We talked all day, about ourselves and about the country. But mostly we talked about my trip, and about our work. She had been reading a lot too, and was doing some journalism and some translations. She had worked for a publisher cousin, editing a bilingual anthology of Parveen Shakir’s poems, and while revising the inadequate English renditions she was inspired to read the Urdu. I told her I had dismissed Shakir for years as a lyricist who could only write about the pleasure and the malady of love, but when she died in a freak automobile accident in 1994, the obituaries forced me to look at her work again. ‘I wrote about her when she died,’ Marvi said. ‘I remember I’d read a few poems of hers when I was about twenty and loved them then. When I read her I just wish my Urdu was good enough to write in!’

The discipline of Shakir’s syntax and the almost Persian grace of her complex vocabulary drew me to her verses; something else in her voice – a yearning, vulnerable intimacy beyond technique, born of our time and our generation – spoke to Marvi. (And there were verses that could have been about our relationship: ‘We ought to have met/in a kinder age/in the hope of a dream/in another sky/in another land.’)

But it was Shakir’s broken marriage, her life as a single mother, her charisma, and most of all her early death that Marvi was drawn to.

‘She’d done so much at that young age. She didn’t reach her forty-second birthday. Look at me, I’ve done nothing yet, and I’m not even going to live to see forty.’

Marvi had almost given up drinking, but was still depending on painkillers to see her through everything.

She dropped me off, too late for dinner, at the house of the aunt I was staying with in Clifton, near the sea.

1997

August. Marvi moved back to London and into a flat across the road from me, at the corner of Lisson Grove. When they divorced, her husband and she had sold the Clifton Hill house and she bought the new flat with her share of the money. She said Karachi had become a place of vigilantes and random vandalism, and even Bath Island, where she had always lived, was no longer safe enough for a woman on her own with children. And after Murtaza Bhutto had been shot down on the streets she lost all hope in the new government. She put her boys in boarding school in Scotland and made her way back to London.