In the nineteen-thirties, my parents, middle class, mixed-race Burghers from then-Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, honeymooned in Kashmir.

It was a wildly impractical undertaking for a very junior engineer and a music teacher from Colombo, given war seemed inevitable and coming ever closer to the sub-continent.

But Kashmir and its fabled Vale seemed a world away from dusty, mercantile Colombo and they seized opportunities and travelled north up the sub-continent, their travel assisted by friendly Anglo-Indian train drivers who told them of the best, cheapest hotels catering to non-Europeans and where, in Hindu India, they could eat meat, preferably goat, not buffalo.