‘Henna moni, I know you hate school. And you’re too good for this provincial backwater. You should be somewhere better, like Calcutta, the honoured daughter of a wealthy family who could buy you all the sweets and magazines you could ever desire. It’s what your mother would have wanted for you.’

Henna listened with interest - Calcutta was glamorous, the sort of place where the movie stars came from. And for once, her fat, ignorant Baba was right - she did hate school.

Enlisting the help of his sisters, Nadim made sure that Henna learned to carry herself in a sari with rather more elegance that she had hitherto shown, and with careful application of kohl, rouge and powder, managed to make her look older than her years, and almost as pale as the Karims. He had her tutors teach her to play tennis, Ricky-Rashid’s favourite sport, which with her natural athleticism she picked up quickly. He found out through bribing the Karims’ servants which books were to be found in Ricky-Rashid’s room, and bought cheap copies for his daughter to read. He discovered she was still illiterate, and almost beat her again - all his dedicated preparation ruined because his lazy harami of a daughter had wilfully chosen to waste her expensive schooling. He stormed impotently at her while she pranced elegantly on her aunt’s makeshift tennis court during one of her lessons, her precise strokes cruelly making her plump teacher race breathlessly from one side to another.

‘Baba, you’re being silly. Just get one of these monkeys to read out some bits to me, and I’ll memorize them. It’s easy,’ Henna said calmly, swinging her backhand return dangerously close to his ear; ‘monkeys’ was the disrespectful term which she used for her long-suffering gaggle of tutors. She was enjoying the charade, the pretty new clothes, the make-up, the dissembling; she even looked forward to the prospect of learning lines from the Shakespearean sonnets her Baba had brought. It was like she was an actress already.