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magazine and waved the cover at me. ‘Larger-than-life mothers.’
    â€˜Oh, come on. You really think we’re going to bond over swapping notes about that? You can complain about your mother going on location for weeks on end, and I’ll reciprocate with tales of my mother exiling herself for three bloody years.’ I crossed my arms, pressing them against my chest. ‘Is that what that whole line about getting to New York to escape being your mother’s son was all about? You thought I would embrace you to my bosom as soon as I realized the strong parallels between us? Admit it, Ed—if you so wanted to escape being your mother’s son you wouldn’t have returned to work at a television studio.’
    â€˜Are you done?’
    â€˜Almost. I just need your mother’s phone number.’
    â€˜For what?’
    â€˜She sent me some calligraphy. I want to call and thank her. She’s not anything like you, is she?’
    â€˜What do you mean, she sent you some calligraphy?’
    He looked so startled that for the first time I knew I had the upper hand. ‘Well, I guess Mummy’s keeping secrets from you,’ I said, and turned to walk out.
    I felt so triumphant about my exit that it wasn’t until I was back in my office that I realized what he’d done. He’d got past the façade. And worse than that, much worse—I knew he realized it, too.

V
    The month my parents married, the Poet wrote his most famous narrative poem,
Laila
. Reconfiguring the Laila-Majnu story, the poem centres on Laila, bereft after Qais has been banished from her presence. Unable to endure the thought of a life without him, she seeks out his likeness everywhere—in other men (she is soon regarded as the town whore], in nature (sometimes the wind brushing her neck reminds her of his touch), in art (she risks her life to steal a painting, because a man at the edge of its crowd scene leans forward in a manner suggestive of the angle of Qais’s back the first time he bent to embrace her). But all her attempts to find her Beloved’s exact copy lead only to frustration, so she starts to adopt his manner of speech, his gait, his dress, his expressions in order to keep his characteristics alive. She becomes an outcast, shunned by all for her madness and, driven out of town, she makes her way into the forest where Qais has been living—and walks past without seeing him. He watches her go and senses something familiar in her, but is too distracted by composing love poems about Laila to give the matter much thought. Years go by and one day, wandering through the forest, she meets a young man who greets her by the name ‘Qais’. She realizes she has finally succeeded in becoming her Beloved and need never be without him again. In that moment of triumph she looks into the forest pool and sees Qais’s face where her reflection should have been, and remembers: the one thing Qais could not live without is Laila.
    I couldn’t help thinking of that poem as I drove over Lily Bridge and headed toward Shehnaz Saeed’s house in the colonial part of town. Kiran Hilal had given me her number and when I had called she didn’t wait beyond the moment when I identified myself to invite me over for lunch that afternoon. I said I wasn’t sure I could get away from work for an extended period of time, and she laughed, and said, ‘We’ll call it a professional meeting, then.’
    What kind of meeting it really would be, I couldn’t say. Even though we’d never met, she had been part of my memory since I was three years old. It was 1974 then, and one of the Poet’s acolytes had adapted
Laila
for the theatre, with the Poet himself in the role of Qais and Shehnaz Saeed as Laila. Though the poem was less than four years old at the time it had already attained the status of a national classic, and though no one objected to the Poet playing the part of the