Reap and gossip. That’s the rule. On harvest days, anyone who’s got a pair of legs and arms can expect to earn supper with unceasing labour. Our numbers have been too reduced of late to allow a single useful soul to stay away. The children go ahead of us, looking for the grey of any thistle heads that have outstripped our barley, then duck below the level ears of grain to weed out nettles, teasels, docks. ‘Dealing with the grievances,’ we say. Then the broadest shoulders swing their sickles and their scythes at the brimming cliffs of stalk; hares, partridges and sparrows flee before the blades; our wives and daughters bundle up and bind the sheaves, though not too carefully – they work on the principle of ten for the commons and one for the gleaning; our creaking fathers make the lines of stooks; the sun begins to dry what we have harvested. Our work is consecrated by the sun. Compared to winter days, or digging days, it’s satisfying work, made all the more so by the company we keep, for on such days all the faces we know and love (as well as those I know but do not like entirely) are gathered in one space and bounded by common ditches and collective hopes. If, perhaps, we hear a barking deer nagging to be trapped and stewed or a woodcock begging to make his hearse in a pie, we lift our heads as one and look towards the woods. We straighten up as one and stare at the sun, reprovingly, if it’s been darkened by a cloud; our scythes and hand tools clack and chat in unison. And anything we say is heard by everyone.

Long before any decisions have been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the morning looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest contents of her life into three categories: things to keep, things to throw away, things to donate to Catholic Charities. Sister Melanie is doing the same.

‘What’s the rush?’ I ask, picking my way past the long row of boxes that lines the front hall, everything labelled and sealed and neatly stacked. It is August, and the heat and humidity have turned the air into an unbearable soup. I think they’re getting ahead of themselves and I tell them so. Sister Kathy, who is responsible for assessing their situation, won’t be coming from the mother house in North Carolina for weeks.

‘We’ve got to be ready,’ Sister Nena says. She does not stop working. Her state of being is one of constant action, perpetual motion. A small gold tennis racket dangles from her neck where on another nun one would expect to find a cross. ‘I won’t pack the kitchen until the very end.’

Not that the kitchen matters. I suspect that the nuns, who are small enough to emulate the very sparrows God has His eye on, should be eating more, which is why I’ve brought them dinner. Sister Melanie is going to Mercy, the nuns’ retirement home, but she doesn’t know when. Some days she is looking forward to the move, other days she isn’t so sure. She stops and looks in the bag at the casserole I’ve brought, gives me a hug, and ambles off again.

Sister Nena is certain that she doesn’t want to go to Mercy. She regards it as the end of the line. She’s hoping to land in a smaller apartment by herself, or maybe with another sister, though finding a new room-mate at the age of seventy-eight can be a challenge. ‘It’s up to God,’ she says, then she goes back to her boxes.

I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn’t have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine, until one day I couldn’t stand it any more and I bought myself a pair of black swimming trunks at a store in the centre of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the water and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the water or not, I could think of lots of reasons to go in but also some not to (the children playing at the water’s edge, for example), until at last it was too late and I went home,

We brought rings and two witnesses to the Edenvale Home Affairs office because we had been told to.

It was 22 February 2009. I had gone to the office, located on a scrappy strip of motor-repair shops and panel beaters east of Johannesburg, to book our ceremony three weeks previously. My partner, C, and I had been together for nearly two decades, but we had little interest in the rites of marriage. We had decided to do it, now, solely because it would facilitate our move to France, where he had been offered a job. It was, we told each other, merely an administrative matter.

Three years before, the South African parliament had passed a law permitting same-sex marriage, upon injunction from the Constitutional Court. We could have done it more easily – through a gay rabbi I know, for example, or a gay judge who is a friend – but we wanted to see the system work for us. Even though we lived on the other side of town, we chose Edenvale because friends had had a positive experience there. Like all Home Affairs offices, it was grimy and arcane, contemptuous and chaotic; the last place on earth you would want to get married. In the old days, Home Affairs had been the processing room of apartheid: it told you who you were and where you could (and could not) be. It was still a place of profound alienation; of a million frustrations and rages a day.

