It had been a lonely winter for a 12-year-old boy.
I hadn’t really gotten over my father’s untimely death two years previously, nor had I as yet reconciled myself to my mother’s marriage to the Punjabi gentleman who dealt in second-hand cars. The three-month winter break over, I was almost happy to return to my boarding school in Simla – that elegant hill station once celebrated by Kipling and soon to lose its status as the summer capital of the Raj in India.
It wasn’t as though I had many friends at school. I had always been a bit of a loner, shy and reserved, looking out only for my father’s rare visits – on his brief leaves from RAF duties – and to my sharing his tent or air force hutment outside Delhi or Karachi. Those unsettled but happy days would not come again. I needed a friend, but it was not easy to find one among a horde of rowdy, pea-shooting fourth formers, who carved their names on desks and stuck chewing gum on the class teacher’s chair. Had I grown up with other children, I might have developed a taste for schoolboy anarchy; but, in sharing my father’s loneliness after his separation from my mother, I had turned into a premature adult. The mixed nature of my reading – Dickens, Richmal Crompton, Tagore and Champion and Film Fun comics – probably reflected the confused state of my life. A book reader was rare even in those pre-electronic times. On rainy days most boys played cards or Monopoly, or listened to Artie Shaw on the wind-up gramophone in the common room.
