I spoke about you often to my husband and friends, who did not read your work, who were shocked by your progressive take and explicitness. The people around me were more conservative than the families in your books and your own family by extension. I had said that I responded to the familiarity of your characters and social circles, I had claimed them for myself. In truth, though, you and your characters inhabited the liberal fringes while I remained with the sedate majority. My parents and your parents would be acquaintances but never friends. They would have been members of the same club and been invited to the same parties but they would sit at different tables. My father would have heard of your father, the celebrated journalist. And your father would have bought his car from my father’s Toyota agency. But your parents married for love, while mine had an arranged marriage. You studied in Britain as a child, while I came here as an adult. I have never smoked, drank alcohol or wore a bikini. If Westernisation was a linear progression and if assimilation was our ultimate goal (and that is debatable of course and not politically correct), but if either were true, then you were ahead of me by several steps. You belonged in Britain better than I did.

In my imaginary conversations with you and in my fan letters, I took you to task sometimes for your risqué scenes and the sinful behaviour of your heroines. Hopefully you didn’t misunderstand me, I was neither aggressive nor didactic. My tone was gently mocking, a tut tut. It would be dishonest not to admit that your explicit love scenes added to the allure of your work. Besides, I enjoyed the bristle in my mind in accommodating your liberal stance. But in my day-to-day life, I was as restrained and conventional as the people around me.