ne day I discovered that my uncle also had a library. Or at least there was a room called ‘the library’, which contained a wall of books, and a long table and several chairs. The room was musty but clean. No one ever used it, like front parlours in the suburbs.

I took in the books, which were hardbacks. Poetry, literature, a lot of left-wing politics, many published by Victor Gollancz. They’d been bought in London by one of my uncles and shipped to Pakistan. The uncle, who lived in Yasir’s house but now ‘roamed around all day’, had developed schizophrenia. In his early twenties he’d been a brilliant student, but his mind had deteriorated.

I sat at the library table and opened the first book, the contents crumbling and falling on the floor, as though I had opened a packet of flour upside down. I tried other volumes. In the end my reading schedule was determined by the digestion of the local worms. As it happened, there was one book less fancied by the worms than others. It was the Hogarth edition of Civilization and Its Discontents, which I had never read before. It occurred to me, as I went at it, that it was more relevant to the society in which I was presently situated than to Britain. Whatever: I was gripped from the first sentence, which referred to ‘what is truly valuable in life…’

What was truly valuable in life? Who wouldn’t have wanted to know that? I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. Of course, I was maddened by the fact that whole sentences had been devoured by the local wildlife. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to return to London was that I wanted to read it properly. In the end, the only way to satisfy my habit—if I didn’t want to ask my father for books, which I didn’t—was to read the same pages over and over.