haste to prayer, make haste to welfare, there is no God but God.

The wailing song floats in from a nearby mosque loudspeaker and cuts through the international air-conditioner hum. She has not prayed as a Muslim for a considerable time, but after hearing the azan she finds herself almost reflexively reciting the du’a, the supplication before prayer, and then she ties up her hair in her scarf and goes to the bathroom and performs the ritual ablution, washing her feet and her hands and arms and running her wet hands over her face.

She takes the prayer rug the hotel provides and arranges it to face the qibla. Silently she goes through the proper intention for the Maghrib prayer and then enters the prayer state easily, without friction, the ritual words and the prescribed movements, the hands up next to the face, the hands folded, right over left on the belly, the kneeling, the full prostration, the cycle of one raka’ah after another until the three ordained for the sunset prayer are done. Sonia has always been religious in her own fashion. In America, she attends a Catholic church in whatever neighborhood she finds herself, as her mother trained her to do. In Muslim lands she follows her adopted religion. In Europe she presents herself as an adherent of Carl Gustav Jung. Nor is it hypocritical, she thinks, not merely a case of When in Rome. She doesn’t see why her worship should be restricted to one faith, especially as she is devoted to all of them and believes that God understands this peculiarity and approves.

Now it is time to get ready for the reception. She showers, washes and dries her hair, dresses in her best shalwar kameez, a black number shot with silver threads, and arranges a black silk scarf over her short hair. The wall mirror shows her a thin, slight woman with graying black hair atop a deep-tanned face out of which shine dark, bright eyes. She thinks she looks like an American in costume, so she takes a breath and shifts the tension in her muscles, especially the muscles of her face. She looks again and smiles shyly for effect. Now she is a Muslim lady, probably a Pathan, at home in Pakistan. She is very good at this, and it gives her an absurd and infantile pleasure.

The hotel has provided a small room set up with a large round table and a bar. As she enters, Sonia sees Rukhsana speaking to a couple of men. One is a slight elfin figure in a cheap tan suit, his blue eyes bright and cheerful behind rimless glasses, his narrow skull clothed with a thatch of sand-colored hair going gray; the other towers over him, a really huge old man, his face decorated by a noble nose and a white brush mustache. Rukhsana gestures her over and embraces her; Sonia can smell liquor on her breath, although the glass she is holding appears to be fruit juice. Rukhsana introduces the smaller of the two as Father Mark Shea, S.J.

“And of course you know Dr. Schildkraut.”

“My dear Sonia,” Schildkraut says, embracing her. “You have not changed even a little bit.”

“Nor have you, Karl-Heinz,” she replies, a lie. Schildkraut is twenty years her senior and now looks it.

“We were just discussing religion,” Rukhsana says brightly. “Perhaps Sonia can add something. She claims to be a Muslim and a Catholic simultaneously.”

“That must be fatiguing,” says Shea. “You actually practice both?”

“I practice,” Sonia replies, “but I’m not good enough to perform either on the professional stage.”

Father Shea laughs, throwing his head back so that he almost faces the ceiling. Sonia thinks he must be a man who likes to laugh but doesn’t get much of a chance in his ordinary work. He says, “I’d be interested in how you get the statement in the Qur’an-that God begets not, neither is He begotten-to play nice with the clear declaration about the nature of Christ in the Nicene Creed.”

Sonia says, “Well, clearly either the Church Fathers were mistaken or the Prophet, peace be unto him, was mistaken, or else-and I think this is most likely-that any statement about God falls short of the ineffable truth and therefore neither is mistaken, but we mortals are incapable of resolving the differences with our puny minds.”

Shea laughs again, more loudly. “Thus you defy the theologians. Well, good for you! We Jesuits, you know, are supposed to be all things to all men, but you put us to shame.”

A man comes by with a tray of drinks. Shea snags a champagne; Schildkraut and Sonia take soft drinks; Rukhsana ignores the man and his tray entirely. Instead she is looking across the room at something, and when Sonia follows her gaze she sees that it is a man heading toward the bar. Rukhsana mutters a brief excuse and walks off in that direction. Soon she is deep in conversation with the man, whom Sonia now recognizes as Harold Ashton, the face familiar from a photograph on a book jacket and a similar one she acquired as she organized the conference. As is usual with authors and their book jacket images, he is jowlier and more worn by time than the image testifies but still handsome in the English style, with a bony high-colored face, long dark hair combed straight back and hanging raggedly over his collar, a strong nose and jaw, and pale imperial eyes. He leans over Rukhsana from his considerable height and touches her arm lightly from time to time.

Now uniformed waiters are passing through the room and laying the first course on the tables, so the conferees do the usual shuffle to find their place cards. Sonia has seated herself between her fellow convener, Amin Yacub Khan, and the Indian psychiatrist, Manjit Nara. Of the other seats, two are occupied by Rukhsana and Ashton, two by Porter and Annette Cosgrove, two by Father Shea and Dr. Schildkraut, and one is empty, its plate of tiny kebab appetizers cooling. Sonia turns to Amin and asks, “Have we heard anything from Craig? Is he going to make it?”

Amin finishes off a kebab, sucking its stick clean. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I heard from him just now on my mobile. His plane is approaching Lahore International as we speak, and he will be here before dinner is over, God willing. I’ve arranged for a car to pick him up and also a police escort.”

“That was thoughtful,” says Sonia.

“Well, yes, we would do the same for any Pakistani billionaire-do we have real billionaires in Pakistan? I suppose we must. I know you have billionaires in India, Manjit.”

The two men banter across Sonia for the next few minutes about the relative wealth of their two nations, which persons have hold of it, and whence it comes. Then the talk moves to globalization, how the free flow of capital is affecting the two countries, how after a long period of stagnation the Pakistani economy seems to be taking off, like India’s did in the final decades of the past century, and what this means for their future relationship. Sonia listens to them talk, glad that they seem to get along so cordially. She is pleased also by their contrast in size, the opposite of their respective nations. Amin is a bear with the shaved head and aggressive mustache of a Mughal aga, a solid cylinder of expensive cloth stuffed with the best Punjab beef. Dr. Nara is a wisp, Gandhi-gaunt, with a flat modest face and the huge liquid brown eyes of a lemur. His motions are quick and precise, birdlike, but like a nice bird in a children’s cartoon, not a bird of prey. The two men seem to be purposely avoiding anything controversial, speaking generalities. Sonia hopes the conference will not be all speaking generalities.

Then Porter Cosgrove speaks up from across the table. “What do you think the effect of all this will be on the Kashmir situation? I mean, there’s no point in becoming increasingly prosperous if you both continue to spend such an absurd amount of your nations’ wealth on arms. Especially as you’re each other’s only likely enemy. I mean, doesn’t anyone in either country think it’s absurd, given present conditions? It’s like France and Germany in nineteen hundred, you know? Anachronistic.”