The Imij founder-CEO answered on the first ring. “I know,” he said, sounding as cheerful as ever. Golden Boy, Maryam and the rest of the board called him behind his back, for the color of his hair, his youthful success, and the sunniness of his manner. It was meant without any affection at all. “The government’s not going to do anything, are they?” Buyout talks for Imij were underway with a software giant planning to expand into social media, fourteen billion dollars and serious multiples on exit at stake. The money didn’t matter to Maryam as money—she lived the same lifestyle as she had a decade ago—but it mattered enormously as the biggest tech deal the UK had ever known. It would catapult Venture Further into the top ranks of global VC firms, pave the way for the grand opening of their San Francisco office.

  “It says the images were reported within minutes of being posted and no action was taken for over thirty-six hours.”

  “Yeah. Cock-up.” Still cheerful. “The administrator thought the whole pig thing was directed at the girl’s weight rather than her religion, which meant it didn’t violate the guidelines against discrimination. We’ve fired him, and we’re putting together a statement. Tougher measures, blah blah. Shocked and horrified. A few users who misuse our platform, et cetera. Do we mention she’s thirteen and the terms of use say you have to be at least fifteen?”

  “Not unless you want to open a conversation on ID checks. Keep it brief. The story will go away quickly.”

  “True. Fat girls don’t stay on front pages.” A snort of laughter at that, which allowed her the satisfaction of thinking, Who’s the pig now?

  She hung up, looked again at the picture of the girl’s parents farther down the article. Pakistani. Her age, perhaps slightly younger. The father had something in his expression that reminded her of Habib Ali. A certain kindness.

  When she returned outside it was to find Zola hopping from foot to foot in the garden, saying, “Please, Mum, please, I’m ten!” which wasn’t encouraging. Layla had just seen a text, sent over an hour ago, inviting Zola to walk to the park with her best friend, Mark, and his parents and their new puppy. Now the puppy and humans were already at the park, and planning to stay awhile, but Layla wasn’t about to walk Zola across while there were people over for lunch. Zola proposed walking to the park alone. It was a short walk, the entire route was studded with the homes of her friends, and she would take the spare phone so they could track her. This spare phone, which was used by houseguests from abroad, had long been in Zola’s sights.

  “Absolutely not,” Maryam said at the same moment that Layla said, “Fine.”

  Zola launched herself at Layla, pretending she’d heard nothing else, and hugged her around the waist. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

  Layla’s look in Maryam’s direction was both apologetic and not about to backtrack. Maryam knew what Layla would say to her in private later on when she objected. It’s perfectly ordinary for London kids to start going out in the neighborhood unaccompanied at this age—her own West London upbringing as opposed to Maryam’s chauffeured Karachi childhood a trump card she was always happy to play, even though part of Layla’s childhood had been chauffeured in Lagos. She could slip between her Nigerian half and her English half with absolute ease, depending on whether it was to her advantage to play immigrant or native, member of the elite or put-upon minority. She claimed that her slippage between ways of being was far more commonplace than Maryam’s unchanging attitude of privilege and belonging, no matter the company or nation in which she found herself.

  “You can walk as far as the park,” Maryam said. “But some adult has to come and meet you at the entrance.”

  “I can walk her over,” Zahra said. “I should get home soon anyway.”

  “No!”

  Zola would usually give anything to have a walk with her beloved Zahra Khala, without other adults around as distraction. But some other need had got hold of her, and made her come toward Maryam to plead with her. She had Layla’s walk, long of stride, to go with Layla’s features. Only her eyes, straight out of a Mughal miniature, suggested the Pakistani sperm donor.

  “I want to go into the world on my own,” she said, a grandiose sentence that was as touching as it was ridiculous. And hadn’t Maryam wanted exactly this at Zola’s age? She would have been even younger than Zola when Abu Bakr first started giving in to her demands to detour somewhere on the drive back from school—the one shop that sold Coke in cans rather than bottles, the street vendor who coated sliced apples in a tamarind and chili sauce from a jar buzzing with flies. She would open the car door, telling Abu Bakr and her sisters to wait for her, and a feeling would settle upon her—so delicious—of stepping out of a cosseted childhood and becoming a participant in the thrum of the city.

