Sandy wind blowing, a home that was flat ground, a home that had no walls, no doors. My family’s cemetery, her brother said suddenly, addressing him. Once he married her and took her back with him to Edinburgh would he be expected to bring her back here if God forbid, she died? Why think these miserable thoughts? A hole was eventually made in the ground, you would think they were enjoying the scooping out of dirt, so wholeheartedly were they digging. With the sleeve of his shirt, he wiped the sweat off his brow – he was beginning to act like them – since when did he wipe his face with his shirtsleeves in Edinburgh? He wanted a glass of cold water but they were lowering the uncle in the grave now. They put him in a niche, wedged him in so that when they filled the grave, the soil they poured in did not fall on him.

For the next three days, he sat in the tent that had been set up in the garden for the men. A kind of normality prevailed, people pouring in to pay their condolences, the women going indoors, the men to the tent. A flow of water glasses, coffee, tea, the buzz of flies. Rows of metal chairs became loose circles and knots, as old friends caught up with each other, a laugh here and there could be heard. What’s going to happen to your wedding now? he was asked. He shrugged – he did not want to talk about it, was numbed by what had happened, dulled by the separation from her that the mourning customs seemed to impose. In the tent, the men agreed that the deceased had had a good death; no hospital, no pain, no Intensive Care and he was in his eighties, for God’s sake, what more do you expect? A strange comfort in that tent. He fell into this new routine. After breakfast in the hotel, he would walk along the Nile, after passing the Presidential Palace, wave down a taxi, go to her house. He never met her and she never phoned him. After spending the day in the tent and having lunch with her brother and his friends, one of them would offer him a lift back to the Hilton. Late in the evening or the early morning, he would go swimming. Every day he could hold his breath underwater longer. When he went for a walk, he saw army trucks carrying young soldiers in green uniforms. The civil war in the south had gone on for years and wasn’t drawing to an end – on the local TV station there were patriotic songs, marches. He had thought, from the books he’d read and the particular British Islam he had been exposed to, that in a Muslim country he would find elegance and reason. Instead he found melancholy, a sensuous place, life stripped to the bare bones.