Salma said that Wilayat was given electroshock therapy. “They said she was mental,” she said. “They gave her all these injections.”

When she was free, Wilayat gathered up her youngest children without warning, packed trunks with carpets and jewelry, and smuggled it all back into India, with the goal of reclaiming her property. Shahid set out with them but eventually walked away. He could not put into words why he left. His story flickers out here.

Early this month, Shahid died in the front room of his house, holding Camellia’s hand.

It was Partition that ruined his mother, set her on the course toward the ruined palace, Shahid had told me. “We had to start all over again,” he said.

In the early 1970s, still empty-handed, increasingly bizarre in her behavior, Wilayat announced to the world that she was the queen of Oudh, demanding the vast properties of a kingdom that no longer existed.

An ordinary grievance, unaddressed, had metastasized to become an epic one.

They took on new identities: Farhad became Princess Sakina, occasionally Princess Alexandrina; Mickey became Prince Ali Raza, and later called himself Prince Cyrus. They no longer made any mention of their Pakistani relatives, or the spacious family house in Lahore that was waiting for them should they return. Maybe they forgot it existed. They seemed to shed their past entirely, to come from nowhere.

The rest of the story you already know.

They were so convincing, and so insistent, that for 40 years people believed them.

The City of the Dead

So there it is: I have plundered their secret. Cyrus would have hated it. He refused to answer questions about his past; it was one of the essential themes of our friendship.