Tonight, the dark lay heavily on him again, so that he found it difficult to breathe, pressed upon by the sea’s insistence. Fatima had been buried within twenty-four hours. Only the men had attended her burial. Prayers from the Quran were said at her parents’ house. Funerals had changed; there would be no official period of mourning with the number of deaths so high. He had seen roadside graves, people buried where they fell. Things had changed and they had been lucky that they had been able to wash her, wrap her in a white cotton shroud, and bury her so her head was towards Mecca. They could not have asked for more under the circumstances. He had joined Fatima’s family then, her father having put on a cassette of the Quran on a loop, her mother’s head drooping with grief, her anxious sister holding her mother’s hand. They had sat in silence, drinking bitter coffee, listening to the buzz of the words on the tape player as neighbours came to sit with them.

When he returned home, he’d collected Hussein from a neighbour. Made him some food, put him to bed. Batted away his questions for another day. In the bedroom, with Fatima’s things surrounding him, he’d felt nothing, waited for a wave of grief that would not come – not yet. In place of it, a deep anger, a curious fury that burned not out of control, but with calculation, with intellect. For the sake of their son, he would not lash out, but he would do something.

For a year or two, he had tried to keep some stability in their life. Would take Hussein to his sister-in-law every day, collect him on the way home from work, but things became harder. The chaos around them increasing, the buildings crumbling. He remembered his distress mounting until it bubbled over one day when he managed to buy some fresh food, the first he had been able to source for months. Hussein looking at him quizzically. His anger growing. His students were becoming few and far between, too. Some of them caught up in narratives that perplexed him. Some of them unsure and belligerent, lost but so painfully certain as their future dissipated in front of them.