And I was about to have one of them: I had been waiting in the queue since 2.30 p.m., and had only made it to the front just after 3 p.m. Although the office closed at half past three, processing stopped half an hour before, and I was just too late. I would have to come back the next day. I was on the brink of a spirited lecture on the meaning of ‘Batho Pele’, the department’s new slogan of ‘People First’, when one of the women behind the desk looked up at me, gold hoops in her ears to match her attitude, and barked: ‘Same sex or opposite sex?’

It took me a moment to comprehend. ‘Same sex,’ I said, a little too loudly, glancing round to see if any of the other clerks in the room would look up in shock, or perhaps just interest. They did not.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and re-dyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

On the boat the first thing we did – before deciding who we liked and didn’t like, before telling each other which one of the islands we were from, and why we were leaving, before even bothering to learn each other’s names – was to compare photographs of our husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished. Their chins were strong. Their posture, good. Their noses were straight and high. They looked like our brothers and fathers back home, only better dressed, in grey frock coats and fine Western three-piece suits. Some of them were standing on sidewalks in front of wooden A-frame houses with white picket fences and neatly mowed lawns, and some were leaning in driveways against Model T Fords. Some were sitting in studios on stiff high-backed chairs with their hands neatly folded and staring straight into the camera, as though they were ready to take on the world. All of them had promised to be there, waiting for us, in San Francisco, when we sailed into port.

On the boat we often wondered: Would we like them? Would we love them? Would we recognize them from their pictures when we first saw them on the dock?

On the boat we slept down below, in steerage, where it was filthy and dim. Our beds were narrow metal racks stacked one on top of the other and our mattresses were hard and thin and darkened with the stains of other journeys, other lives. Our pillows were stuffed with dried wheat hulls. Scraps of food littered the passageways between berths and the floors were wet and slick. There was one porthole and in the evening, after the hatch was closed, the darkness filled with whispers. Will it hurt? Bodies tossed and turned beneath the blankets. The sea rose and fell. The damp air stifled. At night we dreamed of our husbands. We dreamed of new wooden sandals and endless bolts of indigo silk and of living, one day, in a house with a chimney. We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters, who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.

After Jin-Ah got the call from the doctor’s office, she gazed out of her living-room window. Thick clouds, black and hulking, stared back. It was mid-November, and drizzling. The low, grungy sky looked more like a wall than atmosphere. Even Will’s favourite tree across the street seemed raw and thin, but little brown birds still whipped in and out of it as if it were spring. Jinny took this as a good sign. Only happy birds flitted about like that, she thought, and decided that she might also be happy. Then, just at that moment, a little brown bird, the size of a coin purse, flew straight into her window, making a crisp clunk.

Jinny shrieked.

She dropped the phone which she had forgotten to put down after the doctor’s call. The battery pack and bits of plastic scattered across the wood floor. Damn it, she said to herself, and got to her knees, making sure not to move too suddenly for now a tiny something was starting inside her, dividing inside her. While putting the phone back together she couldn’t help but laugh at herself for having shrieked when no one was around to hear it. If Will had been home, she wouldn’t have made a sound. Will liked silence. He liked for the air to remain still. Sometimes they went entire evenings without talking and Jinny had simply grown accustomed to this.

She popped in the battery pack, scrunched in the wires. The baby, of course, would not be silent. Fearing Will’s reaction, she considered telling him the news in public. Dinner at a restaurant, perhaps. A place with candles and circular booths of velvet. The idea cheered her up. The baby news would melt them back to love. Maybe they would sit side by side and hold hands, though they hadn’t done so in a while, not even in private. She would look into his eyes, and if the moment felt soft enough, she would playfully hint at being pregnant by reciting a poem. ‘I’m a riddle in nine syllables,’ she would start, and after saying the final lines (I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train, there’s no getting off) she would make Will guess what she was, the way she made her AP English students guess. Will was a dentist, not a man of literature. He stared into mouths in search of disease. But he did enjoy puzzles and might like solving this riddle-poem. Jinny looked out of the windows again, the screens now jewelled with raindrops. They could take a cab to Lincoln Park and then, if time allowed, stroll to whichever restaurant caught their eye, light drizzles and grey skies be damned.

