Zoya

Zoya is thirty-three and blends perfume to order at a counter in a Dubai mall that does not shut until midnight, and she is our invention, counter and mall included. Born in Mumbai, raised here, she does her best business after ten, when the heat has let go of the city and everybody comes indoors to spend the rest of the evening being looked at. The quickest way to meet her is to read her counter, left to right, at eleven at night.

1. A tray of oud, six grades in six small bottles, from something agreeable enough for a beginner to one that smells like a cathedral burning down slowly. She pours the gentlest first, on purpose. Anyone who likes it best is sold it, happily. Anyone who wrinkles their nose is walked down the row to the sixth, and that is where her evening actually starts.

2. A fan of paper blotters, a pencilled initial in the corner of each, because she stops trusting her nose after the ninth smell of a night and has never once stopped trusting her handwriting.

3. A bowl of coffee beans, which every counter in the trade keeps for clearing the nose between samples and which she privately thinks does nothing at all. It stays because customers expect it, and because watching a grown man sniff a coffee bean with great seriousness is one of the quieter pleasures of the job.

4. A ledger of formulas in her own shorthand, some two hundred people long. She can tell you what a regular wears without opening it. What she cannot do is remember their names, so she has stopped trying and greets them by the formula instead: good evening, rose and leather. It is the convention our guide to etiquette describes for first names, arrived at through a worse memory, and the regulars adore it.

5. A glass of cardamom tea, poured at nine, sipped at ten, abandoned. All her patience goes across the counter. A woman choosing a scent for a husband she is not sure she likes can have forty minutes, and gets them without one glance at the clock.

6. A small mirror, angled towards her and not the customer. Between customers she checks that the kohl has survived the evening. It always has. She checks anyway, and tucks the heavy black hair back over one shoulder, and does not pretend to anyone that this is about hygiene.

7. One bottle with no label, set behind the others where nobody can reach it. It is what she wears. Somebody asks after it most nights, usually on the way out and usually while pretending to ask about something else, and the answer is that it is not for sale. She gives that answer with a pleasure she makes no effort to hide. Her sister has tried to get the formula out of her for six years. So has her mother, with more tactics.

At midnight the shutter comes down over everything else on the counter.

That one goes home in her bag.