Try as she might, their mother’s Karachi gardens could only create illusions of her native place: the air and the water were different. She had grown up in a region where vegetation was lush, trees very tall, and there were wells and running water at every corner. The gardens she made combined natural resources – bougainvillea, cacti, frangipani, guava – with imported orchids and roses. The search for home was a question of green motifs: grassy beds and shadowy places. When Mehran was six she moved them higher up the hill, to a house where another expatriate had made a garden with terraces, arbours and bowers, and almonds and stunted orange trees in great coral-coloured pots, which probably evoked the greener places she’d left behind.

Mehran’s mother was a singer who never made her art into a profession, though she sang for large gatherings of acquaintances and dignitaries. Her teacher, a maestro of the Delhi school, taught her haunting ragas which the children learned from her without great effort as she rehearsed her difficult melodic ornamentations. Some of her songs were poems she had set to music herself; poems by Faiz or Ghalib, or the heart-wrenching lyrics of separation Rani Roopmati had sung for her husband, Baz Bahadur. Other songs were about the rain, as were her stories. She would tell them of the exiled man who asked a cloud to carry messages to his beloved in the city he had left behind, describing the route and the cities over which the cloud would travel. And in Mehran’s mind, those cities were always in his mother’s native Malwa.

Under the almond tree, playing the tanpura, she would sing the words of Amir Khusro, the Songbird of Delhi, words that seemed to echo Kalidasa from another, later age:

Abr o baran o man o yar satadah ba vida

Man juda girya konam abr juda yar juda

Sabza naukhez o gul o bostan sar sabz

Bul bul e ru-e-siyah manda be gulzar juda

The cloud and the rain and my friend and I about to say goodbye,

I weep apart, my friend apart, the cloud apart, The verdant grass, the rose in bloom, the garden green.

The dark-faced nightingale from the flower apart.

And in that garden, by another tree – a frangipani – Sara and Mehran read The Lady of the Lotus, a big and beautifully bound blue volume illustrated with miniatures in delicate colours, which told the story of Roopmati, who poisoned herself for love of Baz Bahadur when predatory Adham Khan came to claim her favours. Set in Mandu, only a few miles away from their mother’s native place, it reminded them of Indore and the rainy season.