The wedding day was deliciously romantic. Ludicrously overdressed in her orange-gold sari, Shona sat her last paper and rushed out of the examination hall to see Parvez waiting, wearing his best suit and a flamboyant button-hole, his sitar case in his hand, with a motorized rickshaw chugging black smoke over his peacock finery. Before her student friends could see, she disappeared into the rickshaw with him, and they stopped at the campus where she had stowed her bags. At the registrar’s, Parvez, good as his word, called two people off the street to be their witnesses - they were workmen trying to fix the street lights, but were all too happy to take a break from the hot job for the fan-cooled registrar’s office.

’Are you sure this is legal?’ she asked bemusedly.

‘Of course, smile for the photographer!’ Parvez said. He had hired someone to take a few shots of them as they signed the papers and yet more shots as they came out of the office, with the grinning workmen behind them.

Shona was to look at one of those photos later, her sari blazing in the sun, her face looking bewildered but happy as she looked up adoringly at Parvez. And Parvez looking like he owned the world: handsome, confident, laughing at the camera, an arm protectively around her, as though he had enough strength for them both and would look after them for ever. Perhaps she and Parvez really did have a talent for being in love - in some ways, apart from their silly sense of humour, it was all they had in common. But it was incontrovertible: they were The Couple That Were In Love, and whose foolhardy, romantic elopement only substantiated the fact further. Twenty years later, she was to wonder where it all started going wrong.

The Crushed Rose Petals of a

Tooting Confectioner

AFTER THE ROMANTIC high of their elopement, the sticky, crowded wait at the airport and cold, dry plane journey made for a deeply unromantic wedding night, but it didn’t even occur to Shona to complain. She just snuggled up to her new husband under the Pakistan International Airlines blanket, and enjoyed the simple intimacy of being able to watch him sleep, his eyelashes fanned against his cheek, his breath deepening but his face remaining poised, and his jaw firm, as though still conscious that he was in public and under scrutiny. In the half light of the sleeping plane, Shona looked at the other husbands and fathers sitting around her, with their fat bellies, bald pates and slack-jawed, half-open mouths, and her pride in her handsome husband soared.