‘Are these what I think they are?’ Samia pointed to a pair of black stars marking two names halfway down the tree. Now that she had pointed it out I could see pairs of starred names scattered across the paper, their familiarity rendering Samia’s question rhetorical. The not-quite-twins. As a child, I had inked those names on to my skin after a hot bath, my pores thirsting for that spiral of legend wrapped around my limbs.

‘This is the saddest of all the twin stories.’ Rehana’s thumbnail underlined the starred words ‘Inamuddin’ and ‘Masooma’.

Baji sighed and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘What we are, we are.’

Baji was clearly like Dadi in one thing at least: she could state the obvious and make it sound like revelation.

‘Although maybe I only think that because I’m an architect,’ Rehana added.

Inamuddin and Masooma were twins born on either side of midnight, almost three hundred years before Akbar and his brothers performed that feat with an added twist. The twins’ uncle, Nawab Hamiduzzaman, aware of the curse of not-quite-twins, ordered the royal physician to poison the babies and ascribe the deaths to natural causes. Someone should have told Hamiduzzaman the story of Oedipus. Or of Lady Macbeth, perhaps. Because after the deed was done, old Ham could not sleep. He could not sleep and he could not pray and he could not peel the taste of poison from his lips. Until at last a man with the dust of distance on his feet and the gleam of prophecy in his eyes won entry into the Nawab’s presence and, bending closer than close, whispered a means to redemption. And it was this: raze to the ground the mausoleum you have just started building for the bones of your ancestors and your descendants and those who come in-between. Make that land a holy shrine for pilgrims from every everywhere.

You may wonder, Then what? And you may wonder, How did that lead to a fall in the family’s fortune? I’ll say this: Think of the Mughals. Think of an image that captures and preserves the glory of the Mughals, and if you have any sense of anything you’ll say the Taj Mahal. Well, the fact is, Shah Jahan bought — in secret and in gold — the plans to that Dard-e-Dil mausoleum from the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil archives, and the only thing he changed when he had the plans copied for the benefit of the contractor was the name. But we know, though you’ll laugh, that Taj Mahal is, was, should have been, Dil Mahal. Other not-quite-twins denied the family wealth, power, freedom, unity; Masooma and Inamuddin’s curse was that they deprived us of posterity. And, oh God, we deserved it.

(When? you might demand. When did this happen? And now I’m forced to concede that it happened during the glory days of the Mughals, when Dard-e-Dil was not a kingdom at all but merely part of the Mughal Empire and Nawab Hamiduzzaman was not a Nawab, not really, no; that title was only conferred upon him posthumously by the Nawabs that followed after Dard-e-Dil became independent of the Mughals. So really old Ham was merely a scion of a once important family which had the good sense to ingratiate itself with the Mughals early on and received, in return, the position of subehdar- chief administrator — of the province comprising those lands which earlier may have been, and later certainly became, the kingdom of Dard-e-Dil. The position was not hereditary and the Dard-e-Dils were sometimes sent to cool their heels in outposts of the Empire but somehow, in contravention of the standard Mughal policy of keeping administrators on the move, the Dard-e-Dils always returned to those lands. Because they were sycophants, competent as administrators, but otherwise so grovelling and seemingly ineffectual that the Mughals saw them as no real threat? Perhaps. But also perhaps because the Mughals trusted them, admired them, acknowledged them as cousins of the Timurid line, and felt that a few years away from Dard-e-Dil was all it took to remind those cousins that they were entirely dependent on the bounty of the Mughal for their own prestige and power. By and large the plan worked through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By and large. But Hamiduzzaman was less than happy to play the role of needy relation. It was, I believe, the desperation to be ruler not vassal, coupled with an awareness of his own impotence against the Emperor, that made him so susceptible to an act as mad as infanticide. He saw that the reign of the Great Mughal, Akbar, was past and, sensing the faintly glimmering possibility of breaking free from Mughal rule, he was willing to sacrifice anything that might stand in the way of an auspicious future for Dard-e-Dils, even if that thing was a pair of mewling babies.)

‘Taj,’ Baji said, interrupting my thoughts. I assumed she must have been thinking, like me, of Shah Jahan’s architectural wonder. But no.

‘Taj, the midwife,’ she said, one manicured nail circling the name of the Nawab who killed a tiger with his bare hands. ‘With her head full of family lore and no reason to love those oh-so-legitimate babies she brought into the world. How do we know she didn’t invent, make up … Oh, let’s say it straight. How do we know Akbar, Taimur and Sulaiman didn’t enter the world on the same day, all just before or just after midnight?’

‘Because their mother—’

‘Samia, please. I’ve given birth in the days before these super painkillers and epidurexes — Rehana, you wouldn’t laugh if you’d been through it yourself — and I would have believed anything, yes anything, anyone said to me afterwards about when the clock chimed and when it didn’t.’ She smiled, as though thinking of something that pleased her inordinately. ‘Maybe Taj saw triplets and wondered if they qualified as not-quite-twins. And then maybe she saw the clock and thought, Why not. Let me make them believe it’s so. Let this be my revenge for their treatment of my mother and me.’

I was thinking, believe me, of my earlier conversation with Samia about Taj. I was thinking that, and thinking also that of course I wasn’t the first woman in the family to be bothered by Taj’s role in our narrative. So I said, ‘Well, I can understand why you feel a sense of affinity with Taj.’

Was it the air, the company, the tilt of my head? I don’t know. I just know that as soon as the words were out something transformed them. At the periphery of my vision, Samia was shaking her head at me and Rehana had turned her face away, but Baji only laughed, throwing her head back and showing all her cavities. ‘Oh, I see Abida in you. I see her so clearly. You with the untainted blood. Here …’

She swooped forward and picked the trailing end of the family tree off the floor, unrolling it on to my lap. ‘Here’s a pair of not-quites you don’t know about.’

Beside Mariam Apa’s name, a star.

A diagonal dotted line connected it to another starred name.

Mine.

Chapter Six

I’d had the opening line of Mariam’s story ready for a long time: In all the years my cousin, Mariam, lived with us she only spoke to order meals. The next line varied, according to my mood. Usually it was: Strictly speaking, she was more aunt than cousin, though I always called her Apa. But when I was feeling more fanciful I sometimes replaced that with: She taught me the textures of silence, the timbres of it, and sometimes even the taste.

My first thought when Baji showed me those stars was, the opening line will have to change. The story must begin with the curse of not-quites.

I should have thought, How is this possible? Given chronology, given science, given my life. How? But Rehana Apa was up and moving towards me, distracting me with her purposefulness as she pulled me up and said, ‘Baji, remember Hamlet? I’m taking Aliya out for something to eat. Samia, stay and look after my grandmother. She’s about to go into regret.’ She turned to me. ‘Where to?’