Mehran carried home an adult reading habit, which his Karachi aunt, his father’s sister, indulged by giving him My Cousin Rachel and Gone with the Wind when he was ten – the latter causing him to wake up at night in a panic, thinking the Yankees were coming, especially when, later that year, war broke out between India and Pakistan. His older sister Sabah had always been distant, as if she belonged to another world; now his younger sister Sara, too, walked into a world of hopscotch and skipping ropes and dolls that was unfamiliar to Mehran, as if forced, by an unwritten rule, to play the game of girlhood, though they would remain friends and allies in some unspoken way. For Mehran, there was to be no wrestling, boxing or cricket; only tall trees to climb, walks down the hill, and many, many books to read. In that season of Gone with the Wind, his mother, who had tried to inculcate in her growing children a taste for Dickens and the Brontë sisters, bought him a handsome edition of War and Peace: better an epic than a potboiler, and a racist one at that, she must have thought.

The Karachi aunt lived next door. Widowed young, and childless, she had reinvented herself as a member of parliament, travelled frequently to attend its sessions, and remarried, surreptitiously, a man who lived in Rawalpindi and visited her rarely. The arrangement seemed to suit her solitary ways. When she was at home, she lived alone with a cocker spaniel and two parrots, all given to her by Mehran’s father. Her library had everything in it – in expensive hardcover – from Isak Dinesen and Iris Murdoch to Flaubert and Pasternak (chosen, his sister Sabah was convinced, by the Book of the Month Club). Twice a week when she was in town, Mehran was summoned into the aunt’s presence to share her supper of soup, grilled chicken and two vegetables, followed by fruit or creamy confections. He was rewarded with a book or two to take away for a week.