‘It’s working, Parvez, it’s flying, it’s really flying!’ she said excitedly. But she wasn’t truly excited about the kite, she was just grateful to the kite for giving her an outlet for her heightened emotion, for her extreme, unlimited happiness at that moment, because Parvez was standing so close to her.

As if by magic, other kites began to fly up from the neighbouring rooftops to join theirs as the boys and girls of the Gulberg district realized that there really was enough wind that day. And then across the sweeping city skyline more and more kites sailed into the bright blue sky. It was as though they had lit a beacon to announce that the skies were friendly once more. Shona saw the brightly coloured creatures shimmer and swing gracefully in the heavy air, and giddy with delight at what they had unleashed, leaned back into pomegranate-scented Parvez for support. Closing her eyes for a moment, she thought to herself, for once with unblinkered honesty and candour, ‘This will be the man I marry.’

The Puppy Love of Parvez Khan

and Shona Karim

SHONA AND PARVEZ eloped when she was just twenty-one, on the day she finished her final exams at Karachi University. Before they met her, Parvez’s family already disapproved of her - an arriviste from Bangladesh, over-educated, and most likely dark-skinned. What good would she be for their son, who despite their relative poverty was certainly handsome and engaging enough to marry a nice Pakistani girl with a decent dowry? In turn, Shona knew that her mother and father disapproved of ‘Cousin’ Parvez, as he was loosely described, and that if they knew her reason for going to university in Karachi was simply to be near him, they would have forbidden her to go altogether. He wasn’t well off - a sin in Henna’s eyes as she had married brilliantly, despite a whole host of disadvantages, and didn’t want her daughter to undo all her good work. He wasn’t university-educated, having helped to expand the family restaurant after he had finished school - a sin in Rashid’s eyes. Rashid himself had gone to Merton College, Oxford, but had thrown himself away on an illiterate child; he wasn’t going to let his daughter make the same mistake in marrying a partner who wasn’t her intellectual equal.