My questioner cannot understand the stones.

‘Why are you bringing these to Israel?’

She holds out the two flints. One has complicated surface patterns of petrol blue and foxy red. I think: it resembles a map. I think: perhaps she imagines the stone is an illicit map of some kind that I am trying to smuggle into the country? I am not thinking straight.

‘I like stones,’ I say. ‘I collect them. I’ve brought these as gifts.’

‘So you do know people here?’

I’ve made a mistake. It isn’t my first. I have been lying persistently and badly for about an hour and a half now, to a variety of interrogators, in a variety of rooms in Tel Aviv airport. The rooms in which I have been questioned have been diminishing in size: entrance hall, side room, back room, booth.

The inquiries continue, looping back over the same ground with minor variations of route, seeking weaknesses in my story. There are plenty of weaknesses.

Where am I staying? Who do I know here? What is the purpose of my visit? What are my plans, exactly, day by day?

I persevere in my poor lies.

The American Colony Hotel, Jerusalem. Nobody. Academic tourism. I plan to visit the Dead Sea, Jaffa, of course Jerusalem. No, I have no intention of visiting the West Bank.

Where am I staying? Who do I know here? What is the purpose of my visit?

So it goes on. I have now assumed that they will not let me into Israel, and that I will be back on a plane to London once they’ve finished. I no longer mind about this. I just don’t want to be in these increasingly small rooms.

Later, another questioner arrives, my fourth. He is a gentle, rubbery-faced man. He doesn’t tell me his name, so I think of him as Benjamin. Benjamin is apologetic in his tone, warm in his queries, like a curious friend. I experience a sudden flowering of Stockholm syndrome. I want to tell Benjamin everything: that I am going from Tel Aviv to the West Bank, that I will be staying in Ramallah with a well-known Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer, and that we will be conducting a series of day-long walking trespasses within restricted-access Zone C landscapes. I almost tell Benjamin these things, then I stick to my answers, red-faced and sweating.

You wet your hair in the sink, then comb it back, slick as a new trash bag. You look nice. OK, so your name is Ricky. You are twenty-three years old. People say you’re sweet. You say to them, ‘No, I’m not.’ But you are. You know you are. You can’t help it. It’s like there’s a piece of candy hidden deep inside you and everyone is trying to find the easiest way to get it out.

Your cellmate, Donald Budke, he’s like Rasputin, or Genghis Khan, maybe even Napoleon Bonaparte. No one tells Donald he’s sweet. His motives are serious, and he’s got acne scars which make him look like a criminal. He is a criminal. He’s ten years older than you, is on his fourth year of a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter. You’re just a high-school history teacher from southern Indiana, or at least you used to be.

On the day you were arrested, the US Customs agent said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Ricky?’ like he knew you or something, like he was really disappointed. ‘Who’s the vehicle registered to, Ricky?’ You told him it was your grandmother’s. You gave him your driver’s licence, your car keys. He asked you to sit in the back of his patrol car while he searched your trunk. You watched through the windshield, waiting for him to find the five cottage-cheese containers full of oxycodone you’d hidden beneath the spare tyre. The sky was pink, like a drop of blood in a glass of water. You thought, Mexico is like an art film. You thought about the ten or so pills in the pocket of your pants, wished there was some way of keeping them so you could eat them later, in the event you were placed under arrest. You didn’t want to eat any of them right then. You were already as high as a butterfly. You fished the handful out of your jeans pocket and put two in your mouth anyway, waited for the spit to come, swallowed. The rest you chewed into a paste and spat on to the floorboard of the patrol car while the customs agent rifled through your roadside emergency kit.

