It was the winter I stayed at Patlikuhl, in my Tibetan boarding school in rural north India, a small, isolated school tucked in a narrow valley between the hills of Nagar. The nearby town had only one nameless road going through it. I say 'stayed' but what I mean is I was left behind. My parents couldn't come to get me because winter was their busiest season but they had entrusted a man who was coming to get his own children with the task of bringing me as well. Unfortunately there were two Tenzin Lhamos in class five. The man ended up taking the wrong girl home. My parents felt bad sending her back, so they kept her for the winter. It sounds crazy now but that sort of thing happened more often than you might think. So I stayed at school for the winter with all the orphans and other children whose parents were either in Tibet or were too poor to fetch their kids for the winter holidays.
It felt like the freest time of my life: no parents, no teachers, no prefects. We still had dorm mothers but we could ignore them. The old peon still rang the school bell but it lost all its customary tyranny. Breakfast, lunch, tea-time, dinner was what the bell now signalled. It became almost comforting. During term time, we woke up at 5:30 am, put on our uniforms and made our beds quickly, all four corners of the bed tucked in with military precision. After breakfast, we cleaned the dorm, dusting and sweeping until it was time for our one-hour study period. We then had morning assembly and then classes finally began for the day. There was none of that in the winter. We woke up at a later hour, only cleaned the dorm once a week and best of all, turned on the TV whenever we wanted. Our dorm mother let us have the run of the place. That was the winter her oldest son was back home, released from the hospital because there was nothing more they could do for him. He wore a kullu shawl over his kurta, like an Indian, and walked up and down the corridor, a silent spectre of a man, getting gaunter and gaunter each week. He had the same vacant expression on his face every day and at night.We fell asleep to the sound of his coughing.
So we had all this free time, my friend Sherab and I. Sherab was in my class but it wasn't at all inevitable that we would be best friends. After all, boys and girls weren't really friends back then, but we were. We spent all our time with each other. We were only eleven, hadn't hit puberty yet and it wasn't weird then like it became later.
Sherab was carefree and reckless, the kind of boy who always looked for a rule to break. He had an untameable cowlick on his forehead, which everyone said meant that he was going to grow up to be a troublemaker. The thing about Sherab was that he was very easygoing and eager to please once you were his friend. He had a natural kindness that boarding school, which hardened many a softer person, never really stamped out of him. For all his roughness, he could be surprisingly sensitive, which is why it was peculiar that he didn't hold back that day when we went to Momo Pasang's room.