Chapter 2: Nishita

# Chapter 2: Nishita

## The School

Panchgani International School was not international in any meaningful sense.

It was a boarding school that accepted day scholars, situated on a twelve-acre campus at the end of a eucalyptus-lined road, with buildings that dated from the British era — stone walls, peaked roofs, wooden staircases that creaked with the specific music of institutions that had been educating children for a hundred years and had stored every footstep in their timber. The school had been founded in 1927 by a Scottish missionary whose portrait hung in the main hall — a man with a moustache that could have sheltered a family of four, staring down at generations of students with the stern benevolence of someone who believed that education and discomfort were synonymous.

The "international" in the name referred to the fact that the school followed the ICSE board rather than the state board, which in Maharashtra's educational hierarchy was considered cosmopolitan the way adding oregano to dal was considered Italian cooking.

My mother dropped me off on the first morning. The Dzire navigated the eucalyptus road with the caution of a car encountering unfamiliar terrain — the road was narrow, potholed, and shared with a herd of cows that had claimed the left lane as sovereign territory and showed no inclination to negotiate.

"It's beautiful," Aai said, looking at the campus through the windshield. The buildings were beautiful — grey stone, red-tiled roofs, the particular aesthetic of colonial hill-station architecture that was simultaneously imposing and charming. The grounds were green. The playing fields were marked for cricket and football. A chapel with a steeple — the school was nominally Christian, though its student body was approximately 80 percent Hindu, 10 percent Muslim, 5 percent Christian, and 5 percent "my parents chose this school for the facilities, not the religion" — sat at the campus's highest point, its steeple visible from the town below.

"It looks like a prison with better landscaping," I said.

"Nishita."

"I'm going."

I got out. Slung my bag over my shoulder. Walked toward the main building with the posture of a girl who was determined not to be impressed and who was, despite this determination, slightly impressed — the stone corridors were cool and smelled of floor polish and old wood, and the classrooms had windows that looked out onto the valley, and the combination of altitude and architecture created an atmosphere that was academic in a way that my Vashi school — a concrete rectangle on a busy road, where the primary ambient sound was auto-rickshaw horns — had never managed.

The principal's office was on the first floor. I was directed there by a peon named Suresh — a man in his sixties who had been at the school for thirty-eight years and who navigated its corridors with the proprietary authority of someone who considered himself less an employee and more a permanent feature, like the staircase.

"New student?" Suresh asked.

"Transfer. Standard 12."

He looked at me with the particular expression of a man who had seen hundreds of students arrive and depart and who could, within thirty seconds of meeting a new one, classify them with the accuracy of a customs officer: boarder or day scholar, rich or middle-class, troublemaker or rule-follower, the kind who would last or the kind who would beg their parents to take them home within a month.

"Day scholar," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"The day scholars sit on the right side of the assembly hall. Left side is boarders. Don't sit on the wrong side. The boarders take it personally."

I filed this information alongside the other survival data I was collecting — the school was a system, and systems had rules, and the rules were not always written in the handbook. Some were spoken by peons who had been there longer than the principal and whose knowledge of the institution's culture was encyclopaedic.

The principal — Dr. Meera Saldanha, a woman in her fifties with short grey hair and the efficient kindness of someone who managed four hundred students and had learned to compress warmth into five-minute intervals — gave me my schedule, introduced me to the administrative assistant, and assigned me a "buddy" who would show me around for the first week.

The buddy's name was Aarav Mane.

He was waiting outside the principal's office when I came out — leaning against the stone wall with the studied casualness of a boy who had been told to be somewhere and had arrived early enough to adopt a pose. He was tall — taller than me by a head, which put him at approximately 5'11" — with the build of someone who played sports but didn't make it his personality. Dark skin, sharp features, a jaw that looked like it had been designed by someone who understood geometry. He wore the school uniform — white shirt, grey trousers, navy tie — with the particular looseness that boys deployed when they wanted to comply with the dress code while signalling that the dress code did not define them: tie slightly lowered, top button undone, sleeves rolled to the forearm.

"You're the transfer?" he said.

"Nishita. Nishi."

"Aarav. But everyone calls me Aaru."

"Why?"

"Because Aarav is what my mother calls me when she's angry, and I prefer to minimise the associations."

I almost smiled. Almost. The almost was significant — I had been committed to not smiling at anyone in Panchgani for at least the first week, as a matter of principle, and this boy with his casual lean and his sharp jaw and his immediate, easy humour was threatening to collapse my timeline.

