Mehran’s grandfather, the patriarch, had his domain on the ground floor, which was at once drawing room, study and library, where books from east and west sat side by side: Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana next to Hawthorne, Fitzgerald’s Khayyam elbowing Plutarch and an Urdu translation of Firdausi. He also had a room upstairs, overlooking the garden, in which he spent time until an operation left him – that man who had walked several miles a day – unable to walk without great effort. His den was the central room in the front wing of the ground floor, which led into the garden.

To the left of his grandfather’s room, if you faced it from the inner courtyard, was his grandmother’s realm. She recited Rumi’s poems in Persian, knew every one of Khusrau’s verses, and spoke the sweetest Urdu in the world; when Mehran was eleven, she untied his tongue by teaching him his language properly. She held court from her four-poster bed, with her books and a few treasured objects beside her. Not averse to certain western innovations if she found them comfortable, she had opted for tradition in her own room. The fine carpet on the floor was always covered by a crisp white sheet, littered with fat cushions on which her children, grandchildren and guests sat around her. The only foreign intrusion in this room was the easy chair, close to the always open door, that she kept there for her husband’s frequent incursions into her kingdom. (Once, she said, she was taking her afternoon nap when she thought he entered, sat down and lit a cigarette; she smelled the smoke of perfumed tobacco linger in the air. She didn’t hear him leave. A little later, awake now, she saw him come in again. She apologised for not having roused herself before. I wasn’t here, he said. Another incident, also in the afternoon, took place when in her sleep she felt his hand play with her silver anklet, and opened her eyes to find no one there.)

In the courtyard was a room that stood apart, like a little pavilion. It was occupied by Mehran’s grandmother’s sister, another wanderer who moved from town to town depending on the season. She was a widow, and the clan’s storyteller. Fiction or fact, you could rely on her to keep the records, or straighten the twist in the tale. Among the romances she told over three afternoon sessions – she always stopped before sunset, as she held onto the storytellers’s tradition that travellers lost their way if you told a story when light and darkness met – were ‘The Prince with the Needles in his Eyes’, ‘The Patient Princess’, and the story of Prince Benazir and his escape from the Bad Fairy Mahrukh who held him captive, and his redeeming love for the princess, Badremunir, who rescued him.