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.

Najma had married a Pakistani who came here to study engineering, and the two of them were living in Watford, with twins. I went out to see them a few times.

One kid had a fever, the other was perhaps a little backward. The couple had been racially harassed, knew no one, and the husband was out all day. Najma would cook for me; she knew I loved her food, and we’d sit together, chastely, while she talked of everything she missed ‘back home’. Exiled, she continued to curse the West for its immorality, while blaming it for failing to dispense its wealth to her family with the alacrity her fantasies demanded.

I took the husband out for a drink, and had to listen to him complaining about the excessive price of prostitutes in Britain.

I could only say that Britain might turn out to be more expensive than he thought.