But everyone believed that our parents were successful for another reason, a deeper reason than their business and academic prowess, than their fight from an unprepossessing start as penniless immigrants back into the middle classes from which they had originally hailed in their native lands. They were successful, because they were The Couple That Were In Love. Everyone saw it, everyone knew it. From the moment of their romantic elopement to London, to their walking down the Tooting streets with our double buggy, hands instinctively intertwined, only letting go when Omar or I started to cry.

We don’t know when it started to go wrong. Maybe, just as our early toddler tears forced their hands apart, as we grew up, we forced their hearts apart, too. Perhaps we drained the love from them, taking it for ourselves so they no longer had enough for each other. Drawing love out of them, as poison from a wound, taking away the dizzy giddiness of love, and leaving them clear-headed, empty and cold.

They used to sit together in companionable silence, in a loose embrace on the sofa, her legs sprawled across his lap while Abbu listened to his music or fiddled with his sitar, and Amma marked her papers or read her French novels. Sometimes they would delight us with their silliness, a childish silliness that could have been put on for us as a show, but more likely was simply for themselves alone and we just the fortunate spectators. A new Indian pop song would come on the radio, and Abbu, who had never lost his Punjabi accent, would leap up and swing Amma around, oblivious to the customers eating below our flock-carpeted feet, dancing and singing along. ’Ilu,llu?’ he’d bellow tunefully, and with a comic waggle of his head, and pressing his heart, would finish the chorus, ’Ilu, llu! means I love you, I lah-uv yo-ou!’ As we clapped along, Amma would only mock protest and giggle with pleasure, her papers and books forgotten. They were just in their early thirties and, despite being parents, could at times still look like the young lovers they had been when they first met.