Or he would call out for Bibi. 'Bibi, everything in this bedroom is in a muddle. How many times do I tell you to help your mother?' And Bibi would scurry around, banging between bed and dressing table and standing on the mattress, which was the only way for her to reach into the wardrobe to rearrange trousers and shirts and saris.

But the execution of these tasks was unsatisfying. The girls hurried through them and when he could think of nothing more, they left. Eventually he hit on something. He took up his books again and employed the girls as page-turners. It was perfect. Lying against a bank of pillows, Chanu had one of the girls hold up a volume while sitting on the edge of the bed. They had to watch his face for signs that he was nearing the end of the page and then turn to the next. He was fair with them. He gave signs, little anticipatory raises of his tangled eyebrows. Only an inattentive daughter could fail to see. A disrespectful daughter. Who fully deserved the lashing, verbal or otherwise, that followed such dereliction of duty.

Nazneen thought about it now, as she undressed. The eternal three-way torture of daughterfatherdaughter. How they locked themselves apart at this very close distance. Bibi, silently seeking approval, always hungry. Chanu, quivering with his own needs, always offended. Shahana, simmering in worst of all things perpetual embarrassment, implacably angry. It was like walking through a field of snakes. Nazneen was worried at every step.

She had to concentrate hard to get through each day. Sometimes she felt as if she held her breath the entire evening. It was up to her to balance the competing needs, to soothe here and urge there, and push the day along to its close. When she failed, and there was an eruption, a flogging or a tantrum or a tear-stained flat cheek, she felt dizzy with responsibility. When she succeeded, she made it a mantra not to forget, not to let it go to her head. Be careful, be careful, be careful. It took all her energy. It took away longing. Her wants were close at hand, real and within her control. If only she focused sufficiently. When she drifted she thought of Hasina, but she made her thoughts as efficient as possible. How much could she save? How much could she send? How would she hide it from Chanu?

Sometimes, when she put her head on the pillow and began to drift into sleep, she jerked herself awake in panic. How could she afford to relax? Then she would go into the kitchen and eat without knowing what she put into her mouth. On bad nights when her thoughts could not be submerged by rice or bread or crackers she began to wonder if she loved her daughters properly. Did she love them as she had loved her son? When she thought of them like this when they grew distant her stomach fell down through her legs and her lungs shot up against her heart. Which was exactly the feeling she had when, on a cool winter night, she went down to the pond with Hasina. It was the feeling she had when she was about to jump, knowing that the water was cold enough to make her scream.

And she squeezed Raqib from her mind. That way lay the abyss. So she swallowed hard and prayed hard, and she used prayer, in defiance of her vows, to dull her senses and dull her pain.

Back from collecting the girls, Nazneen made a cup of tea and mulled over the school-gate gossip. She picked up only Bibi now that Shahana went to big school and preferred to walk back with her friends, but she still thought of it as 'collecting the girls'. Jorina said that police had been to the mosque and questioned the imam for two hours. No one had any idea why, although many predicted trouble and everyone doubted that a church had ever been treated with such flagrant disrespect. Nazma was talking about Razia with Sorupa and broke off mid-sentence when Nazneen approached. Most intriguing was an overheard conversation between two white women discussing how to slim down their dogs. One favoured a home-enforced diet while the other took her animal to a weight-loss clinic. Although English words did not come easily from her mouth, Nazneen had long been able to follow conversation. Not much surprised her any more. But some things still did.

She was making a second cup of tea and thinking about the emaciated piebald curs of Gouripur when Chanu came home with a plastic-wrapped bundle.

'No time for tea-drinking,' he said. 'Come on. Come.' He hurried through to the sitting room and Nazneen followed.

He ripped the thin sheath of plastic and unfurled the legs of a dozen or so pairs of men's trousers. 'Hemming,' he announced to the world at large. 'Test batch.' He tugged at the other end of the bundle. 'Zips,' he said. 'All will be inspected.'

