Somewhere between the hushed calm of Delhi’s Jama Masjid mosque, a blazing drive past the city’s Red Fort and the frantic bustle of Chandni Chowk markets, where my father haggled determinedly over mangoes, I saw it: the flicker of something I hadn’t known was missing. Not the mangoes, though they were excellent. But a kind of evocation, or return. Perhaps of a man realising that the place he’d packed away long ago was still, somehow, intact.

The writer and her father on their trip to India.

I am a child of the ’90s, raised in suburban Canberra during a decade when Australian multiculturalism could be divided into two distinct periods. First, there was the era of cheerful culinary assimilation when everyone embraced hummus, butter chicken and Pad Thai, but weren’t quite ready to see that diversity reflected on prime-time TV. And then there was an era of xenophobia and mistrust, ushered in by the election of a red-headed, fish-and-chip shop owner to federal parliament.

Mine was not your typical torn-between-two-cultures childhood. Sure, we visited my grandparents on weekends and sat on plastic-covered furniture. My abba (grandfather) would disappear to pray in his study five times a day and my name was syllabically challenging for some teachers. But for the most part, my home life – from the meals we ate, to the clothes we wore – were not all that different from those of my fair-skinned........

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