The floor was the cold, hard stone that all pre-Independence British Raj buildings seem to be made of, and my knees were starting to hurt.

‘I think you should get up and go into class.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I mumbled around the chicken chop.

She walked in through the door at the head of the classroom and, chewing furiously, I bolted in through the back.

Simultaneously swallowing and sliding into the seat next to Button, I hissed, ‘She saw me crawling in here with half of Cookie’s tiffi n in my mouth.’

Button made a sort of gurgling, squealing sound and disappeared behind The Rise and Fall of Western Political Ideologies of the Twentieth Century. Behind Alexander Shittles’s homicidal tome (a hideously dull text rumoured to have lulled many a student into death by boredom), she shook and wept.

On the blackboard, The Raccoon started detailing the structure of village panchayats prevalent in the interiors of India.

I grabbed a notebook and scribbled furiously—If you don't stop laughing she's going to chuck us out of class, you bleeding goat.

Button nodded, but continued to shake into the textbook. Sreemoyee Das turned around to shoot us a dirty look from the row ahead. She usually sat in the first row, but the other geeks had filled up the front half of the room before she got into class that day. Detained by whatever nonsense pursuit she had been caught up in (probably begging for a physics test or something, the cow), Sreemoyee had been forced to sit in one of the back rows, which were always the last to fill up because everyone knew that’s where the bad girls sat.

To be fair, Sreemoyee did grow up to be a civil studies teacher herself, so I guess being able to concentrate in that class really was important to her. Then, however, I just flipped off the back of her oily, braided head and Button kept up her tickled convulsions.

I was convinced that we were going to be told to leave the room and go down to the vice principal’s offi ce. Not that I really minded getting into trouble. That happened too often for me to go into a panic over, as most of the good girls of The House did if ever they were caught with a cell phone or some forbidden lip gloss on school grounds. But there were two big reasons that made me very reluctant to break The Raccoon’s patience.

For one, I loved the vice principal. Dr Roshan was one of those people who’re born to play exactly the role they do. An excellent administrator, with smartly cropped hair and the eternal soul of a teacher, she dressed starchily and spoke crisply, in deliberated, weighty sentences. She visibly winced when students mispronounced words, and paused whatever she was doing to explain in a patient, pained voice exactly why it was ‘too-ih-shun’ and not ‘tew-shun’.