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The midwife who had disappeared after the birth of the first child had contacted her a week ago, sending a letter through one of the people who brought remedies to the house. In the letter she promised that she would reveal to Leila the truth about her daughters. This was the reason Leila had refused to go to Qes. First she needed to learn where her children were.

But there had been no further word from the midwife.

She fought her tears. She had given birth to another daughter two months ago and had recently fallen pregnant again.

Razia came into the room and sat down on the deerskin she used as a prayer mat. The five prayers of the day were more or less the only times Leila was not under the mother-in-law’s vigilance. Since talking to Wamaq the day before, she had tried not to think of the room with the animals and birds, but now she went down the corridors towards it, as fast as she could. Fortunately the noon prayers were the second longest of the day.

She stood before the closed door.

She could hear someone breathing on the other side. She raised her hand to undo the latch but then lowered it slowly.

‘Leila.’

She imagined him standing there with the mute creatures. In there was the tiger that had headed the wedding procession when Timur came to marry her – claws blunted and mouth sewn shut for safety. It was shot a month later when the wounds festered.

‘Leila. Let me see you.’

After a while he said, ‘Are you weeping? Leila, open this door.’

He gave it a push and she withdrew down the corridor, having suddenly seen Timur holding a person underwater on the edge of the river and stabbing through the shallows with a knife, the murky water turning red.

Razia was still on the prayer mat, looped about with her
thousand-bead
rosary. She finished and pursed her lips to blow a gentle breath in Leila’s direction, blessing her with the air still fresh from communion with Allah.

The servant girls brought them the
Book of Omens
, and Leila distractedly opened it for Razia.

‘Where are my daughters?’ she asked the woman suddenly.

‘You know you are not to mention them,’ Razia said, taken aback. She looked towards the door. ‘What if the servants hear?’

‘I want to see them,’ Leila said, raising her voice, drawing strength from Qes’s nearby presence.

‘I will not discuss this,’ Razia said sharply, putting the
Book of Omens
aside. ‘Every few months you raise this accursed subject, just when I am about to forget it. Why are you intent on destroying this family? Because of you – the continued rebellion of your body – we are all suffering.’

Leila glared at her. ‘I will run away.’

‘That’s enough, you child of adultery! My son picked you up from a hovel in a godforsaken village and installed you in this palace – and this is the thanks we get? You unspeakable interior organ of a swine!’

With no father or mother, Leila’s bone-poor relatives were only too glad to be rid of her, telling her on the wedding day, ‘Don’t come back. If you can’t have your husband’s love, find sustenance in his hatred.’

‘We are feeding you and giving you shelter,’ said Razia, ‘and yet you want to run away. Don’t you know how dangerous and depraved life is on the outside for a woman on her own?’

Leila buried her face in her hands, in pain as though a hundred needles had pierced her skull from the inside.

She was still a small child when her father died, leaving behind a debt of 1,000 rupees. The council of the wise and the powerful argued late into the night and decided that, to make up for the loss, the men of the moneylender’s family could possess the debtor’s widow one hundred times.

At dawn the men took their boats and went on to the lake where Leila’s mother was collecting lotus leaves somewhere in the rising sunlit mist. They returned an hour later with words nobody could accept as true – words about wings that suddenly appeared, about flight. Everyone believed they had drowned her in their ineptness and collective arousal. But as she grew older, Leila imagined her mother, a quarter of a mile from the lake’s edge, the mist roaming the water like a soft supple fire around her. The seven boats that converged on her bore a total of thirty men, silhouetted in the
fine-grained
vapour. Some of them leaped over the water like panthers even before the boats connected. She fought them, surrounded, numbed by shock but with her eyes screaming the outrage of her solitude. The only escape was upwards and that was what she had chosen, willing the wings into existence upon her body, the emptiness of mist closing behind her as she rose.

The council of the wise and the powerful decided that the moneylenders must wait for Leila to grow up to be compensated – with the interest on the original debt accumulating annually till then.

