‘You are envied, Samra,’ my mother said, ‘envied for living abroad where it is so much more comfortable than here. Don’t complain, don’t be ungrateful.’ But when she saw the resentment on my face she softened and said, ‘It will be easier when you have the baby. Something to fill your day, you won’t have time to be homesick then.’ Yet I imagined that I could just not come back, slip into my old life. Month after month and he would forget me in time, send me my divorce paper as an afterthought, marry someone else perhaps. He would marry an English woman with yellow hair and blue eyes. I catch him thinking that sometimes, if he had waited a little and not rushed into this marriage, he could have married a woman like the ones he admires on TV. We married so that he would not bring back a foreign wife like so many Sudanese students did, or worse, marry her and never come back. Who wants to go back to the Sudan after tasting the good life of the West? With a Sudanese wife though, he would surely come back. This is what his family told me, half in jest, half in earnest. So I was flattered with presents, a big wedding, a good-looking, educated bridegroom and the chance to go abroad. No reason for me to refuse. But perhaps they cannot twist fate; perhaps I am not strong enough to hold him to his roots.

‘If I find a way to live here forever,’ he says, ‘if only I could get a work permit. I can’t imagine I could go back, back to the petrol queue, to computers that don’t have electricity to work on or paper to print on. Teach dim-witted students who never held a calculator in their hands before. And a salary, a monthly salary that is less than what an unemployed person gets here in a week! Calculate it if you don’t believe me.’

He had answers to all the objections I raised. ‘Morality, what morality do we have when our politicians are corrupt, when we buy arms to fuel a civil war instead of feeding the hungry? And don’t talk of racism! We are more racist than the British – how have we Northerners always treated the Southern Sudanese?’

The bus came at last and we sat upstairs while the green countryside around Heathrow drifted past. The green leaves in Khartoum are a different green, sharper, drier, arrogant in the desert heat. I know this bus, I know this route; it is as familiar as a film one sees several times. Two years in London and when I come back after two months in Khartoum I feel like I am starting all over again. Two months wiped out two years, and I am a stranger once again.