My friend V asked me: when people are mean to you, aren’t you tempted to take revenge by writing about them in your column? “No” I said nobly. I believe in Do No Harm (kasam se, I do). But circumstances have forced me to change. Recently, my fancy and high-minded friend went to Lahore. There, our common friend, the filmmaker Farjad Nabi, ever so sweetly gave her a gift for me: a box of fingersticks biscuits.

Fingersticks, legend has it, were named for Lady Aitchison’s slender fingers, and created by South Asia’s perhaps first modern bakery, Mokham-ud-din and Sons which has stood in Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar since 1879. Next to this bakery was where my father grew up, in a home left behind at Partition. I grew up hearing and dreaming about fingersticks. Then, luck and work took me to Lahore. I found my father’s old house by asking about the famous fingersticks bakery. I returned with a piece of brick from the house and a box of fingersticks. I wrote about this very emotional experience elsewhere some years later. As stories can, this one created a tender place in my friends’ hearts. When they send fingersticks, it’s like an aunt sending you sweets from a hometown left behind. When my friend returned, I was in the US. “Courier them to Bombay” I texted.