From the memoir: Bookseller Ajay Jain the writes about his childhood in Delhi’s St Columba’s School

I enter St Columba’s School

January 6, 1975

I did kindergarten twice. Not because I was dim but because my mother was bright.

My father grew up in rural Punjab and Haryana in northern India. My grandfather was a schoolteacher, and most conversations with the men at home were about grades in school. My father made it to the big city and secured a respectable government job only because he scored well in the classroom. For him, pursuing quality education was nonnegotiable.

He had clarity about the “what” and my mother about the “where.” It would be St Columba’s for her son and the adjoining Convent of Jesus and Mary School for her daughter. Only because her elder sister’s children had studied in these schools too.

There was a hitch, though: Columba’s only admitted those over five, while most others took in a year younger. My mother saw it as only a matter of adjusting the clock by a year; I was sent to Air Force Bal Bharti School at four, and then to Columba’s when I turned five. To repeat the grade.

And thus, thirty-four years after the first set of students entered St Columba’s in 1941, I did too. And found me a chair and table in KG-D.

Brothers waited to receive...

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