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collective arousal. But as she grew older, Leila imagined her mother, a quarter of a mile from the lake’s edge, the mist roaming the water like a soft supple fire around her. The seven boats that converged on her bore a total of thirty men, silhouetted in the fine-grained vapour. Some of them leaped over the water like panthers even before the boats connected. She fought them, surrounded, numbed by shock but with her eyes screaming the outrage of her solitude. The only escape was upwards and that was what she had chosen, willing the wings into existence upon her body, the emptiness of mist closing behind her as she rose.
    The council of the wise and the powerful decided that the moneylenders must wait for Leila to grow up to be compensated – with the interest on the original debt accumulating annually till then.
    As the years passed, her aunts warned her against wandering too far from home. One day when she was thirteen she did; and the men, connecting with each other through mobile phones, had recognized their opportunity. She was running from them, having managed to elude them for the time being, when she was seen by Timur, who was on a hunting expedition on the outskirts of the village. They were married within ten days.
     
     
    W hen her anger had somewhat subsided, Razia turned to the Book of Omens and began to study the page Leila had opened earlier, a Chinaman wearing a bright red coat. It was in fact the poet Saadi, travelling through China disguised as a monk, spying on temples dedicated to false gods.
    O augury seeker! she read aloud, know that there is loss in mingling with those who are not of your sort, but you are aware of their deceit and will triumph over them, but to remain safe you must not take off your amulets .
    She walked to her bed and lay down with her eyes closed. She didn’t move for an hour. According to the complex architecture of faith in her head, the Book of Omens seemed to be advising that she and Leila spend the next ten days in continuous silent prayer at the mosque on the river island.
    ‘Is it absolutely necessary?’ Timur said when she spoke to him.
    ‘Yes, my son, it is Allah’s will,’ she replied. ‘With remedies and prayers and fasts, I am making sure that it will be a boy this time, and we must proceed according to what He tells me to do through the Book of Omens . Three days ago, He told me to make Leila wear a Shirt of Joseph, to keep the boy safe from harm, and I have done that. Now you must immediately make a generous donation to the mosque and have a private room cleared for our use.’
    Nadir Shah, aware that the island was irrevocably gone from him, wanted the next best thing, which was control over the mosque. Knowing the enemy would try force, Timur had recently decreed that nobody with weapons should be allowed on to the island. Almost all of the donations to the mosque found their way to Timur, and they were no longer just a few rupees offered by everyday people – word had been spreading and thousands upon thousands were being sent by rich industrialists, businessmen, local and national politicians. An Arabian prince had sent a silk carpet, another a hundred rosaries of black Gulf pearls, and in the imam’s Quran, each of the 77,701 sacred words was outlined in crushed rubies, each of the 1,015,030 consonant dots in crushed emeralds. Things that had been free in the early days – food, shelter, the river crossings – now had to be paid for by pilgrims. All this had to be defended.
    But Timur could not reveal any of this to his mother, and so in the end he agreed with her wishes.
    ‘I am not going,’ Leila said when Razia told her the plan.
    She had decided: she hadn’t heard from the midwife, and these people were unwilling to lead her to her daughters – so Qes was the only remaining hope. She knew she must wait until Razia sat down on the prayer mat again and then slip away to talk to him. That he was still there on the other side of the door was not