My earliest fully formed memory dates back to when I was a year-and-a-half — of someone spooning a fried egg into my mouth as I sat on the verandah of my uncle’s house at Fern Road. Soon after, my family moved to Mumbai and we lived there till I was 27, though we would visit Calcutta every year.

I studied in Cathedral School upto Class X, and hated most of it, perhaps because of my traumatic first day there. I would feign all kinds of illness to avoid going to school. My favourite tactic was to jog up and down as I drank my milk, so that I was forced to throw up. Actually, I loved home, and school was an alien land where I was surrounded by strangers. To this day, I hate staying away from home. In fact, I was so deeply unhappy that I even ran away once. I was in junior school at that time and we were taken to the Bombay Gymkhana for lunch. I spotted our car outside the Gymkhana and as we were being led out, I dashed to it and got in. Of course, I was discovered and taken back. I remember another occasion when I kept dodging from side to side in the car to evade my father, who was trying to get me to go to school.

In Class VI, however, I found a teacher who made school bearable and created in me a love of English literature. I didn’t know the language too well before that, as I spoke in either Bengali or Hindi — with my parents and the domestic help respectively. My teacher encouraged me to read Ladybird books and Enid Blyton, on whom I even modelled some of my English essays. However, since early childhood, even before I could write, I would create rhymes, which my mother diligently wrote down.

When I was in Class VIII, I grew a little rebellious and was shifted to a section noted for its rowdiness. By the time I was in Class IX, I had fallen ill and missed a number of classes, of which I took advantage. I grew out of the habit of studying, though I was always good at English. I even earned a pink card — akin to a black mark — for sporting long hair, not carrying books to school, and talking.