When my friend’s flute died she laid it to rest in its black silk case but didn’t bury it. It gave you its voice, I told her. The clouds carried my messages to her, from the city of my present to the place where her flute died.

As grass and straw, being cut, complain, Latif says, suddenly comes the beloved’s sigh of pain.

I want to write my story. With the sound of the rain in it. The sound of rain on leaves and grass. And the flute’s lament.

My friend said: Sometimes I feel you write my words. As if you stole them from me. Or you took them from the sea or the city of our birth.

And I tell you then: The heart’s a bird. Or a cloud in the shape of a bird. An unwritten letter in its cry. It’s not a perfect falcon. Nor even a swan diving for pearls. No. It’s a gull, in search of sustenance. Or rain.

II

Rain Songs

What is a cloud, after all, but smoke, air and water?

What are my messages, to be silenced by the vanity of sending them by cloud?

I am a passionate lover, eager to reach my beloved.

From the Meghaduta of Kalidasa

1

Father and daughter shared memories of a distant place they had lived in once. They would talk for hours about Hyde Park and Stanmore, Selfridges, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men and Noddy, crumpets and strawberries with cream. It was, to Mehran and his younger sister Sara, insufferably exotic (though they didn’t know the word yet). At the same time, Mehran and Sara felt excluded by their tales, and even provincial. Mehran was the second child, the only boy in a family of three. They lived in Karachi, a hot city, where they ate oranges, bananas, mangoes, papaya and custard apples, knew only the desert and the sea, couldn’t imagine what strawberries or crumpets tasted like; milk and cream made them sick. And if their mother decided to join her husband and her oldest daughter Sabah in remembering that winter day when she would walk on a pond sheathed in thin ice and fallen in, Mehran would feel even more excluded. Since his only picture of snow was what he saw on Christmas cards, in a place that hardly knew rain, snow was as strange to him as chimneys and Santa Claus.

Mehran’s father received the gauzy sheets of The Times every two or three days, and he would discuss ballets and pantomimes with Sabah: one of their most vivid recollections was of being taken to see Russian dancers perform Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House. (For Mehran, entertainment, in those times without television, meant films, puppet shows, amateur dramatics, fancy dress parties and fairs.) Father also had letters from abroad with pictures of the queen on their stamps.