"Come on," he said. "First period is Maths. Mrs. Ghoshal. She's brilliant but she explains things like she's briefing a military operation. If you fall behind in the first ten minutes, you're done. Stay with me."

We walked through the stone corridors. Other students were moving in the same direction — the morning flow, the particular migration of bodies toward classrooms that every school in the world shared. The boarders were identifiable by their slightly dishevelled quality — the rumpled shirts, the unlaced shoes, the hair that had been attacked by a comb rather than styled by one. The day scholars were neater, pressed, carrying the evidence of mothers who had inspected them before departure.

I was aware of the looks. The new girl. The transfer. In a school this size — four hundred students, a single section per standard — a new arrival was an event. Not dramatic, not hostile, but observed. I felt the observation the way you feel a temperature change: not painful, but present. Every eye that glanced, assessed, and moved on was a data point being collected. By lunch, the school would know my name, my hometown, and an estimated guess at my family's income bracket, because Indian schools were, in their social dynamics, as efficient as intelligence agencies.

"Where are you from?" Aarav asked, confirming the efficiency.

"Navi Mumbai. Vashi."

"Why'd you move?"

"My father got transferred."

The answer was true and incomplete, which was the format I had decided on. The full truth — my father got transferred because he was sleeping with a colleague and my mother decided that moving to a hill station was preferable to a divorce — was not information that a stranger needed on the first morning, however sharp his jaw.

Aarav nodded. He did not push. The not-pushing was, I would learn, characteristic — Aarav Mane had the rare quality of knowing when a question had been answered sufficiently and when the space after the answer was not an invitation for more questions but a boundary.

"You'll like it here," he said. "The school's strict but fair. The teachers are good. The boarders are insane — in a fun way. The food in the canteen is terrible, but there's a guy outside the school gate who sells vada pav that will make you forget every vada pav you've ever eaten."

"Bold claim. I'm from Mumbai."

"I know. That's why I said it. The guy's name is Dhondu. He's from Malvan. His chutney is green, his oil is fresh, and his vada has a crunch that Mumbai's street vendors haven't achieved since 2019."

"You're very passionate about vada pav."

"I'm passionate about things that are done well. Vada pav, cricket, and not wasting people's time with conversations that don't go anywhere."

The second almost-smile. Two in five minutes. My timeline was collapsing.

We entered the Maths classroom. Mrs. Ghoshal was already at the board — a woman in her forties with silver-streaked hair pulled into a bun and the posture of a classical dancer, which she was. She taught calculus with the precision of a choreographer: every step in sequence, every transition deliberate, the blackboard filling with equations that she wrote in a handwriting so regular it looked printed.

"New student," Aarav announced. "Nishita Joshi. Vashi."

Mrs. Ghoshal looked at me over her glasses. The look was assessing but not unkind — the look of a teacher who had been teaching for twenty years and who could, from the way a student held her bag and the way she entered a room, make preliminary judgments about mathematical aptitude that were more accurate than any entrance exam.

"Welcome, Nishita. Sit anywhere. We're on integration by parts. Page 274. Try to keep up."

I sat. Next to Aarav, because the seat was empty and because he had positioned himself there with the casual precision of a boy who had planned the seating arrangement while appearing to leave it to chance.

I opened my textbook to page 274. Integration by parts. I knew it — I had covered it in Vashi, in a classroom that smelled of marker ink and traffic fumes, with a teacher named Mr. Desai who explained things slowly and kindly and who had wished me luck on my last day with a sincerity that had made me cry in the school bathroom for twelve minutes.

The lesson began. Mrs. Ghoshal was, as Aarav had promised, brilliant and military. The equations marched across the board. The class followed. I followed.

And for the first time since the tempo had pulled away from Shanti Heights, Sector 17, Vashi, I felt something that was not anger or grief or the numb resentment of a girl who had been uprooted. I felt normal. I was in a classroom. I was doing maths. The chalk dust was falling. The formulas were familiar. The boy next to me smelled faintly of soap and eucalyptus and the vada pav he had clearly eaten before school, because Aarav Mane was the kind of boy who ate vada pav at 7:30 AM and did not apologise for it.

Normal. For forty-five minutes, in a stone classroom on a hill in the Western Ghats, I was normal.

It would not last.

But for forty-five minutes, it was enough.