Shadia was engaged to Fareed. Fareed was a package that came with the 7Up franchise, the paper factory, the big house he was building, his sisters and widowed mother. Shadia was going to marry them all. She was going to be happy and make her mother happy. Her mother deserved happiness after the misfortunes of her life. A husband who left her for another woman. Six girls to bring up, to educate and marry off. People felt sorry for her mother. But your Lord is generous; each of the girls, it was often said, was lovelier than the other. They were clever too: dentist, pharmacist, architect, and all with the best of manners.

‘We are just back from looking at the house,’ Fareed’s turn again to talk. ‘It’s coming along fine, they’re putting the tiles down …’

‘That’s good, that’s good,’ her voice strange from not talking to anyone all day.

‘… the bathroom suites. If I get them all the same colour for us and the girls and Mama, I could get them on a discount. Blue, the girls are in favour of blue,’ his voice echoed from one continent to another. Miles and miles.

‘Blue is nice. Yes, better get them all the same colour.’ He was building a block of flats, not a house. The ground-floor flat for his mother and the girls until they married, the first floor for him and Shadia. The girls’ flats on the two top floors would be rented out.

When Shadia had first got engaged to Fareed, he was the son of a rich man. A man with the franchise for 7Up, and the paper factory which had a monopoly in ladies’ sanitary towels. Fareed’s sisters never had to buy sanitary towels and their house was abundant with boxes of Pinky, fresh from the production line. But Fareed’s father died of an unexpected heart attack soon after the engagement party, an extravagant affair at the Hilton. Now Shadia was going to marry the rich man himself. ‘You are a lucky, lucky girl,’ her mother said, and Shadia rubbed soap in her eyes so that Fareed would think she had been weeping his father’s death.

There was no time to talk about her course on the telephone, no space for her anxieties. Fareed was not interested in her studies. He had said, ‘I am very broad-minded to allow you to study abroad. Other men would not have put up with this …’ It was her mother who was keen for her to study, to get a post-graduate degree from Britain and then have a career after she got married. ‘This way,’ her mother had said, ‘you will have your in-laws’ respect. They have money but you will have a degree. Don’t end up like me. I left my education to marry your father and now …’