Henna planned and hoped to get pregnant as quickly as possible once Rashid was willing to start marital relations with her. Her attempt at marriage as a way to avoid education had not succeeded; she had been unwillingly forced to continue with her lessons, and although her only interest was in the dramatic arts, she had eventually learned to read and write in both Bangla and Urdu, to converse inefficiently in English, and been given a reluctant grounding in maths and the sciences. Although privately educated by necessity, like any other schoolgirl she was made to take public examinations. She was anxious about the results, not because she might have done badly, but because she was vain enough to worry that she might have done well - although with her committed laziness such fears were ungrounded. She certainly didn’t want sparkling grades, which would doubtless lead to the indefinable horror of further education that Rashid had been undertaking. Henna knew that motherhood would succeed where marriage alone could not. She knew self-interestedly that bearing Rashid’s child would keep her in her cosseted position, and that once she was a mother, there would be no more forcing her to stay at the dull books. She would simply hand the child over to the nanny and then start training for her dramatic career in earnest.

Lying back on the same four-poster bed on which, years before, she had unsuccessfully faked the reading of a poem from an upside-down book, Henna surreptitiously glanced at her wristwatch from over Rashid’s straining shoulders. She decided to try a different sort of faking altogether to encourage her monotonously pumping husband to climax before she died of boredom or, worse, missed her favourite radio drama. This time, at least, Henna’s performance was successful, and she was rewarded with Rashid finishing the job with much greater efficiency than he had hitherto shown, for which she showed a vocal appreciation that although insincere was almost kindly meant. Rashid’s pride in accomplishment, that he had finally managed to make his wife enjoy the act of physical love, was dwarfed a few weeks later by his further pride in achievement, that Henna had conceived and was pregnant with their first, and what she was later to ensure would be their only, child.