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in something about David when the opportunity presented itself, and Zareen just as casually tossed up a question or two to show she bore him no ill will and was prepared to be objective.
    ‘David has a wonderful road sense,’ Feroza said at one point. ‘In fact, he’d love to show you around … he can explain things much better than any guide.’
    ‘That would be nice,’ Zareen said carefully, on a note so tentative that Feroza expected her to continue. She looked at her mother with a touch of surprise, when she didn’t, and quickly Zareen said, ‘But will he be able to find the time?’
    ‘Of course he will. He’s planned the weekend for you.’
    Feroza had already mentioned how hard David worked. Besides devoting every moment he could spare to his studies, he held two part-time jobs. ‘His father can easily pay his fees, but he won’t. He feels David must earn his way through university.’
    ‘Quite right,’ Zareen said, approving of the parental decision. ‘It will teach him to stand on his own two feet.’ It was an attitude Parsee fathers would approve of and encourage. If Zareen were to believe all the allusions slipped in by Feroza, David was a genius, a saint and had a brilliant future in computers.
    ‘He seems like such a nice boy,’ Zareen said graciously, and Feroza, delighted by this quantum leap in his favour, hummed as she brushed her teeth. She heard Laura and Shirley move unobtrusively in their room. She saw the light that had come on in David’s garage, go out. Hugging her mother goodnight, saying, ‘And do let the bugs bite!’ she laughed so raucously at her own old joke that it infected the small frame house with her joy, and Shirley and Laura, talking softly in their room, suddenly found themselves giggling about the least little thing. David, who was inclined to bouts of gloom and self-doubt, found the thunderous cloud that had descended on him after his encounter with Zareen—convinced he had made the worst impression possible—lift somewhat. He smiled in the dark and longed to be with Feroza. He hoped she would slip into his room later. But hugging her pillow in the narrow camp cot next to her mother’s bed Feroza blew him an invisible kiss and fell peacefully to sleep.
    Zareen, who had to cope with a twelve-hour time difference, was wide awake at two o’clock in the morning. She found the quiet in her strange surroundings eerie, and the opaque glow behind the curtains as the night sky reflected the tireless city lights, disorienting. In Lahore, at this hour, the pitch night would be alive with a cacophony of insect and animal noises or with the thump of the watchman’s stick or the shrill note of his whistle. And the population explosion in Pakistan having extended itself also to the bird community, some bird disturbed by a sudden light, or by an animal prowling in the trees, was bound to be twittering, some insomniac rooster crowing.
    Covering her eyes and her ears with an old silk sari she kept for the purpose, Zareen summoned the imagined presence of her husband, her caring kinsfolk, and filled the emptiness of her second night in America with their resolute and reassuring chatter. Their voices, trapped in the sari, rustled in her ears: ‘Our prayers are with you. Be firm. We must not lose our child.’
    By the time she drifted off to sleep at about five in the morning Zareen had glimpsed the rudiments of an idea that had the potential to succeed.
    Feroza awoke her mother with a cup of tea. ‘It’s ten o’clock, Mum. We’ve planned a lovely Saturday for you.’
    Zareen was at once wide awake. Refreshed by her sleep, and subconsciously aware of having spent the night in fruitful endeavour, she was in a happier and more adventurous frame of mind. After all she was in America! The New World beckoned.
    They breakfasted at McDonalds and lunched at Benihana, where the Japanese chef performed a fierce ballet with his sharp knives. At night Zareen sank her teeth into a thick