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he’s harmless. Or irrelevant.’
    ‘What about the other Communists?’
    ‘Most of them have become experts at couching their beliefs in religiously acceptable terms. The academic version of Sufi poets, you might call them.’
    ‘And the rest?’
    ‘Some professors were roughed up. They left.’
    ‘How sad.’
    I shrug. ‘Good old Professor S. is still writing away. Which brings me back to you. You haven’t told me what you’re writing now.’
    ‘I have a question for you first.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Tell me about boxing.’
    ‘What do you want to know?’
    ‘Everything. What’s it like? How did you get into it?’
    ‘Family tradition. I was an out-of-shape little kid. Very soft. One day my uncle took me aside and said, “The time has come,” or something like that. He trained me in the evenings: jump rope, speed bag, heavy bag. He was pretty lazy, so he usually sat on a chair and smoked while I pounded away, but every so often he put on his gloves and knocked me around so I’d learn not to be scared. I boxed until the end of college.’
    ‘You said you never won a championship.’
    ‘No. But I made it to a couple. And I won more fights than I lost.’
    ‘Did your mother approve?’
    ‘No, but she always came to watch when I asked her. She hid her face behind her hands, but she came.’
    ‘I’m sure she was terrified.’
    I lean back on the bench and look up at the sky. Two stars, a low-riding moon, dusty haze. Cloudless but not clear. Not very dark but dark enough. Impossible to see anything falling.
    I think of my mother on a rooftop, of waking beside her, early, at first light on an almost-quiet summer morning. The flies would come later, swinging up over the walls with the rising sun, buzzing and ripe like honeybees.
    Someone calls our names. It’s Ozi.
    ‘There you two are,’ he says. ‘What are you doing out here?’
    ‘Talking,’ Mumtaz says. ‘I like this friend of yours.’
    Ozi smiles and puts his arm around me. ‘You’ll get over it soon enough,’ he tells her.
    We walk inside, Mumtaz and I on opposite sides of Ozi, and the pounding of the music gets louder as we approach, the lights from the dance floor reflecting off the walls so that colors start to blur and change, again and again and again.
    The police don’t stop us on our drive home. We are in a Pajero, after all.

4
opening the purple box: an interview with professor julius superb
    Z ULFIKAR MANTO : Good to meet you, Professor. I’ve read some of your work. None of the academic materials, I’m afraid. Econometrics scares the hell out of me and I can hardly even pronounce heteroscedasticity. But I enjoyed that piece you wrote a few months ago about the phoenix myth. Very witty.
    JULIUS SUPERB : Yes, ah, likewise.
    ZM : Your students speak highly of you. They say you’re a brave man.
    JS : They say I’m, ah, a man. A brave man. Do they?
    ZM : Is something wrong?
    JS : Wrong? No, no, of course not. Please excuse me. Never having met, you see. I was somewhat unprepared. But that’s your business. I don’t mean to presume. I’ve read all your articles. That is to say, all that I’ve come across. And they are top-notch. Really first-class journalism. Commendable. Ah, I’ve lost my train of thought. What was the question?
    ZM : Actually, I asked if something was wrong. But let’sbegin at the beginning. How did you first meet Darashikoh Shezad?
    JS : He was a student of mine. He distinguished himself by attending my lectures and taking notes. It was this second characteristic, note-taking, that really caught my eye. So one day I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ To which he replied, ‘I’m sorry, Professor?’ And I responded, ‘No, you’re not. You’ve been doing it for weeks. You’re taking notes.’
    ZM : Is that really so unusual?
    JS : Not really. But I confront each and every one of them. No one takes notes in my class without explaining themselves to me personally. I hit them with an impromptu quiz,