Bhai Hassan was delighted to see his young cousin and lovely new wife. He was less happy when he realized that they were runaways, who were intending to stay in London, and who had nowhere to stay except with him. After giving them a welcoming cup of comfortingly sweet tea, served with rasgulla and burfi from the shop, he showed Shona to the spare room, and made an excuse to take Parvez into his ‘office’, the table at the back of the sweet-shop kitchen.

Kicking off her shoes, Shona was finally able to unwind herself out of her now crushed and rather worse-for-wear sari and pull on a pair of trousers and a long silky shirt. Looking out of the window through the stained yellowing net, she was shocked to find herself wondering where she and Parvez were going to be able to make love, and properly begin their honeymoon. Certainly not in this tatty spare room of Bhai Hassan’s flat above the confectioner’s. She lay back on the single bed and imagined Parvez’s arms around her, in a suite at the Karachi Hilton, lying on Egyptian cotton sheets strewn with rose petals.

In the kitchen, Bhai Hassan was prosaically pounding rose petals to a damp and fragrant sludge with sugar to make the syrup for one of his sweets. ‘Bloody hell, son,’ he said in English that was pure south London. ‘She’s a nice girl but you can’t keep her. You can’t just roll up with a girlfriend in a foreign country and say you’re married and you’re going to live here. You practically kidnapped her. Our family will be out for your blood. And her family have probably reported her missing to the flipping police by now. She’ll have to go back. I’m Bleedin’ amazed you got her through immigration in the first place.’

‘She’s not going back, Bhai. She’s my wife, and I love her and she’s staying with me.’

‘Stop, you’re making my Bloody heart bleed,’ Bhai Hassan said, giving the tattered remains of the rose petals a final vicious bash. ‘How are you going to afford her? You’ll barely be able to keep yourself in London, let alone a wife. She don’t look like she’s used to earning her keep.’

‘Well, you asked me here to help with the business. I’ll work with you, and rent us a house. If you could just let us stay with you until then …’

‘A house?’ roared Bhai Hassan in outrage that quickly dissolved to laughter. ‘Do you really think I can pay you enough to rent a house while I’m living in the Bloody flat above the shop?’