Tasneef Hussain breaks down during our conversation, much to my discomfort. In a doleful voice, he says he has been crying ever since his daughter was arrested in April 2020. Over the past two years, his depression, predating the arrest, has deepened, his sugar level often goes haywire, his fainting spells have become more frequent than before, and he has lost 13 kg. On many nights even tranquilisers fail to numb his mind. In his restlessness he listens to nocturnal sounds chime: “You cannot sleep on a bed of ice or thorns.”

Agony is as inseparable from Tasneef as his shadow. It has followed him even on his sojourn to his ancestral house in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, where he had gone to take a break from Delhi. It cannot be otherwise, for his daughter is his “Kohinoor—his heartbeat, his breath, his third son,” his critic of the Urdu couplets he writes. She would earlier come to him in dreams, smiling. But now she does not. And Eid and Bakrid feel as insipid to him as food without salt.