He knows what she means, though he’s been back to India only twice and never returned to Karachi, his birthplace. He prefers to wander outwards: home, if there’s any such place, is with the people who love him. And that, at the time he meets Marvi, is Rome, where Riccarda has been living for five years. He has begun to feel, after the Indian trips, that he doesn’t belong anywhere; he’s no longer in thrall to the places of his past.

He has only known Marvi a month when, at summer’s end, he hears she’s had an accident – a fall, down a slope – on a day trip to the Chilterns. One leg is badly damaged; she is told it might have to be amputated. She’ll have to suspend her Fellowship, her promising academic career, for a year, at least. Mehran is on holiday too, at Riccarda’s house by the sea, outside Rome.

Back in London, he spends hours at Marvi’s hospital bedside; then he’s on call for days and days when she comes home. How, he wonders, did they bring her to London? She’s enmeshed in a tangle of wires, can barely move; but she tells stories, laughs, sings.

‘The last thing I remember about my fall’, she tells him, ‘is a heather-like plant tickling my left nostril while most of my life flashed before my eyes like an unfolding screen.’

He’s never been good at tending the bedridden or the ill, but he tries.

For a time he thinks he loves her. Love makes it all worthwhile, the dull hours at work, the distance from every unanswered prayer. He even thinks they are happy. What they share, though, is only the illusion of happiness waiting.

1988

‘But who are you to me? Are we a couple?’ she cries.

What can he say? They haven’t given what they have a name. She hadn’t wanted to declare a relationship until she decided on divorce, as she’s about to claim a hefty alimony. And he’s stopped asking about the future, the thought of which frightens him more and more.

From the first encounter of their bodies, they were always tentative, hasty lovers – it was her manner, as if a drunken, furtive loving, in inappropriate and uncomfortable places, in a welter of half-discarded clothes, assuaged the sense of guilt that fulfilled desire seemed to give her. But by now, a little more than a year after they met, they have almost ceased to touch each other. Lovemaking, at least in the conventional sense, has become an ordeal for her.