How close Marco was to me that Italian summer, twelve years ago. I wanted to tell you then, dear R, and I want to tell Lilla now, but I won’t: let’s leave it all in the past. He came so close I was able to let my joy, my passion for you, spill over into our friendship, and reliving that joy in words, or in his silent company, nearly doubled the pleasure of my yearning. He took me to Bracciano and Frascati and we talked and talked and sometimes we didn’t say a word; we climbed hills, and played childish spitting games in ancient Etruscan cemeteries or in the Ostian Sea. Then, at some uncertain moment, we let it all slip away, the companionship and the conversations and the wordless tenderness. Or maybe I was the one to let it go. I remember how we struggled once, he and I, on a hot Roman evening by the riverbank in the shadow of Sant’Angelo, to translate those words of Shauq that ended ‘The Poison of Love’: ‘Ishq men hamne ye kamaai ki/dil diya gham se aashnai ki.’ I came up with something like this: ‘For love’s labour, this is what I earned/My heart I traded/and the craft of grief I learned.’ And Marco laughed and said, ‘But all it means is: “Questi sono i miei guadagni dell’amor / Ho dato il cuore e conosciuto il dolor.” So much easier in Italian!’ His rendition really was much closer to the bare music of the original.

‘It’s what Riccarda said to me when she came out from anesthesia. “Ti voglio bene, amore mio.” Didn’t I ever tell you?’

Then, driving in the pale sunshine past Umbrian fields on that trip to Assisi, Mehran tells Lilla, as he tried to tell Marco the night before, how he had recounted, on another drive, in another season, another chapter of his story and Marvi’s to Riccarda, and he must have shuddered while he told it because Riccarda said: ‘Don’t flinch like that. Have you ever thought that in some way you might have hurt her – might still be hurting her – as badly as you feel she hurt you? Let her go, Mehran, let her go.’

V

Dye my Scarf Green

Would that I could go home again,

to the land of my father’s toil

that I might return to Malir

and die in the blooming desert soil

From ‘Marvi’s Song’, Shah Abdul Latif

1994