  Maryam pressed her knuckles against Zola’s forehead and Zola leaned into her fist. As if something—some knowledge, some strength—could pass between them. “Please, Mama.”

  She would never be ready for this moment. How to applaud your child for fearlessly claiming her right to the world while also warning her about the awfulness of other people? The racists, the homophobes, the Jimmys—so many routes to girlfear. She knew it was some kind of miracle that she’d made it all the way to fourteen before experiencing it herself. Zahra thought that was because Abu Bakr drove her around everywhere with a gun in his waistband, but she knew it was because of the shadow her grandfather cast in the world, the protective quality of it.

  “If Zahra says she can walk her over, then what’s the point of her running off on her own?” Zeno said. “Maryam didn’t ever go out alone unaccompanied until she went to uni.”

  Zola grinned up at Maryam, knowing there wasn’t any possibility this was true.

  “Only up to the park entrance,” Maryam said, defeated by the allyship of her mother. “I’ll tell Mark’s mum to meet you there. And if anything happens along the way that doesn’t feel right, call me immediately. I’ll put my number on speed dial.”

  When Zola had gone, clutching the spare phone in a manner that suggested she wasn’t prepared to relinquish it on her return, Zahra stood with Maryam on the pavement outside the house, watching the curve of the road where Zola had disappeared from sight. The phone in Maryam’s hand showed a blue dot that moved briskly toward the park.

  The street was quiet, reassuringly familiar. It was a long street, but they lived in a bend of it that felt separate. Many of the houses on this stretch of the road had the same Victorian exterior as Maryam and Layla’s home, even if no one else had the same shift into twenty-first century modern architecture when you climbed the portico steps and crossed the threshold. Maryam and Layla and Zola had crossed almost every threshold in the Bend, a friendliness existing between households that hadn’t quite tipped into friendship, at least not for Maryam. In recent years she’d learned, via an app she’d invested in, to identify all the trees and plants in the front gardens—the Japanese maple two doors down, the rowan tree across the street, the Persian ivy sprawling along her own low front wall that she’d never thought to describe as anything other than ivy.

  “Why only to the park entrance?” Zahra asked.

  “No CCTV in the park.”

  “Ten-year-old Maryam wouldn’t have believed the worrywart you’d grow into. No one’s going to kidnap her.”

  “Someone might say something to her. Walk too close. Make her feel uncomfortable.”

  “And what will CCTV do for her then?”

  “Help find whoever it was and make sure he knows never to try that again.”

  Zahra’s superior laugh emerged, the one that said she understood the world better than Maryam did. “I promise you, the police aren’t going to go searching through CCTV footage to find someone who makes a Black kid feel uncomfortable on the streets of London.”

  “I’d convince them,” Maryam said, but with less certainty than she’d like. In this country she was Maryam Khan, #13 in the Wired UK Tech 100 list, and yet strangely no one. She kept her eyes on the blue dot moving toward the park. The only thing that would be on Zola’s mind was a puppy’s velvet paws and liquid eyes and the freedom of being able to walk toward that on your own—buoyant, assured. “What we really need is for every CCTV camera to be a facial recognition camera, but you’re not going to let that happen, are you?”

  “You may credit me with too much power.”

  “What an admission.”

  “You know how the court ruled that facial recognition technology was racially biased and disproportionately used by the police? So, the government’s changed the wording on its policies to say the police will make ‘fair and proportionate’ use of the technology—and is expanding its use. It’s not funny!”

  It was one of the funnier things Maryam had heard in a while, but Zahra was clearly taking it as a personal affront.

  “They’re racist,” Zahra said.

  “The government?”

