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spring air brushing her fingers. She felt pretty. They drove through mango orchards, fields of harvest wheat. Rafik sat telling a rosary of worn plastic beads, mouthing the ninety-nine names of Allah, his eyes dull, allowing the landscape to pass through him.
    They turned onto a single-lane road, which led first through barren salt flats, then irrigated fields, and finally into an orchard of old mango trees.
    ‘All this belongs to Mian Sahib,’ said Rafik.
    They drove up a packed dirt road bordered with jasmine, along the brick wall that enclosed the house, running for several acres, and then into a cul-de-sac planted with rosewood trees. Ten or twelve men sat on benches and stools – the managers and others who wanted to be noticed by the landowner. Rafik stepped out of the car and embraced them one by one. Several of them looked over at Saleema and said, ‘ Salaam, Bibi jee.’
    After they had tea Rafik said to her, ‘Come on, I’ll show you where Begum Kamila’s room is.’
    They went through an ornate wooden door, set in the wall, and into a lush garden that stretched away and became lost among banyans and rosewood trees and open lawns.
    She paused, shading her eyes with her hand, taking in the green sward.
    ‘There’s more than you can see. If you like, I’ll show you later.’
    Walking through a grassy courtyard, Rafik came to a door, removed his shoes, and knocked.
    ‘Come in,’ called Begum Kamila. She was sitting in an armchair reading a book. ‘So you’ve come, have you?’
    She must once have been a very beautiful woman. She wore bright saris and colored her long hair jet black, and on her third finger she wore an immense emerald set in gold, which Saleema once found lying next to the bathtub, and held in her palm for a long time, feeling the heft of the stone, guessing what it must be worth.
    ‘Shall I light the fire, Begum Sahiba?’ asked Rafik.
    ‘Go ahead, it’ll take away the damp. I suppose Daddy’s about to call for lunch.’
    Rafik kneeled in front of the fire, twisting sheets of newspaper into sticks.
    Kamila’s bags had been placed on a long desk by the window, which overlooked another garden. Lines had been chalked in the grass for tennis and a net strung. Saleema took the toiletries into the bathroom and laid them out. Unlike the house in Lahore, where the doors were smudged with fingerprints and the paint flaked off the walls in strips, these rooms had been newly painted. The rugs were bright and clean, the brick floors had been washed, vases of flowers, badly arranged, had been placed all around, mari golds and roses.
    Going out again into the dark chilly bedroom, Saleema found Rafik still kneeling at the hearth, the flames orange on his orange face.
    ‘Is Bibi gone?’
    ‘They announced lunch.’
    ‘May I sit down?’
    He moved over.
    ‘It’s amazing. My village would fit in a corner of this garden, and we were thirty families. And it’s so clean and comfortable, out here in the middle of nowhere.’
    ‘Harouni Sahib is a lord, and we’re poor people. And then, these are the games that the managers play. The better the house and gardens look, the more comfortable he is, the less Mian Sahib notices the tricks they all get up to on the farms. I don’t know what they’re storing it up for, stealing fertilizer and the water and cheating in the books. In the old days no one dared. Mian Sahib made these people – the fathers ate his salt, and now the sons have forgotten and are eating everything else.’
    The fire cracked, the dry mango wood catching hungrily.
    She threw a little twig into the fire. ‘At least their bellies are full.’
     
     
    In the morning she washed Begum Kamila’s clothes, sitting by a faucet outside in the back garden, beside the unused tennis court. Foam on her arms, water splashing onto her bodice from the big orange bucket, she looked up at the trees blowing in the wind, the birds. She was alone. The swaybacked tennis net and the odd chalked lines