From the North Kivu capital of Goma, it takes an hour by helicopter to reach Walikale, a town in eastern Congo’s largest and most troubled territory. With less than 2,000 miles of paved roads across the entire Democratic Republic, Walikale, like much of the North Kivu province it dominates, is virtually inaccessible by road, making frequent UN helicopter flights a necessity to resupply both the UN and Congolese troops stationed in the area. The view along the way is a montage of every image of equatorial beauty conceivable, from jagged volcanic tips to the neatly tended hillside farms that stretch for miles before giving way to a rolling, dense, green forest of trees through which an occasional stream or cluster of thatched-roof huts stands out.

Life for most villagers here consists of what profit they can glean from small trade, subsistence farming and the gruelling labour of the mineral mines for which the town is best known. But there is a natural abundance to the land that is evident to everyone; enough so that each conversation I have – with a soldier, with the owner of a small grocery store, with a group of teenage boys on the side of the road – includes both an acknowledgement of Walikale’s vast riches and the price the territory has had to pay for them. That price informs the fierce scepticism behind each of these conversations, every one of which ends in a request for money, not out of the supplicant’s greed or poverty, but out of the sense that I, like so many others, am profiting from their labour. This is a place as awash in natural wealth as it is in armed groups, from Rwandan rebels to domestic cadres, who, along with the Congolese military responsible for defeating them, have wreaked a collective havoc on a population living in what could be an Edenic corner of the earth.

The UN military base perched on Walikale’s highest hill is a sprawling single-storey brick compound rumoured to have been the former home of a Belgian colonist. From there, the few hundred wooden homes and stores, the football field and the town centre seem to have been conjured out of a need to stake human claim to the ground. It is as if the town, when compared to the jungle that surrounds it, was built in defiance of the trees and towering bush that stand ready to reclaim the sprawling acres of cleared land on which it sits.

In 1907 a woman from San Francisco named Alice B. Toklas arrived in Paris. She was going to meet a fellow American living there already. She was excited because she’d heard a lot about Gertrude Stein.

In 2011 a woman from London named Louise was travelling by Eurostar to Paris. Louise was troubled. Louise was travelling alone because she was trying to understand something about love.

Louise was in a relationship; it felt like a ship, though her vessel was a small boat rowed by herself with a cabin for her lover. Her lover’s ship was much bigger and carried crew and passengers. There was always a party going on. Her lover was at the centre of a busy world. Louise was her own world; self-contained, solitary, intense. She did not know how to reconcile these opposites – if opposites they were – and to make things more complicated, it was Louise who wanted the two of them to live together. Her lover said no – they were good as they were – and the solitary Louise and the sociable lover could not be in the same boat.

And so Louise was travelling alone to Paris.

Carlitos loved the United States. He papered the walls of his room with American flags and tourist posters from odd places, like ‘Idaho, Home of the potato’. He said all the words he could in English, for example ‘Hershey’s’ or ‘Chuck Norris’, and when he did, he chewed on the syllables until they sounded the way they did in movies. I suppose he pronounced the language really well, because nobody understood anything. People had to ask him several times what exactly he had said.

It isn’t that Carlitos was trying to take anyone in. Just the opposite. I never knew anyone as authentic. He was incapable of pretending anything he didn’t really think, though he really didn’t think about too many things. If we became friends, it was because neither of us had more ideas than were strictly necessary. That brings people together.

Carlitos’s father, an extremely fat man, was an officer in the Peruvian navy. He had studied in panama, in the School of the Americas, and then somewhere in the United States in a place whose name I’ve forgotten, something like Naples. In the outside world, he moved around preceded by an escort car, dressed in a black uniform and a white visored hat, which helped to hide his bulk. But indoors he was always in his shorts and undershirt. Seeing his enormous belly about to burst through the undershirt, no one would have imagined he was so important.