  “Since you bring that up, but I meant the cameras. Can’t tell one Black person apart from the other. This is what you want in the world to keep your child safe?”

  Does it look more indolent than English ivy, do you think? Zahra had said when Maryam had identified the Persian ivy for her, and it was hard to know if this was a joke or Zahra’s determination to see racism everywhere in England, even in the naming of plants.

  The blue dot stopped. Maryam gripped the phone more tightly. Blue dot moved. It was that moment of April when the magnolias and cherry blossoms were in full bloom and Zola could be brought to a sudden halt by pinks and whites that practically hurled themselves at you as you walked past certain homes.

  “Tech, unlike people, can be improved. The Imij facial-tagging feature doesn’t discriminate by race.” Or not to the degree that all other facial recognition software did, at any rate.

  “Not to mention the impact of constant surveillance on a society.”

  “It’s here already, just rebranded.” She waved her phone at Zahra. “Do you want to know what percentage of Imij users opt in to face-tagging?”

  “They opt in to being tagged by their friends. That’s a different thing to the police watching you at all times because you’re a climate activist or a guy who goes to a mosque.”

  “You really haven’t been on any form of social media in about a decade, have you? People gave up friends in favor of followers ages ago.”

  “Well, friends can be overrated.”

  Maryam laughed, glad to see the director of CCL fading into the background and becoming her Za again. “So, what was that earlier? That look when Zola asked about sexual partners. Is there someone?”

  “No,” Zahra said. Then, “Just someone in the corner of my eye. Not even worth talking about.”

  “Since when do we only talk about things that are worth talking about?”

  But Zahra wouldn’t be drawn. It was nothing, she insisted. There’d been a moment of flirtation weeks ago, that was all.

  “Your usual type?” Maryam said. Zahra shrugged.

  Maryam said “Zahra!” Zahra said, “Maryam.”

  Forty years of friendship compressed an entire conversation into those few syllables.

  Zahra’s flat looked out onto a large weeping willow, allowing her to lie in bed or read on the chaise lounge in the living room while imagining a garden or even a stream outside. In truth, the weeping willow stood marooned on a roundabout on which six roads converged, in one of the un-lovelier stretches of northwest London. It had been home for over a decade, and she’d chosen it over prettier options precisely for the tree. Growing up by the sea, she’d learned the pleasures of living in a fast-moving city while looking out of your windows onto a vista that allowed the eyes to rest.

  She settled on the gold-and-green chaise lounge, and switched on the floor lamp. This was her reading spot, facing the window rather than the TV, a bookcase within arm’s reach, though more often than she liked to admit she did her reading off a screen. A new message buzzed on her phone—Mrs. Dass on the third floor asking her down for dinner, as she invariably did on the rare evenings she heard Zahra moving about overhead as the Dass dinner hour of seven-thirty approached. She knew the Dasses imagined she must be lonely, and while this attitude generally irritated her for its assumptions about the single life, she saw in the couple an echo of her parents’ devotion and knew they were only reflecting how adrift each of them would be without the other. She accepted the invitation more often than not, but this was one those evenings when nothing in the world felt more enticing than putting your feet up in your own home, an R&B playlist streaming through the speakers, while a fiery tomato sauce simmered on the stove. She thanked Mrs. Dass and said she’d already eaten—any other excuse, such as tiredness or work, would send Mr. Dass up with a plate of food—and now that she was in the message app she scrolled down, without even having to think any more about what she was doing or why, to a conversation dated several weeks ago.

  Was that wow* inappropriate?

  Yes

  My apologies. Let’s try this again: Respected Madam, greetings

  Madam sounds like I run a brothel

  Respected Goddess

  So, now that you live in London do you still wear red saris

  No

  That’s a crime against humanity. Red dresses? Bikinis?

  Inappropriate again?

