I joined Tashi Namgyal Academy in Std IV. I’d learn a few things on my first day. An astronomer was not an astrologer. Italics were when the words in your Better English book became slanted. It was okay for seven-year-old servant boys to carry their nine-year-old masters’ backpacks. Some schools actually had a class for which students wrote whatever they wanted on a topic the teacher chose. On the timetable, the class was called Essay. Essay could also be called Composition. The first period every Saturday for students of IV B was Essay/Composition.

Mrs Pema Namgyal was the class teacher. She taught English, science, geography, and history. In my previous school, the teachers wrote answers on the blackboard, which we copied. Here, we were expected to write them in our own words. Questions that started with “What do you think …” provided endless possibilities. But the 40-minute Essay class was something else. Writing anything I wanted? I had yet to know academic freedom of that kind. I may have even found it confusing.

Mrs Namgyal was middle-aged and kind, but Tashi Namgyal Academy had plenty of teachers who were middle-aged and kind. Autograph books — with poetic gems such as auto is moto (fat)/ life is choto (short)/ sorry I have no photo — saw her name come up most frequently in my classmates’ “favourite teacher” slots. You can, of course, argue that a child’s favourite teacher is almost always the class teacher, so there’s nothing special there — and you’d be right. But I had a favourite teacher from my old school and was determined not to let this new one take her place. Regardless, I wanted to be Mrs Namgyal’s favourite student, and my lacklustre map-marking skills wouldn’t get me there. Perhaps I could try hard in that strange class on Saturday in which one could write anything?

My first essay topic was ‘What I did for my winter vacation’. Three short paragraphs would do. I wrote nine. A page would do. I wrote two and a half. I had written three times as many words as my classmates. I took my notebook to the teacher’s desk and stood in line for her verdict. Supriya, the girl before me, received a ‘Good’.

“So you like writing?” Mrs Namgyal smiled at the length of my essay. “Did you do a lot of it in your old school?”

“This is my first essay,” I said.

“The first line of a paragraph should start slightly away from the margin,” she said. I looked around at my classmates’ essays. Every one of their paragraphs was indented.

My essay had mistakes. I used a double comparative. “‘More easier’ is like saying ‘more better’,” Mrs Namgyal said. I made what I now declare the most Indian of errors: “one of my relative was waiting for us”, a line read. “Remember,” Mrs Namgyal wrote. “‘One of the’ is always followed by a plural word.” And the last one: “Everyone were happy”. “‘Every’ is singular,” she said as she changed ‘were’ to ‘was’. “I know it’s confusing because ‘everyone’ means ‘all’, and ‘all’ isn’t singular. Just remember ‘everybody’, ‘nobody’ and ‘somebody’ are all singular. Funny, right?”

I nodded, embarrassed. Supriya hardly had any marks on her essay. Mine looked like my little cousin had squiggled in red all over it. I knew there would be no “Good” at the end. There wasn’t. There was something else. Mrs Namgyal asked how much time we had left for the class to end. “Twenty minutes,” someone said. “You will easily be able to finish another essay before the bell rings,” she said. I was mortified. Was my essay so bad that she wanted me to rewrite it? “Your next topic is ‘The most interesting person I have met’,” she said.

Long before I read Strunk & White and wrote pedantic essays on subject-antecedent disagreements and even thought of writing The Gurkha’s Daughter , there was Mrs Pema Namgyal — the person with whom it all began. Many Saturdays through Std IV, I wrote two essays while my classmates wrote one. One day, I wrote three. ‘The day everything went wrong’ was a delight to write. I described my father’s driver as “arrogance personified”. I cringe now, but 24 years ago, I was so proud.

Std IV ended in a whirlwind of essays. On someone’s slambook, I wrote “MRS. PEMA NAMGYAL” against ‘Your favourite teacher’. Next year, it was Mrs Kesang. The year after, Mrs Sangeeta. After that, the “autos” and slambooks disappeared.

There were other excellent teachers — teachers who told me I could become a writer, college professors who asked me to concentrate on nothing but writing — but Mrs Namgyal was the first person who encouraged me to take writing seriously.

Mrs Namgyal and her husband died in the Uphaar Cinema tragedy in 1997. I was in Std VIII. The last time I had spoken to her, she had asked me for my English score. “But I got a 27 on 30 on the essay part,” I said. “By now I’d have thought you’d be getting 30 on 30 on the essay,” she had said. Dazed by the news of her death, I hunted for my Std IV book of essays. “Good word,” one comment read. There were many “goods”, a few “very goods”, and one “excellent” — that was for ‘The most important lesson I’ve learned this year’. My classmates, I remember, had written mostly about learning lessons on humility, honesty, and perseverance. My essay was about grammar lessons — about “everyone” being singular and about double comparatives.

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