One rainy February night, I came across a card in the library catalogue that may, I thought, lead me to my great-uncle Rafi’s book of stories. I knew that an acquaintance of his called Rais Jaipuri had been entrusted with his manuscripts. Some of these, it was rumoured, may have disappeared, or were published anonymously. Rais had, however, edited a hefty collection of Rafi’s work which was published after he died, with the title he had chosen himself: Kehkashan. But Rafi was an erasure: he wasn’t even given a footnote in the books of literary history.

Now, under Rais Jaipuri’s name where it had been erroneously catalogued and shelved, I managed to find the book. It was in the dustiest part of the library’s basement. I photocopied the entire volume. Thus I finally discovered the work of the writer who might have influenced me earlier if I’d had a chance to read him. But before I began to read I wanted to take the photocopy as a gift to my mother. (My parents had moved to Kent in 1990, to be near their grandchildren; I bought their St John’s Wood flat, lived there alone, and often took a train on Saturdays to spend twenty-four hours with them.) Though she had rarely spoken about her uncle, my mother was excited and touched, and when I gave her the xerox she told me more about him than she ever had. I was moved to learn how much my grandmother had missed her youngest brother: she had called one of her granddaughters, my sister Sara’s first child, Kehkashan.

‘Mamu Mian’s stories should be translated,’ my mother told me on the phone some weeks later.

‘I’d love to, Ma. If only I could take some time off from my teaching.’

I was planning to be in London for most of the Easter weekend. For three days over the break I lost myself in Rafi’s stories: I was late for a dinner on Saturday, and on Sunday I cancelled a visit to Canterbury, stayed home and read. Rafi’s style was lucid, luminous, occasionally elaborate, sprinkled with the Persian words and syntax with which he was familiar. Far from being archaic, his realistic fiction was set in the increasingly modern milieu of his own time. It barely touched on the princely India into which his sister had married. He wrote about students and young men looking for their fortunes. Unlike the story I read in Delhi, much of his writing was deeply sympathetic to women: to young women with degrees and girls forced to look for jobs. The prevailing tone of his stories was light, witty and romantic. And given to happy endings.