He knows all that. He lives in a fragile shelter, and when the rain comes, it might collapse. He doesn’t have an imagination. He long ago squandered the small poetic capital he had on the handful of excerpts he translated from ‘The Poison of Love’ for the Journal of Urdu Literature; since then, his lyrical urge has left him. But when he wrote down those memories, it was as if he recognised that one day he would have to be a messenger to himself, carrying stories from the places of his past to his present place, and back again from present to past. Whether they make sense to anyone else or not, he needs them to find himself a form, build a vehicle for his longing.

Not yet, though. He isn’t ready.

He puts away the notebook in a drawer with his other scribblings.

1990

Riccarda is going to be operated on for a sudden, rapacious cancer of the lung nearly seven years after she left London to live in Rome. Ironically, it was diagnosed just after her son found a job in a prestigious New York law firm, and she finally decided to leave the mysterious Mr Santini for ever.

Mehran tells Marvi the news. He places his head on the back of the sofa and shuts his eyes. She touches him. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’ He weeps as he hasn’t wept since he was an infant. Marvi runs her fingers through his thinning hair and gently tugs its roots in an odd, consoling way, relieving the tautness of his scalp. He’s grateful for her sympathy but he feels trapped, in himself, in his skull and in his bones, unable to reach out to her, unable to feel her.

The first time he speaks to Riccarda on the phone after her operation she is under sedation and says: ‘Ti voglio molto bene, amore.’ That ambiguous phrase – I care for you, I wish you well, I love you – that’s oddly so close to Urdu, and can be used by siblings, friends and lovers. Later, she doesn’t remember the call, or what she said.

He travels to meet Riccarda in Rome. Disease has made her thin and incandescent. She looks so ethereal people stop and stare at her in the street; children want to touch her.

In the Missoni shop near the Spanish Steps, where she insists on buying him an expensively elegant sweater, the saleswoman looks from Mehran to her and remarks: ‘Your son looks so like you!’

‘I think so too,’ Riccarda says.

Outside, she asks: ‘Do you remember the way we were, love? That summer …?’

He kisses her hand. They’ve never, ever, since they parted, talked about that time. Their time.

Back to London. Marvi, in one of her rages. Her wrists and arms covered in dull red scratches.