She was thirty-eight; I was forty-two. I taught long hours at the university. I spent a lot of time alone, reading or listening to music. Most winters I travelled, to escape the sting of London’s cold, to India or Bangladesh or Java; I could afford to, now that I had a Reader’s post. I had learned that most people lived for work or their families, and since I didn’t want to do either I thought that at least I could see other landscapes, other skies.

On autumn evenings I came back from my classes and walked over to Marvi’s place. She was planning a new book, on neo-liberal economics in what were now called the developing countries; she had a particular interest in the Emirates. Both of us were disappointed in Blair, as we’d been disappointed in Benazir a few years before; I still marched and signed petitions, though I had put all my political hopes on hold. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, holding hands like children with all desire spent and the familiarity of old lovers dangling like a cobweb between us, Marvi and I would listen to Noor Jehan’s songs, singing along with them, or we would recite, in exaggerated imitations of romantic poets in performance at a symposium, verses we remembered by heart. Sometimes we read to each other from Shakir, or other books of poems we had brought back from Pakistan, that jagged free verse our contemporaries were writing and I had learned to understand.

But best of all Marvi loved the great poets of eighteenth-century Sindh, Shah Abdul Latif and Sachal Sarmast. She remembered how, as a child, she heard travelling musicians, on their way back from a festival at some shrine, singing these songs at her grandfather’s gate; sometimes they were called in to perform, and the women of the house listened from behind a curtain, but her grandfather allowed her to sit beside him, to listen to them sing, until she was eleven. On a shelf in her grandfather’s house, she had discovered a signed translation into English of Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo, by Elsa Kazi, a German woman who had married a Sindhi scholar in the early years of the century and spent most of her life in her husband’s country, writing poems and stories. She gave me the book as a gift.