As the years passed, her aunts warned her against wandering too far from home. One day when she was thirteen she did; and the men, connecting with each other through mobile phones, had recognized their opportunity. She was running from them, having managed to elude them for the time being, when she was seen by Timur, who was on a hunting expedition on the outskirts of the village. They were married within ten days.

W
hen her anger had somewhat subsided, Razia turned to the
Book of Omens
and began to study the page Leila had opened earlier, a Chinaman wearing a bright red coat. It was in fact the poet Saadi, travelling through China disguised as a monk, spying on temples dedicated to false gods.

O augury seeker!
she read aloud,
know that there is loss in mingling with those who are not of your sort, but you are aware of their deceit and will triumph over them, but to remain safe you must not take off your amulets
.

She walked to her bed and lay down with her eyes closed. She didn’t move for an hour. According to the complex architecture of faith in her head, the
Book of Omens
seemed to be advising that she and Leila spend the next ten days in continuous silent prayer at the mosque on the river island.

‘Is it absolutely necessary?’ Timur said when she spoke to him.

‘Yes, my son, it is Allah’s will,’ she replied. ‘With remedies and prayers and fasts, I am making sure that it will be a boy this time, and we must proceed according to what He tells me to do through the
Book of Omens
. Three days ago, He told me to make Leila wear a Shirt of Joseph, to keep the boy safe from harm, and I have done that. Now you must immediately make a generous donation to the mosque and have a private room cleared for our use.’

Nadir Shah, aware that the island was irrevocably gone from him, wanted the next best thing, which was control over the mosque. Knowing the enemy would try force, Timur had recently decreed that nobody with weapons should be allowed on to the island. Almost all of the donations to the mosque found their way to Timur, and they were no longer just a few rupees offered by everyday people – word had been spreading and thousands upon thousands were being sent by rich industrialists, businessmen, local and national politicians. An Arabian prince had sent a silk carpet, another a hundred rosaries of black Gulf pearls, and in the imam’s Quran, each of the 77,701 sacred words was outlined in crushed rubies, each of the 1,015,030 consonant dots in crushed emeralds. Things that had been free in the early days – food, shelter, the river crossings – now had to be paid for by pilgrims. All this had to be defended.

But Timur could not reveal any of this to his mother, and so in the end he agreed with her wishes.

‘I am not going,’ Leila said when Razia told her the plan.

She had decided: she hadn’t heard from the midwife, and these people were unwilling to lead her to her daughters – so Qes was the only remaining hope. She knew she must wait until Razia sat down on the prayer mat again and then slip away to talk to him. That he was still there on the other side of the door was not something she doubted.

‘You will do as you are told,’ Razia said firmly. ‘We have been lenient with you so far but that ends now. I am warning you, if the three acts of injustice against my blameless son are repeated at the next birth, neither he nor I will be responsible for the consequences. Like all good and honest people, my son has enemies, forever waiting for an opportunity to strike. They’ll take everything away from him if he doesn’t have sons to stand beside him in later years.’

A black air-conditioned jeep with tinted windows took them from the mansion to the riverbank, from where they crossed the waters of the Indus on a boat. Both Leila and Razia were entirely veiled, and a path was cleared for them through the crowd. A man selling a
soap-bubble-making
device for children was told to stop demonstrating lest the bubbles come into contact with the two women. Four servant girls accompanied them, three Muslims and one Christian. Philomena, the Christian, was to remain in the unconsecrated area until required to assist, and then approach either on tiptoe or on the outer edges of her feet to minimize contact with the sacred building.

It was a long white room off the main prayer hall, featureless but comfortable, and as Timur turned to go he saw Philomena try to pass an envelope into Leila’s hand. Leila didn’t seem to notice it and so Philomena quickly pulled it back into the folds of her veil. From the door he asked Philomena to come back to the mansion because more things were needed for the room.

