I came to a conclusion. ‘So, we have to get Roshan out of the offi ce in the break between periods. Basu won’t bother complaining if she can’t find her right away, I don’t think.’

‘But how?’

‘Say that she’s needed somewhere for something?’

‘Too risky. We’ll wind up with two ends to cover.’ Button was a firm believer in minimizing risk.

‘So we make sure that whatever reason we give her to leave the offi ce is a solid one.’

‘Well, I could go pretend to have a fall while walking past her room. You know how she is—she’ll insist on taking me to the nurse herself if I yowl loud enough.’

I nodded consensus. ‘Yeah, that’ll work. But let’s get one of the minions to do it? I still have more obsessing to do.’

‘Bloody minions can’t do anything right, man. Remember when we used that idiot chit from class five to tell The Raccoon they’d seen a mouse in Wood Hall? Stupid goat made a complete hack job of it. We didn’t even get twenty free minutes in the period!’

‘We’ll pick something easy then . . . fainting! She can pretend to faint. No talking required.’

‘Fine. Let’s go over to the junior side now and find one.’

‘Button?’

‘Tars?’

‘We are terrible people.’

We looked at each other, again. We willed ourselves not to laugh, again. And then we laughed a little, and then we laughed a lot, because yes, yes we were terrible people, but we were also young and brilliant and irreverent, and our lives gleamed heady and victorious ahead of us.

I noticed a little girl, probably from the third or fourth grade, trotting down one of the innumerable winding dark staircases that dotted The House.

Built for India’s governor general during the late nineteenth century, the grand Gothic towers of The House still imbue Calcutta’s skyline with a claim to architectural pride. All us girls who spent over a decade of our lives walking in through the arching green gates of The House carry the school around with us for the rest of our days, in the ankles we can never uncross, the backs we can never slouch, in the pleases and thankyous and old-fashioned curtsies that are now ingrained in us. In the sense of being set apart, of belonging to a privileged club removed in both space and time from the loud, sweaty, dirty city outside.

Inside, bookshelves are lined with William and Wodehouse, staff rooms are lined with Dickensian relics, and classrooms spend more time dispensing etiquette than economics.

‘Oi, small fry! C’mere.’

In the years before the Internet grew kids up before it was time to grow up, the pecking order of seniority still held great rank in school. Unwavering obedience, cited as honourable loyalty, was insisted upon, the looming threat of ostracization maintaining our order for us.