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I was born on the 23rd of July, 1987, in the metropolis of Calcutta, in West Bengal, India. The story of my childhood has had as its setting the rapidly shifting background of many big cities, as my father holds a transferrable position in an Indian bank. At the age of seventeen, as I am now a few days from the beginning of college, I have lived in five cities, and attended eight schools.
My family on both sides in centred in the city of my birth. It is extensive and notable for that degree of warmth and close kinship that characterise the more conservative strata of society in my country. The five years that I spent in this city, between the ages of five and nine, are vivid with recollections of the numerous pleasant occasions we celebrated together. My pride in my colourful culture is deeply imbedded in me from these days, when not a month passed but was enlivened by family visits, weekend picnics, rooftop teas and terrace functions, and of course, pujas, or religious festivals, and the celebration of national holidays.
My education was commenced at an institution in the North-Indian city of Jaipur, a state capital and then a city of modest scope and traditional outlook. This first institution was a pre-school by name of Alphabeta, and here I completed one year of nursery and. After that, at the age of three, I graduated to Lady Bird, where, after two years of kindergarten, my father being relocated to Calcutta, I was admitted into the Narmada school, where I completed the first standard.
My next four years were the happiest of my life, as I passed them in the Future Foundation school, an institution administered by the trust of the late Sri Aurobindo, a visionary and important figure in teh arduous struggle for the Indian independence and the overthrow of the British Raj. I am by no means politically inclined, and must be understood, in speaking of my happiness, to be referring to factors completely independent of the leanings of this respectable organisation -- which leanings, if they existed, were so well concealed that they in no manner interfered with the strict, proper, and thorough instruction and amelioration of the students there enrolled. The school is a reputed one in its own circle, and I am happy to say that I performed well there.
But the reason for my happiness was not only my academic security -- the importance of which at all times has been emphasises by my dear parents -- but, more significantly, the opportunity of association with my family, which has naturally in our moving life been sporadic and interrupted; and, perhaps even more significantly, the development of two relationships that had begun casually in my very early childhood in Jaipur, and which I was able to take up and pursue here, with equal pleasure and leisure.
These two relations, though independent of family, were nevertheless acquired through my father; the two friends I have known since before I was able to walk, are the daughters of two gentlemen who have been for an even longer period of time, colleagues of my father in his bank. By a happy coincidence, these gentlemen happening then to occupy commensurate to that held by my own father, their pattern of movement over India corresponded rather closely with ours; so that when we moved from Jaipur to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to Bombay (now Kolkata and Mumbai), our associations were but temporarily suspended.
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