‘You brown girls are hard work,’ he told her, ‘but your smell alone is worth it.’

Sakina pulled down her niqaab and smiled. She lifted the folds of her black burqa to cross her legs, revealing thin, red leather stilettos and dark olive skin. The man grinned. He loved this city.

CHAPTER 1

His forehead touched the worn patch of his mat as he prayed. Deep in supplication, Akbar Khan whispered the Arabic phrases he’d been taught as a child, invoking blessings on the Prophet, praising Allah and calling on His infinite mercy. The old man moved back to the sitting position, his knees now folded under him, and adjusted the tan-coloured woollen hat covering his black hair. He wore it as a sign of respect and honour to his people. It reminded him of how far he had come; its presence kept them in his prayers. The day he had taken it from the rebel soldier was still fresh in his mind, even though more than half a century had passed since he came across the body as he played in the street.

A single thought flickered through his mind and stole him from his prayers. He scratched his clipped beard and made a note to ask his wife to pick up a box of Bigen from the Pakistani grocery shop nearby. The dusty streets and winding walkways of his homeland may have been decades behind him, but the grey-and-orange packaging of hair dye, like the hat, was another reminder of his birthplace, and one of the few constants in his life. The hair dye, the hat, a beaten brown leather suitcase that used to rest above an old cupboard in his father’s house, and odd memories: these were all that remained of those times. He had heard that suicide bombers had destroyed much of his home town. He had heard that the women cried blood and the children played with Kalashnikovs, and though his Pukhtun blood meant it was not in his nature to take much to heart, he wept for Peshawar.

He slid his hands from his knees to the faded pink of the prayer mat once again and sank into the sajdah. Prostrating before his God, he gave thanks for the cotton kameez of his youth, the only one he’d owned then, and for the row upon row of suits and shalwars and chadors and chappals that were housed in the wardrobe in his home here in England. His wardrobe was larger now than the house he’d been born in, the house where he had watched his parents die.