‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come back,’ Majdy suddenly said. And I wondered if this was the right time, so late at night, to talk of such things, things that would drive the sleep from our eyes. When I looked at him, he seemed weak and this made him look more beautiful than he had looked at the airport. I remembered the stories his sisters told me about how he was when he first came here. Despairing of ever passing his exams, of ever catching up with the work. And now he was nearly through. The rescue package his family sent him has achieved its purpose. ‘I work better when you are next to me,’ he was saying. ‘It is easier to keep awake. When I saw you in the airport today, you brought back many memories to me. Of people I love and left behind, of what I once was years ago. I envy you and you find that funny, don’t you, but it’s true. I envy you because you are displaced yet intact, unchanged, while I question everything and I am not sure of anything anymore.’

And it was only then, late that night, when he came and sat near me on the floor that I told him about our baby.

That night I dreamt of the Ostrich’s bride. She was, like she had told me on the airplane, at university with me. In the dream, we were in one of the lecture rooms, the fans circling above our head. I made a chain from the perforated edges of the computer paper and gave it to her. She wore it as an ankle bracelet and I was anxious that the paper might tear, but she laughed at my fears.

It was the Ostrich who recognised me first on the airplane. ‘Samra,’ he said, and when I looked blankly at him, trying to find the way to my seat, ‘Don’t you remember me, Samra?’ His hair was cut short, his eyes behind dark spectacles and I could tell that he was newly married. From the henna intricately designed on his bride’s palms, from the gold bracelets on her arms, the shimmering material of her new tobe, I could tell they were on their honeymoon. We exchanged news the way people do when they have not met for a long time. Is this happiness then, the sudden rush of recognition, the warmth, the shy laughter? Swapping news of others that we mutually knew. Could I have ever believed that the word happiness can be cramped in a few minutes, a few unexpected minutes in the aisle of an airplane?

‘My brother set up a video shop in Medani, which I run,’ the Ostrich said and we both laughed again, as if it was something funny, as if we shared a private joke. ‘Hindi films are popular,’ he rambled in his Ostrich way. ‘Nobody understands the language but they keep renting out the films.’