‘Well, if you’re okay with it, I’d love for us to go and visit my sister in India.’

Humaira looked too shocked to even dignify that suggestion with a response.

‘What do you say, Humaira?’ Habib reached out and touched Humaira’s arm lightly.

Humaira turned to face Habib, an edge of steel in her voice. ‘Do you want to know what I say, Habib? I say, over my dead body. I’m not going to India and neither are you. Do you not care at all that my grandfather was killed by Hindus in the Partition riots?’

‘Humaira, I too lost my family in those riots. But I have reconnected with my sister after sixty years . . . ’

‘Yes—and she’s Indian and Hindu . . . ’

‘Do you realize that you have been married for almost fifty years to someone who was born a Hindu, Humaira?’ Habib replied softly.

‘That . . . that is your fault. How was I to know? Oh, I pray I will not be punished for this.’

‘I take the entire blame, Humaira. I will bear any sin that it carries, if that makes you feel any better.’

‘It doesn’t. And I still won’t let you go to India.’

There was a moment’s silence as Inaya watched both her grandparents continue to stare at their respective dinner plates. Deadlock, she thought. Then Habib spoke again.

‘You’ve always spoken about visiting Chishti’s dargah in Ajmer, Humaira. How about we go there too, when we visit India?’

Something stirred in Humaira. Chishti’s dargah held a very special place in her life. Her mother and grandmother and almost every generation before had visited the Sufi saint’s shrine to pay their respects. Perhaps this was a sign that her calling had come. Perhaps Habib needed to face his past. Perhaps she needed to face it too.

But she held her silence.

Later that night, after the whole family had retired for bed, Humaira took out her brown moleskin diary. She opened it and slid out the loose pages stacked inside. She looked at the sketches that she had collected over the years. Sketches that Habib had made in the dead of night, furiously drawing during his somnambulism. More than once, she had asked him about the sketches the next morning, and he had looked at them as if he had never seen them before. With her finger, Humaira traced around the circular scribble of the huddled figures and the line that cleaved across each sketch. The darkness and despair that they conveyed sent a shudder down her spine. For years, she had wondered about the deep pain that Habib held within himself—a trauma so torturous that he had kept it caged, but which reared its ugly head in his wakeful sleep. Humaira had never been able to understand where it came from. But now, it all fell into place.

Unforgotten

New Delhi, India

‘But how come you never mentioned it, Ma? Not once?’ asked Rajan.

Toshi took off her spectacles and looked at Rajan and Arathi. ‘I didn’t want to remember what had taken me a lifetime to forget,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’