Chapter 1: Early Return

The train deposited me at a station that consisted of a platform, a tea stall, and a man with a bicycle who claimed to be the Hillside Academy shuttle service. This was the first indication that my parents’ decision to send me to a “prestigious residential institution” had been based on marketing materials rather than site visits. The brochure had featured colonial architecture and flourishing gardens. The reality was a two-hour ride on a bicycle with questionable brakes through terrain that suggested the Western Ghats had never heard of civil engineering.

I was fifteen, watching my suitcase bounce along a dirt path while a man old enough to be my grandfather navigated around potholes with the casual indifference of someone who had long ago accepted his mortality. The monsoon had not yet arrived, but the air carried the threat of it, a heaviness that made my uniform shirt cling to my back within minutes of disembarking. My parents had sent me early, two days before the official term start, as punishment for what my father called “disciplinary incidents” and what I called “principled non-compliance with arbitrary authority.” The distinction mattered less than the result: I was alone, unwelcome, and already sweating through my only clean shirt.

The bicycle finally crested the plateau where Hillside Academy sat like a forgotten monument to British educational ideals. The building was red brick, three stories, surrounded by enough vegetation to obscure the fact that the nearest town was fifteen kilometres of bad road away. A sign at the gate proclaimed “Character Through Discipline” in peeling paint. I noted that the gate was unlocked, which seemed to undermine the security narrative, and wheeled my suitcase up the gravel path with the resignation of someone who had accepted that the next ten months would be an exercise in institutional absurdity.

The dormitory was empty. This was the first pleasant surprise of the day. Standard 9 boys’ wing had twelve beds, twelve desks, and a bathroom that smelled of industrial disinfectant and adolescent anxiety. I selected the bed nearest the window, reasoning that if I had to endure this sentence, I might as well have natural light and an escape route. The previous occupant had left behind a textbook on physics and a photograph of a girl who was probably not waiting faithfully for his return. I placed both in the drawer and claimed the space as my own with the efficiency of someone who had learned that personal territory was negotiable in shared spaces.

The administrative handbook, which I found on the desk, was forty-seven pages of regulations that managed to be simultaneously exhaustive and vague. It specified the exact width of margins for assignments but contained no guidance on what to do when one arrived early and alone in a building designed for forty people. I was fifteen, required to request permission to leave my dormitory after 9 PM. The contradiction did not escape me. I folded the handbook into a paper airplane and launched it across the room, where it lodged in the ceiling fan. This seemed like an appropriate response to bureaucratic overreach.

With my territory established and my rebellion against paperwork complete, I set out to explore. The school was mine for forty-eight hours. The cleaning staff had not yet arrived for pre-term preparation. The kitchen was locked, the mess hall dark, the administrative offices sealed with the finality of a principal who believed in boundaries. I walked the corridors with my footsteps echoing off tile floors, noting the locations of fire extinguishers and emergency exits with the habitual assessment of someone who had learned that institutions were not necessarily benign.

The library was on the second floor, positioned to catch afternoon light through windows that had probably been installed during the Raj. The door was unlocked, which I found curious. The lights were off, which was expected. What I did not expect was the sound of movement from within, a shuffling that suggested human presence in a building that should have been empty except for myself.

I should have retreated. The handbook would have advised retreat. My 14-year-old self, however, was governed by curiosity rather than regulation. I pushed the door open with the slow deliberation of someone who wanted to observe before being observed.

The library was dim, lit only by the emergency exit signs and the filtered grey light of the pre-monsoon afternoon. The shelves were wooden, dark with age, lined with textbooks that had not been updated since my parents’ generation attended school. And there, between the stacks labelled “Physics Reference” and “Biology Supplementary,” were two figures engaged in an activity that was definitely not catalogued in the Dewey Decimal System.