It was Shona who had instigated their love affair - she had been persistent in keeping in touch with him during her adolescence, making him an unwilling pen pal by her sheer perseverance. When she was eighteen she finally arrived in Karachi to study. He met her at the Karachi Tennis Club for drinks and was charmed to discover that his golden-skinned teenage fan club had become a golden-skinned, curvaceous woman, with her mother’s good looks and her father’s gentleness. She had a childish sense of mischief and humour that he shared. He was disconcerted by her foreignness at the beginning, but she would soon speak Punjabi so flawlessly she sounded like a native, her skill at putting on the appropriate accent not unrelated to her mother’s acting talent. On the occasion of their first handshake, they both felt an electric shock, an instant frisson of attraction, a shiver up their spines, that warned Parvez, and confirmed for Shona, that this would be the one. Over the next few years they became the secret golden couple of the club and campus, both so attractive, and so utterly devoted to each other that they were inappropriately tactile in public, hands unconsciously knotting and intertwining, legs or shoulders brushing for that brief, sweet moment of clandestine contact. It was as though being in love was a talent they shared.

Shona was taking a break during the first week of her final exams, indiscreetly walking in the park with Parvez.She was far from her usual merry, sweetly smiling self, and was disconsolately plucking dusty flowers from the bushes and pulling them apart. Parvez squeezed her hand comfortingly. ‘What’s up, Goldie? Are you worried about the French literature paper tomorrow?’ he asked gently.

‘You know what I’m worried about, Puppy,’ she said sadly, pulling away her hand and throwing herself on to a bench.

‘Shh! Don’t call me that in public, people will talk,’ he said in mock horror.

‘What will people talk about that they haven’t talked about already?’ asked Shona curiously, momentarily forgetting her resolve to be dramatically melancholic that day.

‘They’ll say that Parvez is a puppy - a low-down-dirty-little-dog.’

‘Oh, you mean a kuttar bacha?’ giggled Shona, getting the joke and accidentally saying the swear word out loud.

‘Shh!’ Parvez said again, in greater mock horror. ‘Now people will really talk. Parvez is a son-of-a-bitch, and his girlfriend swears like a sweet-maker.’

’You mean a sailor?’ asked Shona.

‘I mean a sweet-maker - you remember me telling you about my Bhai Hassan? The one who opened the sweet shop in London. He can swear for the whole Punjab. Whenever he comes back he’s all Bloody this, and Bloody that. You’d think he worked in a halal butcher’s, not a confectioner’s.’