They settled it at a kitchen table in Small Heath in the September of 1997, and both of them meant it, and neither of them thought for one second that it was binding.
That is the entire trouble.
Nusrat Qureshi had a four-month-old on her hip and a burn on her wrist from the Tuesday.
Farida Sethi had a boy of three under the table doing something to a plug socket that she had told him four times not to do.
They had known each other since a bus stop on the Coventry Road in 1989 — which is a whole other story and which both of them told differently for thirty years — and they had been in and out of each other's kitchens ever since, and it was about eleven o'clock at night and they were on the fourth pot.
"Well," said Farida. "She can have Hamza."
And Nusrat said, "Done."
And they shook hands over a teapot, and then laughed for about four minutes — properly laughed, the kind that has to stop and start again twice — and Farida went home at half past eleven and neither of them mentioned it again for nine years.
Here is what neither of them knew.
Farida Sethi has a photograph from that night. Her husband took it about eleven minutes later, on a camera, because that is what you did in 1997: two women at a kitchen table, one of them holding a baby, both of them mid-laugh, entirely out of focus.
It sat in an album in Small Heath for twenty-eight years.
It is on two mantelpieces now, enlarged, and one of them is in Manchester.
Amira Qureshi first heard about it at nine, at a wedding, from an aunt.
She heard it again at fourteen, at another wedding, from a different aunt, in the tone of a woman conveying a settled fact about astronomy.
By nineteen it was happening about four times a year. By twenty-three she had a system. By twenty-eight the system was so good that she could dismantle the entire conversation in under eleven seconds without being rude to a single person in the room.
Auntie, I'm a registrar. I'm on nights until March.
It has never once failed.
Hamza Sethi had the same problem in Manchester and a very much worse system, which was to agree with everybody.
"Inshallah," he said to his mother, warmly, four times a year, every year, since 2018.
And then went back to Manchester and did absolutely nothing about it at all.
And Farida Sethi — who is nobody's fool and never has been — had known exactly what her son was doing since about 2020, and had let him do it for five years, and had her own reasons, and they were not the reasons anybody thought.