The city was surrounded by forest, ravines and rivers. Hunting duck and deer was a frequent pastime for women and men alike. (In her teens, Mehran’s mother shot a crocodile; her older sister bagged a tiger.) In Indore, Mehran and his sisters seemed to go back in time to the contingent rules and regulations of a more generous and noble era which, with all its sometimes welcome strangeness, had always been familiar from their parents’ ways. But if, in Karachi, Mehran had tried to tell friends about riding elephants on wedding days, or shooting deer in bandit-infested forests, they would have thought it all not only exotic but far less believable than an Enid Blyton story.

In Indore, life’s pace was tranquil, and for a city child, restorative. Mehran read, ate fresh fruit from the garden and honey from a farm on some family member’s estate. Occasionally they drove to the centre of town. It was there that he discovered, at the age of nine, the numerous translations of Indian classics, The Ramayana and Kalidasa’s plays and poems, ‘Shakuntala’ and ‘Meghaduta’ (the story of the cloud messenger) among them, that one could buy in cheap local editions from a bookshop called Rupayana, near the India Coffee House where, after book-shopping, Mehran could regale himself on crisp dosa washed down with hot South Indian coffee.

Ketan, the neighbour’s son, who taught Mehran to ride a bicycle and took him to see Hindi films on warm afternoons, remained his best friend for ten years, though Mehran only ever saw him for two or three weeks a year, and would almost forget him when he went away. But every year Ketan would be there, in the courtyard, on his bicycle, loudly calling out his name; Mehran would go down and take his seat behind him, and they would ride down the lanes to the centre of town.

(This was the beginning of a significant pattern in Mehran’s life. As a child, moving from place to place, he would form significant relationships – with family or friends – only to move on, leaving them behind or carrying them with him as figments of fleeting memory. Later, the pattern would reverse: it was he who, living for a decade in one city with little chance to move away, would meet people who entered his restricted zone to befriend him, elicit some tentative affection and then move away. Mehran came to believe that people – and their affections – were like floating clouds: here one hour, gone the next.)

* ‘Shame! You’ve forgotten your Farsi!’

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