One year down the line, Mishra disappeared. Rumour was that he was in love with a Muslim girl. Both the families were united in their mission: find their wards and murder them. Mishra and his lover, everyone said, had gone underground in Nepal.

Nazneen Khan, who was said to be related to Salman Khan, the film star, was friends with Sameera, the girl who had eloped. One evening, over a vanilla milkshake at Hotstuff, she told me that she had heard from Sameera. The two were in Calcutta, but they wouldn’t be there for long. They were on the run. Both sets of parents were serious about killing their children. There were rumours in Allahabad that the girl was pregnant and had had an abortion. Nazneen was disconcertingly deadpan and non-judgemental about the whole affair. The couple was doing what they had to do; the parents were doing what they were supposed to do. At the end of the day, it was a private matter.

The day after our conversation, the vice principal had a quiet word with Nazneen. ‘You have been seen in town, sitting in restaurants, talking to boys. The reputation of the school is at stake. Just don’t, okay?’

I was next in line. Jha, the vice princi, grabbed hold of my tie—which hung lose around my neck in accepted senior-school style—and slid the knot up rather vigorously. ‘And you,’ he muttered, ‘you better concentrate on your studies. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Almost a year had passed since the Rachna-Archies card-Mishra incident. This was my final year at school. Exactly nine months to the farewell and then I was out of here.

Relationships in Allahabad seldom went beyond phone conversations. I had had my fill of these as far as Rachna was concerned. Things could only go further if your family owned a motor spare parts shop and a Maruti 800. We owned neither. Rachna knew several such characters and had been seen in Jhusi, in an air-conditioned Maruti parked on the banks of the Ganges.

I myself was now besotted with a girl called Divya who had joined school in class 11. She had silky black hair, which she wore short, and sad brown eyes like a cocker spaniel. Her face was dotted with pimples. She was a committed NCC cadet. Her walk was a fetching combination of army erectness and girlie bum-swaying. After an afternoon of disciplined marching, she would walk back to the cycle stand, her face the colour of a tomato, the epaulettes on her khaki shirt hanging loose.

This year my backing came from two sources: Nazneen Khan and Karan. Nazneen had invested in six garish rakhis on Raksha Bandhan. She had strategically tied these on the wrists of six school louts who had been making passes at her. Now they were her protectors. And, by proxy, they became my protectors too.