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From as far back as I can remember, my mother felt the periodic need to apologise to me for where we lived. She would start with nostalgic accounts of the Rawalpindi mansion – the stately entrance, the sprawling gardens, the abundance of space – “so much that even the servants had their own kitchen.” Then she would say that the reason she had ended up trapped in this one room was precisely that she grew up so happy, in such luxury. It all had to balance out, she explained, which meant I would be compensated for current hardships with much joy and comfort in my adult life.

In truth, I didn’t feel particularly deprived – at least not during my early years. Our room was big enough to accommodate all its bulky furniture and still leave me a generous clearing of tiled floor for play. This is where I engineered battles between my toy cars and trucks, sat to limn (judging from my mother’s praise) great masterpieces of art, set fire to matchboxes, paper planes, and – less successfully – the cars of a train set (only burning off the paint, but also, to my credit, warping the rails). The storage trunks...

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