His hand brushes against mine in the darkness. His skin is hot and rough. Short hair, curls combed flat with some amateur pomade that shines even in the penumbra of the movie theatre. His smell insinuates itself over the rest. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I look back. Everything he has is new: the white shirt, the watch, the open backpack with a few books on Afro-Cuban art. He is a young professor or a student about to graduate. Thirty years old, no more. I move my hand from the armrest and hide it between my legs. On-screen, the actor speaks directly to the camera, challenging the Empire: junk food is to blame for the world’s obesity. He introduces us to his vegan girlfriend and the doctors who are going to accompany his body as it falls over the precipice, stuffed with trash for an entire month. The man lets his hand fall on to my leg in a smooth move that nobody else sees. It takes but a second – a caress – for everything else to disappear . . . the people, the movie. He is all that exists now, his slow, deliberate breathing. I lie in wait, hunching closer to the woman on my right. I could ask him to let me go by, tell him that I have to go to the bathroom and wait in the lobby. But I don’t do anything. The woman scoots over a bit so that my arm stops touching hers. All three of us stare ahead in silence. On-screen the American body begins to decompose. Swollen, flaccid, lacking all desire, it vomits in the car park of a McDonald’s and the cinema bursts into laughter. The man on my left laughs along and leans his leg into mine. This time I stay put. He realizes it’s become a battle of wills (he likes that). He settles his backpack down on his left leg so the stranger sitting on his other side can’t watch him. His hand moves over to his pants, he unbuttons them and pulls down the zipper. Without turning my head, I can see him take it out. He strokes it with his right hand, holding on to the backpack with his left. Up and down, faster and faster. He laughs when everyone else laughs (up, down) without taking his eyes off the screen (up, down). A German man lounges in the row just in front of us, oblivious to the fact that he is aiming at his neck (up, down) his breathing gets deeper, falters, nobody notices (up, down) his hand goes crazy, his breathing envelops both of us (I will not . . .) he finishes himself off with the applause, eyes fixed on the screen, spattering the back of the German’s seat, the tips of his blond hair, painting the wood in spasms, signing it with a last drop of semen.

Granta introduces Jamil Ahmad with this tale of two lovers who spark a blood feud when they elope. They find unlikely shelter at a desert garrison and there establish a quiet life, punctuated only by the seasons of desert dust and heat. But even as they make a home, the past slowly stalks them. Rich and lyrical, this remarkable tale evokes a harsh climate, an unforgiving tradition and the stubborn optimism of love.

To this day, investigators are still adding sightings of Bruno Vivar to the case file of the disappeared Navidad siblings. Every summer since the incident, a dozen witnesses from different parts of central Chile claim to have seen a young man fitting his description: striped T-shirt in various combinations of primary colours; shorts or bathing trunks; leather sandals; extremely thin hairless legs; dishevelled hair in a ragged cut, sometimes brown and other times dyed red. Over and over again, as if his parents’ last memory of him had been burned on the retinas of so many who never knew him (the press coverage was as intense as it was brief), they see Bruno Vivar lying in the sand, face down on a towel, staring out to sea, looking disdainfully through some photographs, or swimming in silence. Other testimonies, of course, add specific and equally disturbing details: Bruno drinking at hotel bars, beer in cans or double shots of whiskey that he pays for with a card issued in the United States, while with the other hand he fondles a die that he spins like a top on the lacquered surface of the bar; sitting on a terrace at noon, noisily eating French fries; reading, in the dining hall, a letter delivered to the hotel weeks before; tossing the die and then writing another letter never sent by the local mail.

These bits of information come from different sources: guards; waiters; store clerks; receptionists; cleaning people who at the time also yearned to assemble the missing pieces of the case but who only succeeded in helping the police to declare impossible a verdict of either homicide or kidnapping. It has been tacitly assumed that Bruno Vivar – a legal adult – simply abandoned his family all of a sudden, which isn’t a crime in Chile.

