In class, Marco was reading out the lines ‘dekh lo aaj ham ko ji bhar ke / koi aata nahin hai phir mar ke’* from ‘Zehr-i-Ishq’. Listening to his soft, dry voice, accompanied by the sound of the wind in the leaves outside, I could just hear the silk-wrapped arpeggios of Tahira Syed (who had recently recorded a musical arrangement of that section of the poem) echo in my head. Suddenly Dick guffawed: ‘Oh, like so much nineteenth-century Urdu literature, this is at the level of Victorian penny dreadfuls.’ And I, who had never even heard of Edward Said or his emerging theories, exploded: ‘But that sort of comparison is facile! I don’t see why you’re making it.’ I don’t remember Dick’s response: it was probably dismissive, but I had made my point.

‘Zehr-i-Ishq’ or ‘The Poison of Love’, one of our set texts, was from the second half of the nineteenth century: it was the story of a youth who fell in love at first sight with the girl next door and had an affair with her in a society which secluded its women and didn’t allow romance. Its heroine spent a long time dying. Why couldn’t the hero, I asked myself, simply have pleaded with his parents to bring her to their home as his bride? Even in my childhood I had heard accounts of unfortunate love affairs that had ended in family reconciliations. On the other hand, there was also the story of my great-uncle Rafi, who was unlucky in love and died young (of grief, I couldn’t help thinking). But the death throes of Shauq’s poem gave the language one of its most stirring romantic ballads. As for our other texts, the poem ‘Muamlat-i-Ishq’ (‘Matters of Love’), by the hugely celebrated Mir, was also the story of a grand, tragic and adulterous love – it ended, though, in madness, not death. Our tutors, admirers of the late Mughal eighteenth century, preferred its tougher timbre to Shauq’s sensuousness; they held that after the 1857 Uprising (which they still called a mutiny) nothing of merit had been written in the classical tradition and only reformist poets like Hali, with their English influences, were worth reading. I was drawn to Shauq’s almost cinematic romanticism, which caused constant debates in our three-man class. Then, of course, there was Mir Hassan’s perennial wonder tale in verse: ‘Sihr-ul-Bayan’ (‘The Enchantment of the Tale), the story of Benazir, the Bad Fairy Mahrukh, and the Princess Badremunir. I knew it from my great-aunt’s version, which as a child I often heard her tell. But I hadn’t known its title, or which came first, the written tale or the pithier version my great-aunt told. And as for the Bad Fairy, I would rather not have remembered the nightmare figure of my childhood she evoked.