The author in the desert near his father’s farm in Pakistan’s Punjab, around 1980.

At a town—not even a town, a crossroads, with two samosa stands and a cigarette shop—my driver turns off the K.L.P. road, Karachi-Lahore-Peshawar, and onto the Shahi road, the royal road, the Nawab of Bahawalpur’s road. This is the moment when I know that I’ve come home. We skirt the desert to our south, Indian Rajasthan and Jaisalmer not more than three hours away through the dunes, if the border had not been closed for decades, moving quickly, as if surging toward food and rest, having driven ten hours already, down to the farm where I am to live much of my life these next twenty-five years.

This is cane country, canal country, desert reclaimed by the British, country well entered, white from salt on waterlogged flats, elsewhere green, drawing you into its center. From the canal-head works, running five kilometres to the boundary of the bit of property that my grandfather bought on spec in 1916 and never once visited, there were only two or three scraps of cultivated land when I showed up that day in 1987 with my fresh-minted Dartmouth degree in English lit. Today, from the head works to my farm, and thirty-five kilometres on to the Indus, where the plain ends, there is hardly a patch of ground large enough to pitch a tent that is not cropped, to cotton or sugarcane, mangoes or wheat. This was the last wild place in the Punjab, and I watched its wildness fade, the Rajasthani colors almost lost. The Mahrs, the nomadic desert people, have bought land now, selling their herds.

The adventure began, as adventures sometimes do, with a summons and a forking choice. Sent away at thirteen, from my home in Pakistan to an American boarding school, then to Dartmouth, I knew one thing in my senior year, as I fished away at an honors thesis on the obscurities of James Merrill’s poems: I needed more time, time to gain experience, to read, and finally to write the deathless poems that bubbled up almost within reach of my consciousness and which I then believed would inscribe my name in the skies. As graduation loomed, in New Hampshire, my father had been sending by every post letters asking and ordering and suggesting and hinting that I return to Pakistan, where he would unfold his plans for me. There I knew I would have leisure, would find subjects, color, conflict. If I was serious about becoming a writer, it seemed the best way forward.

Pakistan had, in any case, exerted a fascination upon me throughout my foreign schooling which arose not only from intense nostalgia but also from my divided identity, my sense of being perhaps more like my American mother than like my Pakistani father, aware even as a child that I observed the place from a remove. My father’s family had been Lahoris for generations, city dwellers who owned farmland, rather than country people translated to the city. Nevertheless, the nub of the identity that I sought to capture lay not in Lahore but on my father’s lands.

The two farms that my father owned, one near and one far from Lahore, were as different from each other as the moods of two towns or two landscapes can be, the near one long-settled, tractable, easy of access and familiar; and the far one unhinged from my ordinary life, distant, the land still being tamed—a frontier. I always asked to celebrate my birthday there, or to go at vacation time, making the place particularly mine as a way of differentiating myself, not least from my brother, who was a year older and looked much more Pakistani. We were intensely close, and yet we chose differently in this: he chose Lahore and the things of the city, played high-handicap polo at thirteen, and I chose the distant farm. Among many other things, this defined our relationship, our twinlike division of the world.

In those years, we always travelled to the farm in the south by overnight train. Arriving at the Lahore station by night, in two or three straggling cars, among hissing gas lanterns on venders’ carts and the shouts of red-coated porters greasing their way through the crowd with suitcases stacked on their heads, we were bustled into a cream-and-green railway bogie, onto a train that seemed always to begin clanking and rolling just as we boarded, onto the Tezgam, the Khyber Mail, the Karachi Express, so that bedrolls and hampers of food and bottles and leaking thermoses, cases of tinkling silverware and rattling dishes, enormous leather-strapped suitcases would be thrust up into the moving vestibule, and Ghulam Rasool, my father’s portly valet, galloping alongside the surging locomotive, would make a last desperate lunge, both feet seemingly in the air and his torso blown sideways in the slipstream, and be triumphantly hauled in by numerous hands.

The warmth of the green compartment made me sleepy, and my father would stroke my hair when I laid my head on his lap, as he looked out of the window, speaking of grownup things with my mother, their conversation serene and reassuring. My brother and I would clamber onto the upper bunks, the beds upholstered with thick green velvet, and be rocked to sleep. In the morning, we were woken before dawn, as the train powered through a last long stretch of desert, and then glided into the station, which came suddenly to life, the porters jumping into the moving cars and arguing over which one would get the fare.

I suppose I will never again experience freedom as I felt it then on the farm, at five and eight and twelve, the gold and the green of it and the dust in my sandals and the cow-heavy smell of the village, piles of white warm cotton as high as houses to be climbed, and the smell of oil pooled where the tractors were kept, and where I wickedly hunted sparrows with an air gun that made a most unsatisfying sound when fired, as if it were spitting. At eight, I received my first real gun, a .22 rifle, good enough for sitting doves, though I rarely hit one; and a year later a handy little lady’s shotgun, which finally put me on the way to hunting game—deer in the nearby desert, duck on the ponds left over from the great flood of 1973, snipe in marshes that became as familiar to me as my back yard in Lahore, so that I drew them according to plan, cunningly, moving the birds about the marsh without driving them away into the distance. My shikari, or guide, who died between two visits—my first significant death—had six toes on each foot and carried an ancient muzzleloader, with which he would shoot sitting coot and long-legged wading birds, black-winged stilts, birds that no other person would eat, boiling them for hours in a stewpot that he never cleaned or emptied but simply topped up with whatever he happened to bag. In the early morning, as we knelt waist deep in reeds waiting for the flighting duck, patches of fog burning off as the sun rose, the water icy, he would groan and mutter, saying, “O God, O God, my ass is getting bumps like a peanut shell.”