In summer, I visited Pakistan for the first time in twenty-seven years. I had edited and introduced a book of seven of Rafi’s stories, four of them translated by my mother and three by me; it had come out there the year before, with a preface by the novelist Qurratulain Hyder. Later, I published a revised version of my childhood memories in a well-distributed Islamabad journal and, in Urdu translation, in a Karachi quarterly. I spoke about all that, and gave lectures on literature and on translation. ‘What is the relevance of light, romantic writing like Rafi Ajmeri’s to our lives today?’ the veteran litterateur who was chairing my session asked. ‘The elegance of his prose and its gorgeous irreverence: we could do with some irony in literary studies,’ I retorted. ‘The writing of his contemporaries is often so earnest.’

After visiting Islamabad and Lahore I returned to Karachi to rest for a few days before taking my flight back to London. Somehow I was less than surprised when Marvi, who hadn’t attended any of my lectures though somewhere in my mind I thought she might, rang me from the café below the apartment block I was visiting in Zamzama, as if it hadn’t been five years and more since we parted. It was raining, muddy, flood weather. For several hours, sometimes a day at a time, there was no electricity, and the streets were flooded. I remembered one summer it rained this way. I was eleven, my mother was in hospital, and crossing the flooded city in a hired car to visit her was a hazard. But I wasn’t in search of my childhood here: it was the tense, crowded present of my native city that intrigued me, enthralled me. I thought Karachi had forgotten me but it claimed me back as if I’d never been too far, even if I had stayed away too long.

‘Hey, you brought the thunder clouds with you, and London rain.’

Marvi grinned, and it seemed that the five years we were apart had just fallen, one by one, like pages off the calendar.