Nasreen chewed for several moments, staring at Alia before answering. “Pushing boundaries. That’s the only way to change things. You ask for more than they’ll give, but as much as you deserve. Have you learned nothing from this country?

But this was what had come to him, this was what woke him up and led him to his desk, and Waleed, uncertain about so many other things in his life, was always sure about his writing. He had started with a small memory, one in which he woke up in a sudden fit, damp with the sweat, alive with panic.

After the move from the District, Waleed had begun to have nightmares. He would wake up shouting, calling for his mother, telling her the roof had been blown off, the ground had given way, their house was nothing but dust and rubble, rubble and dust.

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.

On insomnia-plagued nights, she told herself that she could have learned to live with and inside those stories, she would have found a way to meet them, offer to bandage him up, return him whole to himself. It was only much later when she realised that it wasn’t the stories, it was the constant fluctuation between being showered with attention and then abruptly ignored, being loved with a totalising force, and then treated with an arctic disregard. It was the knowledge that, at any moment, she could be made invisible: that terrible swing between being alive and dead.

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.