‘You need to join the working world. Escape from your cocoon of Us and Them and the gaping hole between. How do you know he was a servant? He could have been a clerk. A tailor. A shopkeeper. An anything.’

‘But not a social equal.’ I took the letter out of my back pocket and passed it to Sameer.

He read it and handed it back. ‘No, not a social equal. What great conclusion have you reached from that?’

A young boy came round selling plastic combs and spools of elastic. Sameer said we wanted neither but he’d give the boy ten rupees for getting us Cokes from the drinkwallah. I changed the order to one Coke and one Apple Sidra.

‘We know this man was in love with Mariam. We know, we can at least surmise, she gave him no encouragement.’

‘So far you’re on solid ground, but I sense a swamp approaching.’

‘What if it was his social status that stood in the way? What if, because of his social status, Mariam never even considered him a possibility?’

‘Possible. Shaabaash, chotoo.’ Sameer took the drinks from the young boy and handed him a ten-rupee note. A beggar saw Sameer’s wallet and came over to us, palm outstretched. Sameer waved him away.

‘But then, as she was planning to leave for Karachi, the fact that she was leaving allowed this man to say something to her. Maybe something said in hope. Maybe something said as a reprimand. At any rate, it was something that made Mariam see—’

‘Allah bless your union,’ the beggar said, circling back after an unsuccessful foray to the group beside us.

‘Something that made Mariam see everything she had never seen, every possibility she had never even considered considering.’

‘I’ll pray that you pass your exams,’ the beggar said.

‘And so she arrived in Karachi ready to consider the possibility of loving a cook?’ Sameer said.

‘More than ready. Determined to prove that she was capable of doing so. She always had the strangest stubborn streak. Remember Dr Tahir and the sari?’

‘In the name of Allah …’

‘So her silence was subversion.’ For once Sameer was paying attention and not laughing. ‘We look at this guy’s letter and we decide his social status. You think Mariam’s silence was a protest against the prejudice built into language? That’s why even when she did speak it wasn’t to the élite. She only spoke to Masood to order meals and even then — Did you ever notice this? — she spoke in questions not in imperatives. She’d say, “Bhujia? Koftas? Pulao?” Basically, she was undercutting the whole employer-servant paradigm.’

I thought of all I couldn’t say to Masood’s brother. ‘Maybe. Yes, maybe. Why not?’

‘And the ultimate test of her ability to look beyond class was the act of eloping?’

‘Let’s not get carried away.’ I looked suspiciously at Sameer. Was he trying to out-Aliya me with these leaps? But he looked quite serious. ‘By that point she loved him, I’m sure. But only because she first acknowledged that it was possible to do so. Do you think that’s part of the reason society was so outraged? Because by eloping with Masood she made eloping with a servant possible?’

‘May Allah give you many many sons.’

‘Well, I heard of more than one servant being fired straight after the elopement. For looking. For daydreaming. Did you know daydreaming is to be discouraged among servants? I read that somewhere. And Bachelor Uncle sacked his driver because he caught his neighbour’s daughter staring at the driver’s bare chest one day.’ Sameer handed the empty bottles to the beggar and told him he could collect the bottle deposit from the drinkwallah. The beggar made an expression of disgust. What good was a couple of rupees to him?

‘I can get you a job,’ Sameer said, standing up and brushing down his trousers.

‘This is my job,’ the beggar said, and walked away.

‘Works every time,’ Sameer laughed, unlocking the car door for me. As we drove away from the bright redness of the setting sun he said, ‘Is that what’s going on with this guy, Khaleel? You want to prove something to yourself just as Mariam did?’

Chapter Twenty-One

It had nothing to do with the weather, but Mohommed still insisted on saying, ‘I told her so,’ when Dadi slipped and hit her head and had to be taken to the hospital. The doctor — Great-Aunt One-Liner’s son — said she was fine, no damage done, but no harm, either, in staying in hospital overnight.

I offered to be the one to stay with her, and my parents agreed, but Meher Dadi said her sister had nursed her through measles when they were children so the least she could do in return was sit in the hospital room until Dadi fell asleep. Technically, only one of us should have been allowed to stay after visiting hours, but the nurses and orderlies were no match for the stubbornness of Dadi and her sister. After much wrangling, the nurse on duty finally pretended to believe Dadi’s claim that I had left and gone home, even though I yelped quite loudly when the nurse stepped on my hand as I lay in my hiding place under the bed.

‘And knock before you enter,’ Meher Dadi said to the nurse. ‘Sometimes at night I dance around naked and I don’t want anyone barging in on me when I’m in that state. Not the way my breasts look now. What were once melons are now half-empty bladders.’

Older Starch was more brazen in her manner of ignoring hospital rules. ‘Hello, hello, Abida Khala. What a terrible thing this is.’ She sailed in with arms outstretched. ‘Couldn’t make it for visiting hours so I told the nurse outside of my connection to several trustees of the hospital and here I am with Maliha.’ Her daughter kissed Dadi and Meher Dadi and shot in my direction a look that conveyed all the embarrassment a twelve-year-old can feel at the hands of a parent.

‘There are visiting hours in the morning,’ Dadi said.

‘That’s all the way tomorrow. Can’t let you fall asleep thinking I didn’t look in on you. Besides, Maliha has to be taken for waxing in the morning and it’s her first time so I’m going along to hold her hand.’

‘It’ll hurt, won’t it, Aliya Apa?’ Maliha said.

Older Starch turned to her. ‘Hurt? What’s hurt? Do any of us live without it? But, Maliha, you’ve heard the story of Sameer Bhai and the lizard in the bathroom. It was the same colour as speed and it leapt on to his leg. Real acrobat it was. Just one chalaang from the floor and on to his shin. Shorts he was wearing, shorts! You think he didn’t try to kick it off? Of course he tried. But his legs are so hairy that the lizard gripped on with its claws and climbed, one claw at a time, climb climb climb, up his shin, over his knee, up to his thigh and we don’t even want to think about what would have happened next if that reptile hadn’t hit a bald spot around a scar and lost its grip. Aliya, Aunts, I ask you: would this trauma have occurred if he had waxed his legs?’

I don’t know what we would have said if Great-Aunt One-Liner’s son, alerted by the nurses, hadn’t walked in and ordered Older Starch and her daughter out of the room. He pretended I was just a pile of clothes, even though Older Starch said, ‘But, Aliya.’

‘Every story has a moral,’ Meher Dadi said when the door closed, and then she and Dadi clutched each other and laughed so hard they knocked heads.

I was quiet through the evening, allowing them to talk as only sisters can. The talk meandered through nearly eight decades of memories, their word associations too far removed from logic to make much sense to me and I thought, For all the talking we’ve ever done together there’s still so much I’ll never know. I knew I was capturing a memory as I watched them, both lying on the bed now, so oblivious to my presence it was as though I were not yet born. They spoke of the living with nostalgia, and of the dead with mirth, and I wondered at my earlier inability to see how remarkable were the women of their generation, who spoke so rarely with regret, though they had seen so much turn to dust.