My mother, with her typical, bizarre confidence, never once asked me to keep Bashir Ahmed’s visits a secret, but I did. It seems astounding to me now that I never let it slip out, even by accident; but children are, in their way, the most secretive of creatures, and it was, at the time, the ruling principle of my life: the two of them, Bashir Ahmed and my father, represented different worlds, and to cause those worlds to overlap, even slightly, would have brought nothing short of disaster. To my child’s mind, Bashir Ahmed belonged exclusively to the world of afternoons, with their high, walled
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