On the last day of school, there was a fight. No one quite knows what happened. One minute we were standing in neat rows, the next there was pandemonium. The girls huddled together on the stage of the auditorium, like nuns in a besieged convent, while the boys had it out on the floor. The teachers who tried to intervene got beaten up. A group of boys drove around the dusty cricket field in an open Jeep, firing shots into the air. It wasn’t clear whether this was being done in provocation or celebration. Mayank Luthra, always a loner, stood in a corner of the auditorium, breaking plates. Gingerly he picked up each plate with both hands, then raised it above his head as if offering prayers to the sun god, before finally letting it crash to the floor. He went through two entire stacks, both eyes shut tight, a picture of contemplative aggression in a gallery of flying fists.

By eleven in the morning, it was clear that the farewell was not going to last till the afternoon as planned. The plates were all smashed, the cola stolen. I cycled back home to pack in an extra two hours of cable TV. MTV had just come to Allahabad with its drop-your-sideburns ads and all-American programming. The Pearl Jam-obsessed Danny McGill was its star VJ. When I switched on the family’s black and white television set, Eddie Vedder was growling, ‘I am alive’ into a microphone. Then, in what looked to be a desperate attempt to drive a point home, Vedder chucked the mike and dived into the crowd. To my seventeen-year-old self, just back from the failed farewell at Boys’ High School, this seemed to confirm a growing suspicion—that the world was chaos and anarchy the way forward.

Two years earlier, my school—an all boys’ grind established more than a hundred years ago—had turned co-ed. ‘I’ve decided to throw some roses among the thorns,’ declared Frederic DeSouza, the principal, at our first co-ed assembly.

I promptly fell in love. Thorny, bespectacled me fell in love with rosy, anorexic Rachna. She had matchsticks for legs and long, very long hair.

I discovered New Kids on the Block and yellow Digene. I bought an Archies card (ten clocks displayed on the front and inside the punchline: ‘It’s time we got together’) and gave it to Rachna between the covers of an accounting register.

Rachna responded by refusing to acknowledge my presence in class. I was desperate. Then one day she passed me a note: Come for the soccer match in the evening.