I’m 62 now, trying desperately for 63. Before I get completely deranged and “the advancing years disengage the operation of my mind from the content of my speech” and writing, I must express my gratitude to the many, many people and circumstances that lit up my life through the years. I begin here, at the end of this book.

I was a very bad student, possibly the worst ever in the first school I attended. This was at odds with what my father thought. In his idea of me as an unlikely combination of Albert Einstein and Newton rolled in one, he’d got me admitted directly in Class 3 of a school called Bazarpara U.P. School in Angul, Orissa. Like most Indian parents, my father put me into private tuitions. The teacher and I tried valiantly but try as we would, I just couldn’t fathom the art of subtraction even though, with difficulty, I could add. In Class 3, I passed but featured at the bottom of all the students who passed. I overheard my father telling my Mom he really didn’t know what the future held for me, going by the early signs. Then someone called Kalpataru Sir happened.

I really don’t know why he took a shine to me – probably because he was a student of my father who himself was a school teacher for higher classes in a different school. Under his tutelage, I started to understand many things which were blind spots for me and started feeling a little more confident.

In Class 4, we didn’t have a roof over our heads in the classroom. When it rained, we used to cower under some trees and our class teacher (there used to be one single teacher for all subjects per class) used to be under another tree doling out wisdom for the ages. The standards of teaching were very strict and brutal. One day, a parent came and complained that our teacher wasn’t strict enough. When she protested, he said that she wasn’t beating his child at all. When she protested again, he wanted to see an example. After a few tight slaps, he was disappointed and said how was that a punishment when the spine hadn’t been touched. Then, egged on by the parent, the teacher let loose on the back of the child with the hard slate and the father was finally satisfied.

Another parent came and asked for his two sons to be admitted. The teacher was happy, asked the whereabouts of the kids and assigned two of the students coming from that village to accompany them. To this, the parent protested. Allaying the teacher’s concern about young children coming to school from a distance of 20 kilometres, he blithely reported that one was 18 years old and the other one was 19 years young.

This was all by the way. The real story is, in Class 4, I came across a brilliant fellow student, Hari. Not only was he a topper in each single subject, he was great at sport and at soothing any ruffled feathers, was teacher’s pet, had enough humility for a whole school. In his very artistic handwriting, he used to copy teachings of the Bible. My ambition was to emulate him and I borrowed those notes and tried reproducing and memorising them until my grandfather saw me and told me to also do the same with Veda and Vedanta. Well, Hari was our paradigm for excellence.

In the Half-yearly exams in that year, the class teacher rattled out our scores in each paper. We were asked to write them down on our slates, total them up and get them checked by Hari. We did and Hari okayed mine. Then, Hari said he had to total up his own marks and it turned out that his total was less than mine by two marks. The teacher, Hari and I were thoroughly perplexed and checked and rechecked but, turned out, I’d topped, against the run of play.

Three months later, a bulky guy (Hari's father) landed up in the class and dragged Hari out. When our teacher ran after him shouting why, he asked who would help him in (manual) scavenging when he was getting old. That was the last we saw of Hari.

Kalpataru Sir managed to get me through class 4 with flying colours. In Class 5, he became my class teacher. Somehow, he believed I was capable of better things and, step by painful step, got me to qualify to appear for the National Scholarship examination. He used to coach all of us National Scholarship aspirants in his spare time but I don’t think he was charging any money. One morning, my parents had overslept so I couldn’t make it to his coaching class. He landed up at our house and soundly berated my parents for being so callous about their son’s future.

In the middle of all this, my father got transferred so we had to pack our bags and a cow and go away. About two months or so later, by some quirk of fate, he was transferred back to his old station, Angul. The joy on Kalpataru Sir’s face was to be seen to be believed. Much later, I learnt that in those intervening two months, he had abandoned his coaching of the other students also and resumed only after I turned up again. Mid-career, while applying for a Masters’ in Public Management abroad, I sat for GRE and many tricks Kalpataru Sir had taught me came back to me in the course of the exam, leading to a 99 percentile score in the quanti paper.

When the internet happened, I tried long and hard to “find” Hari and Kalpataru Sir on the net but to no avail. I do hope, Hari’s genius eventually found him. I also hope, Kalpataru Sir had a fulfilling life and many other students benefitted from his academic and personal generosity. I went to Angul town after four decades with my kids to show them where I grew up. I located the school with great difficulty and found that it was in ruins and apologising for its last-gasp existence. Only some students in Class 1 were being sought to be taught in a dark, dingy room. The class room where I used to sit in my class 5 under Kalpataru Sir’s watchful eye was practically destroyed. It was all very sad. I’m eternally grateful for my own accident of birth and other accidents which made for a fairly privileged life. To many Hari’s, to Kalpataru Sir, to everybody, my sincere, silent salute.