Zan watched her flinch. ‘Not nice, is it,’ he said, ‘when someone attacks your family?’ Jia remained silent, her confusion evident on her face. ‘Your father-in-law should have known better. No one forced him to sign the papers, and the courts have found him not guilty, but you have given Elyas permission to shout at Baba. It’s not our father’s fault that your husband’s father did what he did.’

He said the words slowly, deliberately, and was ready for retaliation, but she dropped her head into her hands, and by the time she looked up, black lines of mascara and kohl were smudged across her cheeks.

‘I watched an old man standing in the dock and fighting for his life, day after day, knowing that I was partly responsible for putting him there. While we sit safely in our houses, that is what Baba does to people. He doesn’t care who it is or what happens to them. He just keeps on going. It’s business to him, just business. He destroys lives, livelihoods, and all for what? For money. He’s kept it from us, this business of his, but this time I saw it, every last drop of pain. I watched it being wrung out of an innocent man. All because his son had chosen to marry me, and because I am Akbar Khan’s daughter.’

Her father, her hero, the hypocrite, and so was she. She couldn’t forgive him and it was tearing her apart. ‘He’s done all these things, all these awful things and more, and yet I still love him? What can I do?’

‘Why do you need to do anything?’ Zan replied. ‘Why do you care so much what people think?’ His arrest and the years that followed had changed him from the inside out. ‘Making peace with the differences between our birthplace and our parents’ is hard. Making peace with their choices is even harder.’ Jia looked up at her brother: his face was unblemished, his eyes were tired. Standing in their father’s house they would both have given anything to turn back the clock and be children again. But there was no way back. Life had shown them its disfigured face. ‘Jia, we’re not like white society. They look after their own and that’s what Baba does. The day you see the world for what it really is, you’ll realise the lines drawn between right and wrong are not black and white, and they are not drawn for or by people like us. That day, you will see our father for what he really is, and you won’t be able to forgive yourself.’ There was nothing more to say. Jia knew that words could not change who they were and what had happened. They stood in silence, looking at each other, each one helpless in their own way.