I was staying with Sabah and Farhan in their roomy white flat in Nizamuddin, overlooking an elegant mausoleum. The first few days were a round of visits to relatives, friends, gardens, monuments, shrines. Marco had given me the number of an old acquaintance at Jamia Millia, who, he said, would always know where he was. When I rang, a woman’s irate voice told me that she didn’t know where Mr Feliciani was, or even who he was. As always, I felt I had let Marco down by arriving later than he expected, and he had gone off on his travels to places he’d wanted me to see with him.

I liked Delhi, and felt I had been there before. Yet I hadn’t, and it was so new: of the cities I had been to, only Rome was as densely paved with history’s stones. My father had studied here in the forties; a decade or more before, mother’s uncle Rafi, the writer in the family, had often stayed in Daryaganj, in the old part of town, and fallen in love with the daughter of distant cousins who lived in the neighbourhood. Farhan took me to bookshops in Old Delhi, where on the pavements I found more books about the subjects I was meant to research than I would ever read, but Rafi’s book of stories wasn’t available and no one had heard of it.

But I discovered more about the writer and his work, from Annie, my mother’s friend, herself a lauded and much-loved novelist; she knew his name and his fiction, had heard stories, from her novelist parents, of his personal charm and elegance. He was known, she said, as Rafi Rangeela – Colourful Rafi. She showed me one of his stories, in an anthology of stories culled from the once popular journal called Sarosh to which her parents and she had often contributed. The entire story spun around a Persian proverb – ‘You ought to kill a cat on the first day’ – and Annie described it as a deft contemporary reworking of The Taming of the Shrew. It was far from exotic (as I had thought it might be); a witty satire on the emancipation of women, but not very kind to their goals.