Marvi would dream of the heroines of Latif’s stories, brave, tragic women, often of peasant background, who set out in search of lost loves and died along the way. She had borrowed her name from one of them. I, too, had grown up listening to singers perform the saint-poet’s beautiful song-like poems since childhood, and had even tried to read the originals with the aid of Urdu versions. But now, Marvi and I would read the poems together while we listened to them, sung by Abida Parveen and others. Because she knew the language of the originals, I came closer to understanding the rapture of the verses: laments for lost loves, but also celebrations of the desert and the clouds and the rainy season.

Marvi showed me a typescript of a translation :

My cloud-friend’s playing rain music

I dye my scarf rice-green

I hang bells around my little calf’s neck

I dye my scarf rice-green

Latif says: Come to my courtyard

Take care of me, friend

I’ll dye my scarf rice-green

It was from Latif’s Sur Sarang, but when I asked her who had done it, she said she didn’t know.

Kazi’s renditions, which attempted to replicate the elliptical cadences of Latif’s songs, were compelling, but to my ear they did not always work as poems. I spent hours one Wednesday afternoon in the library, looking up every translation I could find, and took the volumes I borrowed over to Marvi’s. We planned for a while to translate some of the great poet’s work into English, but between Marvi’s brief attention span and my commitments, we never found the time. Only later – much later – I realised Marvi had translated the song about dyeing the scarf rice-green, probably on some stormy Karachi afternoon.

Marvi was shrunken and skeletal, her eyes huge and leaf-brown in her little wax-lantern skull. ‘I look like Morticia Adams,’ she groaned when she caught casual sight of herself in a mirror. She almost always went out in a wheelchair: if she took too many steps without a stick, she fell. She had arranged for a young Javanese divorcee to look after her; Sumirah spoke good English and looked after her well, cooking and keeping the flat tidy. The rumour was that during her years in Karachi Marvi was sniffing cocaine. She had come back to London to escape from the habit into the relative ease of prescription drugs. I had learned not to ask her more than she told me. She’d been a part of me I’d torn out long ago, a part I never understood, or even admitted to losing, but still I felt a pain like an amputation of a limb when she left. Now that I had ceased to feel that pain, I could care for her from a distance.