  Hmmm. Maybe you really have become a completely appropriate grown-up

  Pity

  It was an automatic movement now from the message to the profile picture and then, via the VPN that was always on, to the mobile site for Imij, where she refused the suggestion that she download the app and continued as an anonymous user. He was married; she’d learned that the first time she’d found his profile page via a trail from Saba to her brother to Hammad. His wife was much younger, all makeup and salon-dried hair, and always posed with the same smile, cheeks sucked in and chin lifted, head angled just so. In pictures of the two of them standing together, his hand rested on her hip bone, proprietary, and she leaned into him. Every picture the same hand on hip bone, the same lean. His feed was largely indistinguishable from that of a number of men she knew from school—the expat life of someone working in the financial sector, socializing almost entirely with Pakistanis, traveling to other countries to watch cricket matches, almost never without a wine or whiskey glass in hand, sometimes a cigar. Hammad at a beach resort, Hammad at a rooftop bar, Hammad at Versailles. There were two sons too, grown men, who appeared occasionally and clearly weren’t the present Mrs. Hammad’s children. Since she’d last checked—only yesterday—he’d put up a new post. It was a gif of Hammad dancing—arms raised, hips swiveling. They seemed to move independently of the rest of his body, those hips. He was wearing the black button-down shirt and blue jeans that were practically the uniform of a certain kind of Karachi man, not unattractive at all. The gif replayed over and over. She sipped her wine and watched. Marvin Gaye sang.

  Tomatoes and chili and basil scented the room. She stood up, went to the kitchen to add pasta to the boiling water.

  She had reached the age when she no longer bothered with the question why in relation to her own character. By contrast, too much of her university years and early twenties had been wasted trying to think or talk her way out of her own desires. Layla, her closest friend at Cambridge, had named the issue early on. There were two Zahras in relation to men—Suitable Zahra and Proclivity Zahra. Suitable Zahra dated the Sri Lankan mathematician who made hoppers for her in the morning; Proclivity Zahra cheated on him with her law tutor. Suitable Zahra met friends of friends at picnics and went out to dinners and movies before deciding whether to move things further; Proclivity Zahra had sex in nightclub bathrooms with men whose names she never asked.

  She took the cubed aubergine out of the oven where it had caramelized and folded it into the sauce. She couldn’t imagine doing that now, sex in nightclub bathrooms—it wasn’t the anonymity but the indignity of the surroundings that would stop her. This is how you know you aren’t young anymore: you start to care more about thread count than immediate gratification. Was there any life left in this parmesan rind?

  Tom Lennox had come along when she was twenty-four, at first a Proclivity, a forty-year-old man living with his longtime girlfriend. But once he’d left the girlfriend—which he did very quickly—and everyone became accustomed to the age difference, it was clear that he was entirely Suitable. “Ticks-all-the-boxes Tom,” as Maryam referred to him. Even her father approved. She’d loved him a great deal for several years, that was nice to remember. Things worked between them for a while, and then they didn’t. She still thought of him affectionately, they spoke every year on what would have been their anniversary, and the good feeling between them made her glad she’d twice stopped just short of having affairs to see if that would relieve the captive feeling marriage had given her. Far better that she realized she didn’t want to be married—to anyone. And with that understanding, Suitable Zahra disappeared.

  Still another eight minutes for the pasta. She wandered back out into the living room, where her phone rested on the side table fashioned out of a tree stump. She touched the screen and Hammad and his hips were there again.

  She had long since stopped asking the question why, because she no longer allowed the world to tell her what was and wasn’t acceptable for a woman to want. The question shifted to safety—physical safety, reputational safety. That kept her off apps—imagine if the tabloids came across her profile? Or one of the men sending rape and death threats her way? She could think about the threats in a reasonably dispassionate manner, having trained herself to stay away from the places where they announced themselves. The need to enter her name in a search bar had long since been vanquished. Unseen, the threats didn’t sit heavy inside her; instead, they formed only one seam of the skin of fear stitched onto her, which marked her as a woman and to which she was now so accustomed that most days she didn’t even think about it. Girlfear, Maryam had once called it.