Joe Bloggs

There were about 25 of them. One of the two bats was broken. They were using old metal pipes for stumps. I said I wanted to have a go at batting - howls of excitement - so they chose one of the more athletic looking boys to give me a trouncing. I barely saw the ball, hit wildly at it and missed it by a couple of feet. Behind me I heard a loud clang of metal piping: I was out for a duck. They quickly learned the lesson of the day: why England is one of the world's worst cricketing sides. I explained the rule of this game was that they had to keep bowling until I hit it. It took five balls (including two more clangers), by which time the bowler obligingly slowed the pace by about 80%.

It was a real high after the disappointment of the meeting with the principal. It took me back not just 22 years, but about 30 to the last time I picked up a cricket bat. As 22 years before, all the boys wanted to touch my hair. They looked thoroughly disappointed as I left the field, but gave me an animated farewell wave.

Even 22 years ago I'd heard stories about how the powers that be were taking kickbacks from the construction companies in exchange for lower than specified quality of materials. Now it showed. There were missing bricks, cracking concrete, ill-placed windows and doors and sagging walls. The school has three 'houses': Beas, Ravi and Sutlej, the names of the three rivers that run through what's left of Indian Punjab. I was affiliated with Beas at that time, and it was the first one I visited now. It's been left to the elements. Most rooms were boarded up, and a look through the windows revealed only piles of rubble. The other two houses are still functioning. But the classrooms have broken desks, the gym has broken equipment (and hardly any of it), and the dormitories broken beds. As I wandered round I'd encounter a few young boys that were bemused to see me. Evidently they were no longer trained to say 'Good afternoon, sir' to anyone that looked like a visitor. Then an older boy came down some stairs, saw me and straight away offered to show me round. Within a couple of minutes, after extracting a promise that I wouldn't repeat anything he told me, he said that the place was going to 'rack and ruin'. Indians rather like their English double-expressions: other favourites are 'all and sundry', and 'part and parcel'. The boy said 1982 when I was there was the 'golden age' of the school. I asked how old he was: 15. How did he know about 1982? His father has a friend who worked at the school just after that time. I said I wanted to see the apartment I stayed in. It too was falling apart. We knocked on the door and a young physics teacher, Mr Banerjee from West Bengal, answered. He warmly invited us in, and we had a good but short chat about education, Indian politics, etc. I didn't want to go in to what a pile of trash I thought the place was, because I thought he might be offended.

The boy then led me back to the principal's house, I met up with my waiting driver (always smiling even after I'd kept him waiting for two hours), and we drove into town. I had pretty much made up my mind. We'd spend the night in a hotel in town, and the next day we would drive to the other end of Punjab, only about 10 miles from the Pakistan border, and I would look for Davinder Jeet Singh in his mud hut village. A sports teacher at the school at that time, he became my closest friend. During a school holiday we once took a bus to his village where his father, who used to be in the Indian Civil Service, had retired. We had spent a couple of nights there. By day 'DJ' showed me round the village, and took me to the cane fields where he gave me a sample of unadulterated liquid cane sugar. His mother gave me glasses of hot, sweet milk that had been milked minutes before. 'DJ' was in his late twenties back then, so now he'd be about 50. Fat chance that he'd be there, but perhaps someone could tell me where he is now. And so what if it all came to nought? We'd drive for 200 miles through the Indian countryside, on election day, and end up wandering round an Indian village, talking to the farmers. Perhaps if there was still time we'd see the Pakistan border, just as a fourth Indo-Pakistan war broke out over Kashmir.