One last term: the final months of my undergraduate degree. I had a handful of stories from the twenties, thirties and forties, by Premchand and Manto, to read, shrill pieces of polemic that didn’t appeal to me. There were poems by Iqbal, which I admired, and by Faiz, whose work I had always loved above all other poets’ since I discovered, at sixteen, a bilingual volume of his poems on a shelf of the modern languages section at my local library. But Dominic, the young man who taught me modern Urdu poetry and probably understood it about as well as I did, said: ‘Everything Iqbal wrote was derived from Nietzche and Bergson; Faiz habitually plagiarises Yeats and even Tennyson.’ He seemed unaware that they were master craftsmen in a grand tradition directly influenced by Rumi and Hafiz.

For an hour a week I also studied Sindhi and Siraiki poetry with Dominic, the one tutor in our department who knew the languages and loved vernacular poetry. Since I didn’t have time to learn the harsh, graceful languages my father had spoken as a boy and then lost, I would study a page or two from a grammar book and then attempt to decipher the texts of the poems with vocabularies. What I really wanted was to understand the work of Shah Abdul Latif, Sachal Sarmast and Kwaja Ghulam Farid, the great poets of the Indus Valley who used those age-old tales of blighted loves my mother had told us to map the experiences of the soul’s longing for its origins. I would finally only have to write an essay on the use of folktales in mystic poetry with the help of translations; but my love for music meant that I could spend hours listening to recordings of the finest musicians singing these poems, their voices ripping into me with the sharpness of one of the daggers which in their songs they often plunged into their own breasts or those of other hapless lovers.

Much of the time I worked alone on my dissertation on realism and romance in three masnavis. (I was working on the rise of romantic individualism in Urdu poetry, and poets who, by using a confessional ‘I’, had closed the gap between artist and artisan. I had argued to include Shauq: Dick would have preferred an essay on the elegant eighteenth century, his own favourite era, but I cleverly said I would talk about the decadent aesthetic of the later poet.) At least in this obscure corner I escaped the shadow of English literature and French and German philosophy.