So now I have a dream-wife, the dreamer becomes conscious enough to think. What the hell to do with her? – But it isn't up to him. Ayesha and Mishal Akhtar are together in the big house.

Ever since his birthday Mirza Saeed had been full of passionate desires, ‘as if life really does begin at forty’, his wife marvelled. Their marriage became so energetic that the servants had to change the bedsheets three times per day. Mishal hoped secretly that this heightening of her husband's libido would lead her to conceive, because she was of the firm opinion that enthusiasm mattered, whatever doctors might say to the contrary, and that the years of taking her temperature every morning before getting out of bed, and then plotting the results on graph paper in order to establish her pattern of ovulation, had actually dissuaded the babies from being born, partly because it was difficult to be properly ardent when science got into bed along with you, and partly, too, in her view, because no self-respecting foetus would wish to enter the womb of so mechanically programmed a mother; Mishal still prayed for a child, although she no longer mentioned the fact to Saeed so as to spare him the sense of having failed her in this respect. Eyes shut, feigning sleep, she would call on God for a sign, and when Saeed became so loving, so frequently, she wondered if maybe this might not be it. As a result, his strange request that from now on, whenever they came to stay at Peristan, she should adopt the ‘old ways’ and retreat into purdah, was not treated by her with the contempt it deserved. In the city, where they kept a large and hospitable house, the zamindar and his wife were known as one of the most ‘modern’ and ‘go-go’ couples on the scene; they collected contemporary art and threw wild parties and invited friends round for fumbles in the dark on sofas while watching soft-porno VCRs. So when Mirza Saeed said, ‘Would it not be sort of delicious, Mishu, if we tailored our behaviour to fit this old house,’ she should have laughed in his face. Instead she replied, ‘What you like, Saeed,’ because he gave her to understand that it was a sort of erotic game. He even hinted that his passion for her had become so overwhelming that he might need to express it at any moment, and if she were out in the open at the time it might embarrass the staff; certainly her presence would make it impossible for him to concentrate on any of his tasks, and besides, in the city, ‘we will still be completely up-to-date’. From this she understood that the city was full of distractions for the Mirza, so that her chances of conceiving were greatest right here in Titlipur. She resolved to stay put. This was when she invited her mother to come and stay, because if she were to confine herself to the zenana she would need company. Mrs. Qureishi arrived wobbling with plump fury, determined to scold her son-in-law until he gave up this purdah foolishness, but Mishal amazed her mother by begging: ‘Please don't.’ Mrs. Qureishi, the wife of the state bank director, was quite a sophisticate herself. ‘In fact, all your teenage, Mishu, you were the grey goose and I was the hipster. I thought you dragged yourself out of that ditch but I see he pushed you back in there again.’ The financier's wife had always been of the opinion that her son-in-law was a secret cheapskate, an opinion which had survived intact in spite of being starved of any scrap of supporting evidence. Ignoring her daughter's veto, she sought out Mirza Saeed in the formal garden and launched into him, wobbling, as was her wont, for emphasis. ‘What type of life are you living?’ she demanded. ‘My daughter is not for locking up, but for taking out! What is all your fortune for, if you keep it also under lock and key? My son, unlock both wallet and wife! Take her away, renew your love, on some enjoyable outing!’ Mirza Saeed opened his mouth, found no reply, shut it again. Dazzled by her own oratory, which had given rise, quite on the spur of the moment, to the idea of a holiday, Mrs. Qureishi warmed to her theme. ‘Just get set, and go!’ she urged. ‘Go, man, go! Go away with her, or will you lock her up until she goes away,’ – here she jabbed an ominous finger at the sky – ‘forever?’

Guiltily, Mirza Saeed promised to consider the idea.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she cried in triumph. ‘You big softo? You... you Hamlet?’

His mother-in-law's attack brought on one of the periodic bouts of self-reproach which had been plaguing Mirza Saeed ever since he persuaded Mishal to take the veil. To console himself he settled down to read Tagore's story Ghare-Baire in which a zamindar persuades his wife to come out of purdah, whereupon she takes up with a firebrand politico involved in the ‘swadeshi’ campaign, and the zamindar winds up dead. The novel cheered him up momentarily, but then his suspicions returned. Had he been sincere in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the epileptic, Ayesha? ‘Some coast,’ he thought, remembering Mrs Qureishi with her eyes of an accusative hawk, ‘some clear.’ His mother-in-law's presence, he argued to himself, was further proof of his bona fides. Had he not positively encouraged Mishal to send for her, even though he knew perfectly well that the old fatty couldn't stand him and would suspect him of every damn slyness under the sun? ‘Would I have been so keen for her to come if I was planning on hanky panky?’ he asked himself. But the nagging inner voices continued: ‘All this recent sexology, this renewed interest in your lady wife, is simple transference. Really, you are longing for your peasant floozy to come and flooze with you.’

Guilt had the effect of making the zamindar feel entirely worthless. His mother-in-law's insults came to seem, in his unhappiness, like the literal truth. ‘Softo,’ she called him, and sitting in his study, surrounded by bookcases in which worms were munching contentedly upon priceless Sanskrit texts such as were not to be found even in the national archives, and also, less upliftingly, on the complete works of Percy Westerman, G. A. Henty and Dornford Yates, Mirza Saeed admitted, yes, spot on, I am soft. The house was seven generations old and for seven generations the softening had been going on. He walked down the corridor in which his ancestors hung in baleful, gilded frames, and contemplated the mirror which he kept hanging in the last space as a reminder that one day he, too, must step up on to this wall. He was a man without sharp corners or rough edges; even his elbows were covered by little pads of flesh. In the mirror he saw the thin moustache, the weak chin, the lips stained by paan. Cheeks, nose, forehead: all soft, soft, soft. ‘Who would see anything in a type like me?’ he cried, and when he realized that he had been so agitated that he had spoken aloud he knew he must be in love, that he was sick as a dog with love, and that the object of his affections was no longer his loving wife.

‘Then what a damn, shallow, tricksy and self-deceiving fellow I am,’ he sighed to himself, ‘to change so much, so fast. I deserve to be finished off without ceremony.’ But he was not the type to fall on his sword. Instead, he strolled a while around the corridors of Peristan, and pretty soon the house worked its magic and restored him to something like a good mood once again.

The house: in spite of its faery name, it was a solid, rather prosy building, rendered exotic only by being in the wrong country. It had been built seven generations ago by a certain Perowne, an English architect much favoured by the colonial authorities, whose only style was that of the neo-classical English country house. In those days the great zamindars were crazy for European architecture. Saeed's great-great-great-great-grandfather had hired the fellow five minutes after meeting him at the Viceroy's reception, to indicate publicly that not all Indian Muslims had supported the action of the Meerut soldiers or been in sympathy with the subsequent uprisings, no, not by any means; – and then given him carte blanche; – so here Peristan now stood, in the middle of near-tropical potato fields and beside the great banyan-tree, covered in bougainvillaea creeper, with snakes in the kitchens and butterfly skeletons in the cupboards. Some said its name owed more to the Englishman's than to anything more fanciful: it was a mere contraction of Perownistan.