A country in transition. I thought of Aliya’s declaration: soon things must change. Kazakhstan was a beacon of hope. But states live miracle to miracle, utopias need cash. You have to keep the faith in progress going or the bad dreams start.

I thought of her grandmother’s dialect. Not many Dungan speakers remained. My old supervisor at Cambridge would have been fascinated. I saw myself flying Astana to Heathrow; the train to Cambridge. It’s chilly but bright, Hertfordshire passing by, a winter day that looks like spring. Straight to the college library. The security guard remembers me, nods. I find Victoria Fell’s Literatures of Central Asia on the shelf. My bookmark is still there. I sit down.

In fantasies we can be still. Yet that library was a place I had scavenged for means of escape. Linguistically, I had moved outwards from the European tongues into the disorientation of Russian and Arabic, then south, to the strange ones in between. In my second year I won a prize to be spent on travelling, so I hiked down to Tehran. That was in 2002, two months after Iran joined the Axis of Evil. It didn’t seem particularly evil. A man who ran a pub near where I grew up had told me that in the 1970s they used to drive double-decker buses from London to Afghanistan and on to India, searching for pot, opium, mysticism. That was before 1979: before the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had faded photos of himself in tie-dye, the bus painted orange. It felt like learning of an old land route between continents that had become submerged.

But, with the low profile of a solo traveller, I re-created much of the route. The mid-Nineties were tranquil compared with now. With every step away from home I felt lighter. My mother was on her third partner since my father’s death, but any anger I had carried from my childhood was becoming counterbalanced by a sense of guilty relief; I could escape.

After Iran, the closest I could imagine to a future was some kind of fieldwork that kept me travelling, so I proposed a thesis on Persianate culture in the time of the Mongols. The violently expanding empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had thrown scholars and poets together, some seeking refuge, others collected by the emperors themselves: trophies and treasuries of knowledge. I was interested in the illiterate Khan, collecting scrolls as he conquered, haunted by the knowledge they promised. Hunting truth like the enemy, my supervisor had said. Here, I thought, was a corner of history obscure enough to hide in.

My supervisor was a brilliant woman. She’d spent time in Sudan and Yemen and had written the definitive book on Arabic poetry. Her husband had been a ‘diplomat’, as she described it. In retrospect, of course, it was all quite obvious. She was waiting for people like me. The whole place was a honeytrap.