Nazneen wanted to begin at once but Chanu insisted on calling the girls.

'When I married her, I said: she is a good worker. Girl from the village. Unspoilt. All the clever-clever girls-' He broke off and looked at Shahana. 'All the clever-clever girls are not worth one hair on her head.'

Bibi opened and closed her mouth. Her white lacy socks had fallen around her ankles and her shins looked dry and dusty. Shahana had begun to use moisturizer. Yesterday she had refused to wash her hair with Fairy Liquid. She wanted shampoo now.

Nazneen held on to the casing of the sewing machine. Chanu waggled his head and beamed at her. She fixed the thread and began. One trouser leg, then the other. When she had finished, they clapped and Bibi became sufficiently carried away to venture a small cheer, and Chanu's applause was emphatic, and Shahana smiled fleetingly and marched back to the bedroom.

Chanu brought home holdalls of buttonless shirts, carrier bags of unlined dresses, a washing-up tub full of catchless bras. He counted them out and he counted them back in. Every couple of days he went for new loads. He performed a kind of rudimentary quality control, tugging at zips and twiddling collars while probing his cheeks with his tongue. Chanu totted up the earnings and collected them. He was the middleman, a role which he viewed as Official and in which he exerted himself. For a couple of weeks he puzzled feverishly over calculations, trying to work out the most profitable type of garment assignment, the highest-margin operation. But he had to take what was going and the calculations were themselves a low-margin endeavour. Then he had time to supervise in earnest and he made himself available at her elbow, handing thread, passing scissors, dispensing advice, making tea, folding garments.

'All you have to do,' he said, 'is sit there.'

She got up to stretch her legs. She picked up one of his books and blew off some lint, hoping something in him would respond to the call of neglected type.

'We're making good money this week.' He pulled at his lower lip, working it out. 'Don't worry. I'll take care of everything.'

For two whole months she did not even know how much she had earned. It was a relief when, for the first time since the piecework began, Chanu retired to the bedroom one evening and called for a page-turner. The next day, a Saturday, he made a kind of fortress of books around him on the sitting-room floor and delivered a pungent oration on the ancient history of Bengal. On Sunday he shaved with extra care and limbered up in front of the mirror in a suit, but did not go out. The next day he went out all day and came back singing fragments of Tagore. It was a good sign.

Tuesday and Wednesday passed in the same pattern and Nazneen completed the linings of thirty-seven mini-skirts. She had no more sewing to do.

Chanu gathered his family together and exorcised some troublesome blockages in his throat. 'As you are all aware.' He noticed Shahana's dress. She had hitched up her uniform at school so that it bloused over the belt and rode up towards her thigh. Without changing her expression she began to inch it slowly downwards.

'As you are all aware, we have decided as a family to return home. Your mother is doing everything possible to facilitate our dream through the old and honourable craft of tailoring. And don't forget it was we who invented all these weaves of cloths muslin and damask and every damn thing.' He seemed uncertain. He looked at his daughters as if he had forgotten who they were. Only when his darting gaze fixed on Nazneen did he remember himself.

'Ahem. So. We are going home. I have today become an employee at Kempton Kars, driver number one-six-one-nine, and the Home Fund will prosper. That is all I have to say.'

Nazneen and Bibi clapped their hands. It came as a surprise that Chanu could drive a car.

As if to dispel their silent doubts he took a tattered piece of paper from his pocket. 'Driving licence,' he said, in English. He inspected the document. 'Nineteen seventy-six. Never had it framed.'

So Chanu became a taxi man and ceased to be a middleman. And on the first hot day of the year, when the windows were closed against the ripening of waste bins and the flat hummed to the tune of its pipes, and Nazneen had mopped up the overflow from the blocked toilet and washed her hands and sighed into the mirror, a new middleman appeared. Karim, with a bale of jeans over his broad shoulder.

This was how he came into her life.

CHAPTER TEN.

