In the first year at university, Urdu had been, in a way, my default subject, coming second to Persian just as it had come second to English all my life. The tutors of Urdu were quiet scholarly men in their late twenties and early thirties, who revolved around another charismatic figure: Mr Dick of the curly grey locks and portly body, a Marxist who still read all literature in terms of class struggle and economic monopolies, but had a sensitive and paradoxical, though erratic, understanding of traditional Urdu poetry: like Lukacs, he probably held that a culture’s decadent writers best exposed its shortcomings from the inside, while radicals and revolutionaries indulged, on the page, in wishful thinking. He held that in the century he loved best, the eighteenth, Urdu poets were still artisans, who practised their craft like jewellers or potters, working with inherited patterns and ritualised designs rather than voicing an individual agony, apart from a few honourable exceptions. But Mr Dick’s reputation, in contrast to Lady L’s, was confined to our corridors.

I only had to attend one seminar a week, with students who had started a year or two ahead of me, in which one student had to deconstruct an Urdu poem. There were close readings and discussions by students from the final year of Faiz or Iqbal, the moderns who had first inspired me, in my teens, to read Urdu poetry. Or we discussed classic lyrics, Wali and Quli and Sauda and Ghalib, for two hours. My Urdu spelling was atrocious, but I discovered a talent I had never suspected I had for unravelling elaborate similes and undoing the multiple knots of a metaphor. Much of the time, I just had to pick up xeroxed copies of prose texts like Bagh-o-bahar (The Garden and Spring: or the Tale of Four Dervishes) and Umrao Jan Ada, read them alone without supervision, and deliver a scribbled exegesis, a report, or (now and then) a few pages of translation.