ABSTRACT
I suppose that my attraction to far-off things can be traced in part to the first seven years of my life, spent in surroundings of legendary beauty in the valley of Kashmir. My father, at the time of his engagement to my mother in 1920, had worked for some twenty years in the Indian Political Service, mostly as a frontier commissioner in remote Himalayan outposts such as Leh and Gilgit. They had met on board ship when he was returning to India from home leave and she was accompanying her mother on a visit to Australia. There were twenty years between them and she hesitated over his proposal. He landed at Bombay and returned to his post with nothing decided, but six months later he made the long journey (about two thousand miles, which would have taken ten days by various modes of transportation) from Kashmir to meet her on her return voyage at Colombo. This time she accepted, and they were married in Bombay the following year. Soon afterwards he took early retirement, and they settled for some years in the capital city of Srinagar, where I was born in March 1923. I was their only child.
