They saw the queen in 1960. She wore a yellow-petalled hat and waved to hundreds of bystanders from a car. Sabah was taken to meet her; Sara and Mehran weren’t, too little as they were at four and five.

‘Does she rule over us, then?’ Mehran wanted to know.

‘No,’ his mother said.

‘Why’, he asked, ‘do we call her a queen?’

‘She’s the Queen of England,’ he was told.

Was England in London? Was London in Pakistan, or in India? Mehran knew India was far away, because getting there required a drive to the airport, a wait in a lounge, a trip on a noisy plane, and a long, long drive into town once they reached Bombay.

‘No, it isn’t, it’s much further than India, very far away.’

On that, at least, they could agree.

In England, Mehran’s mother had been asked if she was a princess (which she was, in a way, though she didn’t like to be called that) or a movie star. (One day, she came across Louis Jourdan shooting for a film with Leslie Caron. She asked them for an autograph; they took out their pens and asked for hers.) At home, she seemed quite normal, though she was different from most people’s mothers. People often gasped at her beauty when they saw her; she sang very well, and frequently drove her little car up one-way streets.

Sabah had every Enid Blyton book that had ever been published, and inevitably Mehran read them as he made the transition from picture books to more grown-up tales of adventure. But though he couldn’t understand the food they talked about – marmite and potted shrimps – the Famous Five and their picnics seemed very adventurous in comparison with the sedate family outings he knew, where adults and children drove off together to the seaside or some green place. The thrill of the Five’s midnight feasts was something he couldn’t replicate, as getting up to raid the fridge after midnight seemed an exceedingly tame act when the fridge was stocked especially for the children with apples and pears, and chocolate and cheese, and some hapless servant might rise and rush to ask Mehran and Sara what they needed, thinking they had been underfed at dinner.

Reading about England made Mehran no more curious than he was about China or Estonia. (The first foreign city he visited, at Christmas, when he was nearly eleven, was Rome, which he had wanted to see: when the chance came at the end of that Italian trip to visit London or Beirut, he preferred to go to Beirut because it was on the way home and he had heard London was freezing.) But Andersen and the Brothers Grimm and the narratives in the Old Testament and the Qur’an he loved, up to and beyond graduating to The Iliad, The Odyssey and the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.