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We too have influence in the government.’
    ‘Find a way to get the Saudi Arabians involved,’ Razia advised. ‘Win the patronage of an Arab prince for the mosque. They are a blessed race.’
     
     
    T he months passed and the longed-for day arrived. The Flower of Mary opened in the bowl of water once again, to float there like a wooden snowflake. Talismans obtained from the mausoleums of various saints were tied with different coloured strings around Leila’s thighs. But the umbilical cord still hadn’t been cut when Razia locked her bony fingers around Leila’s throat. ‘You little witch! Why must you ridicule and torment my son like this?’
    Timur had taken precautions this time: three stern giant-like figures appeared outside the room, materializing as though out of the shadows, to intercept the midwife and the servant girls. One of the girls attempted to run away but a blow lifted her off her feet and threw her against a wall. ‘Come with us,’ they were told firmly. Downstairs, the women were made to watch as one of their number was beaten senseless, and then their entire families were banished from the province and their homes razed to the ground.
    A few hours later a group of children running after dragonflies on the edge of a pond discovered the body of a newborn girl floating in dark red water. Suspecting that it was the jettisoned fruit of a sinful union, the holy men and women refused to allow it to be buried in the graveyard proper. Its resting place was to be the patch of adjacent ground reserved for those wives, mothers, sisters and daughters who had disgraced their families by running away from home.
    The divide wasn’t just on the surface: an ‘underground wall’ – delving to the depth of fifteen feet – kept the dishonourable corpses separate from the honourable ones.

III
     
    W amaq and his brother Qes were travelling towards the mosque on their motorbike when they ran out of petrol.
    Qes, riding pillion, and the more daring of the two, hopped backwards on to the ground before the machine had come to a halt. He was sixteen years old, his hair long and disorderly, and he had a mole above the right corner of his mouth that was considered lucky or unlucky, depending on the part of the country. Wamaq was a year older but no taller. He wore a green cap embroidered with tiny orange beads and dozens of circular mirror pieces, fragments of the world sliding in and out of them as he moved. There was a faint but permanent welt under his jaw. He had acquired it at the age of eleven when, to make him confess to the theft of a wristwatch, a policeman had put a noose around his neck and made him stand out in the open on a block of ice, the sun and the warmth of his own body strangling him slowly as they melted the ice.
    Wamaq got down and lowered the battered 50cc motorbike on to the ground, leaving it there for a minute. The dregs in the petrol tank could be made to flow into the carburettor that way, good for another kilometre or so.
    The last time they were in the area the brothers had found work on a crew constructing the river-island mosque. Having heard Qes’s singing voice during the daylight hours, the other workers had insisted he make the first ever call to prayer from the mosque. He made believable every song he sang, as though he’d written it himself. You could hear his life in his voice. Afterwards Wamaq and Qes and the others were told to move on and to stay away for a period. The brothers were returning after about twenty months.
    As he stood beside the horizontal motorbike, Wamaq wiped his sweat-covered face on his sleeve and looked around. Qes had taken a small music box from his rucksack and was turning its crank: the inch-long steel drum began to rotate, its pins catching against a metal comb – and the air filled with a melody of the purest notes. Qes had made the device himself and the music too was his own invention.
    These brothers were what they appeared at first glance: two