At times, the only enticing voices I heard echoed the siren call of the corporate world. But even if I had wanted to find my way back to the world of finance, how could I? Hadn’t I done everything to escape it, more than three long years ago? In the February mornings I filled in job applications, and in the afternoons I walked to the public library and brought home volumes of plays to read, by Ibsen or Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams. I stayed in my room and listened to flamenco or jazz or ghazals on my record player. Or I would spend hours writing in my notebook, reflections on life and art, worth very little to anyone but myself. I had always found it hard to shape my thoughts to write a coherent essay or an article, and only wrote spontaneously under the pressure of a test or an exam, but when I sat down with my journal I could write for hours, poems and dreams and recollections. It wasn’t that I liked the act, or the activity, of writing; I just wanted to stay with my thoughts and see what I could disentangle. Even more so now, after returning from India with nothing significant to come back to.

And then the winter was gone.

After Riccarda left London in late March, I knew I had to get out of the house, further away than the library. I was jobless and dejected, had no one I could really call a friend, and my old mentors had ceased to show interest in me after I failed in my attempt to find funding for postgraduate research. Mr Dick, who called me The Nawabzada, had always found me arrogant, and hadn’t endorsed any of my admittedly feeble attempts to enter the hallowed shrine of academe. My mother would tell me that I had to do something, anything, just to get away from Ibsen, Chekhov and the apartment.

My university had started to seem like one of those enchanted prisons I had read about in the romances I studied for my degree. In my dissertation – ‘The Eye and the I: Realism, Romance and Magic in Three Urdu Masnavis’ – I had opted for realism, the social protest, as I saw it, of Shauq and Mir, against the romantic fantasy of ‘The Enchantment of the Tale’. But what was real? Had the life I had lived as an undergraduate, circumscribed by my time at the university, been the model of realism I had taken it to be, or a kind of enchantment? I reminded myself of one of those heroes emerging from a short spell spent in a fairy’s castle, or the rebellious and idealistic scholars who retreated from the evils of existence to a cave, to come back one day to find that a hundred years had gone by, and the world had changed so much it was no longer the place they had left behind.