It was a strange thing, and it took her some time to realize it. When he spoke in Bengali he stammered. In English, he found his voice and it gave him no trouble. Having made the discovery, she went back to the beginning and made it afresh. She considered him. The way he stood with his legs wide and his arms folded. His hair. Cut so close to the skull. The way it came to a triangle at the front, and the little bit which stood up straight at the centre of his forehead. He wore his jeans tight and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. No. There was nothing there. No clue to the glitches in his Bengali voice.

And he was sure of himself. He took a strong stance. Sometimes his right leg worked to a random beat. He wore white trainers and a thin gold chain around his neck. He said, 'My uncle owns the factory.' He said, 'The sweatshop. My uncle owns it.' And he bounced his leg and fiddled with his mobile phone, waiting for her to count up the linings.

He wore the phone at his hip, in a little black leather holster. He felt the length and breadth of it and tested the surface with his thumb as if he had discovered a growth, this tumorous phone on his side. Then he refolded his arms. They looked strong, those arms. His hair. Razored short against the skull. It was odd, that the shape of a skull could be pleasing.

When his phone rang, he took it out to the hallway. She caught only fragments. A word, a phrase, a word repeated, a word struggling for release. The caller would not let him speak. So it seemed. It took some time to work out that it was his voice, not his listener, that had failed him.

'My husband had a mobile phone,' she told him. 'But he gave it up. Said it was too expensive.'

'Y-y-your husband is right.'

She switched to English. 'Very useful thing.'

'Y-y-yes, but t-t-too expensive.'

She saw at once that she had made a mistake. She had drawn attention to the very thing she had thought to hide. He would not speak English now. He would not disown himself. She thought of what to say and how to say it. But by then he had put money on the table and left.

She still had five more hems to do when he came the next time. Opening the door she knew that something was wrong. The look on his face. He rushed past and into the sitting room. He held the window frame. 'Gone,' he said. 'They've gone.' His head and shoulders slumped forward, and he began to pant just then though the action was over.

'What it was?'

He turned round. Sweat across the top of his lip. Sunshine in his hair made it sparkle. Some kind of oil. Or more sweat. He told her about the two men pushing leaflets through front doors. Pushing their filthy leaflets through letterboxes. He picked up the box right under their noses and he ran with it.

He got into position now. Legs wide, right leg working, and she saw the thigh strain inside the denim and she looked down at her sewing, which she had not finished. They had chased him but he was faster. He put the box, the filthy leaflets, in the bin where they belonged. He looped the estate, they didn't see where he went, he looped back again to check, and nobody saw him come up to the flat. It was safe. Quite safe.

'They'll get what's coming to them, man. That ain't the end of it.'

'What they say? The leaflets.' She had forgotten to cover her hair.

He sat down, across the table from her, and now the sun was directly behind him so that from the corner of her eye she saw him as a silhouette. It was the first time he had sat down in her home. She thought about tea but she was unsure what it would mean, to have tea with this boy. He was not a relative.

'I know who they are.'

'These men.'

'I know them, man. I know them.'

'Yes.'

'Lion Hearts. They are behind it. We are going to make them pay, man.'

'Who they are?'

'Just a front. They are only a front. We know everything about them. Everything.' He had his hands palms up on the table, slightly cupped, vibrating. Weighing it all up, or asking for trouble.

He put his hands under the table. She watched him obliquely.

'In our country,' she said, 'everyone would stop. Come and help you.'

He rocked back in his chair. 'This is my country.'

She told him she still had five hems to do and he said that he would wait. Though she kept her eyes to her work, she felt his gaze. Sun on the needle surround flashed iridescent prisms over her fingernails. She machined in bursts and thought of drawing the curtain but the thought was, somehow, confusing to her and she did not do it. The last hem snagged and she had to get up for the scissors.

She saw then that he had been reading all this time and a heat came into her face. He looked up and she looked away.

'That sari,' he said. 'My mother had one. Same material I mean.'

