The school where this was taken is in a village in rural Uttar Pradesh, the state in northern India where I was born. It’s a poverty-ridden area and this is a poorly funded school, with few books and no electricity. My father taught there for 35 years, throughout my entire life, but it’s not the school I attended.
When I was two, I started repeating crude words I’d picked up from older boys. My father’s response was to sell off his inheritance, take out massive bank loans and send me to an elite boarding school in the Himalayas. For the next 18 years, my parents could only afford to live in a tiny shack – their bedroom doubled as a kitchen and they shared an outside toilet. These were pretty drastic measures, but my father was determined to give me the best possible chance of escaping the environment I’d been born into. The new world I entered could not have been more different. I’d spend the holidays with my parents in their modest circumstances, only to return to a school with sprawling grounds, where my friends were the sons of top businessmen, politicians and Bollywood stars.
