...

It's been about two weeks since I came back from my vacation at home in the foothills of Himalayas.

It was in this little hometown that I learnt to count using my fingers, to read a wall clock, wanted to break free of the four walls of a play school to wander into the world, met my first interviewer without knowing what he really meant other than a man who dressed in white from top to bottom and had the word 'principal' attached to him.

No sooner I had joined Don Bosco in Grade 1, than I came down tumbling the first flight of stairs quite akin to Jack in my world of nursery rhymes. It was quite a frightening experience to go to a new school and meet an avalanche of people rushing down stairs, fall head flat and end up with a bruised skull.

Thereafter, alighting a flight of stairs was the most challenging thing in school for me. The person who shouldered me through those difficult times was an angelic 'Anglo Indian lady'. She was the 'Lady with the hand' - the hand which I would cling on to for life. As the school bell rang, I would wait for her to appear from the teacher's room and every day for the first two years of my school life, she would take me through the dreaded staircases to the ground floor. She was Mrs. Glashan.

It's now close to a decade that I have left Don Bosco but this is a memory that has lasted untarnished through the shingles of time. I vividly remember her look, her watch, her sarees and her smile. It was in search of all this and more, I found myself at the doorsteps of my school in this new year.

The cacophonous hour of lunch break was on but a gossamer of silence enshrouded me. The familiar school board carried a little note. Mrs. Glashan had passed away in the morning.

The stairs were right in front but the fear of not having the hand to hold me was overbearing. I turned back.

Some losses are irrevocable...

Carbide