As cadets, we rubbed Coca-Cola on our soles so we wouldn’t crack open our heads while playing outside. The dew soaked the concrete and we glided on the court like an aeroplane when it rains, our hands hidden in our fists, the pavement greasy beneath Saturday’s frost, and just at the mouth of the airport, eleven pale giants fastened to the seats like packages, the pilot narrows his eyes so that the nose meets the blue lines, the wind, the rain, all of the gods’ lightning illuminating our enormous jaws. On those winter courts, how we broadsided those boys from the Salesian school, there go the boys having taken communion – we used to say – there go the boys parading their embroidered crests, no one breathes until the aeroplane rushes on the runway and the pilot releases the brakes. A pitch-dark night: the sky falls in pieces over Treviso, it always rains in Treviso, what does it matter if from here to the hotel and from the hotel to the field we’re watched by the guard dog, oh, how we bit as cadets, how we rushed at anyone, and one Saturday they came to see me from La Caja and they shook my hand like a gentleman, they said, aren’t your parents home? Damn, you can really hit it, how would you like to try spending some time with us? La Caja! With Izquierdo and Lafuente and that tower of curls who was shooting at just fifteen years old, a trunk with elephant ankles who moved slooooowly like a mimic, but when he got it down court, oh, La Caja. My folks said fine, but only if you go on with school, and there was Mom, crying as if I were going off to Antarctica, don’t cry, Mommy, I’ll come home every weekend, all those hours on the bus that brings back the San Fernando recruits, heads shaved and bone-thin as lepers, sad and gloomy-faced with their backpacks hanging at their shoulders, their noses covered in pimples. Two breakfasts, meat at lunchtime, fish for supper, piles of vegetables on tin trays: we also made up an army, an army of gigantean kids with sharpened hands, prominent Adam’s apples and the shadow of a moustache.

First her ears hear; they open. Then her eyes can see; they open. Her face, a revolving door, swings open and shut, open and shut. She no longer sleeps at night; it’s too hard to breathe after four breast-implant operations. She drops, like rain down a window, collapsing in fatigue, breathing through her mouth, and even exhaustion seems miraculous. Then during the daytime, tiredness and lack of sleep bring on momentary, frenzied fits of rage. She’ll walk into a shop and, if no one rushes to help her, she screams and causes chaos. The people around her turn to look. Mónica can see their faces – they’re disgusted, they’re shocked – she feels their eyes look her up and down, feels them on her, climbing her legs, hanging from her hips, her breasts, their eyes. When she walks out into the street, their eyes tinkle like little bells jingling from her flesh and that brings back her smile; for days now there’s been something new in the world: her body bathed in their looks, but, like acid, something has coursed through her and eaten away the sweetness. Even the house has changed; it’s been all chopped up. There are times when she wants to go to the bathroom and ends up in the kitchen, and vice versa.

‘It’s because I’m not sleeping,’ she thinks.

But not sleeping is as familiar as the pen marking the page in her operation diary, suspended there, like a thought containing everything. Who is that, walking at night? Who makes that noise, those footsteps that are suddenly beside her bed and then stop? It’s as though someone were really sitting there; she feels their weight, in the middle of the night, and thinks, ‘Now they’re going to touch me.’ And she plays with that touch, she whets it. She changes position again, opens her mouth again, as wide as she can. Inhales. Even the air is weightless now, no longer dense enough to fill her lungs, to oxygenate her blood, as it used to. Her breasts hover on either side of her body, she’s suffocating. She tries sitting up and then lies back down. She thrashes around, loses consciousness for three hours and then suddenly regains it, flails her white arms, startled.

‘Tomorrow I have a film shoot,’ she says aloud.

Immediately she wonders if she really said it aloud or only thought the words. She wants to say them aloud, and so touches her fingertips to her lips to make sure they’re moving this time.

‘Tomorrow I have a film shoot,’ she repeats.

When a Pakistani friend won a promotion to a powerful job in Peshawar I went to congratulate him on his new sinecure. He is a cultivated man with a beautiful home from the British colonial era and tentacles all across Pakistan’s tormented tribal region, where he once served as a political agent – the all-purpose government official who is supposed to act as lord and regent over the fractious tribes and the inexorably rising tide of the Taliban.

As always, my friend wore a starched and pressed white shalwar kameez. While we talked he carefully untied the green ribbons on stacks of well-worn cardboard folders, signed the government papers stacked inside with a fountain pen, and then tossed the retied folders on to the floor. Every half-hour, a clerk appeared and carried away the piles of completed paperwork.

