... he had always cherished the idea of writing, the romance of late nights and strong coffee, the ecstacy of a well-turned sentence or a phrase that references five things at once, that sense of invincibility that comes when things charge and move and arrive unbidden, when the world is brought to heel, when the violence of the outside is contained, order is enforced, logic is remade. But those days were fragile and few.

There was a question Nasreen could not stop asking. She wanted to know, once he realised what was happening, if he regretted sanctioning those hours at that table; she wanted to know if, during those last moments, he hated them, as she did now. She was convinced he must have, even as she hoped he didn’t.

Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. She’d tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.

She knew that what she had wanted back then, when it felt like they would live there forever, was the option to leave. That she’d found the noise and the filth and the constant nosiness of the neighbours unbearable, that she’d wanted to be able to visit for the Carnival. She’d wanted windless seasons of trees and land and space, the Kirstenbosch home of her girlhood, before they’d been moved from there too. But she kept the longing a secret, knowing its impossibility, knowing the law’s indifference to her preference.

It is still night in Cape Town. The kind when one cannot imagine its terrible winds, its past pains, when everything feels new, just-born, a history made up of stories, gentle and good.