She didn’t tell Ma and Ri that all her worst fears of the English had been confirmed by a photograph Sister Lucija pointed out to her, trying to make her laugh. It was called Our Honeymoon in France and showed a young man and woman sitting on a stretch of yellow sand, the sea a blue haze behind them. He was dressed in tiny blue shorts, she in the tiniest of swimsuits. Everything was on display: their naked knees, the hair standing up on their legs, the deep curves of the woman’s bosom (with a gasp Mariam realised it was Eva), the hair that grows upwards from between a man’s legs sprouting out in tufty curls from the top of his shorts. Mariam felt disgusted. She did not want to see any more such pictures. She thought with something like nostalgia of the boxes of unsold burqas left behind in London.

She stood at the window looking at the sea, shining in the moonlight. At the trees creaking above her head. Blossoms in winter which she didn’t know the names of. Sand on the beach, the sea which she was scared of. In a hundred years’ time, she thought, some English people will stare at the writing on the study wall and wonder at the sorrow of a Sheedi girl alone in a stranger’s house without her baby to keep her happy.

Eventually, she told Ma and Ri what had happened. Ri was the first to answer.

It happened to me too, she said.

Ma, who fell pregnant within months of getting married, who had recently been delivered of a baby boy, made a soothing, overly complacent noise.

Ri said, In Karachi I went to the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi.

Ma, whom motherhood had made pious, emitted what sounded like a tut. Shrines are false worship, she said.

The other two ignored her.

Ri asked, Is there a shrine you can go to?

Mariam said, There is a church nearby.

A church? said Ma.

Good, said Ri. Although, if you ask me, a shrine would be better.

Following Ri’s advice, Mariam began to visit the church across the field. She sought out the Prophet Isa. She knew what Ma thought: that her baby lentil had died because she had run away, gone independent. But Mariam wanted the Prophet Isa, a baby himself, to tell her it wasn’t so. She sat alone in the church, contemplating the baby in the painting, surrounded by other babies in the sky. The strangeness of it – a blue sky, with babies floating in it – made her feel unrooted. There was nothing to be scared of now, was there. Nothing in the islands. Nothing in the house. Only, perhaps, her husband. Only her own sad heart.

JUDGE: On page 12 of your witness statement you have written that everything changed for you in the islands. Would you like to explain?