The whole household was waiting to welcome Mariam but she barely saw them. Eva and Alice were like clouds passing overhead, silent, unnoticed. Only Lucija, dressed in her fulsome nun’s habit, caught her eye. Mariam put out a hand. Lucija led her upstairs, laid her down on the bed, sat beside her, stroking her hair, as the tears washed through her.

The tears did no good, however.

Mariam stayed in her attic room as people came and went in the house below; people arrived and were kept away, their voices in a different part of the town, the azan in the distance, the clatter of pots from another house as one of the wives or daughters did the dishes.

She imagined sending a text to her aunt:

I love Christmas in London! So sparkly!

And how her aunt might write back:

Our Prophet (PBUH) told his followers not to—

But Mariam had destroyed her phone’s SIM. She heard a footstep on the stairs. It was Lucija, bringing up her food.

‘Please get up now, Mariam,’ said Lucija. But Mariam didn’t want to get up.

‘Please come and wash now, Mariam,’ Lucija insisted. But Mariam didn’t want to wash.

She waited until the house was asleep; then she took out the book of poetry her father had given her, and wrote him a message in Sindhi in the margin: My baby died. Writing made her cry again. She did something so wrong, she thought, that her baby left her.

She walked downstairs, creaking through the old house, in and out of the night-time shadows. She wrote messages to her little lentil in secret places: on the inside of the cupboard door in the bathroom, along the cardboard ridge of the icing-sugar packet which Eva brought home with her shopping, on the wall of the study behind the huge volume of the Times Atlas. I am sorry – I will never not be sorry – that you left me.

She remembered her Latif: she was Sassui, following her lover hopelessly through the desert; Sohni, swimming over the river faithfully and fatally to Mehar. Without her baby lentil to distract her, she looked with new eyes at this house where she had come to live and defend her child from its father. Such a strange place, now she thought of it. She told Ma and Ri: Where we come from, the richer a person is, the further they live from their village; and the wiser they are, the more modern things and shops they put between themselves and the fields of sugar cane and wheat which bred them. But now here I am in a house all worn and old, stuck on a rock in the middle of the deep dark sea. The house itself, with its darkness and anarchy.

Trodden all over by outdoor shoes.