‘My brother died in a communal riot just after Partition. Your grandparents, and all those other Dard-e-Dils who leapt on to the Pakistan bandwagon, had left by then, were in Karachi; so my brother died in their place.’

‘In their place?’

‘He died for what they believed in.’

She was making it up. I knew that with utter certainty. None of the Dard-e-Dils died in the Partition riots; they either left for Pakistan in first-class style, with armed convoys or in the safety of aeroplanes, or they stayed within the four walls of the palace in Muslim-majority Dard-e-Dil until the worst of the troubles died down.

‘He was my half-brother,’ Baji said, very softly. ‘We had different fathers. I hardly ever spoke to him. He was not royal, you see. He was not too grand to be killed in something as common as a riot.’

Why weren’t any of the windows open? I could barely breathe.

The doorbell rang and even Baji looked relieved by the interruption. Stinky (or was it Smelly) charged out of his room and into the drawing room, leapt over one table, rolled under another, somersaulted over a third, unlocked the front door and leapt, rolled, flipped back into his room before the bellringer had quite finished entering the flat.

‘Rehana Apa!’ Samia kissed the newcomer — a younger version of Baji, but with hair halfway down her back. Her elbows were quite ordinary.

‘My granddaughter,’ Baji said to me. And then to Rehana, ‘This is Aliya.’ Rehana Apa smiled at me, a lovely smile, and embraced me.

‘These cousinly demonstrations can wait until later,’ Baji said. ‘Rehana, why don’t you bring it out?’

It? I thought. Tea?

‘Can I help?’ I said.

‘Not if the past is anything to go by,’ was Baji’s response.

Samia seemed as mystified by this as I was. We sat back in our chairs as Rehana Apa exited the room, and Samia started to talk to Baji about the difficulty of getting saris dry-cleaned in London. I tried to understand why I felt such hostility towards this woman whom I’d never before met. Because she hadn’t greeted me with open arms? I was usually adept at receiving coldness with indifference. Why should she bother me so much, when I knew nothing about her except for that matter of the elbows (and it couldn’t be that because I had no such animosity towards her granddaughter, who had provoked in me only feelings of warmth in the few seconds she’d been in the room)? So what else was there? She’s liable to start ranting at the mere mention of my grandmother’s name. Surely, surely, if anything, that should create a feeling of affinity between us. I’d done my fair share of ranting about Dadi in the last few years. Even as I thought that, I remembered Samia saying Baji blamed Dadi for the family split after Partition, and my face flushed with rage. How dare she? ‘We were girls together,’ Dadi had cried when she missed the chance to meet the mysterious Prufrock relative from India. She had cried. Slipped down on to the marble floor … My Dadi sat on that cold, hard floor and though I was only a child I knew the tears she was weeping were old, old tears.

I felt tears forming in my own eyes, so to distract myself I looked around at the framed photographs cluttering the walls and tables. A few of them were in colour, but by and large they were black and white and, here and there, sepia. Baji was still talking to Samia, but as my eyes wandered in her direction she extended a hand and pointed at a picture on the wall. I got up and walked over to it.

The setting was the grounds of the Dard-e-Dil palace. I recognized it instantly from the photographs and paintings that adorned the walls of Dadi’s house in Karachi, recognized it well enough to know that to have snapped that particular vista the photographer must have been backed up against the marble statue of Nur-ul-Jahan, founder of the house of Dard-e-Dil. Behind the figures who posed in the foreground was the arched entryway to the verandah that led to the part of the palace where Dadi’s immediate family lived. Her father, though related to the Nawab only through marriage, had the prized ability to make the Nawab laugh and, as such, was indispensable at court. Officially, he was a minister, but it seems to me he came closer to fulfilling the role of court jester. My other great-grandfather, the courtier-cum-yak-enthusiast, was somewhat more independent (or less favoured) and lived away from the palace. But not so very independent, or so very out of favour; if the photographer had angled his camera up, say, thirty degrees he would have captured that spot on the palace roof where you could stand and look through a gap in the trees to see the house where the yak-man and his wife raised the triplets, just outside the palace walls. (‘House’ is the word Dadi uses to describe the triplets’ home, but within the boundary walls there were stables, a mosque, and fruit orchards, to name just a few accessories to the ‘house’.)

All this I registered when I looked at the picture, but only to the extent that you might register the details of a frame when looking at the ‘Mona Lisa’. My real interest was in the three boys and the girl who were the reason for the photograph. My first thought when I saw the brothers was how strange it was that I had never before seen a picture of all three of them together. Their arms around each other’s shoulders, they stood so close they could have been Siamese triplets in sherwanis, their necks rising dark from the high white collars, their hair identically parted and slicked down. Abida — she was too young in the photograph for me to think of her as Dadi — stood in front of her three cousins, swaying back just enough to make it impossible to discern from the lens angle whether or not she was leaning against the middle brother’s chest. But whose smile was that on Abida’s face? Not Dadi’s, certainly not. The peculiar expression, ‘her face spilling over with laughter’, made sense for the first time as I looked at that teenaged girl, her back arching towards the impossibly beautiful boy in the centre of the photograph.

‘You see, I have a photograph of her, and of your grandfather, on my wall,’ Baji said. ‘Despite what I said earlier. Don’t think my feelings are one-dimensional. Don’t think you can dismiss me as an embittered old woman.’

‘Baji,’ Samia said. ‘Please.’

‘That’s all I’m going to say about it. Now come and sit down, Aliya.’ Baji waved me over to the floor cushion beside her. I hadn’t seen Rehana re-enter the room, but there she was, helping Samia pull a coffee table a little closer to Baji, a long roll of paper under her arm.

‘I want to register my disapproval of this,’ Rehana said.

‘Yes, yes, you’ve done that. Now lay it out.’

‘You know about Babuji, of course,’ Baji said, motioning to Rehana to hand me a cup of tea from a trolley which had appeared without calling any attention to itself. I nodded my thanks to Rehana, and nodded a yes to Baji. Babuji was the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil family tree, as his father had been before him and his grandfather before that. It was said (which means none of my relatives in Pakistan wanted to admit to being the original teller of this tale because it implied contact with the Indian relatives) that Partition and the subsequent Age of Frequent Flyers had in no way impaired Babuji’s family’s meticulous record-keeping, and all Dard-e-Dil births and deaths made their way to the family tree, regardless of bristling borders.

‘This is a copy — a pruned copy — of the family tree, as recorded by Babuji,’ Rehana said, placing the paper on the table and unrolling it. This was a pruned copy? The coffee table must have been about four feet by four feet, and still the edges of the paper curled off three sides of the table and rolled down to the floor. There seemed to be some vastly elaborate colour scheme at work, involving purples, greens, yellows, reds, blues and a whole range of colours and shades besides. It seemed that those who were directly descended from the first Nawab via the patrilineal line had their name inked in purple, but what the other colours were supposed to signify I didn’t know. They probably indicated how far you had strayed from being the offspring of a direct male descendant. Yes, true enough. My grandparents’ generation was hanging over the edge of the table, but I could just make out Dadi’s name in blue. Her mother was red, and you had to go back a generation further to locate Dadi’s purple grandmother. How Dadi must hate that! But it must be some comfort that Akbar’s bloodline allowed Dadi the privilege of purple children. Samia and my generation was hidden from view, but I didn’t need to see our names to know Samia’s direct line hadn’t been purple since her great-great-grandmother. I was purple, but it appeared my children would be red unless I married a fellow purple. I wondered, If I were to marry a non-purple Dard-e-Dil, would my children still be red? Or was there a maroon or something for such cases? Why should it matter, either way?