I rested my head against his chest. ‘I miss her,’ I said, and at last I cried for her death.

Maybe a bird didn’t start to sing outside the window in notes of heartbreaking beauty. But when I recall that moment, that’s how I remember it.

XXV

That was January. Now it’s April. I’m back in Karachi, and yesterday I saw Ed.

It was at the café at which I’d met Mirza, the café to which Ed had invited me for coffee that day in the office when he decided to tell me the truth, though I don’t think even he knew if he really would have done that when the moment came.

I was driving near the café when I saw Ed’s car parked outside, and knew I would have to stop.

‘You look terrible,’ I said, when I entered and saw him sitting alone, though that was a lie.

His frame seemed to shrink at the sound of my voice. He looked up from his coffee-cup. ‘You don’t.’

‘I just want you to know, Ed, in case there’s any confusion about this, that what you did to me was unforgivable.’

He blinked in weary agreement. ‘But you’ve survived it, as you survive everything, Aasmaani. Whereas I, well, I’ve lost the only two people who have ever mattered to me. You and my mother. She doesn’t want anything to do with me either, it appears. Let that give you some pleasure.’

I felt achingly sorry for him, despite everything. I remembered lying in his arms, and the abandon of believing we had a future together, and it would be a lie to say I didn’t regret most bitterly that things hadn’t worked out the way I had wanted them to in those few moments when Ed and I found each other and found completion.

‘I owe you a great deal,’ I said.

He looked up with a twisted smile, as though waiting for the punchline.

‘I mean it. What you did really was unforgivable—’

‘I think you’ve made that point.’

‘But it made me look at all those other things I’ve thought of as unforgivable in my life. And it made me look at all the reasons I have to ask for people’s forgiveness. You’re among those people, you know.’

For a moment, the corners of his mouth started to lift up. And then he said, ‘But you can’t forgive me.’

‘I can’t trust you. However much I may continue to love you.’

He opened his mouth, but I shook my head and he smiled a little sadly and looked down into his coffee-cup. There was nothing more we had to say to each other, and we both knew it.

I walk along the beach. I walk slowly. The sand is shot through with silver and I have to dodge the clumps of dried seaweed. There’s a tear in the sand. I lift it up, careful not to squash it. A tentacle emerges, translucent. It straightens and then curls, seeking something that will help it sustain life. I carry it to the water which abandoned it on shore and place it in the waves.

A boy on the rocks at one end of the beach is shouting something, his voice lost in the wind. He raises two pieces of wood, held together in a manner that suggests a gun, and pumps invisible bullets into the sea. He is a boy enraptured by the glamour of certainty: you can read it in his face.

I draw closer and now I can hear him. There are no words coming out of his throat, just a cry of triumph.

Did they cry out like that, the men who broke Omi?

There was no way to find who they were, not when the trail was seventeen years cold. They weren’t men who left clues. And my pathetic attempts at investigation hadn’t caused them the slightest twitch. All those phone calls, it had transpired, came from a lonely man at STD who spent his day calling different women and hanging up when they answered. Sometimes the world is so sad, and so senseless.

That’s what they did, Omi and Mama: they gave meaning to the world when it seemed senseless.

It’s true, of course, that I’m just creating another story for myself, another version of my mother’s life, and Omi’s, and mine. But if, in the end, the ways in which we apprehend the world are merely synonymous with the stories in which we feel most comfortable, then this is a story I am willing to claim for my world. And one I’m determined to spread.

I’ve been in touch with one of STD’s rival companies to volunteer my services as researcher for a documentary about the women’s movement in Pakistan, to be broadcast in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Hudood Ordinances. At first the executives at the company weren’t too enthusiastic. It would be a direct assault, they said, on the religious parties in the Frontier. Well, yes, I said, and I have other plans in mind, too. When they continued to dither I called Shehnaz Saeed and she said she’d narrate the show and consider talking to the TV channel about future projects, too. There was no dithering after that.

And Shehnaz did something else for me, something remarkable. Yesterday she sent me a home movie she’d shot at a party, in 1983, and within it, for just a few seconds, Mama and Omi come into focus. They’re standing a few feet apart, and he’s watching her as though he’s never seen anything so beautiful. She’s talking to someone — that journalist who had warned me against prying that day in STD — and the camera finds her halfway through the conversation.

‘Look,’ Mama says. ‘It’s not about the ultimate victory. It’s just that a nation needs to be reminded of all the components of its character. That’s what we do when we resist, just as it’s what the poets do, what the artists and dancers and musicians and,’ she shot a glance over towards the camera and smiled, ‘don’t pretend you’re not hoping I’ll say this, Shehnaz — what the actresses do: we remind people, this, too, is part of your heritage and, more importantly, it can be part of your future. Be this rather than those creatures of tyranny.’

‘Why should they listen if the creatures of tyranny are the ones with power?’ the journalist said.

Mama exchanged smiles with Omi, as though somehow the conversation had stumbled into some private area of discourse that they’d long ago traversed. ‘It’s true, that in concrete battles the tyrants may have the upper hand in terms of tactics, weapons, ruthlessness. What our means of protest attempt to do is to move the battles towards abstract space. Force tyranny to defend itself in language. Weaken it with public opinion, with supreme court judgements, with debates and subversive curriculum. Take hold of the media, take hold of the printing presses and the newspapers, broadcast your views from pirate radio channels, spread the word. Don’t do anything less than all you are capable of, and remember that history outlives you. It may not be until your grandchildren’s days that they’ll point back and say, there were sown the seeds of what we’ve now achieved.’ She looked at Omi again.

‘What will Aasmaani say about us when we’ve gone?’ he said, smiling at her, ignoring everyone else. ‘That’s the real test.’

I called Shehnaz to thank her for that reminder of their lives, trying to find the words to express how moved I was by just those few moments in which they were both alive again and so utterly delighted to simply be in each other’s company. But before I could explain why I had called she started weeping for her son.

‘Find a way to forgive him,’ I said to her. ‘For your own sake.’

‘Can you do that?’ she asked.

‘No. But you’re his mother. That changes everything.’

Rabia is watching me from a distance. She’s been watching me closely since I got back from Islamabad last week after Beema’s mother’s funeral. She doesn’t know whether to trust that I’m well.

I’m not well, but I’m getting there. I still wake up some nights screaming from dreams of Omi. I still miss Ed. I find myself weeping uncontrollably in moments when I least expect it, and I know it’s for Mama. But already I can feel this begin to pass into a quieter grief, one that will become part of my character without destroying me.