It was soft blue with a deep green band around it. Chanu had picked it out. He called it subtle and he said it was like her, subtle beauty, which she liked though she knew it was the words that pleased him.

She said nothing.

'She's dead now. Man.' He looked at his magazine, as though his dead mother were nothing to him.

'I sorry.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Man.' And he turned the page. 'Are you a good Muslim? Twenty ways to tell.' He held up the magazine, and Nazneen saw that it was no more than a few flimsy pages in black and white, stapled at the side.

Driver one-six-one-nine was frequently on duty in the evenings. Evenings in the flat became more relaxed. The girls did their homework in front of the television. Shahana said it helped her to concentrate. Bibi chewed the end of her pen. The laughter on the soundtrack never made her smile although Shahana developed a sophisticated giggle. Nazneen continued with her piecework. If she worked fast, if she didn't make mistakes, she could earn as much as three pounds and fifty pence in one hour. Maybe a little bit more. She heard the television and she caught glimpses of Shahana on her tummy, legs in the air, crossing and uncrossing. She thought about the five-pound notes inside the jar, wrapped in a cloth, inside a plastic bag, snapped into a see-through container that sat in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. She reminded herself of the money in an envelope on the high shelf, near the Qur'an, and decided it was haram and would have to be removed. She counted the money pushed into the foot of a pair of tights, wound up in a ball at the back of her underwear drawer. Another five pounds put away today. Fifteen more pounds wrapped in clingfilm, inside a sandwich bag, pushed into the hole in the wall next to the boiler. She would take it to the Sonali Bank in the morning. Hasina would have it before the end of the month. Some she would give to Shahana for the things she coveted, shampoo and lotion and slides for her hair.

Sometimes Chanu was out for the whole night. Then she would rise early and have the food heated, rice cooked fresh, ready for him on the table. 'I'll eat now.' He said it as he came through the door and he sat down with his coat still on and ate, jumping up when he remembered he had not washed his hand, preparing another mouthful before he had even taken up his place again, calling for pickle and chutney and a slice of lemon, some chopped onion on a side plate, a glass of water. 'Oh, well put it here,' he said when she told him it was already on the table. 'Put it just here so I can reach it.'

'These people,' he would say. 'Ignorant types. What can you do?'

She never learned anything about Kempton Kars. She did not hear about any Mr Dalloways, any Wilkies. The customers retained their mystery. All she knew was what he told her, that they were ignorant types.

But he was philosophical. 'You see, all my life I have struggled. And for what? What good has it done? I have finished with all that. Now, I just take the money. I say thank you. I count it.' He put a ball of rice and dal in his mouth and held it inside his cheek. 'You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out. And that is what I am doing now. What else can you do?'

These speeches he made in the simple language of a simple though not ignorant-type man. But when he took out his books in the evenings he spent at home, he began to speak differently.

He had Shahana turn pages as he lay on the sofa. Bibi was in the bedroom, twisting her ankles together beneath the desk and worrying a bit of paper. Shahana's face was pulling in on itself, setting into a mask of utter disregard. She knelt by the sofa and held the book at an angle to her father's face. He raised his eyebrows. Then he raised them again, further this time so that they untangled from each other at the centre. Shahana turned the page.

'Ah,' said Chanu. 'The search for knowledge. Is there any journey more satisfying? Call your sister.' But he called her himself. 'Bibi. Come quick.' She came running and stood behind Shahana. Chanu took the book in his own hands, sat up and chewed over some knowledge that he planned to share with them.

'I will tell you something. All these people who look down onto us do not know what I am going to tell you. I have it here in black and white.' He waved the book. 'Who was it who saved the work of Plato and Aristotle for the West during the Dark Ages? Us. It was us. Muslims. We saved the work so that your so-called St Thomas could claim it for his own discovery. That is the standard of our scholarship and that is the standard of their gratitude.' He held up a finger and it trembled with emotion.

