I enjoyed my two-year stint teaching at Budanilkantha School. I wept, I slept and kept my memories of one of them no more: Nirajan. His Royal Highness, who came to me as a shy, untidy boy, his shirt hanging out, lugging buckets of water.

The boys had to all do their share of house duties, and he had to fill all the filters at Annapurna House. Curled up in his bunk, with a sore throat, his hair shadowing a pale face. This was the quality of the school: no class distinction, boys from the remotest villages hobnobbed with royalty and the elite. I wonder how many of the scholarship programs in other institutions were able to inculcate this sense of fair play and camaraderie among students They were not my pupils, I was the learner. I learnt to parent, even though I had three children of my own. They were my mentors. I learnt of their pain, their sorrow, their confusion. The confusion was mainly the result of our social norm of lack of parent-child communication. Each must be in his/her place and there is no scope for easy laughter. Children of the nouveau riche whose parents had no time for them. Daddies too busy making money or politicking, mummies engrossed in the social circuit.

They would sometimes call me to talk to them. We would sit on the freeezing steps, under the stars and they would unwind, nodding knowingly when they came up with problems of pubescent metamorphosis. Many, I did not know how to handle, but I listened nevertheless. And they just needed someone to talk to.

There were love stories, heartbreak tales, especially when the school allowed girls to be enrolled for the first time after 20 years. They hated them at first, would not sit at the same desk, would not even look at them, resented them because the girls got printed salwar kamij to wear after school, while they had to make do with the blue and grey uniforms all the time.

The school had a beautiful costume room that the boys had been ruling roost over for the last twenty years, preening and dressing up, and they certainly did not like the idea that the girls now had sway over the wigs, satin, velvet. But when the girls won the shooting championship, all that changed.

What is touching now is when you are remembered even after so long. I have met them from Nuwakot to New York. On a slippery slope near Trisuli, trying to avoid the leeches, I notice a young bearded man following me. Maybe some NGO guy, I think. Suddenly this apparition speaks: "Megha Maam, what are you doing here? Don't you know me? I am roll number." Those roll numbers, they never leave you.

At The Rox trying out my salsa steps, this young man sidles up. I ignore him, my gaze fixed 40 degrees off his right shoulder. He bends forward: "Maam, don't you remember? You taught me in class six." How can I connect that sleepy-eyed 12-year-old to this Latino hunk sashaying his way across the floor?

Then there were the girls. The scholarship girls from the villages were transformed, they learnt fast. There was informal peer support from older girls who were big sister, mother, protector, arbitrators to all the bahinis. One who helped the smaller boys and girls, and who always had a smile on her face is now a stockbroker. The intelligent all-rounders, the shy quiet ones, all weaving their laughter and successes into the pattern of my own life.

There is no greater happiness, let me tell you, than being remembered by someone you taught long ago. All decent youngsters now, doing well for themselves, and keeping the torch alive.