Mea culpa, it isn’t anything I’m proud of, but couldn’t have helped it. The first time I was able to whistle as a kid was, a tad inappropriately, inside an agiary, my family fire temple on Hill Road in Bandra.

I stifled it that instant in a gulp. To think I’d practised at home for months, dismayed to lag behind an adored elder brother who puckered up jauntily whistling Yellow Submarine and Yellow River (don’t ask, even I wondered why he fancied both songs with the shared colour in their titles). Yet that small, sharp, barest escape of breath chose to leave my seven-year-old mouth just where it did!