I was supposed to wait for my father by the side gate of the school. I am writing about something that happened in the mid 1970s, when I was a Standard-VI student in Baldwin Girls High School in Richmond Town. My father would be coming by in an auto rickshaw, and I had to be ready to hop on.

So I stood happily at the side gate. Going home with daddy was always fun. We had so much to talk about. Any moment one of the many autos passing by would stop for me, with that familiar, loving face looking out for me.

Just then, a teacher came looking for someone to take her books to her room in the hostel. I tried to look away, but she came up to me and asked me to do her the favour. Normally, I would be delighted to oblige. But I was unable to help her, surely she would understand. She would not give up, but promised to wait there and tell my father why I was not where I was meant to be, and that I would be back in a minute.

So I took her books and placed them where she wanted them placed and ran back to the side gate, where a very irritated daddy was waiting in the auto rickshaw. The teacher was no where to be seen; maybe she had a good reason for why she had not waited to explain matters to my father.

My father was not going to hear any explanation from me either. Instead, he gave me a 25-paise coin and told me to catch two buses and get home the hard way—because I had been disobedient, he said. To this day, I am not someone with a short fuse, but that evening, I was angry. Well, I was angry for a few seconds anyway, enough to throw the coin back into the autorickshaw that was moving away from me. And it was gone.

The autorickshaw was gone, and I had no money to get home. I would have to walk home now. Thanks to Google maps, I can now see that it was a four-kilometer walk. At the time, it seemed unimaginably long, and I had a very heavy school bag on my back too.

Funnily, I found the situation exciting. I remember going via Residency Road. I stopped at Sridhar Book Shop, a shop I was familiar with, just to ask if they had a cardboard box as I needed one for a project. They did not have one to give me, so emboldened now by this experience, I went into another shop, this time a liquor store, and asked for a box, which they were glad to supply me with. Walking became a tad harder with a bulky box to carry, but it was great fun. I would have had to cross Mahatma Gandhi Road, which was so beautiful in those days, and Cubbon Road too.

I wondered what my mother was telling my father, especially now that it was getting quite late. Google Maps suggests that it would take 50 minutes to cover this distance, but I might have taken thrice as long, as it was beginning to get dark. As I neared home, I was getting even more excited, because the truth was on my side and I had done nothing wrong, and I was having a whale of a time. But what would my parents be saying to each other, I wondered. Would my father listen to my explanation when I got home?

I had to walk some distance along the Ulsoor Lake before turning into the street that led home. And when I got to my front gate and climbed the stairs to our flat, my parents were both very happy to see me. My father, though still of the opinion that I had been terribly disobedient, had completely forgiven me. And my mother had many questions for me. They were shocked to know that I had walked home, and became quiet when they realised that I had thrown the coin back; my father had not realised that I had thrown the coin back. My mother was impressed that I had gone into a shop to get a box for my project.

And then my father asked the obvious question: By the way, why were you careless and playing inside when I told you to wait at the side door? Because he asked, I told him what had happened. He did not say anything after that. In our house, we did not say, “Sorry.” But the next evening, my father took me to a “hotel” and bought me a gulab jamoon, my favourite sweet. The long walk was well worth the attention.