Bibi took the end of one plait and tucked it into her mouth.

'Dark Ages,' said Chanu, and his face flinched from the insult. 'This is what they are calling it in these damn Christian books. Is this what they teach you in school?' He threw the book on the floor. 'It was the Golden Age of Islam, the height of civilization. Don't forget it. Take pride, or all is lost.' He lay down again, exhausted by the slander, and the girls began to back away.

He called after them. 'Do you know what Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western civilization?'

The girls hovered at the end of the sofa.

'He said he thought it would be a good idea.' Chanu laughed and Bibi smiled. 'I'll teach you,' he said, 'more about our religion. And we will study Hindu philosophy. After that, Buddhist thought.' And he put a cushion beneath his head and began to hum.

Nazneen was helping the girls to tidy their room. A piece of wallpaper had begun to peel away from the wall above Bibi's bed and was turning itself into a scroll. She picked up a doll from the floor and put it on the end of the bed. There was a man doll under the chair, eyeless now and one-armed, naked and imprinted with dirt. Nazneen looked at it but did not pick it up.

'I'm not going,' said Shahana. 'I'll run away.' She opened a cupboard and pulled out a bag. Inside she had put a nightdress, a pair of shoes, jeans and a T-shirt. 'I'm ready to run.'

Bibi rubbed her fists into her cheeks. Her eyes went red. 'I want to stay with her.'

'Shush,' said Nazneen. 'No silly talk.'

'It's not silly,' shouted Shahana. 'I'm not going.'

Nazneen straightened up the desk. She picked up a small pile of dirty clothes and held it to her chest. Bibi tested the thin carpet with her toes and Shahana was busy scratching her arms.

'We just have to wait and see.' Nazneen sat down on Bibi's bed with the dirty clothes on her lap. 'We do not know what God has in His mind.'

It was not enough and Nazneen looked for something else. For one dizzying moment she was flushed with power: she would make it right for the girls. It strained her insides, as if she would vomit. And then, just as quickly, it left her.

Bibi came and sat next to her so that she felt the heat from her body. There was an ink stain on her school blouse and a white sheen of dry skin across her shins.

'Do you want to go?' Bibi turned her broad face to look up at her mother, as if she would catch the reply between her own lips.

Nazneen told the girls a story. The story of How You Were Left To Your Fate. It was not the first time they had heard it but they both listened well. She began with the words I was a stillborn child, and she ended with that was God's will. It was the way she always told it.

Bibi discovered a scab on her knee and played with it. Nazneen began to fold the clothes on her lap, remembered they were dirty, balled them and stood up. As she reached the door, Shahana called to her.

'You didn't answer. It wasn't an answer.'

'It was my answer,' said Nazneen.

The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and could not. It was as if the village was caught up in a giant fisherman's net and she was pulling at the fine mesh with bleeding fingers, squinting into the sun, vision mottled with netting and eyelashes. As the years passed the layers of netting multiplied and she began to rely on a different kind of memory. The memory of things she knew but no longer saw.

It was only in her sleep that the village came whole again. She dreamed of Mumtaz that night, and her mynah bird. The bird lying on its back in Mumtaz's palm while she stroked its shining black chest. The clatter of its feet across the top of an oil can and the collar of white around its throat. 'You make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha.' It put back its head and ducked it, ducked again. 'You make me laugh.'

Mumtaz fed it with her own hand. It slept on the roof of her hut and she swept up its droppings each morning. For a couple of years they were inseparable.

Amma sucked on her large curved teeth. 'Treat it like a baby, but it will fly away. Waste your love on a bird, but it cannot love you back. It will fly away.'

'You're bad,' Mumtaz told the bird. 'Go away.' But she smiled at Amma. 'If it is God's will, he will fly.'

'It's a terrible thing,' Amma told Nazneen. 'A widow and childless and she had to return to her brother. Giving her love to a bird. Depending on a man like that.'

'Terrible thing,' said Nazneen.