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care, hastening the day the girl would be robust enough to begin receiving nightly visits from Timur.
    ‘It takes one hundred drops of milk to make one drop of blood,’ she told Leila. ‘And it takes one hundred drops of blood to make one drop of semen. So you must not waste or misuse again something that takes so much out of my son.’
    She asked Timur to concentrate solely on the glorification of the mosque. ‘I heard that Nadir Shah’s men have scuffled with ours.’
    Timur nodded. ‘He says it was all my doing. That the miracle isn’t genuine.’

    ‘What have we to do with the mosque?’ Razia asked in indignation. ‘He thinks we are out to swindle him at every turn, but to doubt a happening as hallowed as this, to reduce Allah’s work to human battles, makes him an infidel.’
    She didn’t know that the imam and his aides, and every other mosque attendant, were Timur’s men and employees.
    He said, ‘According to him the angels would have built a more perfect structure. Not just one small, rudimentary room with a dome and minaret.’
    Razia read a verse against the influence of Satan, and said, ‘Praise be to Allah that my son, unlike Nadir Shah, recognizes holy signs.’
    ‘I am encouraging more and more people to come, and I will be expanding the mosque. Bringing in boats for an easier crossing. Tents. Free food. Building shops on the riverbank.’
    And they were arriving in number: along the roads, the bridges, the streets, came the lepers and the terminally ill, the destitute and the helpless, the lame and the blind and the mute, asking the mosque to end their ordeals as they kissed its walls and floors for minutes at a time.
    Every few days one of the new arrivals would detach himself from the crowd moving towards the mosque and make his way towards Timur’s mansion. This person would be in possession of a jar containing dried leaves or blossoms. Others brought sacred pebbles, or butter churned from the milk of cows pastured in Paradise, or handwritten manuscripts of magic spells dictated by the djinns of Mount Kaaf. All these Razia had summoned from the farthest reaches of the province to ensure that Leila’s next child would be a boy. She pretended that these remedies were either for a distant relative or were to darken the unsettling grey colour of Leila’s eyes.
    One treatment required Leila’s entire upper body to be covered in gold leaf for a day. She looked as though she had acquired the torso of an idol. A goddess in a breastplate. Later, as the servant girls were gently rubbing off the thin metal, the skin above her heart refused to let go of it. An oval patch on her left breast would not come off no matter how hard they tried – Razia gasped in disbelief. One of the girls then revealed that whenever she had bathed Leila, her bangle had become lightly magnetized to Leila’s heart and would have to be pulled free of the attraction. She was made to demonstrate it and the bangle fastened on to the gold-covered patch on Leila’s skin.
    ‘I was right,’ Timur said, when he was called urgently by his mother. ‘She is thinking of someone.’
    Razia nodded. ‘It does seem like longing. She’s summoning someone.’
    But there was no reaction from Leila, no matter how firmly they questioned her.
    ‘Maybe it’s nothing at all,’ Razia said eventually. ‘Just a side effect of all the medicines.’ She led Timur out of the room. ‘We have to wait and see.’ Outside the door were the servant girls, who had been sent out so they could speak privately. As they made their way down the stairs, Razia asked about the mosque. Timur told her that Nadir Shah was trying to get the government involved, hoping the mosque would be declared officially illegal.
    ‘The government would do it gladly, of course,’ Razia said, ‘to prove their enlightenment to their Western masters.’ She gave a sigh. ‘My Allah, to think that mosques are being torn down in a Muslim country.’
    ‘He won’t succeed.