Government offices are important symbols in Pakistan – size, furniture, scope of retinue. This one was handsome, a large room set off a broad veranda in the ersatz Moghul-era quadrangle of pink stucco. A white mantelpiece signalled the dignity of the office holder. Above it hung a portrait, more a sketch in dingy brown, of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The face was gaunt and elderly – an aquiline nose, sunken cheeks, unforgiving mouth. A peaked cap high off his forehead and a plain coat buttoned to the neck with a high collar gave the aura of a religious man. The picture reminded me of the first image I had ever seen of Jinnah: a mysterious, dark oil painting covered with glass hung high on a wall of the formal reception room at the Pakistani High Commission in London.

A few months later I returned to see my friend. Same signing of documents, same clerk, different portrait above the mantel. The new visage showed a serious young man with a full head of dark hair, an Edwardian white shirt, black jacket and tie, alert dark eyes. What happened? I asked.

In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion’s mouth, its size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus. One night under the vast silence of a perfect half-moon and six stars, a mosque appeared on a wooded island in the river, and Leila was woken by the call to prayer issuing from its minaret just before sunrise. It was the day she was to be blessed with a son.

As she knew there was no mosque within hearing distance, her initial impression was that the air itself was singing. Leila manoeuvred herself out of bed and went towards the door, making sure not to disturb her mother-in-law who had taken to sleeping in the same room as her in these last days before the birth. The servant girl appointed outside the door had fallen asleep, and as Leila moved past, a bad dream caused the girl to release a cry of fear.

Leila was fourteen years old, thin-framed with grey, glass-like eyes and a nervous flame always burning just beneath her pale skin. She pursued the song of faith drifting in the fifty-roomed mansion that had been in her husband’s family for several generations. The river with its boats and blind freshwater dolphins and drowned lovers was half a mile away, and there was nothing but rocky desert and thick date orchards between the riverbank and the mansion.

Long after the voice withdrew, she continued her search for its origins, now and then placing an ear against a wall. Earlier in the night she’d heard momentary fragments of other songs from the men’s side of the mansion, where her husband was celebrating the imminent arrival of his first son in the company of musicians and prostitutes. No doubt they were all asleep by now.

The windows in the women’s section of the house were inaccessible, nudged up against the ceiling, so the light poured in but not enough air. Leila was looking up at one of them when she heard someone come in behind her.

‘You shouldn’t be down here,’ Razia, her mother-in-law, said, unable to conceal her alarm. ‘If you needed something you should have asked one of the servants.’ Her attenuated face was wheat­coloured and pitted with smallpox scars. She had long white hair and every other year a doctor would inject liquid gold into her bones and joints to counter the ravages of time. ‘You should be resting,’ she said. It was the tone she had employed a year earlier when Leila came to the mansion as a bride, a tone suitable for the child that Leila had been back then. Someone who longed for her dolls and frequently misplaced her veil. But as soon as she became pregnant there was no end to Razia’s devotion and love. Along with the abundant care came the vigilance, an ever-present awareness that the girl was not mature enough to know the importance of the asset taking form inside her body.

Nineteen seventy-five marked the end of the dictatorship in Spain. The repressive regimes in South American countries would hold out until the following decade, but other cultural changes were afoot. In Europe, the tradition of exiled South American writers living and working in Paris gradually came to an end. Instead of looking north for their intellectual meridian, a young generation of émigrés began seeking publication in post-Franco Spain.

The writers in this collection were all born in or after 1975.

Many of these writers have not suffered in their own skin the social and moral circumstances that haunted their predecessors. When asked, the majority expressed scepticism, with varying degrees of reticence, nervousness or irony about the idea of an author having an active role in public life. Mario Vargas Llosa, whose bid for the presidency of Peru in 1990 was the theme of Granta 36, is perhaps the most obvious example of a public and influential figure following the intellectual model of Camus or Sartre...