Michael waited in the hallway as she unlocked the door to her apartment. It was the first time he’d really looked at her. She’d tied her brown hair up in the car. Her eyes were like rum-soaked almonds, her skin golden and soft. She took off her shoes and stepped barefoot on to the parquet floor of the entrance hall. A crystal chandelier hung in the centre of the room, and stairs curved up one side.

‘Why don’t you wait in there,’ she said, pointing to an open door. ‘I’ll be down shortly.’

He did as she asked, and found himself in a large hexagonal library. Four of the walls were covered in shelves stretching from floor to ceiling. Books by writers as diverse as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chuck Palahniuk, Manto, Byron, Bukowski and Ghalib reached up to the ornate mouldings of the ceiling. A moleskin chesterfield stood to one side of the room. A glass wall adjacent to it looked out over a courtyard garden. Photographs, mainly in sepia and black and white, but the occasional colour image too, hung on the opposite wall.

Michael felt suddenly small, a rare occurrence for a man who stood six foot two. He had retained the lankiness that teenage boys have when their arms outgrow the rest of their body, and found himself awkward as he tried to sit in one of the armchairs. He stood up again and waited.

He wanted Jia Khan to be impressed by him. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she was so different to him. Privileged and self-assured, she knew her place in the world and how to move through it. He was a mixed-race medical student in his early twenties, and still trying to figure out what that meant.

The Khan’s daughter was infamous among his father’s people, spoken about in hushed tones; the rumours about her were many. She was the only person known to have challenged, confronted and abandoned the Khan and lived to tell the tale.

He was lost in thought when she walked in. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked, startling him. He pulled his eyes into focus, took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt and put them back on to study the image he’d absentmindedly been staring at. It was a copy of Life magazine, framed, mounted and hanging on the wall. The photograph on the cover – one he’d seen hanging in chai shops across Pakistan – was of an old man with aquiline features wearing a peaked hat of the kind worn by the people of Kabul. The sight of the qaraqul resting on Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s head always left him queasy. What kind of people used aborted sheep foetuses to make headwear?

‘It’s from 1948,’ said Jia. ‘That particular one took quite a lot of effort to track down.’