paused to turn a page. I found the girl I had once promised to be within the pages of that collection. The girl who knew his poems, who listened to him argue God with Mirza, poetry with my mother, political responsibility with Rafael. The girl who believed without question — I owed this to both him and my mother — that some things in the world you fight for, regardless of the cost to yourself, because the cost of not fighting is much higher. The girl he would have fought for, the girl my mother would have fought for. The girl I had to fight for.

I didn’t move from my bed all day as I made my way through those 312 poems, and as I read the last line of the final poem and turned to the end-page I saw, tucked into the inside flap of the back cover, a sheet of thin blue paper.

I think I knew what it was even before I unfolded it and saw the encrypted writing, with a date on top—28 April 1979—which told me this was composed just days after General Zia had Omi imprisoned.

I read the first three words of that letter, and for a moment it was Ed writing to me. And then I continued through the sentence, and it was no one but Omi speaking to Mama.

Forgive me, beloved, but your last letter was a thing of such absurdity I had to tear a corner off it and place it beneath my tongue as I slept, knowing it would fill my dreams with barking cats, suns that revolve around the planets in zigzag courses, and Siamese twins on stilts trying to tie each other’s shoelaces.

You can’t help worry, you wrote, about my imprisonment.

O my beautiful jailer, why would you wish upon me the indifference of freedom? These bars, those walls, the guards who shoot at unauthorized shadows which slide towards me in the prison yard — do you think I haven’t yet recognized them for what they are? Do you think I don’t know you’re responsible? You have always been so literal about the metaphorical, and I can’t deny that there are moments these days — particularly around meal times — when I wish it were otherwise. I know all the things I’ve said to you — I’m held captive by your heart, imprisoned in your grey-green eyes, and if you hold out the key of freedom to me it will melt with desire the instant my fingers touch yours to take possession of it.

That, Samina, was figurative language.

So I really didn’t expect to wake up within this cell, and at first, I’ll admit, I was a little irritated. But now that I’ve learnt to look more closely at the metaphor — did it turn concrete or have I become an abstraction? — I can’t help but applaud what you’ve done. In here, I am nothing but the man who loves you. All else is stripped away. Love and separation and longing — those are the stages of my day. The sun rises in one and sets in the other and darkness embraces me in the third.

1 think of Qais in exile, so consumed with the rapture of his love for Laila that love becomes entirely self-obsessed, unwilling to drag its gaze away from itself long enough to recognize the object of that love walk across the surrounding wasteland. The object of my love, Qais thinks, would make the ground grow verdant at the touch of her feet, not like this sensibly shod woman who creates only shadows as she walks, her clothes sweat-stained from travel. And as I recall Qais I begin to fear — for how can the woman in my head really exist, how can such a love bear reality? That is the only fear I have in here. The only thing they could do to hurt me, Samina, is to make you other than the woman I believe — no, I know — you really are.

I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.

Give Aasmaani the largest possible embrace from me. Ask her to explain metaphors to you if you find yourself struggling with your tendency towards the literal — she understands these things better than either of us could imagine.