By the time Shona was ten years old, her uncle Aziz had taken over running the family lands from Rashid, allowing her father, now a qualified accountant, to get a job with one of the large multinationals which had opened a Dhaka office. Aziz had run the estate so successfully that he had diversified, and had also bought some lands in West Pakistan, in the Punjab where some of their distant relatives had settled. It was with these relatives that Rashid sent Henna and Shona to stay in I971 when civil war broke out over Bangladeshi Independence. Henna had hoped that Lahore would prove another Calcutta, and was sorely disappointed at how dry, dull and provincial the town was; like it all needed a good dusting.

Shona, however, loved Lahore, with the dry heat that was so much more pleasant than the crushing, constant humidity of Dhaka. She loved the rambling old stone house in the genteel quarter of Gulberg, with its walled garden and wrought-iron swing. She was admired for her golden skin and her impeccable manners, and made all her father’s relatives comfortable with her insincere compliments and admiration of everything from their clothes to their cooking. What Shona loved most about Lahore, though, was that there was a boy called Parvez staying in the Gulberg house, a distant relative of the distant relatives; he was from Karachi, and filled the house with his music, playing an eclectic mix of classical Asian and English pop records on the jumpy old gramophone, often accompanying the melodies with either his sitar or guitar, which he played with an amateur’s enthusiasm. He was fourteen, and although Shona was only a few years younger than him, and only three years younger than her mother had been when she married, she felt like an awkward child around him; he was almost a man, and he had the easy grace and manliness of the film actors that her mother so admired. With his half-grown moustache, he reminded her of Omar Sharif, whom she’d seen in her mother’s movie magazines. Instead of following around her mother, Shona started shamelessly following Parvez around the whole of Gulberg. He was good-natured and didn’t mind her tagging along. Once she followed him up to the roof of the house with some syrupy sweets that she had asked the cook to make, knowing they were his favourite.

‘Hi, Parvez,’ she said shyly in English, their common language, as Shona had not yet learned Parvez’s native Punjabi. She breathlessly came up through the twisting stairwell. ‘I’ve brought you some rasgullas, and some cold pomegranate juice.’