I’d been disappointed to hear that Lady L wouldn’t be teaching me again. Somehow the few months I had been her favourite student had given me some sense of purpose and orientation, even though her classes hadn’t taken me in the literary direction I expected. By the time I began my second year, Riccarda had left and was taking photographs in Turkey and Indonesia. I was left entirely alone in the Persian class, hunching over the homilies of Sa’adi, or Qabus’ advice to his son, in which all manner of conduct from letter-writing to personal hygiene was strictly codified. But I soon adjusted to the fresh rhythm of poring over texts, without companions or classmates, in the company of my new and less charismatic tutors. Persian Studies meant, for me, the subtle disciplines of word order and subjunctives and parsing, and then the vagaries of translation, which – I was often reprimanded by yet another tutor, a sandy Englishman who didn’t quite seem to know what he was doing with the Persian canon – I practised too freely or too literally.

I’m sure that my training in Persian helped me to navigate the maze of my own language, but I can’t remember ever studying a Persian poem, with Lady L or any of my other teachers. Rumi’s Masnavi I read with my mother in my teens; the subtleties of Hafez I would struggle with later, on my own. Urdu was much easier than Persian. I spent my childhood in Karachi with my ear to the radio, listening to musical settings of many of the verses I was now studying, and could recite poems by heart without even realising that they were the work of classical (or modern) masters. I absorbed their vocabulary and the rules of prosody through music, and didn’t even know how sound my understanding of rhythm and metre was. Then, living in India as a teenager, I learned to like Bombay movies, and for a time their sentiment and melodrama, even when it was excessive, had seemed more real to me than life. Though I didn’t know Sanskrit, I recognised its rhythms too. And there was my mother, the songs I heard her sing: my musical education must have helped to develop my ear for the melody of the written sentence.