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proves Allah’s justice. How can religion reconcile the privileges you were born into with the hardship I have had to face from birth? This is how: you have power and emeralds; I have talent. And history has shown that fine couplets live longer than fine banquets. God is great.’ My father’s family claims that the Nawab showed his greatness by banishing, rather than executing, the offending poet. But they never say so within my mother’s earshot.
    â€˜You’re diffusing the suspense,’ Rehana Apa said.
    Mariam Apa was never about suspense.
    She stood up as my parents entered the drawing room,quite assured. ‘Made us feel as though we were the needy relatives, not her,’ my mother recalls. ‘Though once we’d taken a look at her we couldn’t really think of her as needy.’ She was dressed in a blue chiffon sari, three gold bracelets adorned her left arm, and a gold chain with a diamond-studded pendant in the shape of an Arabic Allah hung around her neck. My mother looked at her cheekbones, her clavicle, her straight black hair, and knew she was a Dard-e-Dil.
    â€˜Hello,’ Aba said. ‘You’re not … Mariam?’
    She just smiled that smile of hers which once made a rose burst into bloom, and Ami reached out to hug her. It is always possible to measure my mother’s reaction to a person by multiplying the time, in seconds, that she speaks without pause by the number of words she utters in that time. The greater the result, the greater her affinity for the person. When she met Mariam Apa she went into seven digits. So my father says, and he’s always been good at calculations. At any rate, the warmth of my mother’s reaction to Mariam Apa’s smile was so overwhelming that whole minutes went by before my father realized that Mariam Apa hadn’t said a word.
    Rehana Apa pulled a pen out of her handbag and started writing numbers on a leaf. ‘Seven digits?’ she said. ‘Really truly?’
    â€˜Now who’s diffusing the suspense?’
    Aba stopped Ami’s monologue with a tap on her shoulder and said, ‘We just received this letter –’ he waved in the direction of the room where the letter lay – ‘and were very sorry to hear about your father. What happened?’
    Mariam Apa looked heavenward and raised her hands and shoulders in a gesture of resignation to a higher will.
    â€˜Well, yes, of course there’s that,’ Aba said. ‘But can you be more specific?’
    Mariam Apa tapped her heart.
    Ami reached over, grabbed Mariam Apa’s hand. ‘Can you speak?’
    Mariam Apa nodded.
    â€˜Oh,’ said Ami. ‘Well … well … oh. I suppose I should show you your room. Of course you’re staying; the issue doesn’t arise of not. We only found out so the bed hasn’t been made up but it’s a lovely room, my favourite in the house actually. I prefer it to our room but Nasser doesn’t like it because of some reason he’s never seen fit to share with me. But I know you will …’
    That’s when Masood walked in. He had come to work for my parents a few months earlier, and had been hailed by all who had sampled his cooking as ‘a cook to be hired but never fired’.
    â€˜Begum Sahib,’ he addressed Ami in Urdu. ‘What should I make for dinner tonight?’
    Before Ami could answer, Mariam Apa said,
‘Aloo ka bhurta, achaar gosht, pulao, masoor ki daal, kachoomar.’
    And my mother was so stunned that Mariam Apa had ordered her favourite meal that she went into labour.
    Mariam Apa held her hand throughout the birth, while Aba sat in the waiting room practising the self-hypnosis exercises the gynaecologist had taught Ami to help ease the rigours of childbirth. Between contractions Ami revealed that she and Aba had been planning to name their child Mariam, if she was a girl, but there couldn’t be two Mariams in the house.