AS December days become shorter and darker, I find it hard to believe that just four weeks ago at this time I was on a train to Heathrow airport, where I took a plane to Istanbul, en route to Dhaka. Exactly a year ago I’d attended the Hay Festival there, enjoyed the experience, and made new friends. As a result of my visit, I had been commissioned by the enterprising Dhaka-based independent press Bengal Lights Books to put together a selection of stories from all my books, to give Bangladeshi readers a sense of my entire writing career.

I worked on that selection throughout the summer with my young poet-friend Ahsan Akbar who had invited me to Dhaka in the first place; the immediate connection he’d felt to my work was that, more than 20 years after me and from another country, he’d repeated my journey to London; he’d relived my experiences as he read a memoir of arrival I’d written for the Pakistan issue Granta. He’d gone off in search of my work and then we met. The selection of 19 stories he’d made had a number of Karachi stories in it, along with several set in London; the title story — ‘Electric Shadows’ — was the only overtly autobiographical fiction I’ve published, a story about my life in Karachi in 1965 and ’66. So, in a rather intriguing situation, I was going to launch a book with a title story set in Pakistan and at least two others that were set against the war of ’71.

I’ve been visiting Bangladesh since 1981, as my sister married and went to live there at the very beginning of the decade, but it wasn’t until my third visit in ’93 that I really began to see the city through the lens of history. That was after I read Fahmida Riaz’s fictionalised account of her visit to Dhaka, Zinda Bahar, with its exploration of the Pakistani psyche through the reflections of one woman who’d experienced Pakistan in the dazed state of many intellectuals at that time before virtual communication made single perspectives a virtual impossibility.

My own experience was different. My only Pakistani schoolfellows in London, where I’d lived since ’70, were from the ‘east wing’ — three boys and a girl. I remember the silence of the girl when the war began and the transformation of one of the boys into a firebrand of a freedom-fighter. The second was watching how things went; until independence was declared he didn’t announce his credentials. The third was an Urdu-speaker of North Indian origin; his family was in Pakistan but expected to move back to Dhaka and did, via London. So I’d seen the war from here in England, where the entire world was on the side of the new nation; I had no nationalist machine to tell me what to think or how to react. I was 16. In the years that followed, I continued to have close Bangladeshi friends of my age, one of whom regularly shared my room during his summer vacations from Hull. So when I went to Dhaka in ’81 I hadn’t been expecting any personal hostilities and hadn’t encountered them.

It was in 1993 that I began to read Dhaka through the lens of Urdu literature: there was Chalta Musafir by Altaf Fatima in which, if I remember the theme correctly after two decades, a young woman of Punjabi origin leaves the war-torn country and her Bengali lover. There were many stories like that, for example one by Umme Ammara, and others about marriages destroyed by con-flicting ties. But most importantly, perhaps, there was a magnificent novel by Qurratulain Hyder — Fireflies in the Mist — which she’d given me to read in her own English translation before it was published. QH was rather rootless herself by then and hadn’t attempted to introduce an apologist’s perspective in her multi-vocal and multi-generational novel, which was entirely narrated by Bengalis, and also looked at the gradual self-exile of many Hindu Bengalis, including the heroine. That year I wrote my own story ‘Karima,’ based on two true accounts of women from Bangladesh, one of Bihari origin, who’d found themselves in London as domestic servants and then illegal migrants, and had startlingly similar lives as women in spite of their very different experiences of the war.

But it wasn’t until the ’90s that I also found myself having to answer questions for the first time from the point of view of the oppressor. Or rather — as I recently saw in a story by a Bangladeshi writer — I was asked to examine the unconscious notion that many Pakistanis have of a united past which was destroyed only by the machinations of malign powers within and without. I had no answers except to accept their self-avowed differences on their own terms, and to say that whereas I would never even claim to understand their experiences, there was no way I could stand on the Pakistani side either, even if saying that I just wasn’t there, for any part of the violence, was a mild excuse.

