The photos went back years, from when she had first married Parvez; they were all the pictures they had taken together before they had become a family. Once the children had come, all the family photos had been pasted proudly into a set of golden lacquer albums that Parvez had bought her as a present, ready to show to guests, and for the children to fumble through when they were bored. She also kept a few photos on display in the living room in sturdy wooden frames, which she would occasionally update as new shots took her fancy. Rather than going to the trouble of putting the replaced photos back with their original set, she simply popped them in a manila envelope that lived at the top of the box, telling herself she would sort them out later. It was this envelope that Shona came across first, and she spread the photos across the carpet.

These were the most poignant photos, as they were the ones which had once had pride of place in her living room, and which had eventually become so familiar that they had lost the power to move or delight, becoming mere wallpaper before being decisively rejected for new, more recent developments.

The first picture that caught her attention was the photo she always thought of as her wedding picture. Her orange silk sari blazed in the sun as she looked up with bewildered adoration at her laughing, handsome husband, as though she couldn’t quite believe what they had just done, and that he would now be hers for ever. They were so happy, so foolish in their happiness; they both had the myopic look of people who couldn’t see further than each other, as though they were all that existed in the world, The Couple That Were In Love. The photo reminded her of secret assignations in the Karachi Tennis Club, of pink rose petals in a Hilton bedroom, of making love surreptitiously in the syrup-sweet-smelling flat above the confectioner’s when Bhai Hassan went out; it was like facing a ghost of her past. Handsome Parvez, looking straight through the camera lens and into her eyes seemed to be saying, ‘See, you can’t deny it. We’ve changed. Look at what we once were, Goldie. And look at what we’ve become.’