Marvi, Riccarda. My night guests, my dream visitors who died at dawn. Interred in the twentieth century. We are born, we die, and sometimes, for a while, we do something in between. Sometimes we live as though we were dead, or we die while we’re living. Most often, though, our lives are just a sequence of bookends, afterthoughts, epilogues.

As I walked away from the mosque towards the station, I saw two gulls wheeling overhead in a blanched and naked sky, and I wondered what had brought them to town on such a dry day, to a place where there was no water. I tried to remember whether the Thames flowed nearby. I was sure it didn’t. My footsteps were unburdened but my eyes felt like drifting clouds full of rain and undelivered messages.

I left for my first trip to New York a day or two after Marvi’s funeral.

VI

Berries and Fruits of the Land

There were deserts between us.

But now, the desert is green.

The rain of grace fell

and we eat

berries and fruits of the land.

Annemarie Schimmel, ‘Marui in Umarkot’

2010

‘Your camel-racing professor! She lived to be ninety-six, you know,’ Lilla says. ‘She died last July.’

‘Lady L? Last summer? No! Surely she’s been dead for ages?’

It’s April. They’re smoking by a fountain in the courtyard of an old church Lilla wants Mehran to see. Talking about Riccarda in the rain. (Years ago, Lilla guided Riccarda into Lady L’s classes, though she’s never told me why.)

They look it up on Lilla’s iPhone; Lilla’s right, Lady L retired to the northern town where she was born, and had a late flowering as a fire-breathing evangelist in the local parish church. She also fulminated against migrants in the green and pleasant land, quoting an old friend in the Himalayas who said his kingdom had remained safe for centuries because they had never allowed foreigners to settle there. The obituaries confirmed the rumours about her activities in the world of espionage and political skullduggery. But unlike the shock of so many death notices, when you discover someone you once knew or cared for has been gone a while without your knowing, the only surprise this time was her late-blooming religious mission, and that she had lived on for so many years.

‘So weren’t you afraid to go there – amidst all the bombs?’

‘I’m more annoyed by security at airports these days. I was going home, after all.’

Mehran had come to Rome from Karachi several days ago, to celebrate Lilla’s seventieth birthday, which fell on May Day. It was marked by the presentation to her of a festschrift at a conference on the poetics of translation. He hasn’t been back for seventeen years, since that last trip to Assisi. Now it’s nearly time for him to leave.