Sometimes Mehran sees colleagues for a drink after work, and sometimes they invite him home to dinner. He rarely goes out with Marvi, who won’t meet Mehran’s friends except in his house or hers. She showed up drunk (or drugged – it’s hard to tell with her) at his place more than twice. At least once she turned away some friends of Mehran’s after asking them over to dinner. Now he always eats with friends from work at restaurants: they feel awkward about asking him to their homes on his own. They assume that he’s spoken for; he’s no good at filling the empty space at their tables for an eligible man to pair off with a single female guest. To such acquaintances, most of them in long-term relationships, he is an anomaly: neither single, divorced, nor committed. A man not even in his mid-thirties with a mysterious woman in the background: a sick woman, as rumour has it. ‘Perhaps she’s uneducated, or in purdah, how would you know?’ he sometimes feels like saying.

Marvi has many friends. When Mehran first met her, she was surrounded by Third World intellectuals of the sort that debated world politics: some, or so they claimed, were so far to the left that they felt it was pointless to revolt, because they couldn’t fight such a rotten system. They found Mehran bourgeois: he signed petitions, marched in protests and for causes, had even voted for Kinnock. Several of them seemed to share a predilection for Bollywood movies, noisy, violent and very different from the lachrymose romances he watched as an adolescent. They thought these Ayn Rand-like fantasies of heroic villains and virtuous whores were a genuine expression of the popular spirit; the only way, apart from street theatre, to make authentic art in the Third World. He kept away from them; he didn’t like armchair politics.

Other friends were rich Pakistanis of the kind he had grown up with and learned to avoid. Her friends were vitally important to her and they decided early to keep their circles separate. Then, as her drinking grew more dangerous, and she spent long afternoons at home, she took to making friends at the corner shop, the beautician’s, and most often at local pubs. It isn’t uncommon for her to invite him to dinner and for him to enter a crowded flat, immerse himself in a fug of dope, the stench of burnt food, and the blare of Bollywood music from her ghetto blaster. (Though she loved traditional Pakistani music when they first met, it’s always Bollywood now.) If he leaves early, he’s subjected to screaming midnight calls: ‘You’re a man, you walked away, you should have thrown them out.’ If he stays, he is accused of insulting her friends with his intellectual arrogance, while she – so much better educated, with her doctorate, than Mehran – can mingle with the masses.