That autumn, Marco and I began our twice-weekly seminars with Mr Dick. We read long romantic poems by Mir and Shauq and Mir Hassan, Sauda’s satires and Anis’s laments for the martyrs of Karbala, all eloquently expressed in the most lucid language. If there was any excess at all it was not of verbiage but of emotion, which didn’t disturb me: it reminded me of a more intense and somehow purified version of the sentiments in the popular songs on the radio I grew up listening to and still hummed. I didn’t have to think much, or prepare much; just prise open the text so it could reveal its mysteries, or read the words out loud and let the poems talk to me, their rhythms singing in my head. Now I realised that the rolling cadences of Keats and Tennyson had always been a music as distant from my ear as the assonances of Mir or Ghalib or Faiz were close.

‘The last gasp of a dying, feudal culture!’ Dick intoned in his first lecture, then half-chanted a verse by Mir: ‘Aag the ibtida-i-ishq men ham/ab jo hain khak intiha hai ye.’ He followed this with his own translation: ‘I was all fire when first I fell in love / Now at the last nothing but ash remains.’ Mir, he said, was probably the only one of the eighteenth-century poets in whose writings the melancholy fire of lived experience smouldered. Dick was also a champion of Nazir Akbaradi, an eighteenth-century schoolmaster from Agra about whom he had written a classic volume, The Unsung Poet, on which he had built his reputation. Nazir wrote in demotic language and unpretentious metres about normal everday events; his poems had titles like ‘Hunger’, ‘Bread’, ‘Poverty’ and ‘The Gypsy’s Song.’

Man is fire and man is light,

A man will guide you through the night,

Then say goodbye, and that’s the end.

You’ll never know he was your friend.

Because Nazir chafed against the constraints of Persian verse, Dick saw him as an embodiment of the common spirit. I hated his rough language and rustic imagery, and often argued about him with Marco, who lauded his use of Hindi vernacular. (In response to Nazir’s verse about a cucumber, he declaimed: ‘Pane! Pane di ogni bocca!’* ‘That’s not Nazir’, I said. ‘No, it’s Pablo Neruda. The Nazir of our time.’)

Marco endeared himself to Dick, who found me aloof and aristocratic, called me The Nawabzada behind my back, and didn’t at all understand why I was in an Urdu class and not at Oxbridge. (He said so to Marco, probably knowing that the story would be retold and I would hear it. As I did.)

* ‘Bread! Bread for every mouth!’

1980