Rockwell spells out the various meanings just before, uses ‘tomb’ and other, narrower English words for ‘ samadhi’ towards the beginning and by the end, when the reader has stuck around to understand the concept, uses just ‘ samadhi’ without further explanation. ‘Tomb’, in that vein, is just one of the meanings that the Hindi word ‘ samadhi’ can convey-it can also mean ‘shrine’ or an act of self-immolation, typically undertaken by a sage. Themes and metaphors of death and reincarnation are used liberally throughout. Rockwell implements this advice admirably in Ret Samadhi/ Tomb of Sand, a novel that follows its protagonist, a recently widowed, nearly 80-year-old woman as she gains a new lease of life, prompting her to retrace her youth which was spent in what is now Pakistan. For longer works, he thought that you could teach the reader how to read the book as it went along, and you can see this in motion in some of the great Russian novels.” But also, he was talking about translating poetry when he said this. “He had this way of speaking wherein almost every sentence that came out of his mouth sounded like an aphorism you would never forget it. Ramanujan said, during a seminar, that for the translator, every footnote was a confession of failure,” Rockwell says.

“By the time I started reading Ashk,” Rockwell recalls, “I already felt like I knew Lahore so well.” Rockwell eventually met Ashk in India and persuaded him to let her translate his works, in particular his epic novel cycle Girti Deewarein the first two novels in the cycle are now available in English as Falling Walls and In the City a Mirror Wandering, respectively. Having been thrown into the deep end, so to speak, Rockwell went about reading widely about the Indian subcontinent in the pre-Partition era-texts on the geography, the economics, even non-fiction that described the markets, the businesses, the food, the clothes and so on.

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