One of my aunts was living in Karachi, Pakistan, at the time of partition. She was a close friend of the famous Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-84). Faiz was the first great writer I ever met, and through his oeuvre and his conversation he provided me with a description of the writer's job that I accepted fully. Faiz was an exceptional lyric poet, and his many ghazals, set to music, earned him literally millions of admirers, even though these were, often, strangely unromantic, disabused serenades:

Do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had for you... How lovely you are still, my love, but I am helpless too; for the world has other sorrows than love, and other pleasures, too. Do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had for you.

He loved his country, too, but one of his best poems about it took, with lyrical disenchantment, the point of view of the alienated exile. This poem, translated by Agha Shahid Ali, was put up on posters in the New York subway a couple of years ago, to the delight of all those who love Urdu poetry:

You ask me about that country whose details now escape me, I don't remember its geography, nothing of its history. And should I visit it in memory, It would be as I would a past lover, After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion, With no fear of regret. I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.

An uncompromising poet of both romantic and patriotic love, Faiz was also a political figure and a very public writer, taking on the central issues of his time both inside and outside his poetry. This double-sided conception of the writer's role, part private and part public, part oblique and part direct, would, thanks in large part to the influence of Faiz's example, become mine as well. I did not share his political convictions, in particular his fondness for the Soviet Union, which gave him the Lenin peace prize in 1963, but I did quite naturally share his vision of what the writer's job is, or should be.

But all this was many years later. In 1947, Faiz might not have survived the riots that followed partition had it not been for my aunt.

Faiz was not only a communist but an outspoken unbeliever as well. In the days following the birth of a Muslim state, these were dangerous things to be, even for a much-loved poet. Faiz came to my aunt's house knowing that an angry mob was looking for him and that if they should find him things would not go well. Under the rug in the sitting-room there was a trap-door leading down into a cellar. My aunt had the rug rolled back, Faiz descended into the cellar, the trap-door closed, the rug rolled back. And when the mob came for the poet they did not find him.

Faiz was safe, although he went on provoking the authorities and the faithful with his ideas and his poems - draw a line in the sand and Faiz would feel intellectually obliged to step across it - and as a result, in the early 1950s he was obliged to spend four years in Pakistani jails, which are not the most comfortable prisons in the world. Many years later I used the memory of the incident at my aunt's house as the inspiration for a chapter in Midnight's Children, but it's the real-life story of the real-life poet, or at any rate, the story in the form it reached me by the not-entirely-reliable route of family legend, that has left the deeper impression on me.

As a young boy, too young to know or love Faiz's work, I loved the man instead: the warmth of his personality, the grave seriousness with which he paid attention to children, the twisted smile on his kindly Grandpa Munster face. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that whatever endangered him, I would emphatically oppose. If the partition that created Pakistan had sent that mob to get him, then I was against it. Later, when I was old enough to approach the poems, I found confirmation there. In his poem "The Morning of Freedom", written in those numinous midnight hours of mid-August 1947, Faiz began:

This stained light, this night-bitten dawn This is not the dawn we yearned for.

The same poem ends with a warning and an exhortation:

The time for the liberation of heart and mind Has not come as yet. Continue your arduous journey. Press on, the destination is still far away.

The last time I saw Faiz was at my sister's wedding, and my final, gleeful memory of him is of the moment when, to the gasping horror of the more orthodox - and therefore puritanically teetotal - believers in the room, he proposed a toast to the newlyweds while raising high a cheery glass brimming with 12-year-old Scotch whisky on the rocks.

Thinking about Faiz, remembering that good-natured, but quite deliberately transgressive incident, he looks to my mind's eye like a bridge between the literal and metaphorical worlds, or like a Virgil, showing us poor Dantes the way through Hell. It's as important, he seems to be saying as he knocks back his blasphemous whisky, to cross metaphorical lines as well as actual ones: not to be contained or defined by anybody else's idea of where a line should be drawn.

The crossing of borders, of language, geography and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deeds and the universe of the imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world's many different kinds of thought policemen: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of my life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or "artistic" reasons.

Born into one language, Urdu, I've made my life and work in another. Anyone who has crossed a language frontier will readily understand that such a journey involves a form of shape-shifting or self-translation. The change of language changes us. All languages permit slightly varying forms of thought, imagination and play. I find my tongue doing slightly different things with Urdu than I do "with", to borrow the title of a story by Hanif Kureishi, "your tongue down my throat".

The greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier, Vladimir Nabokov, enumerated, in his "Note on Translation", the "three grades of evil [that] can be discerned in the strange world of verbal transmigration". He was talking about the translation of books and poems, but when as a young writer I was thinking about how to "translate" the great subject of India into English, how to allow India itself to perform the act of "verbal transmigration", the Nabokovian "grades of evil" seemed to apply.

"The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge," Nabokov wrote. "This is mere human frailty and thus excusable." Western works of art that dealt with India were riddled with such mistakes. To name just two: the scene in David Lean's film of A Passage to India in which he makes Dr Aziz leap on to Fielding's bed and cross his legs while keeping his shoes on, a solecism that would make any Indian wince; and the even more unintentionally hilarious scene in which Alec Guinness, as Godbole, sits by the edge of the sacred tank in a Hindu temple and dangles his feet in the water.

"The next step to Hell," Nabokov says, "is taken by the translator who skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers." For a long time, or so I felt, almost the whole of the multifarious Indian reality was "skipped' in this way by writers who were uninterested in anything except western experiences of India - English girls falling for maharajas, or being assaulted, or not being assaulted, by non-maharajas, in nocturnal gardens, or mysteriously echoing caves - written up in a coolly classical western manner. But of course most experiences of India are Indian experiences of it, and if there is one thing India is not, it is cool and classical. India is hot and vulgar, I thought, and it needed a literary "translation" in keeping with its true nature.

The third and worst crime of translation, in Nabokov's opinion, was that of the translator who sought to improve on the original, "vilely beautifying" it "in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public". The exoticisation of India, its "vile beautification", is what Indians have disliked most. Now, at last, this kind of fake glamourising is coming to an end, and the India of elephants, tigers, peacocks, emeralds and dancing girls is being laid to rest. A generation of gifted Indian writers in English is bringing into English their many different versions of the Indian reality, and these many versions, taken together, are beginning to add up to something that one might call the truth.

from "Step Across This Line: Selected Non-Fiction 1992-2002"