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asking the class a question.
    She looked around the garden. The grass was still too long, and full of weeds now, but with rows of students at work in the back garden, the enclosure looked neater, purposeful, and her uncle no longer looked so small as he strode up and down in front of his class. ‘They need dictaphones,’ she thought, watching the wind teasing the corners of Vanessa’s notes as she thumped her fist down to hold them in place. ‘And a chalkboard,’ she thought, watching Mirza Uncle. ‘No, a projector,’ she thought again as the sun dipped behind a cloud and the light dimmed in the late afternoon sky.
    Afterwards, she watched her uncle smiling to himself as he piled the storage boxes, suitcase and few plastic chairs into a tidy pile in the corner of the garden. Vanessa and Sven were in the kitchen with her, Sven’s large hand on his girlfriend’s hip, his eyes blinking hard whenever her corkscrew curls bounced in his face with every slight turn of her head as she ate her biscuit.
    “It’s funny,” Amal said, “Like the kitchen door is the 18th parallel. Like between North and South Korea. Like he’ll be shot, or some world war will start if he steps in.”
    “No,” said Vanessa, eyeing her biscuit before she bit into it again, “he’s like Miss Havisham, except he can’t bear to see the wedding cake and stuff going rotten and being buried in cobwebs. Miss Havisham, if she had a tent, and Pip was a girl.”
    “And Miss Havisham was a fifty-something, portly Indian man,” said Sven, rolling his eyes.
    “He steps in,” said Amal.
    “When? What for?” Vanessa looked at Amal, who did not speak, and then Sven.
    “No outdoor plumbing,” he said, shrugging.
    “Oh.”
    They all looked out at Mirza Uncle. Rehan was talking to him, juggling what looked like a penknife, a small torch and a packet of chewing gum.
    “Did he say anything about his plans?” asked Sven. “Is he ever going to give up?”
    “I don’t think there’s any planning going on.” Amal said. “It’s just one day at a time around here.” She stopped suddenly as the words of the azan came floating over the back garden. Outside, Rehan and her uncle were standing in prayer in the back garden, something she only ever saw at Eid prayers once a year at the mosque, when her parents had been still living there. They had rolled out a clean bedsheet over the grass next to the tent, Mirza Uncle standing in front, Rehan behind and to the side, both with heads bowed and hands folded over their stomachs.
    Amal stood in the living room, watching her uncle and his student from the edge of the patio curtains. She felt as if she was watching someone as they slept. She moved a chair by the patio door a few inches and rubbed at a stain on the cloth with her thumb. She sat in the chair for a few minutes, looking out at the figures on the lawn, then jumped up again and shifted a potted plant into a triangle of light slicing through the extension. When she looked again, Rehan was walking back to the house with the folded bedsheet in his hands. She hurried back into the house as Rehan slid open the extension door and turned to arrange the books on the coffee table, lining up their spines into a tidy stack.
    A few minutes later, Sven and Vanessa left, and Amal sat down with a textbook and tried to read, stroking the cat who jumped into her lap. Moriarty was not impressed, however, with these perfunctory attentions and slid off again.
    Rehan opened the door to the living room. His book bag was on his shoulder, and he had a pencil balanced over his ear. “I’m going to leave now,” he said, smiling haltingly at Amal, who was chewing her pen and reading her textbook intently. She mumbled her acknowledgment, and then realized that she was being rude. She looked up only as far as his knees and said goodbye. She cringed when she heard the front door closed, and looked up to watch him cross the front garden. She was still looking at the space where