My parents would rave about a kind of custard available to them in their youth. This sounds like a bizarre thing to wax eloquent about, but they genuinely believed a particular brand of custard sold when they were young was far superior to anything available on shelves by the time they had me. This magical, mysterious sweet treat was supposedly available in the days soon after the British left, when Bombay's streets were still clean and the air still fresh. Apparently, everything went downhill from that point on, and custard was just one of the casualties on that long list.

I used to dismiss this kind of talk as nostalgia that tends to bathe our collective past in a golden glow, glossing over the bad and sweeping away all the negativity and awfulness under a rug, allowing us to smile as we thought about our glorious youth instead. I increasingly question my own scepticism though, as I get older and the past starts to seem like a genuinely nicer time after all.