But Karachi, which had given Mehran his sense of a city’s life, was never his only place; perhaps because of that he always felt slightly restless there. Was it the city’s rainless climate that made Mehran long for the other homes he knew? Like his parents, he too spent many hours sending cloud messages to other places, messages of longing for something that he knew existed otherwhere. There were all the characters from his Indian story he missed: people he loved, but knew only from a respectful distance; in the two or three dense years he spent away from them because of war and strife between the two countries, they became shadowy but remained beloved, like people from a well-loved but half-remembered childhood book: or even more like those leaves or petals placed between the pages of a book, which elicit a twinge of longing but don’t immediately remind you of what it was you wanted to save, petal, leaf or page.

When his father finally decided to leave his birthplace to resettle in the rainy country of his youth, Mehran was nearly thirteen. He and his sisters were scattered: Sara and he went to India, to see whether they would be happier, at least for a year or two, in their other monsoon world. Sabah followed their father to England; their mother stayed behind, alone with the Bad Fairy Mahrukh, to wind up two decades of life in Karachi.

For years Mehran never looked over his shoulder at the city he had left behind. Karachi in his twenties and thirties remained a foreign place to him. When he went back he was forty-one, and almost a stranger to the topography of a city he could only recognise in fragments. He didn’t contact most of his father’s relatives, though the one aunt he did visit forced him to meet some of them. (But what is the loss of a place compared to the grief of losing people? Grandfather, grandmother, aunt, cousin – he took an interminable journey that severed him from all of them. It was only when he heard the news of his grandmother’s death that India called him back in a voice so loud he had to listen. As it would call him back, time after time. But why not count, instead, the ones he saw again, in London or in India – aunt, uncles, cousins, friends – to console him for the ones he’d lost?)