RASHID WAS PRACTICALLY middle-aged when he first fell in love. At forty-three, he had matured and filled out and become better looking than the callow, milky-faced academic of his youth. His figure was no longer skinny, and he now wore a suit rather well; the slight grey in his temples was distinguished rather than ageing, and his profile seemed fine-boned rather than weak. Although outwardly he appeared fit and well and even attractive -he was only forty-three after all - inside he felt defeated, worn and ancient. Like a ruin left abandoned to take its punishment from a brutal sun and the encroaching jungle. The last twenty-five years of his life had been a study in apathy and disappointment. He had married a pretty child who had become a thick-waisted tyrant, who tolerated him while she took over his home, and with whom he had perplexingly proved infertile after their first child. He had given up his academic and professional dreams to mismanage his family’s landed interests until his more adept younger brother was old enough to take over and undo the damage he had well-meaningly caused - his sacrifice both unappreciated and unacknowledged. He had been gifted a wonderful daughter, who until her late teens was the only good thing, the only golden ray of sunshine in his life, but from whom he had been estranged ever since she had ill-advisedly gone to university in Karachi rather than England. He had loyally ignored the gossip he had heard about her behaviour in Karachi with a certain Pakistani boy, believing her when she returned home on her vacations from campus and assured him that there was no truth to the rumours. He had been repaid for his trust by her proceeding to elope with that same boy on the day she finished her final exam.