This is a collection of episodes from boarding school days in Darjeeling, the queen of Indian hill stations, during the dying days of the British Raj. The author was born in Hong Kong during World War II, smuggled across to mainland China under the noses of the occupying Japanese forces, and later kidnapped by his mother and flown by US bomber into India, where he was deposited in a succession of boarding schools. Along the way he collected pre-war...