In drawing rooms across the country frazzled Begums complained that all this fasting, combined with the heat, made their cooks so horribly bad-tempered. Of course, one felt guilty asking them to stand over a stove and cook under these circumstances. Masood, however, loved it. He liked nothing so much as to shoo us out of the kitchen with the warning, ‘If you smell my food you will be so overcome with temptation that you’ll break your fast on the spot. Leave, leave, before you make me into an instrument of Shaitan and I send you to hell.’ The only person he allowed in was Mariam Apa, who would chop and stir and watch, as she never did during any other time of the year.

And oh! the meals that resulted. We started with the requisite date, of course, to symbolize fidelity to the first Muslims in the deserts of Arabia, but then … on to gluttony! Curly shaped jalaibees, hot and gooey, that trickled thick sweet syrup down your chin when you bit into them; diced potatoes drowned in yogurt, sprinkled in spices; triangles of fried sarnosas, the smaller ones filled with mince-meat, the larger ones filled with potatoes and green chillies; shami kebabs with sweet-sour imli sauce; spinach leaves fried in chick-pea batter; nihari with large gobs of marrow floating in the thick gravy, and meat so tender it dissolved instantly in your mouth; lassi that quenched a day-long thirst as nothing else did and left us wondering why we ever drank Coke when a combination of milk, yogurt and sugar could be this satisfying; an assortment of sweetmeats — gulab jamoons, ladoos, burfi.

There were always at least ten people gathered at our house by sunset for Iftari and, at some point, someone would look up from his or her third helping and say, ‘Mariam, have you finished eating? That’s an insult to the food. It’s divine!’ And Mariam Apa, who always ate just enough to show she appreciated the food, would make a gesture as though plucking the words from the air and swallowing them, to indicate, ‘I am eating your praise.’ Then she would look across at Masood, who had walked in with hot naans to go with the nihari, and smile her smile of congratulations. Masood would incline his head in a gesture that was not so much a salaam of deference as an acceptance of well-deserved praise.

(When I start to talk about Masood’s cooking to people who’ve never tasted it, I’m often greeted with looks of scepticism. All I’ll say is this: the Dard-e-Dil relatives of Dadi’s generation swear the finest meals they’ve eaten have all come from Masood’s kitchen. Such a compliment is not to be slighted when it comes from people who’ve eaten food from the fabled kitchens of the Dard-e-Dil palace where legions of cooks plied their trade, each one specializing in a different kind of food. So, for instance, there was one cook for the rice dishes and one for the parathas, one for the sweetmeats and one for the kebabs.)

In our house, the only meal that ever surpassed those Ramzan meals was the one Masood and Mariam Apa conjured up for me the day I was accepted at a college in America. Halfway through the meal I burst into tears to say, ‘But who will cook for me when I’m there?’

Masood almost touched my shoulder, said, ‘Don’t worry, Aliya Bibi.’ It was the first time he’d ever called me ‘Bibi’ and the deference it implied made me feel even more miserable. ‘When you come home for the holidays I’ll feed you so much they’ll have to roll you back on to the plane.’

‘Promise?’ I said.

‘Promise.’ He smiled back.

Two weeks later he was gone.

I pulled the airline blanket over my face and tried to regulate my breathing, which had become ragged just thinking about Masood’s departure and what followed.

When I told Samia that I never told Mariam Apa’s story, I wasn’t entirely honest. Admittedly, I’d never said it aloud in one go, but in dribs and drabs I’d hinted at, implied and blurted out every fragment of it at college to my roommate, Celeste. Brilliant, artistic, revolutionary, multi-multi-ethnic and entirely unpindownable Celeste, who moved into our room at the start of freshman year while I was still in transit and decided to make me feel at home in Massachusetts by customizing her reproduction of Che Guevara. Imagine me, walking into the airy, brightly coloured dorm-room and seeing a six-foot-by-three-foot painting of a long-haired man with beautiful eyes, a mango in one hand and a cricket bat in the other, his teeth red with blood.

Betel-nut juice, Celeste explained weeks later, when I felt I could query her artistic judgement.

The first thing Celeste asked me when I’d unpacked was, ‘Who is she?’ She was Mariam Apa, captured in black and white, framed and displayed on my desk. I evaded answering in any detail until the end of that semester, when Celeste announced, ‘I’m going to make a painting of your cousin, Mariam. You got any input on that?’

‘Yes. Can you paint her older? So I’ll have some way of knowing how age might change her face.’

Celeste turned her attention away from the picture of Mariam Apa and towards me. ‘It’s more common for people to want a painting to remove a few years from the sitter.’

I laughed. ‘The thought of Mariam Apa older … older and happy. Can you, who never knew her, imagine that? I so wish that I could.’

‘So she died?’ Celeste was never one for cloaking brutality in euphemism.

‘My grandmother would doubtless say it would be better if she had.’

‘Okay, spill.’

How Celeste made sense of the garble that followed, I’ll never know. But I’m clearer now. So, deep breath, forget about Massachusetts, forget about the flight, and let me take you to the day of Masood’s disappearance, two weeks after he called me Bibi.

I knew something was wrong the moment I returned from school and the only smell to assail my nostrils as I walked up the driveway was that of the manure recently delivered to my neighbour’s garden. Ami was standing in the kitchen as I ran in, staring in mystification at Masood’s rack of spices.

‘What’s happened? Where is he? Is he ill?’

‘No, no, he’s not ill. He had to leave. His father has died. Masood’s the head of the family now. So he’s gone.’

‘For how long?’ I didn’t stop for a moment to think about Masood’s loss; I just wondered how long I’d have to do without his cooking.

‘Jaan, he’s gone. They need him there. It’s feudal land, you know. It seems his father was the cook at the home of the zamindar, and Masood will be taking over that position. He said to tell you he’s sorry he didn’t have time to say goodbye, but he had to catch the morning train.’

‘But how will we …’ I looked around the kitchen, cavernous and strange. ‘What about Mariam Apa?’

Ami shook her head. ‘I don’t know. We’ve already found a new cook — the one who worked for your dadi when Mohommed was on leave — and he’s starting tomorrow, but I don’t know if Mariam … I don’t know what. I don’t know.’

All I was thinking was, I’ll never hear her voice again. But when I saw the flutter of Ami’s hands across the spice jars and her refusal to meet my eye, I thought, Oh dear God.

It’s not just that she only spoke to speak to him of food; she also only ate when it was his food she was eating. When Masood had taken his father on haj, two years earlier, he’d frozen a week’s supply of food for Mariam Apa so that she wouldn’t starve.

‘Where is she?’ I said.

‘In her room. When Masood was leaving he told her to keep eating, otherwise she’ll fall ill and cause him much pain. And she smiled and … hugged him. Briefly. She hugged him goodbye.’

I stared. A hug — across class and gender. And he wasn’t even much older than her. Before this had their fingers even touched as they passed a tomato from one to the other? I doubted it. A hug! I wouldn’t have, and Masood had carried me piggy-back style when I was a child.