Early this summer I went to the library in Tooting Broadway, an hour’s journey from where I live in London, in search of Urdu books that have survived the test of time. I had been reading about vintage novels — by Nancy Mitford, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie — which people read again and again when they need an escape. My own favourite bedside books are Himaqaten and Mazid Himaqaten by Shafiqur Rahman, the comic genius of Urdu literature. The former is an exuberant mixture of comedy, romance and stories of youthful pleasures, set in Lahore and the hill stations of north India in the years between the world wars; the second is a playfully intellectual series of parodies of Urdu literary genres: historical chronicle, modernist poem, dastangoi; it also includes an autobiographical travelogue, pastiches of self-help manuals, and the kind of formal letters semi-educated women used to write. My copies, which I discovered 17 years ago among my mother’s old cookbooks, are worn out with rereading, but I was hoping to find other works by this favourite author who had, over the course of several decades, produced many volumes of fiction, some of which I had read but never owned.

I discovered two shining rows of Shafiqur Rahman titles at the library. His entire backlist was reprinted about a decade ago by Sang-e-Meel Publications. (Sang-e-Meel has a long list of reprints, from Nazir Ahmed and Ruswa to Hijab Imtiaz Ali, which gives a new resonance to the milestones their name brings to mind. Not all these rediscovered books can be termed classics in the conventional literary sense — for example, the populist romances of Razia Butt. But most of them are certainly milestones of their genre, worth preserving for posterity.)

I picked two: Rahman’s first collection, Lehren, and the much later Pachtavay. Reading the former, I couldn’t believe that this teenaged writer of tender, melancholy tales of lost loves, with a poetic gift for description, would grow up into the mischievous, robust writer of Himaqaten; promising though it is, Lehren barely signals the huge and brilliant originality of his later work.

Reading Pachtavay is a very different experience. Written in the aftermath of World War II, it gives voice to war veterans and soldiers from every part of the world on their way to battle. At the centre of the book is Jenny, a dark novella about the narrator’s encounter in a Bombay nightspot with a Eurasian woman, once his lover. After a series of broken relationships with vagabond intellectuals, and an abandoned career as an artist, she seems to have found happiness with an unlikely partner. Somehow the story seems to evoke, in its beautiful, haunting prose style, the existential conflicts of an entire post-war generation.

Shafiqur Rahman as a humorist is unique in Urdu literature, but untranslateable, as his pact with his readers depends on a play of words deeply rooted in a common language. In his tragic stories, however, punning humour is replaced with an irony and a compassion that transcend linguistic barriers. He has been categorised as a ‘light’ writer, and his prose is often absolutely weightless: but joyful or tragic, this versatile genius is one of the best short story writers of his or any other time. (I have since discovered that Sang-e-Meel has produced omnibus volumes of his work, which I can’t wait to acquire.)

Back in Tooting after a gap of a couple of months, I came across another Sang-e-Meel reprint by Fatima Mobeen, a writer I had never heard of though I’m told she was very popular in the 60s. Packaged as a flashy romance for a new generation, it had the intriguing title of Irani.

A biographical note by the author’s son informs us that Mobeen was born in 1910 in UP, and later moved to Lahore. A great-niece of the pioneering scholar and publisher, Mumtaz Ali, she wrote her first book in 1950 and her last in 1985. I expected Irani, with dialogue set out like a play in the style of old Urdu fiction, to be a domestic novel in the conventional mode. But in marked contrast to the entirely feminine and often claustrophobic interiors of those family stories, it is, in fact, a modern fairytale. Its heroes and heroines move in the cities of Bombay and London, in luxury liners, hotels, Indian palaces and English country houses, in the last days of the Raj, when the Indian upper classes (Muslim, Hindu and Parsi) and the colonial gentry interacted socially and yet maintained invisible boundaries of cultural, religious and moral values.

Niloufar, the young daughter of a rich Bombay merchant, stranded in a winter storm with her retinue on their way to Agra, stops a car and asks for a lift. The car’s chauffeur, who calls himself Irani, says he works for a prince; he is handsome, personable, and seems sophisticated beyond his station. He also shows them the Mughal heritage sites. When they part, Niloufar has feelings for him which she represses, considering him her social inferior. Later, he saves her from a runaway horse. Then, at a grand party, in the manner of the fairytales Mobeen reworks, Irani the chauffeur is revealed to be Murad, a prince in disguise.

Traditional fairytales usually end when identities are revealed, or continue with the prince punishing the proud heroine for treating him with arrogance. But revelation is the point of departure for Mobeen’s modern retelling: here it is the heroine who is set on punishing the prince. She considers him a deceiver and a misogynist; and also, on the evidence of gossip columns and chattering friends, a philandering, decadent aristocrat. How she teaches him a lesson takes up the rest of the story, which involves the heroine’s painting of a seagull and aseascape that Murad sees displayed on a London wall, encounters at hunting, shooting and fishing expeditions, a ball or two, a polo match and a disastrous near-alliance with a bigamist.

Irani, which combines eastern romance with a Jane Austen-style comedy of manners, is probably the most delicate and exotic of Mobeen’s luminous novels. Her later, longer books weave historical, social and religious motifs into their marriage-oriented plots: all seven of these were made available again in two handsome omnibus editions in 2007. (But may we request the publishers to include full biographicaldetails as well as the original dates of publication in future reprints?)

What do readers enjoy today in such fiction? Lush romance, records of a long-vanished, pre-independence world that even at the time of writing had all but disappeared, or both? (It’s worth remembering, too, that Mobeen probably wrote Irani just a decade or so after the period in which it is set.)

I asked my mother, who regularly rereads Dickens and George Eliot: “What takes us back to certain writers? Nostalgia? And if it is nostalgia, are we missing the period their books portray, or the joy with which we first read them?” “Familiarity and identification,” she said. So I lent her Irani; though she is a generation younger than Mobeen, she could verify almost every last detail of the novel: she vividly remembers the forties (and more vaguely the thirties), when she was growing up in ‘princely’ India, was not restricted by purdah, hunted and fished with her brothers, met colonial officials and their families for tea, picnicked in palace grounds, holidayed in Bombay, and, just as the novel’s heroine stayed at the Savoy — though more than a decade later — she went with my father to stay at the Ritz. She can even spot Mobeen’s inaccuracies: “No narcissi in Agra in winter,” she said, “and we wore those ‘khann’ blouses after the forties, not in the pre-war period, which is this book’s period.”

I agree with my mother’s point about identification and familiarity. Mobeen’s reimagined world is familiar to me not only from my parents’ memories, but my own. In my childhood, traces of the princely past and the colonial legacy still persisted, in Bombay, Delhi, Agra and other places I visited on holiday, and even in Karachi; traces I found slightly old-fashioned but not remotely exotic. In the 1980s I accepted their gradual disappearance as inevitable.

I often read to see what books gave pleasure to readers decades ago, how writers imagined their readers’ pleasures, and which of these books we must keep alive today. And I took great pleasure in these rediscovered milestones of Urdu, light or profound, comic or tragic, which preserve for posterity our worlds of memory and imagination.

The writer’s latest novel, The Cloud Messenger, was published in 2011