During the years in which I’d been teaching and travelling and writing, she went through something painful in Karachi that I could only guess at. She had put a distance between herself and not just me but the hunger, the thirst, the craving she’d had for life, for love. And that distance made an equal affection, or what seemed like one, easier for us both.

Marvi had discovered the kind of solitude that had always been my companion. She would spend hours reading, listening to music, drawing, writing. I hoped that she, too, would find a form to work in, a new form to contain her musings. Even in our most tender and companionable moments I could sometimes sense her withdrawing from our conversation – her eyes would wander, her sentences dangle incomplete. At first I thought the painkillers were doing that. Now it was I who sometimes wanted to stay with her a little longer, to ward off the night for another hour or two before I crossed the road and switched on the lights and the television in my own flat. But soon I knew it was not me she was withdrawing from, but every one of her memories, of joy, of pain. And when her eyelids began to droop and her voice grew faint I would kiss her forehead and leave.

I remembered how she had once said: ‘Pain, that’s all there is. You think it’s love, but it’s only pain.’ We spent our youth looking for signs in the night; for a while, each one of us thought the other was that sign, and when we found how wrong we were we looked for light elsewhere. Now we knew that the night’s darkness, the solitude and absence it offered us, together and apart, was the sign we had been looking for.

Once she kissed the tips of my fingers and said: ‘Who’ll be there for you when I’m gone? How can I leave you alone? I don’t even have anyone to tell to keep an eye on you. You don’t eat properly. You starve yourself all day and then you stuff yourself with bread and rice. You’re careless about your health. You chain-smoke.’

I put my head in her lap. ‘Don’t be morbid.’

Then she told me that if she did live on another year or two, I should stay with her, maybe even marry her.

At other times she’d turn her head away from me and say we never would have made it, she and I, even if she had been whole and well. ‘We met too late. Or too early.’