Let’s start where most stories about India should begin – with food.

During my first visit to India five years ago, my in-laws cheerfully fed me chicken curry mopped up with rotis and parathas in the coastal town where they live, north of Mumbai. After the third, fourth, fifth plate I was so full that I lay on the floor, watching the ceiling fan drowsily beat round and round.

This turned into a rather too predictable pattern. (Too much gulab jamun in Delhi, too much chickpea curry in the Himalayas, too many happy hour drinks in Goa…)

Now I’m in Hyderabad, in India’s southern Telangana state, and I’m still eating. In fact, the only note I’ve written about breakfast at the richly decorated Celeste restaurant, in the 19th century Taj Falaknuma Palace, is ‘feeders’ – underlined twice. (My masala omelette is chased with a breakfast dosa – the chef’s suggestion – smeared thickly with coconut paste, tamarind and a puddle of ghee.)

This excessive breakfast isn’t out of character. The mere act of checking in at Falaknuma involves a horse-drawn carriage, a set of red velvet steps to climb up to it and a slow march to the palace while being doused in rose petals from overhead.

I’m told guests at Falaknuma are ‘treated like the Nizam’ when they check in. Who is this Nizam?

We’ll get to that.

Hyderabadi history begins with Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, who founded the city in 1591 and built the Charminar, the four-minaret monument that, after Mumbai’s Gateway to India and the Taj Mahal, is the next favourite to appear on Indian postcards.

Today, the Charminar is an ornate gyratory, with scooters, autorickshaws and cart-pushing locals flogging strips of gum, cheap colourful bangles and pomegranates wheeling around it.

This Qutb Shah dynasty was usurped by the Mughal empire, which descended on Hyderabad from Central Asia via northern India. This kicked off the Nizam dynasty, ruling the ‘princely state’ of Hyderabad that was once India’s largest and richest. Their wealth built forts, palaces, thrones; and amassed jewels and some rather lovely chandeliers from Bohemia hanging in the Chowmahalla Palace.