The grandmother’s youngest brother Rafi, Mehran and his sisters were told, had published a book of very beautiful stories. Mehran’s mother and her siblings knew him as Mamu Mian, the charming, elegant poet and storyteller who died very young, when Mehran’s mother was about thirteen.

Until Rafi’s generation, Persian had been the family language, and he and his sisters and brothers remained bilingual. Mehran’s grandmother was the first in the family to begin to write in Urdu; she submitted poems, articles on conduct and essays on religion to a journal called Saheli. When, in 1913, Mehran’s grandmother married the young chieftain from Kathiawar, a radical who had turned his back on family wealth to become a teacher and housemaster, she gave up writing to bring up her children, all of whom inherited her love of the arts and their father’s intellectual bent.

Mamu Mian was, Mehran’s mother recalled, a very frequent visitor to Indore in the thirties. He had begun to write at a very early age, and was a regular contributor to a journal called Sarosh, in which Mehran’s aunts and mother read his stories. By now, the family communicated mostly in Urdu; when they were visiting an aunt who addressed them in Persian, they responded in Urdu and she rebuked them in Farsi: ‘Tuf be shoma! Farsi faramosh kardid.’*

To the left of Grandfather’s domain was Mehran’s uncle’s apartment, a little bastion of modernity within the timelessness of the family home. Furnished practically and smartly, it was remarkable, above all, for the range and number of books it held: in the bedroom, novels by Nabokov, Murdoch and Barth; in the study, volumes of Indian history, where, at the age of thirteen, Mehran read enough about ancient and medieval times to get a high mark in an exam without studying the set texts at his new school which was in the south, so far away that it seemed to be another country.

Mehran’s uncle was a historian, whose voluminous research in Indian history, from ancient times to the establishment of the Mughal Empire, was a corrective response to colonialist texts. Six feet tall, with prematurely silvered hair, he was as handsome as a god or a movie idol – of the Hollywood, not the Bollywood, variety.

Mehran and his sisters had to switch languages here, practising Urdu grown threadbare from disuse with various members of the extended clan who would have found their English chatter a frivolous affectation.