In Karachi, every rhythm of the day was broken by the telephone. There was no telephone in Indore. You read and you talked and you listened to stories and played in the garden, and in the cool of the night you went for after-dinner walks along the leafy lanes. Then, refreshed, you left. Mehran never felt he would have enough of that life until, in his fifteenth year, he stayed there for two months, and, tired of the rainy season, started to long for sun and the city again. It was as if he was shedding, cell by cell, his reason for belonging. By then he had spent eighteen months in that small town in the southern hills, and tasted the salt of foreign cities – Rome, Naples and Beirut; in leaving behind Karachi, he had said goodbye to the sandy tract between the desert and the sea that was his native place. He knew he would soon be moving on, to live in the rainy city his father and his sister had made their own so many years before, the city he had never seen.

III

A Painted Happiness

And when I paint that loving jealousy

With chalk upon the rock, and my caress

As at thy feet I lie, I cannot see

Through tears that to my eyes unbidden press –

So stern a fate denies a painted happiness

From the Meghaduta of Kalidasa

1978

Marco Feliciani was a bit of a lad: spare and sturdy, with amber eyes and chestnut curls, at first glance he looked either petulant or pensive, depending on his mood, until you saw the wry grin on his thin lips. He loved good films, the theatre, food, lots of sex (he said), smoking dope and (very occasionally) getting drunk on beer, red wine or grappa. Sometimes, on a Sunday, he attended Mass at Brompton Oratory. He had travelled all over Asia in his teens, working in Catholic convents in South India and Buddhist monasteries in Thailand. He had got my number from Tina, a Venetian girlfriend of mine he’d met at a party: she said I was someone with whom he might practise his spoken Urdu, and give Italian lessons to in exchange. Though my Italian was quite fluent I didn’t want to rebuff him, and vaguely thought the encounter with a future colleague might be interesting. I’d just left a job in a bank where I had worked for a year; at twenty-three, I was about to go back to study something I had always wanted to.