My mum had a folder of recipe pages torn from Femina and Eve’s Weekly. These featured a prize for the best reader’s recipe, usually traditional regional cuisine, with a slight twist. Nothing too out of the box or alien. Even aged seven, I would spend hours looking at these.

My parents came from different communities, as had my maternal grandparents, so our home food was quite mixed. We were an air-force family, so there was the angrezi mess/club type of food too — cauliflower au gratin, custard and kidneys on toast, not to mention various local dishes — bagharay baingan or gattha — picked up through over various postings and the diverse social make-up of cantonments. My mum wore saris but also polka dotted maxis (it was the 1970s). We spoke English or Hindi at home and ate off glass plates, not steel.