Early one morning, just over a fortnight ago, I took a train to Paris. It was 33 years since I’d last been there, and friends had often asked: But you read so much in French and Paris is so close: why don’t you ever go there?

It’s true. From my earliest introduction to French fiction in translation, when I read Zola, Merimee, France (Anatole, the author, not the country) and some now-forgotten names (was it Gauthier who wrote ‘Cleopatra’s Nights?’) in my aunt’s library in Karachi, until the time I learned to read the language, I’ve read a lot of French literature, and Flaubert, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, George Sand and some others have played a part in my development that, let’s say, Dickens, Hardy or Austen never have. When I first began to write, I used to wish it were French and not English that had been forced down my gullet, and people would occasionally detect a faint foreign cadence in my sentences which was, in fact, the echo of my readings in French. But I never made a relationship with the city in the way I have, for example, with Rome, Seville, Dhaka, Delhi, Jakarta or Islamabad.

The two writers I was visiting in Paris were both foreigners. Iman, who is Lebanese, writes fiction in Arabic, and Marilyn, who is American, writes poetry and prose in English, and translates from French and Arabic. (She’s going to include fiction by both of us in a French literary journal she’s co-editing.) I asked myself, as I walked across the Seine with my Lebanese friend, why Paris had drawn so many writers to live there. One reason was the pull of language. So many people had gravitated there from all over because they were Francophone: Marthe Bibesco, Eugene Ionesco and E.M. Cioran from Romania, Nemirovsky and Sarraute from Russia, Kundera from then-Czechoslovakia; and most importantly for me, perhaps, Ireland’s iconic Beckett, whose Mal Vu Mal Dit drew me to reading him and many others in the original French.

And then there were the Francophone Egyptians — Out el Kouloub; Albert Cossery; and Andree Chedid, whom I met more than once. She moved to Paris as a young woman, but never managed to forget Egypt. Some even said that her nostalgia for the lands she left behind was orientalist. Certainly the way she was read had an orientalist hue. In England, her work became popular in the ’80s, at about the same time as Nawal El-Saadawi’s, and for some of the same reasons — foremost among them the growing interest in the newly-minted image of the oppressed Muslim woman. Chedid’s From Sleep Unbound, the story of an arranged marriage that ended in tragedy, was described as a portrait of a Muslim woman’s struggles even though its female protagonist was actually a Copt.

Speaking of Muslim women, Mariama Ba’s exquisitely crafted So Long a Letter, whose narrator survives her husband’s polygamy and then his death, was described on the back cover as “the cry from the heart of a Muslim woman”. This brings me to the question of the colonials and ex-colonials who wrote in French from Africa but didn’t become expats or exiles. Just to mention Ba’s own Senegal, there were Birago Diop, whose beautiful animal fables brought African fables to an international audience; Sembene Ousmane, whose tough tales of strikers and protesters had no touch of fable, but who could, in stories like ‘Vehi Ciosane,’ introduce an element of magic into the telling of the tale; Cheikh Amidou Kane, whose spellbinding Ambiguous Adventure pits tradition against modernity with chilling grace; Aminata Sow Fall, whose Beggars’ Strike imagines what society would be like if the poor stopped accepting alms (khairaat). From Gambia, there was the wonderful and prolific Camara Laye, whose Sufi parable, The Radiance of the King, was recently reissued with a preface by Toni Morrison (Morrison, as an editor, before she made her name as a novelist, read many of these fictions, which may have helped her find her own distinctive African-American voice). These stories were my introduction to the imaginative life as well as the history of West Africa. Since these writers also came from, and described, their Muslim backgrounds, I could feel a strong empathy with them. (Even today, Ba’s novels or some of Sembene’s stories, with only minor adjustments, would make brilliant Pakistani TV dramas — I can imagine Atiqa Odho playing the heroine of So Long a Letter.) On another note, I could imagine a lifetime spent reading non-Western works that would be as fulfilling as any Eurocentric trajectory.

If the French language introduced me to a West Africa I had never seen, North African writers had an unprecedented intellectual effect on me in my early 30s. Assia Djebar, one of her time’s finest writers, made me reconsider the entire colonial burden on my own culture. One of the most pertinent questions she raises, again and again, is the question of lost mother tongues, in her case Arabic and Berber, and how to retrieve them in the coloniser’s language, which, according to her, is both a poisoned chalice and one that offers release from oppressive traditions. Her contemporary, Rachid Boudjedra, took the question of language even further by abandoning French, his original language of choice, to write Arabic novels for about a decade, though he gnomically returned to French after making his point. The question that perplexed me at the time was: why lament the loss of language as Djebar did instead of reclaiming it in all its aspects? The truth was, as I soon discovered, that my knowledge of my own mother tongue, though more than competent, was insufficient for my demands on myself as a writer, and I realised that she had mapped the linguistic dilemmas of the postcolonial world. I was soon to begin a search that would allow me, for a while, to approach Urdu with as much respect as if it were foreign to me, to immerse myself in its literature. And yet the loss of language was a subject almost as compelling as the loss of homelands in that age of deracination.

Then came the work of Tahar Ben Jelloun. In those days of Third World literary conferences, writers in exile, and a newly-dawning sense of what migrant writers should (or shouldn’t) be doing, his Sacred Night (which won the prestigious Goncourt prize for French fiction in 1987) offered exciting new avenues. Like Djebar, he wrote in French; but he used the tropes and traditions of Arabic folklore and poetry and made his prose resonate with distinctly un-French melodies. He also attempted to reclaim Orientalism from a handful of modernist or post-modernist writers who had made it their domain. His work contained, if I remember correctly, a sly dig at that great lover of the One Thousand and One Nights, Jorge Luis Borges. I haven’t reread Ben Jelloun’s early work for years, but at the time I was drunk and heady with the way he could interweave Eastern fantasy and Western post-modernism. For a while, my aesthetic took a new turn: onwards with experiments, conventional realism be damned!

So, all those years later, it is not to Paris but to the French language, not francophilia but francophony, to which I remain connected. And it was perhaps no coincidence that the writers I was visiting didn’t, unlike my group in London, write in the language of the country they were living in. I remembered how, on my bookshelves, there were books by two writers for whom Paris was a city of temporary abode, and who never abandoned their original language: Nina Berberova, who wrote of the lives of Russian expats often living in a state of abjection; and Sadegh Hedayat, whose handful of Parisian stories were about lonely students and their usually unsuccessful attempts at loving relationships, and who ended his own life there. I will always write in Arabic, says Iman, who is working here on her fourth novel and plans to stay on for quite a while.

Had I come on pilgrimage to a city of these foreigners whose writings I have loved, I asked myself, whether they stayed on here forever, or whether they were migratory birds? On the train home that evening, however, I wasn’t thinking of literature or exile, but of my friends and of the city I’d just revisited. I have forgotten to say that I love cities and bridges, and the bridge I had walked over had taken to hanging locks on its railings and throwing the keys of those locks in the Seine as a declaration of faith. As the train chugged towards the tunnel that would take me back to London, fragments of a new story about expats and rivers and keys and lost histories were forming in my head. In Urdu. To the rhythm of the wheels, the echo in my ears went Paris mein saintis pul hain, paris mein saintis pul, paris mein saintis pul, saintis pul, saintis pul…