But as the years went by, those incidents became more and more rare and the loose embrace on the couch less and less common. They still held hands when they walked, but it was now a gesture of habit rather than affection. They only seemed to hold each other in their sleep, and for this reason more than any other, Omar and I used to get up out of our beds in the mornings and join them in theirs, clinging to either side of them while they clung to each other, to share that moment of instinctive intimacy before it dissolved with the consciousness that came with the morning light. ‘My men,’ Amma would say, as she woke sleepily and looked at us; but somehow we already knew that Abbu was being excluded from that seemingly inclusive term. Abbu spent more and more time with his business colleagues, with his music; Amma came back later and later from work, and spent more time with her books. They stopped spending so much time in the same room - Abbu would continue to listen to his records in the living room, but Amma would often disappear to the kitchen or her bedroom and listen to French stations on the radio, saying she needed to keep abreast of things for school.

Alone, Abbu would cover the cracks by sharing his music collection with us - his vinyl and tapes and CDs, like sympathetic comrades, providing wise words and comfort, and sometimes a searing insight so sharp that it hurt him like a physical pain. At those moments, his sorrow was tangible, palpable.

Our parents’ new unhappiness polluted the very air we breathed. We began to look nostalgically at old photos, with smiling faces and turned-up eyes, and wondered how we had managed to live through and yet simply miss the time they had been happy. Before the cold war that followed with our adolescence, we had been embarrassed by their outrageous, demonstrative affection. Had someone told us what would happen, wouldn’t we have savoured every moment, every loving word, every unthinking embrace in between?