Last Monday evening — three days before her novel Sunlight on a Broken Column and her collection of stories Phoenix Fled were finally reissued in England after a gap of nearly two decades — I stood at Attia Hosain’s doorstep, on a street between Chelsea and Fulham, remembering 10 years of long conversations we’d had in her sitting room, about life and literature. From there, I walked a few steps to the Chelsea Arts Club, where some friends were meeting me in the garden.

Here, in October 2013, Attia’s son Waris Hussein and daughter Shama Habibullah had arranged her 100th birthday celebrations. Friends who loved her — writers, actors, others — had braved a very stormy evening and gathered to reminisce about her. She’d been gone 15 years, but her presence was also honoured in Distant Traveller, a book her daughter and I had co-edited, a selection of her short fiction, which included several stories that had never been published in her lifetime.

Standing at her doorstep, I recalled how, starting with our very first conversation in 1987, her words had illuminated her books for me. I hadn’t read Phoenix Fled (1953) then — which would be reprinted along with her novel by Virago the following year — but was full of questions about her classic novel, published in 1961, which I had first discovered at the age of 15.

On reading it afresh a few months before, I was entranced by the beauty of her prose. Her writing — she was often to remind me — drew as much from the Urdu and Awadhi that were spoken around her as it did from English, the language of her intellectual formation. She handled this trilingual register without a touch of false exoticism — something I had never encountered in a South Asian novel. Since I couldn’t write fluently in Urdu at the time, it was something I aspired to do in my borrowed tongue.

I was struck by the novel’s flawless reconstruction of a world of elegance, civility and privilege and its unflinching examination of gender and class inequalities and the injustices of a feudal society. This world of stately homes and gardens, clubs and campuses, complex ties between families and their retainers, and boundless affection but also rigid restrictions and rules, evoked scenes from the long holidays I’d spent with my grandparents in Indore and my aunt in Gwalior, until I was 15.

Attia wrote about Awadh; my maternal family lived in Madhya Pradesh, but the resemblances, even with a gap of 30 years, were uncanny. The old world order might be changing, but it wasn’t dead when I left it.

Attia pointed out to me that her heroine, Laila, does not have any literary aspirations. She’d felt that making the central character of the novel an artist would build a barrier between her and the ordinary reader. Switching with ease between the languages we shared, she recounted how, when she first moved to London, her head was full of other voices and stories: of the ordinary people she had known, and about whom she had written before she depicted her own aristocratic milieu, and the urban intelligentsia of India during its struggle for independence.

These were subjects that captivated my interest as an apprentice writer. She spoke of the pain she’d felt when her own family, and others, were divided by Partition: “we have lived with our hearts in pieces; you must write about that.”

I had seen my mother cut off from her family for a year in 1965 when contact between Pakistan and India was impossible. My family also moved to England (in 1970) to make contact easier, just as Attia (a friend of my parents) had decided to stay on in England after Independence, moving restlessly between two countries almost until the end of her life. The shadow of 1947 loomed over several stories I wrote after our conversation.

Sunlight on a Broken Column has a grand historical sweep. It culminates in those years when families were parted and populations exchanged. It refuses to indulge in melodrama or sentimentality. But Phoenix Fled, when I read it, had an even greater influence on my choice of subject and genre; I became increasingly drawn to short fiction. Attia had written from the perspective of peasants and servants in a way I didn’t dare to until I read her tales.

‘The Street of the Moon’, her own favourite, tells the story of a beautiful woman married off to an opium-addicted cook. She elopes with a handsome rogue, only to end up walking the streets. ‘Phoenix Fled’ sees an old woman abandoned during riots, and ‘After the Storm’ tells of a young refugee traumatised by the massacres of 1947.

There are stories of revolutionaries, radicals, rebels and young women intimidated by the Anglophile lifestyle of India during the Raj’s declining years. It’s a brilliant portrait gallery of the 20th century’s second quarter.

Attia spoke of her years in London working for the BBC, and of her shock when her adopted country turned from relative tolerance to the fanatical racism espoused by Enoch Powell and his supporters. She’d started a novel set in London, but left it unfinished because she found its subject too painful — those ‘lost’ chapters are included in Distant Traveller.

She encouraged me to write about England which, to her regret, she couldn’t. Consciously or unconsciously, I began to look less at the past. Particularly after the first war in Iraq, I depicted the London I knew, reflecting contemporary realities of displacement, war and inequality.

Our constantly deepening friendship lasted until her final illness and death; I mourned my father and Attia within a month of each other. But I’ll end here with some living memories: Attia at the launch of my first collection of stories, addressing our audience in her beautiful voice to tell them of the young man who had come to her “with his eyes full of dreams.” My book, she said, holding it up high, was the realisation of those dreams.

A few weeks before this, I had discussed her life and work with her on the same stage at London’s Nehru Centre, surrounded by our families, and her friends and fans, on her 80th birthday. I’d lost my voice that day, perhaps as a result of stage fright, and she’d rung me up to tell me to gargle with very hot tea.

Miraculously, I found my voice. I think that’s a metaphor she’d love.

The columnist is a London-based novelist and short story writer

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 29th, 2021