Mehran had cousins in Bombay, and friends. There were cinemas a few moments’ walk or drive away from where they stayed, and a club by a nearby beach. In Karachi they lived a half-hour’s drive away from the centre of town; getting to the cinema or the seaside was a long-haul plan, and there was only a little market, called the Nursery, a short walk away from them at the foot of the hill, where everything from marzipan cakes to paperback novels, sanitary towels to sticky toffees, and sharpeners with wiggly 3D figures on them could be had. There was an ice cream parlour called The Dew Drop Inn frequented by the more louche teenagers of the area in their skin-tight clothes, who were known as Teddies; Mehran and his sisters could only drop in if they were in adult company, otherwise they would have to send the driver in to buy them strawberry ice cream cones. No such strictures in Bombay, where cones could be had on every corner. It was as if they had strayed from a still and enclosed world into movement and expansion. Bombay people were louder and freer than they were, but also – at least in comparison with the privileged class – spoke less elegant English, watched Hollywood movies and listened to British pop (the Beatles, the Stones and Sandy Shaw were more in vogue with them in the mid-sixties than American singers) later than Mehran and his friends did; they were still wearing drainpipes when Mehran had migrated to flares.

His mother was always impatient to move on from Bombay to the place she missed most of all: Indore, her home town, which Mehran always mentioned last because it remained, to him, at least, if not to all of his siblings, the most important. There, the passage to another time was complete, but this, rather than calendar time, was the time of fiction, though Mehran only recognised this in his thirties when he became a voracious reader of classic Urdu novels. To them as children, it was a story that they were living rather than reading, but also writing to read later, as if it were a diary, when they were back at home.

Their grandparents’ two-storey house, with its red-tiled porch and terraced roof, and its inner courtyard which was the centre of much of their activity, stood in a vast garden of mango, guava and lime trees. There was a well by the outer wall, shadowed by the tallest tree Mehran had ever seen – a eucalyptus. (His mother remembered his grandmother strolling there, telling her beads by the jasmine bushes.)