She has light brown eyes and cropped black hair.

‘Didn’t you know?’ he says. ‘Ayla’s in Santa Barbara. She got married last week.’

He stays all night, after everyone leaves, talking to her till first light. Her voice is deep, she drawls. When he says goodbye she kisses his mouth in the doorway. She tastes of cigarettes.

He’s back at her house the next evening, listening to music, singing the words of Faiz or Ghalib, drinking iced vodka; again, he leaves at dawn.

The third day she comes to visit him at nearly midnight, on her way home from dinner with friends at a restaurant.

A migrant from Karachi like him, Marvi is, at twenty-eight, four years younger than Mehran. She’s an economist. The mother of infant twins, and married: unhappily, he soon finds out. She came to London with her husband, did her PhD at the London School of Economics, and took up a postdoctoral Research Fellowship when she finished. She’s reworking her doctoral dissertation into a book; it’s a rereading of Joan Robinson in the context of Marvi’s native Sindh where she did her research, wearing a chadar, in small, conservative towns. (Even Mehran, with his non-existent knowledge of economic theory, can appreciate her work when he dips into the bound manuscript she lends him.) Moving away from Karachi means living away from her husband, who has gone home to look after his estates.

At seven, Marvi was sent to a convent school in Murree and then on to a boarding school in Cheshire, where she was known as Mary. (She learned to rebel – at being served sausages and bacon, for example – and the appellation had become Contrary Mary.) She struggled with her family as a teenager when she ran away from Cambridge with a vagabond actor, but then she married a distant cousin she said had fallen in love with her at a family gathering, went back to complete her studies at LSE, and laid fresh claim to her father’s affection.

Mehran is envious when she speaks of the sense of belonging to which she clings by going back, every year and sometimes more often, to Karachi, or to the small feudal town in Sindh where she spent childhood summers with loving maternal grandparents.

‘I spend my life longing for the place I’m not in, but when I go back I never fit,’ she laments. ‘I married a place, not a man, because I thought the man was home.’