The next year I finished my new novel, The Forty Rules of Love, which became a record best seller in Turkey. I went back to giving interviews, writing columns and essays, attending literary festivals and commuting between cultures like I always did. I stopped teaching at the University of Arizona, as it proved impossible to travel with a baby for so many hours. Instead we made a new beginning in London, spending half the year there, half the year in Istanbul. I learned to fuse a nomadic existence with the requirements of a settled life.
Our daughter's name is Shehrazad Zelda — the former from the charming storyteller of the East, the latter from Zelda Fitzgerald. Eighteen months later we had a son, Emir Zahir — the former from the old traditions of the East, the latter from a story by Borges, "The Zahir," and a book by Paulo Coelho, The Zahir.
In everything I wrote and did, I was, and still am, greatly, gratefully, inspired by Zelda and Zahir, and by the beauties and intensities of motherhood.
The second pregnancy was an easy one, and neither after the delivery nor in the months following it did I run into Lord Poton — or any of his relatives. I hear he is getting old and stiff with arthritis. Perhaps he will soon stop bugging new mothers altogether, preferring to spend his time shining his lamp.