PORTSMOUTH

At Fratton Station, Sulaiman Jamil stepped into the announcer’s booth every day and sat down in front of the metal microphone, wiping it gingerly with his handkerchief. As he emptied a glass ashtray brimming with cigarette butts, he glanced up at a worn calendar of Samantha Fox taped to the wall. She wore a dangerously high-cut gold leotard, turning sideways so her pert bottom was almost visible in the camera shot, as though she were offering it, promising it. Her feathery blonde hair hung loosely around her face and, with a finger, she pulled the front of the gold bodysuit, exposing all but a centimetre of her breasts.

Every morning as Sulaiman Jamil entered his booth and began his routine of tidying his desk before the day’s work, he blushed and tried to avoid the mocking glance of Miss Fox.

“My office, janaab,” he wrote to Nur Muhammad, his best friend, “overlooks a magnificent train station, connecting Portsmouth to the great United Kingdom. It is exceedingly neat and clean.” Sulaiman Jamil hadn’t received any of his friend’s cheery blue airmail letters in weeks. He had tried to convince Nur Muhammad to leave India with him, to get on a plane, to cut his ties, to seek his fortune in the open skies and remake his destiny in England.“What hope did we have back there?” India in 1990, whatever they said on the World Service radio, was closed to the world. But Nur Muhammad refused to leave.

Not because he loved his home. Not because he had anything there, in Varanasi, to protect – no business, no wife, no life. Just, “No, I’m not going.” That’s all Nur Muhammad said. “The West is finished, wait and see. The sun they are always going on about? It’s about to set. Wait, don’t wait, makes no difference.You’ll see.” Sulaiman Jamil thought of Nur Muhammad, his best friend, his only friend, standing next to bloated pye-dogs feeding off the remains of the dead at the ghats, hawking his services to pimply English teenagers, and he was overcome with guilt for not insisting enough. Nur Muhammad was wrong, Sulaiman Jamil was almost sure of that.

“I think of you,” he wrote on the thin, gauzy paper, before quickly scratching it out.

Sulaiman Jamil looked out the small, cloudy window at the crisscross of rusted railway tracks and wondered where his friend was now. Fatima Bhutto, born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1982, is daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, niece of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and granddaughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. She was raised in Syria and Karachi. Her new novel, The Runaways (Penguin), is out this month.