Without knowing the word, Mehran knew when he was about five that his father was a permanent expatriate. Born in Karachi, Mehran’s father had grown up in many other places. As a teenager he had been sent off alone in a ship to England, where he studied for several years until, in 1939, his own father’s anxieties about the war took him away. He had, when independence diminished his family’s lands and fortunes, become the director of a company that sold many fine varieties of rice to Middle Eastern countries, and other commodities to other places. He travelled so frequently that the family joke was to define his destinations by days of the week: Monday was Beirut, and Sunday – the day of rest – was, of course, reserved for London, which remained his favourite holiday destination. And though he was very much a part of Karachi – it was hard to imagine the city without him – when he was with them he was always dreaming of other places.

Mehran’s mother was more immersed in the life of her husband’s native city than he ever seemed to be. Apart from getting the children to school on time, often driving or collecting them herself, then overseeing their homework, there were charities, art exhibitions, fashion shows, diplomatic receptions and concerts. At home, the music lessons twice a week, or the occasional article she was bullied into writing by hand, and dictating over the phone, by an aunt or some importunate friend who worked for Dawn or The Morning News, kept her busy from morning till, at times, after midnight. Then there were the huge family gatherings they hosted occasionally on Sundays, when Mehran’s uncles and aunts and their offspring turned up for enormous meals.

Their mother’s expatriation was of another sort. Mehran knew she had moved here as a bride in 1948, from Indore, her birthplace, and gone with his father and Sabah, their infant daughter, to London, two years after; back in Karachi a couple of years before Mehran was born, she had made every effort to recreate, in her gardens, a semblance of the landscape she had left behind in Indore. Mehran had an early memory of the first house they moved to in the late fifties: a truck arriving to plant grass in the barren yard. He could have been inventing it, but he was sure his parents had chosen the house because it was on a hill full of hedges and wild flowering bushes, with soil more fertile than the sand and rock that seemed to make up most of Karachi. And when he said, one day, that he remembered the garden growing green and grassy overnight, his father laughed. (‘You weren’t far from wrong,’ his mother told him many years later. ‘The grass was imported from New Zealand; it was the fast-growing kind.’)