But from time to time she still reaches out to him for warmth. He holds her thin body with its fragile bones in his arms for hours, kisses her face or her bared skin all over, until his body rebels against the constraints of hers and then she cries and says she knows he has to go elsewhere for the pleasure that she can no longer give him; one day, she knows, he’ll leave her for a saner, stronger woman.

After the accident, Marvi had a period of what seemed to be a total, even miraculous, recovery: she walked, travelled home, even went back to lecture at university. In the winter months while she healed they worked together for days on her manuscript, which a university press had accepted for publication. Then, at an alcohol-laden party in Karachi, where she had flown to for the winter against her doctor’s advice, she fell again. After that, she always walked with a stick, which became an essential part of her flamboyant party performances.

At conferences, she made glamorous appearances on platforms, dressed in black with a black cane; but her oddly fragmented, aggressive and occasionally incoherent lectures and interventions soon made her very unpopular with listeners and organisers alike. Whether drink, drugs, nerves or pain caused that behaviour Mehran couldn’t tell, but after one or two such episodes, he refused to go to public events with her. Later, he hears that she attends conferences in the wheelchair she often uses as a passport to service from others; she loudly heckles speakers, usually right-wing economists, from the audience. At other times, she lies in bed for months.

He has watched her seek relief from constant pain: wine; vodka; cocktails of painkillers (at first, after her accident, a nurse injected her with morphine, but then Marvi persuaded her unscrupulous GP to allow her to use the needle herself). Sometimes she starts drinking as soon as she gets out of bed, until she falls asleep at some odd time of the day, wakes up after an hour or two, has a few gulps of black coffee, and then it’s back to the bottle, to the vodka or the wine.

Though he has tried to help, he isn’t strong enough. He feels he is drowning. He drinks more than he should when he’s with her; sometimes when he’s not, he drinks to escape from whatever it is that keeps him from leaving her. But drinking, he feels, is merely a kind of slow suicide: people who want to kill themselves should just do it, swiftly, not waste time over it. He turns abstemious for days, which she says is his contrary way of keeping control and shutting her out.

‘But who are you to me? Are we a couple?’ she cries. ‘Sometimes you make me feel I’m less than a woman. Much less. You’re cold, Mehran.’

What can he say?