Two men with Kalashnikovs under their blankets were positioned outside the room, pretending to say the rosary beads, and when he told them just before leaving, ‘Be on your guard,’ one of them grinned in response.

‘It’ll be easier for a man to fetch a bowl of lioness milk than to get past us.’

Timur took Philomena back to the mansion, re-emerging an hour later and driving back to the mosque. He had managed to make her talk just in time.

Upon entering the prayer hall he saw three women in conversation with the guards. When they saw Timur, one of the guards said, ‘This woman says she is a midwife and has been summoned.’

She turned round and saw Timur.

‘She is a midwife,’ Timur said, smiling.

Her voice echoing off the high dome, the midwife said, ‘In Allah’s house today I am going to reveal the truth about you to everyone.’ A few of the worshippers sitting around the prayer hall became interested and looked up. However, one man, without raising his eyes from his Quran, said, ‘Yes, this is Allah’s house, so would the lady kindly allow us some silence and peace?’

Timur addressed the hall. ‘I apologize, but this dire matter concerns all Muslims. This woman was a midwife employed by me for the birth of my first child. When my son was born, she – a Christian – strangled him.’ A few cries went up uncontrollably around the prayer hall at this. ‘Yes, she was a Muslim but has secretly converted to Christianity, and is now conspiring against us genuine Muslims.’

‘Liar!’ the woman shouted, but she became intimidated when the imam of the mosque appeared, gazing in displeasure at the scene. She said in a lowered voice, ‘Allah is still my Lord. And I am walking out of here with that poor girl.’ All around were constant murmurs and sounds of agitation from the worshippers.

‘She disappeared immediately after killing my unfortunate newborn son, and has reappeared today. Earlier this afternoon she bribed a Christian servant girl from my household who agreed to help her. She has brought with her these other women – schoolteachers and members of a foreign organization that preaches vulgarity to our pious womenfolk in the name of liberation. They have come here to this blessed place – which, as everyone knows, was built by angels at Allah’s own command – to kidnap my wife. Go in and see how the Christian servant has drugged my Allah-loving mother by putting something in her drinking water.’

People were now standing up, their voices louder, one man nodding to himself and saying, ‘The influence of the West has been the biggest calamity to befall the planet since Noah’s flood.’

‘I returned because I lived in guilt for all these years and months,’ the midwife said. ‘There was nothing I could have done back then but I should have done
something
. You did not have a son, you had a daughter –’

‘That’s enough. You are an apostate and a blasphemer.’

‘I am a Muslim!’

‘Then how do you explain this?’ Timur said. A man had appeared and handed him a small cloth bundle. ‘This is yours? We found it a minute ago in the boat you have hired to take away my wife.’

‘Yes, it is mine.’

Timur pulled out a crucifix on a chain. ‘I will not untie the bundle but those of you who need further proof will find a desecrated copy of our beloved Quran in it.’

There were wails and sounds of deepest genuine anguish from everyone. The three accused protested their innocence but their voices were drowned out as a number of men and women moved forwards and began to beat them, pulling them to the floor by their hair and clothes. They were screaming desolately as a pack of policemen arrived and took them away, the worshippers striking them constantly, a few spitting on them. Timur handed over the evidence to a policeman, who kissed the bundle repeatedly before pressing it to his heart, and held the swinging crucifix at arm’s length as though carrying a dead rat by the tail. Apostasy was punishable by death, as was blasphemy, but it was possible the case would not reach the courts – the women would be murdered within the next few days in the police cells, either by their fellow criminals or by the policemen, so repugnant were the crimes they were accused of.

As the people returned to their worship, Timur went into the white room. His mother lay on the mattress at the far end, conscious but with her eyes half shut. The servant girls were massaging her feet and head. Philomena had administered nothing but a mild sedative but Razia thought she was dying.

‘Tell them not to bury me in the public cemetery,’ she said, ‘or the grave robbers will dig me up to get at all the gold in my bones.’

Leila stood just a few feet from Timur. ‘I had no knowledge of any of it,’ she said, trembling.