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being relegated to ‘a rock’ or ‘crowd scene’; when teams were picked for anything, anything at all, I was never, ever, the last to be chosen; I knew all the words to all the songs on Whaml’s ‘Make It Big’ album, and had been the one to inform a group of sixteen-year-olds that the line from ‘Wake Me Up’ was not ‘You make the sun shine brighter than the darkest day’, which made no sense at all, but rather ‘You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day’. I could do a dead-on imitation of Qabacha from ‘Tanhaiyan’; Qadir, not Imran, was my favourite bowler. And perhaps all this might have meant that I was remarkable for being a perfect blend of admirable traits, except for the fact that there were other things blended in, colder things. I didn’t know how to embrace the world, the way Karim did; I didn’t know how to make strangers feel at home, the way Sonia did; and I didn’t know how to embody a loyalty so fierce it meant putting myself at risk for others in any fight, even the fights that seemed absurd, the way Zia did.
    â€˜Hmmm...’ Uncle Asif stared down at his toes and made them wiggle. ‘But I notice you, even when there’s no one else around.’
    I smiled at him. ‘That’s because I really like you, and you know it.’
    â€˜Ah, there’s that charm again.’ He picked up a poker and smiled at me. ‘I liked all my parents’ friends when I was your age. Then I grew up and began to understand what kind of people they were and, you know, a lot of them just weren’t very nice. Maybe one day, when you’re old enough to see beneath the smiling veneer, you won’t like me any more.’
    Unsure if he was serious or not, I curled on to the sofa and looked at the framed black-and-white photograph on the coffee table of Uncle Asif baring his teeth in half-grimace, half-leer, at a camel which had pushed its snout to within inches of his face. ‘Doubt it,’ I said.
    He waved the poker in my direction. ‘An aphorism from the middle-aged to the extremely youthful: you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.’
    The tree carving hadn’t been far from my mind since I’d seen it; the memory of it gave rise to an uneasiness in my stomach. ‘Why didn’t my father marry Karim’s mother?’
    Uncle Asif turned away and poked the fire with vigour. Sparks flew up and leapt over the grate. ‘That’s not my story to tell.’
    â€˜In other words,’ I said to Karim later that night, as I sat in the bay seat of his bedroom window, ‘there is a story there.’
    He nodded and brought two bowls over to the window from his bedside, liquid sloshing against the sides as he walked. Green dye in one and purple in the other. ‘I got them from one of the nomad boys. In exchange for my marbles. Because green and purple seemed like map colours. But now I don’t know what to do with them.’
    I looked down at the ceramic bowls uneasily. I had the strong suspicion they were expensive items of art; I had a stronger suspicion the dye might not wash off very easily. ‘Good you got rid of the marbles. They were beginning to give me the creeps.’ They really were. They looked too much like the eyes of the nomads’ mad goat with its twisted horns that resembled dried leaves curling in on themselves.
    Karim tore a piece of paper out of a legal pad and sat down across from me. Jackals howled in the distance. I dipped my hand in green dye and pressed it against the paper. Karim dipped his hand in purple dye and pressed it over my palm print. Karim’s hand was smaller but his fingers were broader. Some of the lines of our hands ran together for a while in purple—green, then veered off in different directions. I half-expected the letters ‘Z’ and ‘M’