You can’t explain all this. You switch the TV off and take Tahera’s hand in yours, squeezing, in gratitude for her acquiescence to your plans. Despite the confidence you’ve shown, you fear that she might still be resentful of your decision to come to San Francisco, to Seema’s side, instead of Irvine, to hers.

48

Tahera takes the phone into the kitchen, determined to speak with her father. Refusing to speak to Seema is understandable, but declining to speak with her—how like Abba to cast out all of them when one displeases him, holding them all accountable for each other’s lapses.

Naeemullah gives in to Tahera’s insistence and desultorily inquires about Nafeesa. Their conversation, like it has the past months, takes on a professional tone—prognosis, progression, pathophysiology. As their discussion tapers off, he clears his throat, signaling he’s ready to hang up.

Desperately Tahera casts her mind for something further to interest him. “I’ve been reading Keats’s poems again, Abba,” she says, in a rush. “After so many years.”

“Wonderful!” His attention is temporarily held. “And what do you think now?”

It’s their old debate, one she’d lost to him many times. Naeemullah prefers Wordsworth, pooh-poohing Keats as immature and mawkish, idolized only by young girls with romance on their brains. He would accept grudgingly that Keats’s later odes had some merit but was scathing regarding the narrative poems, especially the long Endymion: “All sighs and pretty words.”

But Endymion had been her best-loved. She’d wandered through her youth likening herself to Endymion roving doggedly through earth and heavens seeking his love, the moon. She’d spent countless evenings alone on their rooftop terrace after dinner, pacing back and forth, with only the clouds and the moon for company, futilely trying to memorize the almost thousand lines of the poem. Eventually she’d settled for learning only her most treasured sections.

“I haven’t gotten to Endymion yet,” she lies, slipping once again into her childhood habit of protecting Keats (and herself) from her father (and sister). She’d started on Endymion earlier that evening, the poem appearing as strange and otherworldly now as it had years ago, with its descriptions of miraculous natural beauties and its mysterious and mystifying allusions—Phoebus, Dryope, Hyacinthus, Zephyr—names once again unfamiliar and intriguing.

“Ah, your rambling lovesick shepherd—” Naeemullah chuckles. “We’ll talk when you’ve reread it. You’re definitely older, but are you any wiser?”

“No one can hope to be as wise as you, Abba.” Her bitterness overflows. “Seriously, why do you still treat me like a child?”

An exaggerated surprise, his usual tactic. “Haven’t we been discussing your mother like two equals?”

“Like doctors, not father and adult daughter.”

“What else do you want me to say?” His voice turns harsh. “That I’m unhappy your mother is there, when her place is here?”

“I would have come to Chennai to look after her.”

“I’m fully capable of taking care of her. My only request to you is that you see that she returns soon.”