‘You’re obsessed with Riccarda, with her cancer, it’s separating you from your friends and all those who used to love you. I know you think I’m crazy. But you’re a fucking ghost.’

After the news of Riccarda’s illness, Marvi and Mehran have less and less to say to one another. Her flat is filled with the friends she meets at pubs and bars: they spend their evenings around her, smoking hashish or marijuana, taking ecstasy and drinking. And Mehran is with her less and less; more and more often he’s in his own studio flat a few streets away, at calling distance.

At less than thirty-five, he feels like a cloud, like the ghost Marvi calls him, as if he died in some other era. He has become used to being unfulfilled, and even if he does find himself in other beds it doesn’t matter. He is still Marvi’s. He is still alone.

Dear R,

Once Marvi said to me, her head resting on my knee, in one of her drug-dazed moments: ‘When I was in Karachi in July, it started to rain and didn’t stop for three days. There was no electricity and the streets were flooded. I watched the clouds gather and burst, and the lightning flash and the rain beat against my window, fight it as if it had a will to smash the glass barrier and break in, break in and wash over me, drown me, and I thought the memory of you was like that rain, and I was that window, with invisible bars and invisible shutters, and the more you wanted to smash the glass I’d raise the barriers and you’d be like that rain, with its flashing and its storming, and then its sudden end when it’s spent itself …’

Your loving M.

1991

In the world beyond their windows, things have also changed, some for the better: since Benazir Bhutto came into power, even the disappointments that pursued her supporters during her first term didn’t succeed in vanquishing hopes for a new era in Pakistan. Many of their friends are going back; Mehran, too, begins to dream of his lost city. In response to the burgeoning national promise, he has started reading contemporary Urdu writing; his interest has turned from his earlier field of study to post-partition literature, the prose writers that were the intellectual progeny of Faiz, his favourite modern poet. Now he wants to teach today’s Urdu fiction and poetry, translate it and write about it, at least for the next ten years. He spends hours in the university library, searching out uncut, unread volumes of fiction and poetry freshly arrived from Pakistan.