His former colleague William Blane, now physician in Lucknow, acted as a go-between: Blane told Anderson that Tafazzul ‘generally spends an hour or two with me every other day in reading English books … those on Astronomy he is most fond of … you may send him a few books in that science or in the higher branches of Mathematics.’ The vakīl started work on more challenging and rewarding materials, mainly obtained via Burrow and his friends. These included canonical texts of eighteenth-century mathematics and rational mechanics, such as the 1769 Mechanics of the eccentric Wearside mathematician William Emerson, a work that offered its students a reliable version of Galilean kinematics and rational analysis.