Mehran was two or three when the aunt lost her first husband; she had insisted on taking him home with her, away from his parents, to sleep beside her and replace the son she never had. Often Mehran would awaken, in pitch darkness, thirsty, and be too afraid to call out in the night for water. One night, during Ramadan, she decided to sleep in Mehran’s parents’ house instead, probably for the companionship of breakfast in the pre-dawn hours. He must have been four. He woke up in the dark, in fear, and stumbled out of bed, to the light, where she was at breakfast with his parents and Sabah. When, the next evening, she wanted to take Mehran back to her house, he clung to his mother’s legs and refused to go with her. He had heard that she was planning to take him on a trip across the sea. After that day, though she never claimed Mehran as her child again, she did, from time to time, say that he had an impudent double called Wicked Willie Winkie who had taken over the identity of the quiet, gentle boy he was by habit. Mehran and his sisters were taught to give her unstinting affection, since she had no children, and it took Mehran years to realise how very little she had given any of them in return. (Tellingly, the aunt’s name was Mahrukh, like the fairy who stole the boy-prince Benazir from his parents as he lay sleeping. But while Prince Benazir was twelve when the fairy abducted him, Mehran was three when his aunt took him away; and he didn’t hear the story of Benazir and the Bad Fairy until much later, from his storytelling great-aunt in Indore.)

‘When did you first begin to miss Karachi?’ Mehran’s mother asked him when he was much, much older. ‘Not Karachi, but the idea of a city of my own,’ was his answer. It was long, long after leaving, when he’d spent half his life away, that he began to excavate the contours of a city sunken in his memory’s depths. The house and garden in Indore, on the other hand, had always stayed in his consciousness. But he remembered a trip through Bombay at the age of nine, waiting to go back home while the rain was relentless and his mother was lingering; it was late August, the new term was about to begin, and the time had come for them to leave. Was it his books he missed, or his house and garden? One or two friends, or the way he knew the city centre well enough to guide a driver anywhere he needed to go alone, most frequently a bookshop? (Mehran knew the artery of roads, lanes and byroads around Elphinstone Street, Saddar and Bunder Road, all the cinemas and sweetshops and vendors of fruit and food.)