Akbar Khan tried hard to allay her concerns. ‘My blood will not allow her to lose her path. Dignity and honour course through our veins and hers. Have more faith in me and in your child, and in yourself. In any case, every great leader is shunned before they are admired.’ And when he realised that the fear in her eyes was for her child and not for their family honour, his voice softened. ‘My love, my jaanaan, trust me.’ She shook her head, and he whispered terms of endearment, tracing his finger across her forehead and gently moving wisps of hair from over her eyes and tucking them behind her ear. Through the warm tears of a wife and mother, she relented, as she always did.

‘My daughter will marry a very important man,’ Akbar Khan had announced to the midwife the first time the baby was bundled up and handed to him. The hours, days, years passed more swiftly than he’d have liked, but he continued to whisper his many plans into his daughter’s small ears, first the right and then the left.

At just ten months old, Jia Khan waddled around the office, her father discussing business with various men of ill repute. Brushing aside her curly fringe, she would cup her father’s wide, dark face in her chubby hand and try to kiss him, as he unflinchingly made decisions about work and the fates of men. No one dared question the presence of the child or why she was allowed in the quarters of men while they discussed business affairs. She was the daughter of their leader. She was their honour.

And so, some would say, it was inevitable that things turned out the way they did. ‘Men of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier know better than to question their Khan. Yet you raise your voice to me?’ her father had said the day she left, the day her heart was broken into pieces so small that not even the angels could put them back together.

‘It’s a good job I’m not a man,’ she told him. ‘You’re a liar and a murderer. You killed Zan, you destroyed my hope, my marriage, and you have the audacity to tell me that you did all this out of love?’ The last words had, in fact, been more a statement of fact than a question; she had no need of his excuses any more. And with her broken heart, she had smashed his in the way only a daughter can: ‘I hate you.’