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ransom, and although she was never found, the police had charged two brothers with her murder. The court heard that she had probably been fed to pigs.
    Suddenly he understands why the investigation was called “Operation Ivory”: the police knew that there was every possibility of there being bones to gather up.
    Language can provide some refuge from terror, as when the words “lethal injection” are employed to refer to “poisoning”; to “send someone to the electric chair” means to “burn them alive”; and to hang is to “strangle.”
    The rumours concerning the missing couple—he must try to think of them as dead now—are many (they had turned into a pair of peacocks!), but these are the facts. Last summer, Chanda and Jugnu went to Pakistan for four weeks. It was the last week of July and they were expected back in August. Chanda—the daughter of a nearby grocery-shop owner—had moved into Jugnu’s house back in May, against her family’s wishes. They did return from Pakistan—the passports and luggage were found in the house, the documents showing that they had come back a week earlier than expected—and were murdered sometime over the next few hours or days. Neither Shamas nor Kaukab saw them arrive, nor were they aware of their presence in England—right next door.
    Inside Chanda and Jugnu’s house, there are numerous glass-topped cases containing moths and butterflies of every colour, from the dull and inconspicuous to the glossily enriched, the visual equivalent of a nightingale’s vibrant note, the long pin impaling each body reminiscent of the shaft that passes vertically through the wooden horse of a carousel.
    Button-shaped or bottle-like, truncated cones or spheres full of spines like sea urchins, or domed as though intended for the roof of the smallest mosque imaginable: sometimes the eggs of butterflies are laid on tree bark, in neat groups like vases in a potter’s courtyard, and sometimes they are positioned on the surface of a leaf, as far apart as the tastebuds are on a human tongue, or they may run around a twig like a spiral staircase. They come in as many colours as contact lenses, as disposable cigarette-lighters, and possess a similar translucence. They may be left exposed, glued to the selected base, while the females of some species cover theirs with a blanket of hairs which they free from their abdominal surface.
    And if Kaukab was puzzled one brightly hot summer morning as she came across her three children intently licking off tiny beads from their hands and arms, she was appalled on being told that they were butterfly eggs, her eyes narrowing critically, her endurance reaching its limit when Jugnu told her, in all seriousness, that there was no cause for anxiety because he had made sure that the eggs were safe. “Some butterfly eggs do contain poisonous chemicals as protection against predators, especially those species which lay their eggs in clusters and produce brightly coloured eggs . . .” Such information was second nature to him and he often forgot that he could not assume a similar learning in others. “. . .And nor is there any need to worry that the children may jeopardize a species by eating its eggs: these came from the butterflies that scatter them during flight, the Skippers and the Browns. They had no chance of hatching any way, so don’t worry—”
    He stopped there, having noticed the look on his sister-in-law’s face.
    One of the children said: “They landed on us while we were out by the lake.”
    After that morning Kaukab tried on a few occasions to prevent the children from going out to the hills with Jugnu to collect butterflies and moths, but her wish proved a net of weak threads.
    Paper turns yellow over the years because it’s burning very slowly due to contact with the air. Stacked chronologically, the photographs of Jugnu in the various boxes in the house the police had termed “the house of death” would form a spectrum of pale