The hostel was a nineteenth century palace. An impression of an archetypal European architecture, it was built by aristocratic Rana Rulers of Nepal for their profligate lifestyle, revelry, and carnage. After the ouster of this brutal regime, the palace was abandoned. The palace was then leased to a private boarding school by the government. Its colossal foundations, reverberant rooms with high ceilings, woody gazebos and corridors, were the talk among the students for its haunted souls that were believed wandering about there. The principal, Mrs Shakuntala Devi was bold and a highly feared woman, whose mere shadow would give all the pupils and teachers, shudders of fright. An inarticulate speaker in her mother tongue, she used to address her students everyday in the morning assembly with added emphasis on cleanliness and etiquette in perfect English. She?d sometimes get hysterical and vent her anger on her pupils? demeanours with squeamish remarks and witty demos in the assembly. For all the pupils were quiet and irresponsive, she used to remind them their school motto every morning, ??.?, that was daubed with veneering yellow over green on the main school gate. Classes would follow assembly on maths and then science, mathematics and so on. Gopal?s class was a group of twenty boys and twenty girls. All girls looked pretty on their compulsory pink-ribbon-tied hair-dos, in two braids at the sides. Boys were forbidden to grow their hair long and all of them had brut crew cuts. Their class teacher, Mrs Ghimire, always used to say, ? Boys! Your heads look like that of the extra-terrestrials?. She would then giggle giving her toothless grin again and again. ?You are an average student with possibilities of improvement and better results. And, if you don?t take your studies seriously now, you might just as well end up repeating the whole year again. The choice is yours, Gopal.? Mrs Ghimire would tell Gopal to do better every time she came across his academic progress. He would have ended up an intelligent boy if he listened and tagged on to his teachers? advice. But, he was indifferent. He was very inquisitive and fussy about everything but too stubborn and reluctant to believe what others said. Nobody was right but him. ?I?ll come up with better results the next term, Ma?am? Gopal would slide his palm down his nape and reply her coyly every time with the same gesture and tone. It was the winter of ?97. The final board exam was only a week away and the usual schedule had been changed into a particular one that required studying from morning to evening until dinnertime. Gopal woke up every morning to see fog envelop his hostel building and dews splattered white on the grounds. These foggy mornings, it occurred to him like he is somewhere in a world of clouds above the sky. But, as the sun emerges slowly and melts dews into glistening water droplets and vaporizes fog into a wintry zephyr, it cropped him up with a feeling of rejuvenation and brought him back to his mundane existence. Crows flitting and crowing on naked boughs of deciduous trees seemed to him, a reminiscence of folklores that marked an arrival of something predestined. On a clear wintry day, a distant panoramic view of snow-capped mountains was visible beyond the hills. Having spent his entire childhood and adolescence in the valley of Kathmandu at his hostel, the world beyond these hills remained a mystery to him and was confined only within his imaginations. During the preparation, Gopal?s batch of all forty pupils except some prodigies spent the whole day rote learning their syllabus for the coming exams. Everybody was serious this time though there were occasional pranks and sudden outbursts of hysteria during the study periods. For no particular reasons, they would read their books the same way as monks chant prayers in a monastery. At length, they would hum like pundits reciting mantra in a Hindu marriage ceremony. Some boys would keep them rekindled in their books during the study periods, with sudden outbursts of Pink Floyd?s ?we don?t need no education? in deep unified baritones and falsetto, someone pausing for an oral jing jing jak jing jing interlude. At another moment, they would act like patients quarantined in a mental asylum. Gopal was just as excited and distracted to the thoughts of having him eluded in a world outside the hostel, after the exams. The longing for freedom during the preparation evoked such euphoria on him; he would show signs of apprehension and restlessness. His mates would squint and howl at him, ?Are you alright?? The final board exams were only three days away. Gopal and his two friends, like the rest of the students were all busy preparing for their science examination inside a classroom. All of them were concentrated in their books. ?I?m still not confident with this theory of relativity.? Gopal complained his friends. Mohan, who was quietly practising a derivative equation, reacts with a smile and said, ?These geniuses who came up with all these laws and theories must be schizophrenics. A normal mind couldn?t come up with an idea of law of gravity by just looking at an apple falling from a tree.? ?Newton, Einstein, and Archimedes- they all are psychos.? Gopal said. Everybody laughed aloud at Gopal?s response. An electronic bell rang stridently for almost thirty seconds signalling their dinnertime.