There are others, Majdy’s new friends. ‘So-and-so is good,’ he says, ‘friendly.’ He invites them here, men with kind eyes and women who like the food I cook. But I must be wary, there are things I mustn’t say when they are here. I mentioned polygamy once saying we shouldn’t condemn something that Allah had permitted, remarking that Majdy’s father had a second wife. When they left he slapped me, and, fool that I was, I didn’t understand what I had done wrong.

‘Why, why,’ I asked and he slapped me more.

‘It’s worse when you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘At least have a feeling that you have said something wrong. They can forgive you for your ugly colour, your thick lips and rough hair, but you must think modern thoughts, be like them on the inside if you can’t be from the outside.’ And what stuck in my mind after the stinging ebbed away, after the apologetic caresses, what clung to me and burned me time and time again were his comments about how I looked. I would stand in front of the mirror and, Allah forgive me, hate my face.

‘You look beautiful in blue,’ the Ostrich said, and when I was cruel he said, ‘but I can be a judge of voices can I not?’ I didn’t ask him what he thought of my voice. I walked away. It must have been in the evening that I was wearing blue. It was white tobes in the morning, coloured ones for the evening. The evening lectures were special, leisurely; there was time after lunch to shower, to have a nap. To walk from the hostels in groups and pairs, past the young boy selling peanuts, past the closed post office, past the neem trees with the broken benches underneath. Jangly earrings, teeth smacking chewing gum and kohl in our eyes. The tobes slipping off our carefully combed hair, lifting our hands, putting them back on again. Tightening the material, holding it under our left arm. I miss these gestures, already left behind. Majdy says, ‘If you cover your hair in London they’ll think I am forcing you to do that. They won’t believe it is what you want.’ So I must walk unclothed, imagining cotton on my hair, lifting my hand to adjust an imaginary tobe.