I thought, Hamlet? I said, ‘Any doughnut shop.’

‘To Piccadilly Circus then,’ Rehana Apa said. She allowed me silence as we walked. I suppose she thought I was thinking of that star beside my name. But actually I was thinking of America. My college days, so recently finished, were days of empty spaces in my head. Spaces without chatter, spaces without textured silences. I was so utterly foreign there, so disconnected from everything that went on that I could afford to be passionate about the tiniest injustice in the domestic news.

‘I don’t really want a doughnut,’ I said. I put on my best academic voice. ‘The word “doughnut” is a sign, the visual image of the doughnut is the signifier and a nostalgia for another life is the signified.’ I gestured vaguely with my hand. ‘Can we just go and sit under a tree instead?’

Rehana Apa said she knew a wonderful tree, and indeed she did. A shady beech in Green Park. Or perhaps it was an elm. Or an oak. I know nothing about trees, but I’ve read enough novels set in England to be pretty sure no other trees of importance exist there.

‘What about Hamlet should Baji remember?’ I sat down, unmindful of the damp.

Rehana Apa touched her palm to the tips of the grass, found the grass wet, dried her palm with a tissue and sat down anyway. ‘When Polonius says he’ll treat the players as they deserve, and Hamlet says, “Use them after your own honour and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty.” ‘

‘Such an aristo remark,’ I said. ‘Combat abuse with nobility; it’ll make the other guy look so small.’

Rehana Apa shook her head at me. ‘I love Hamlet in that moment. It makes me weep for everything he’s forced to become.’

I leant against the tree trunk and tried not to stare at her. My cousin. She must have been a dozen or so years older than me, and suddenly that didn’t seem very much. And here we were, talking about Hamlet. With everything else there was to talk about, we were talking about Hamlet.

‘Those kids at Baji’s. Are they yours?’

‘Stinky and Smelly?’ Rehana Apa laughed. ‘Yes. When the older one was born Baji said he had eyes like the old Nawab, Binky. So I said to my newborn child, “Should we call you Binky?” and he put his hand to his nose and scrunched up his face. My husband said, “He’s saying not Binky but Stinky.” And it stuck as such names do. The second born didn’t have a chance.’

‘Their real names?’

‘Omar and Aliya.’

‘Really? Aliya?’

Rehana Apa nodded. ‘Samia told me there’s a Stinker in the Pakistani side of the family.’

‘Yes. And his brother is Pongo. Weird, isn’t it? How our names overlap despite, you know, the complete lack of communication between the two sides of the family. How did Samia get in touch with you?’

‘We met at an art exhibition. Treasures of the Indian princes. We both kept circling back to a cabinet which displayed the sword our illustrious ancestor, Nur-ul-Jahan, used in the Battle of Surkh Khait. Once we started talking it took about seven seconds to work out the connection. Do you think your — our — relatives in Pakistan will criticize her for fraternizing with the enemy?’

‘No. Well, maybe one or two will. But I suppose the overwhelming emotion will be curiosity about how you’ve all fared. And the Indian relatives?’ It occurred to me suddenly that we didn’t support the same cricket team, this cousin and I. We’d never share that joy or camaraderie or heartrending despair that Samia, Sameer and I — and various other cousins — had so often experienced as we sat together in Sameer and Samia’s TV room, digging our nails into each other with anticipation during the final overs of a one-day game.

‘Probably react the same. Except, as you say, for one or two.’ Rehana Apa pulled a twig out of my hair. ‘Besides, almost everyone who stayed in Dard-e-Dil is now locked in some kind of property dispute with other relatives, so we’re expending our quotas of familial animosity within the national borders. And, for the record, I think Pakistan was a huge mistake.’

‘For the record, I don’t see it that way. Glad we’ve got that part of the conversation over with.’

She laughed and slapped my hand lightly. For a while we were silent and I found myself thinking again of him. Khaleel. I tried to picture him in Liaquatabad, but I had no idea what Liaquatabad looked like, so I just imagined tiny storefronts and burst sewerage pipes and cramped flats with laundry hanging over the balconies, spattered with crow droppings. I didn’t know if I was imagining a place I’d seen, or one I’d had nightmares about when I had nightmares about Mariam Apa. I looked at Rehana Apa’s elbows and I knew I had lied to myself when I said that crippling memories were what made me recoil at the prospect of Liaquatabad. I was born into a world that recoiled at such prospects. If Rehana Apa were to tell me that she was in touch with Baji’s mother’s family, I’d be shocked. I’d wonder what she could possibly have to say to them, and how she could bear to be reminded that she was one of them just as much as she was one of the Dard-e-Dils. But for all I know, I reminded myself, they could have risen in the world in the last few generations. They could be as polished and urbane as Rehana and I. They could be as polished and urbane as Khaleel.

Rehana Apa must have seen my brows furrowing deeper and deeper because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘If I understand correctly, Mariam’s older than you, older than me. What I mean is, you do realize that this twin stuff is absurd, don’t you? Babuji won’t say why he added it to the tree, but you know, just because we claim he’s always right, it doesn’t mean he is.’

So I told her the story of Mariam Apa’s arrival, and of mine.

It started with a letter to my father; another one, like Taimur’s, with an indistinguishable postmark. It was addressed to Sahibzada Nasser Ali Khan, and my mother was still new enough to our family to laugh at the pomp of that address. The letter (my mother still has it) said:

Huzoor! Aadaab!

I hope you are well and I hope you hope the same of me. I am writing because there is a young lady, Mariam, who soon before was motherless but since last month is an orphan. Her father (late) was Sahibzada Taimur Ali Khan whose name you must know and maybe even his face if you have old pictures. But even if not his face is your father’s face and so you will recognize her also because she has the familiarity. She is coming to look you up and I like her so much that I want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never!

In true Hollywood fashion the gate-bell rang as soon as my parents finished reading out the letter and, in a further cinematic twist, my mother was so surprised by the sound she spilt her tea over the paper and it washed away the signature, which my parents had read when reading the letter, but could not afterwards remember because the letter’s sentence structure convinced them that the writer was no one they knew.

So the bell rang and my father, certain that the laws of Hollywood had no part in his life, frowned at the spilt tea and told my mother it was probably just the night-watchman come to collect his monthly gratuity (which was and still is a tiny amount, but how much can you pay a man for riding through the neighbourhood on a bicycle while blowing a high-pitched whistle which sounds as if it’s the shriek of something supernatural).

At this point in my tale, Rehana Apa stopped me to enquire what I thought of Pakistani movies. I had to concede I’d never seen one of Lollywood’s productions, though Samia’s brother, Sameer, once went to see a local flick with his driver and cook and came home howling with laughter. ‘So the hero’s at this party, looking suave in his safari suit, and a waitress — not a waiter, a waitress! I ask you, From where? — asks him what he’ll have to drink. And I’m thinking, Is he going to do a shocker and ask for alcohol? But no, he asks for Coke with ice. Except he says it in English in some pseudo-smooth accent, so how it really comes out is “Cock on rock.” ‘