Having worked in various Indian cities after leaving his hometown, Srinagar, the writer Mirza Waheed moved to London a couple of decades ago to work for the BBC World Service. It was, as immigration goes, a painless transition. Working at the World Service’s famous Bush House headquarters, a heritage building that housed, at one point or another, the likes of George Orwell, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and countless others, Waheed’s London was cosmopolitan, almost absurdly polyglot, a plausible world capital. “I loved the town,” he says as his slightly dishevelled figure beamed in from his London flat on a smartphone screen. He flipped this experience to write of the altogether unhappier early years in London experienced by Dr K, the protagonist of Waheed’s new novel (his third), Tell Her Everything.…
