Shona watched as Sharif and the band loped onto the stage and her handsome son’s face appeared in close-up on the big screen. He looked so much like his father. They erupted into one of their most popular songs, to tumultuous cheers and screaming from the front. Young kids, who had sat down while the dirgeful youth was on stage, jumped up and began to dance in the cool September air. During the first chorus, an insatiably catchy, jingly Indian riff came up, and then Shona saw her.

Henna made her entrance, resplendent in a flowing silk dancer’s outfit, with loose trousers and sleeves and a glittering embroidered bodice, bracelets at her ankles and wrists, and her hair elegantly swept up. She led a trio of Bangladeshi dancers who stamped and swayed to the music. Shona watched her mother on one of the screens; she looked beautiful, she looked twenty years younger, her face transported with happiness as she performed to hundreds of admiring strangers in the park, her life’s ambition fulfilled. It had been Henna’s idea to create a dance to go with this song, and although Sharif had his doubts initially, it worked wonderfully. Shona was bursting with pride for both of them, and almost wept at the sight.

Dermot was watching her curiously. ‘You’re glad, aren’t you, Shona, that you told them all the truth?’

Shona smiled and nodded reassuringly at him, her eyes shining with tears. She knew that she was still learning how to tell the truth, or rather unlearning how to deceive; gradually unspinning the silken webs she had woven into her conscious and unconscious life, that had become so much a part of her they were like something innate. It was just like learning to speak a new language, Shona thought to herself: the more she practised, the more fluent she would become.

Acknowledgements

The following people helped me enormously with this novel, which was written in a succession of rented apartments during a French winter, while I was pregnant and we were renovating our ruined farmhouse. My husband, Phil Richards, gave me tireless, unselfish support and a room of my own. My mother, Niluffer Farooki, told me inspirational stories and cooked untold delicacies whenever I returned to visit her in London. My sisters, Preeti Farooki and Kiron Farooki, gave me confidence whenever I had a dark night of the soul, with their cheerful and unfounded assumption that I could write. And my beautiful niece, Raman Newton, helped me to remember what it was like to be a little girl.

I’d also like to thank Geeta Nargund of St George’s Hospital in Tooting, for her advice on fertility treatment, and not least for the treatment she gave my husband and me, which enabled us to have our wonderful little boy, Jaan.