I first met him in the foyer of the Everyman cinema, and wasn’t immediately drawn to him. He seemed opinionated and world-weary, though I was soon to discover he was only five months older than I was. Then some chance remark I made in Urdu made him grin and show strong white teeth. We relaxed with each other. After that, there were visits to the cinema – everything from Ray to Ozu, and Tarkovsky to Rohmer (he didn’t like Italian films) – and to many of the cut-price delights that London had to offer, from Japanese drummers at the university theatre (his idea) to an Indian play about Tughlaq at the Commmonwealth Institute (mine). Our conversations were companionable and jovial; intellectual, too, but rarely academic. He left to spend a fortnight in Italy at the end of August. We met again on campus at the beginning of October.

When I had finished school at eighteen, I’d failed to agree with my parents about what I should be doing at university. My tutors had recommended that I study English at Sussex, while my father wanted me to read Law at Oxford, as he had done. I hadn’t found a place for either, and had been offered a History and Languages programme in a Hertfordshire college, where all I’d gained, before I dropped out after a year, was a beginner’s knowledge of Spanish. Later, instead of studying, I travelled around Italy and Spain, picking up the languages in Rome and Milan, Barcelona and Murcia. Then I worked in the bank for over a year, because my parents said, when I turned twenty-one, that I should do something useful: they couldn’t keep on giving me an allowance merely to pursue my hobbies. I loathed my job. I saved, then applied for a partial scholarship to fulfil my dream of studying Persian. My father agreed to cover the substantial shortfall. (He didn’t approve of my choice; my mother, I thought, covertly did.)

Marco had joined university a year before me: he was studying Urdu and History, and had taken Persian as a minor in his first year. He’d wanted to leave Italy because, he said, classes there went so slowly that it was difficult to finish your studies before you were thirty. One advantage of being with Marco was that we spoke either Italian or Urdu to each other and didn’t need English at all, which gave us a special kind of ease.