My life didn’t change overnight, but the work was regular. And just as the tutor whose work I had taken over for a year was coming back, and I was going to be out of two jobs, I heard from Dominic that my old university was recruiting graduates to give private tuition to part-time students. At first the work was sporadic and the cheques slow to come in, but I made a living which, in time, became decent, if frugal.

1984

I worked during the day and my evenings were free. The irony was that I owed the jobs I was doing to my knowledge of my mother tongue, but it wasn’t Dick’s florid disquisitions on lyric poetry that guided me: I had acquired the discipline I applied to my knowledge of verbs, nouns, clauses, conditionals and subjunctives from Lady L and her textbooks of Persian grammar.

1985

Everything seemed to happen through chance meetings in the campus courtyard. I ran into Sujit there, an old friend of Marco’s, who offered me a job: commissioning books and music reviews, and subediting, for a journal of South Asian diasporic culture called Aangan he was receiving public funds to run. ‘The work will take a day or two a week,’ he said. ‘You can do a lot of it at home.’

1986

Back on the campus of my old university I was reminded, from time to time, that I had once belonged to the enchanted confraternity of the former students of Lady L. I smiled and never explained that I had only studied with her for a few months, and away from class her interest lay not in aesthetics or prosody but in the economic demography of Qajar Iran. My limited knowledge of Persian poetry was self-acquired. Academic legend was turning Lady L into a Hafiz-quoting mystic. A side of her I had certainly never seen. But there were other stories in circulation too, about how she’d been a spy, and the evil mastermind behind the fall of Mossadegh in 1953.

It’s easy enough to live with a legend. I was briefly the flower in her buttonhole and the star of her eye, so I didn’t think I was being deceitful, or posing as one of her enchanted circle. I had just forgotten how short my time with her had been, and that she only taught me the austerity of Persian’s grammatical rules and nothing at all about poetry.

IV

Love Poison

Khatm hoti hai zindagani aaj

khaak men milti hai javani aaj

chup raho kyun abas bhi rote ho

muft kahe ko jaan khote ho

samjho is shab ko shab baraat ki raat

ham hain mehmaan tumhare raat ki raat

chain dil ko na aayega tujh bin

ab ke bicchre milenge hashr ke din …

My life comes to an end today

So why must you waste your years without gain and fling your youth into the dust?

Silence, love! Why do you weep in vain?