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My birth, on a sweet, orange-tinted evening, coincided with the arrival of Avinash Pillai in Smyrna.

According to the European calendar, it was the year 1905. The month was September.

When the passenger ship carrying the Indian spy approached the port, I had not yet been born, but through the opening in my mother’s womb a slender beam of light had begun to seep into the dark pool where I had lived for months. She couldn’t get up and walk. Not because of the weight of me, but because of the opium she was inhaling from the pipe wedged between her middle and ring fingers. She’d turned her face to the window and was watching the curtains flying drunkenly in the arms of the wind.

The previous year – or was it two years ago? – she’d danced a waltz with one of the engineers from the Aydin Railway at a midsummer party held at the Bournabat Club. The man had whirled her around on the polished-wood floors much like those curtains were flying around just then. What was the man’s name? She remembered his high British cheekbones, the house he lived in at the northern end of the quay and the soulless skill of his steps, but somehow she couldn’t recall his name. Mr…? Mr Somebody. What? A strange name. Not ordinary. She raised her head and took another puff of the pipe between her two fingers. Purple rings wavered in front of her dark eyes. Mr Somebody slid away, across the polished-wood floor.