‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘These are for you.’ He held up a bunch of flower stems.

‘Am I being stalked?’

He laughed. ‘I promised myself if you didn’t get it, I’d leave.’ His expression changed to embarrassment. ‘I can still leave. I don’t mean it’s my decision to make.’

‘Hang on.’ I grabbed the spare keys and ran down the stairs until I came to the final bend leading to the lobby with its glass doors, and then I ambled. ‘How?’ I said, when I was through the doors.

‘Your luggage tag. From the airport. I remembered the address on it because I have a friend who used to live in that building.’ He pointed across the street. Adam’s arm reaching towards God. When I first stood in the Sistine Chapel I wondered if Michelangelo was aware of his blasphemy. Who even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?

Khaleel dropped his arm. ‘Look, I’m sorry. This is stupid. It’s just that I was thinking of you and then you were there.’

‘And then I wasn’t.’

‘Just after I mentioned where my family lives.’

‘What? No, no. Samia just realized it was our stop, that’s all. She’s a little scatty sometimes.’ If I had said a UFO had landed behind the Ritz and its occupants had activated Samia’s homing beacon, I might have pulled it off. I can tell stories, but I can’t lie particularly well. Samia, scatty!

‘Did you say “catty”?’ He grinned and leant back against a car, with arms folded. The I’m-cool-enough-to-handle-anything pose. ‘So what’s so terrible about Liaquatabad that you had to run away at the first mention?’

‘Karachi’s huge. Really. What was sea and swamp and wasteland not so long ago is now tarmac and concrete and, well, another kind of wasteland.’

‘Tell me about April’s cruelty,’ he said. ‘Or answer my question.’

It didn’t surprise me that he knew his Eliot. On the plane he’d had a copy of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems. ‘I’ve never been to Liaquatabad. But it’s on that side of Karachi.’

‘Which side?’

‘That.’

‘Are you planning to elaborate?’

‘I’m feeling minimalist.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, and I thought he was going to walk off. So I said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know about the great class divide of Pakistan.’

‘Oh. It’s like that, is it?’ He scuffed the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other. ‘So I’m the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.’ Before I could quite decide how to respond to that he said, ‘I had a hard enough time growing up in the States knowing the other kids were laughing behind my back at my parents’ accents, their clothes, their whole foreign baggage. The way I dealt with that was by telling those kids to either lay off or stop pretending they were my friends. Most chose the first option. But what I’m saying is, I decided pretty early on that I’d rather risk unpopularity at school than feel embarrassed at home. So don’t expect me to start getting defensive about my family now just because …’ He put his hand to his scalp. ‘Aaah, hell. Can we go somewhere? And talk?’

Of course we could. But not upstairs; he didn’t even suggest that, but followed me around the corner towards a café. When we came to a crossing his hand lightly touched my elbow, convincing me not to make a dash for it between one speeding bus and the next. At the café we sat down at an outdoor table. I ordered coffee; he asked for tea.

‘Tell me about Karachi.’

I dipped a lump of sugar into my coffee and watched it change colour. He hadn’t said, ‘What’s Karachi like?’ as so many people did, as though they thought I could answer that question with a single, simple analogy. My stock answer was, ‘Like a chicken.’

But to Khaleel I talked of June, July and August, the three months that were all I had known of Karachi during my college years. The spring semester always ended by the middle of May, but I’d spend a month or so with college friends, or cousins in New York, having instructed my travel agent to book my flight home for 16 June or as soon thereafter as possible, by which point Dadi was sure to have departed for Paris, where she spent three months every year with her younger son, Ali, always making a point of being there for his birthday on 16 June.

‘But summer in Paris is horrible,’ Khaleel said. ‘Hot, and still. All the Parisians leave for the countryside.’

‘Dadi hates the monsoons. If they come early, she leaves early.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve never asked.’ I had my suspicions though. In avoiding the monsoons Dadi was avoiding memories of her youth in Dard-e-Dil. Dadi’s sister, Meher, had once told me that Dadi’s favourite festival of the year when they were children was the festival that marked the first of the rains. In the Dard-e-Dil palace grounds lengths of silken cord were looped around the boughs of trees and held coloured planks of wood a few feet off the ground. The young girls of the family would rush out, bangles clinking together, and would sing the monsoon songs as they swung higher and higher in the air. Beneath numerous tents great feasts were laid out, with special emphasis placed on mangoes. At the height of the mood of dizziness and gaiety the Nawab would produce a rain-shaped diamond from his pocket and bestow it on the girl who swung the highest without faltering in her singing. Dadi left Karachi before the monsoons so that she wouldn’t remember all those girls she sang with and all the lustre of her early life.

‘But I thought the monsoons were unpredictable,’ Khaleel said. ‘Don’t they sometimes start early, sometimes start not at all?’

‘Aren’t you the expert on global weather conditions? Karachi monsoons, French summers …’

‘I’m French.’

‘Shut up.’

‘No, really. My parents are professors. Physics. Both of them. And bitten by the travel bug. So they get teaching jobs all over the place. And when we were in France I got citizenship. They didn’t want me to be a US citizen because it was the seventies, Vietnam and all that, and they had visions of me growing up and being drafted to fight in some war they considered morally repugnant. Which pretty much covers all wars.’

‘But the French require you to do military service.’

‘Well, maybe I’m lying. Maybe I’m not French. Or maybe I have done military service.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Don’t pigeon-hole me, or my family, in Liaquatabad.’

I looked down into my coffee. ‘I try very hard not to pigeon-hole Liaquatabad.’

‘So what’s the problem? Why didn’t you jump back on the Tube before the doors closed?’

‘It was my stop.’

Khaleel poured his tea into a saucer, blew on it and tipped it into his mouth. My eyes swivelled round to check that no one I knew was watching. I knew right then everything my family would need to know about Khaleel’s parents. They were hardworking, decent people. Not professors, though. Somehow they’d made it to America, land of opportunity, with barely more than the clothes on their backs, and worked absurd hours for even more absurd wages, swearing all the while that for their son it would be different. And it was. He was smart enough and lucky enough for scholarships, and he’d assimilated; maybe he’d even been offered (and accepted) the chance to live as an exchange student in England or France while still in school. At college, perhaps he’d studied abroad for a year, and now he was thinking of going back, back to Karachi, to show his parents’ families that yes, the Butts had succeeded in the US, and you wouldn’t even know how humble his parents’ origins were, except in moments when he revealed little habits he’d picked up at home, like slurping tea out of a saucer.

‘If I tell you I just drank in that manner to see your reaction you’ll never know if it’s true, or if I’m saying it precisely because I did see your reaction.’ He wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘So for that reason, and also because I did see your reaction, let’s shake hands and say goodbye.’

‘No.’ It was time to unlearn the art of shrugging. But, even as I thought that, I knew that this time the option to step away didn’t exist. Run away, yes; but for reasons so complicated I couldn’t cope with thinking about them, and also for reasons as obvious as his smile, there could be no pretence that I was capable of ambling away with only the barest backward glance.