Illustration/Uday Mohite

I was a wretched, goody-two-shoes in school. Harmless masti all year, but pretty muggu in the end. Rarely standing first, but almost always ranking between 2 and 4 in class. It’s true that, thanks to our encouraging English Miss “Nonny” — Elba Fernandes — I once won an enormous inter-school elocution shield for our school. But, I could never be properly wicked. At least that’s how I remember it. Memory can be an unreliable slave of subconscious convenience: it sometimes forgets things not convenient to remember, and sometimes invents things that never happened that make you feel better — which I realised on watching the superb animation feature Waltz with Bashir. Anyway, I was pretty boring in school — I had two pigtails, used rubberbands to hold up sagging socks, and had a dark band at the bottom of my skirt that mum ‘unrolled’ as I grew taller. So, my heroine was always the Naughtiest Girl in School, more un-tameable than Enid Blyton’s. I always aspired to be as wicked as her. She was bold and brazen, bunked class, had boyfriends and had nothing but contempt for punishment.