There are two versions of the bus stop on the Coventry Road in 1989 and both women told theirs for thirty-one years and neither of them ever once corrected the other in company.
Nusrat's version, which she has told at about forty weddings:
She was two and twenty. She had been in England three years and she had a job in a school kitchen and a husband on nights and she had not, in those three years, had one conversation with anybody that was not about a bus, a bill, or a child.
It was the November. It was raining in the way it does on the Coventry Road, which is sideways and without conviction.
And there was a woman at that bus stop with a pushchair and a look on her face, and the 60 did not come for forty minutes.
"And I said nothing for the first twenty. Twenty minutes. In the rain. Because I had been in this country for three years and I had learned that you do not speak to people at a bus stop.
"And then her boy dropped his glove."
Farida's version, which she has told at the same forty weddings, usually about eleven minutes later, to a different group of people:
"She stared at me for twenty minutes."
"That is not — "
"Nusrat, you stared at me for twenty minutes in the rain."
"I was being polite."
"You were being extremely frightening," said Farida Sethi, "and I had a baby of four months and no sleep and I thought, this woman has decided something about me, and I was working out whether to move to the other stop."
Here is the part both versions agree on, and it is about four sentences long, and neither of them has ever embellished it.
The glove went in a puddle. Nusrat Qureshi picked it up. And then, because it was filthy and because there was nothing to be done about it, she took it, put it in her own coat pocket, took her own glove out of the other pocket and put that on the baby's hand instead.
It was enormous. It went most of the way up his arm.
And a woman of four and twenty who had not slept in eleven weeks looked at a baby wearing an adult's glove up to the elbow and laughed until she had to hold onto the bus stop.
They were on that bus for eleven stops.
By the fourth one Farida had said the thing about her mother-in-law that she had not said to anybody. By the seventh, Nusrat had said the thing about the school kitchen. By the eleventh they had established that they lived four streets apart and had done for two years.
"I have got your glove," said Farida, at the door of the bus.
"Keep it."
"I am not keeping a glove — "
"Then bring it back," said Nusrat Qureshi, "and have tea."
She brought it back on the Thursday.
There is no photograph of any of this and there is no document and there are two people alive who were there, and one of them was four months old and is now seven and thirty and an architect in Birmingham with three children.
The glove was in a drawer in Small Heath for one and thirty years.
Farida Sethi produced it at the walima in the November — out of a handbag, in front of about four hundred people, at the moment nobody was expecting anything — and gave it to Nusrat Qureshi, who had entirely forgotten it existed and who had to be taken out of the room for four minutes.
It is in a frame now.
It is on the same mantelpiece as the photograph from 1997 and the photograph of two women laughing at the edge of a room, and it is the only one of the three that visitors ever ask about, and the answer takes about eleven minutes and neither woman has ever given the same one.