When she looked up, Rae was watching her, a look in his eyes like kindness. Encouraged she said, 'I used to wear a uniform like that in secondary school'. 'They made us wear shorts', he said, 'even in winter. It was awful, walking to school in the cold. I was glad when I got expelled'. 'You got expelled from school?', asked Yasmin. What terrible thing did you get up to?' 'I wrote an essay'. He was laughing so that Sammar did not know whether he was joking or not. 'I wrote an essay entitled Islam is better than Christianity'. Yasmin started to laugh. 'Liar, I don't believe you, you're making this up'. 'No, it's true. This was in the '50s. They probably wanted to expel me anyway and this was the last straw'. 'Why did you write something like that?' 'I had an uncle who went with the army to Egypt in the Second World War. When he got there, he became interested in Sufism, converted to Islam, and left the army. You can imagine, he was considered a traitor, a defector. My grandmother told people that he was missing in action. She kept saying it until she believed it and everyone else in the family came to believe it too. Uncle David wrote to her, and to my mother too, explaining why he had done what he did'.