But let me get back to the festival. I landed in November, just as I had the very first time. Dhaka’s grown a lot, but November is still mild, sunny and green. I was going to be part of an interna-tional assembly and this time, among international luminaries such as William Dalrymple and Jung Chang, three Pakistani friends were also to be part of it — Asif Farrukhi, Muneeza Shamsie, and Fatema Hassan. Fatema had lived in Dhaka as a child and as a teenager and had an abiding and affectionate relationship with the land she’d had to leave. As I left I heard to my disappointment that Asif, who had edited an anthology of ’71 stories, wouldn’t make it, but within a day of my arrival Fatema was reading out her poems in Urdu under a banyan tree to a transfixed audience. In a very jetlagged and unscheduled appearance I was there, reading translations of her work in English. Fatema would, from time to time, punctuate her readings with pithy paraphrases, literal renderings and asides to the audience in fluent Bengali. At the end, a young Bangladeshi stood up and said that even though she’d thought she didn’t know much Urdu, she’d understood everything, even without the help of the translations.

Fatema’s appearance the following day was equally exciting. The lawn of the elegant Bangla academy was packed with many people who couldn’t find seats as Fatema, Muneeza and two Bangladeshi poets spoke about poetry in three languages. Poet Asad Chowdhury, who obviously has a huge following, spoke mostly in his mother tongue and I could only follow the gist of his words, but could tell that he was praising Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal, as well as citing Persian poets, in his comments. Fatema switched between English and Bengali with impressive rapidity and once again made a noticeable impact both with her interventions and her limpid poetry, which she read in Urdu without a translator. (By coincidence, the two (Bangladeshi) women sitting on either side of me spoke impeccable Urdu — one of them was born in Balochistan.) An interruption in the proceeding was the quiet exit of several audience members, including the young volunteer who was looking after me — it was time for Friday prayers. (Speaking of volunteers, my friends, including Laksmi Pamuntjak who flew in from Jakarta for the second day, were impressed by the consideration of the young students who spent three days looking after us and making sure we arrived at our sessions (and meals) on time. They were intelligent, communicative and voracious readers, and warm and protective guides.)

I had four sessions in three days, including my own book launch and one on cross-border South Asian connections which somehow morphed into a discussion about regional languages. My favourite was on the last day: a panel on poetic images of place. I was with my friends Laksmi and Mimi Khalvati. Raziya, the chair who took over at the very last minute and made the whole session appear to be an extremely relaxed conversation between practitioners, told me in Urdu as we’d walked away that she had studied briefly in Karachi. I had every intention of attending several events, but the truth is that at such gatherings of readers and writers the most stimulating exchanges take place offstage.

One of the great pleasures of the festival was meeting an emerging generation of Bangladeshi writers and discovering their books. I bought short stories by Niman Sobhan, Abir Hoque and Muneeze Mansur, which I look forward to reading over my winter holidays, but my favourite acquisition was Maria Chaudhuri’s memoir, Beloved Strangers, which I read in a day: candid, lucid and lyrical, with the emotional grace of a novel and the impact of lived truth, it announces the arrival of a truly gifted writer.

We also had some of our most stimulating conversations with students in the intervals between sessions. Many were curious about my Pakistani roots. How old was I when I left? Did I go back? Were we really helpless to prevent what happened? Did I feel it was imperative or at least useful to write in my mother tongue? Often I found myself telling them about their young Pakistani contemporaries, how they’re curious about a country that was born long before they were and about which they have no baggage except the burden of history, and which they’d like to visit not as historical adversaries but as friendly near-neighbours. I was reminded of how once I’d been chatting to a Bangladeshi poet under the April Islamabad sun when a very young reader from Chakwal came up to have a book signed. Don’t they hate us? He said ruefully. My friend understood. She put out her hand and took his. No, she said in English. No, we don’t.