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on the other. His desk was of a dark and lustrous wood, and he placed it where he could see his books and whatever else was going on. He took his English classes here, classes that he refused to give up despite his administrative duties, that man was so fond of teaching.
    The principal came, murmuring apologies at the zealousness of his guards.
    ‘The times are such‚’ said Kailashnath.
    ‘Indeed,’ agreed the principal.
    ‘So unfortunate,’ I added, though no one was listening.
    Did we really want to see the college? The principal looked politely disbelieving. Kailashnath enlightened him. I was introduced as the Delhi seeker after local and historical knowledge. The principal sent for the oldest two teachers. He himself had only joined recently, he explained.
    We set off, the men striding ahead. Following slowly, at my aunt’s pace, I agonized over the valuable information I might be missing.
    We walked into the main building. My parents must have walked down these hallways, across these stones, and I felt the past hovering, cliché-like, over that run-down building, beckoning me into its orbit.
    The main college buildings were colonial, with classrooms built around a large, brick-paved courtyard, with a raised cement platform at one end.
    ‘This is where we still have assembly,’ said the principal.
    ‘How quiet the college is,’ I wondered aloud.
    ‘Exams are going on,’ explained a teacher to my aunt, courtesy dictating that he ignore the younger woman while addressing the older.
    On the way down the corridors, I could see that exams were indeed going on. The desks were arranged in parallel rows, and after years of invigilation in my own college it was not hard to see that many of the students were cheating. Heads furtively bent forwards, backwards, or at acute angles, open exam scripts pushed over the edge of the desk, question papers being dropped on the floor and exchanged. The invigilators were chatting to each other in front of the classroom. In Delhi, students of some men’s colleges cheated with open knives on their desks, a threat that the invigilators did not dare confront, but here obviously the rules were better understood by those concerned.
    ‘We have a very high rate of pass,’ said the teacher turning to me at last.
    I politely commented that that must bring pleasure to them all.
    ‘Yes, ours is considered a good college, though of course it no longer has the reputation it did in your father’s time.’
    ‘Oh no. That was the height of the college. Its days of prestige,’ said the other teacher.
    ‘I never knew the Professor Sahib,’ said the principal. ‘But people still tell stories about him.’
    *
     
    We first went to the library. It was housed in a large room running the entire length of the building on the first floor. There were old-fashioned wooden cupboards with glass doors arranged around the walls. In the middle were desks and benches dotted with a few students. The room was cool, even in the middle of summer. The ceilings were high, and the deep, recessed windows covered with wire netting. It looked old and graceful, peaceful and untouched.
    ‘The librarian sits here,’ said the principal, going towards a small room at the back. ‘Our oldest staff member.’
    We approach the librarian. Yes, he remembers the Professor Sahib.
    ‘This library,’ he said, gesturing around the big room. ‘He made it. He used to buy the books when he was principal. Whenever he travelled anywhere, he would come back with a suitcase-full for the college. We had the latest and the best.’
    The sight of the books drew me, and I wandered over to look at the names on the faded spines in the literature section. A casual glance, and then closer, my gaze held by those muted colours, those old names. From one cupboard to the next I looked. How many of these same titles, the same edition even, had I lived with in my own home? What did he do? Reproduce the home in the college and vice versa?
    I