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  Meanwhile, my mother chose an auspicious day for me to pay the tuition fee. It was a Thursday and happened to be the end of the month. My mother nagged me to pay the fee of Rs 400 that day although my father only had Rs 300 left. He told her, ‘Wait for a few days. I will get my salary and then Sudha can pay her fees.’

  My mother refused to budge. ‘Our daughter is going to college. It is a big deal. We must pay the fees today—it will be good for her studies.’

  While they were still going back and forth, my father’s assistant, Dr S.S. Hiremath, came along with his father-in-law, Patil, who was the headman of Baad village near Shiggaon, the town where I was born. Patil curiously asked what was going on and my father explained the situation to him. He then took out his wallet and gave my father a hundred rupees. He said, ‘Doctor Sahib, please accept this money. I want to gift it to this girl who is doing something path-breaking. I have seen parents take loans and sell their houses or farms to pay their sons’ fees so that they can become engineers. In fact, sometimes, they don’t even know whether their child will study properly or not. Look at your daughter. She desperately wants to do this and I think she is right.’

  ‘No, Mr Patil,’ my father refused. ‘I can’t take such an expensive gift. I will accept this as a loan and return it to you next month after I receive my salary.’

  Patil continued as though he hadn’t heard my father, ‘The most important thing is for your daughter to do her best and complete her course and become a model for other girls.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Sudha, promise me that you will always be ethical, impartial and hard-working and that you will bring a good name to your family and society.’

  I nodded meekly, suddenly humbled.

  My first day of college arrived a month later. I wore a white sari for the first time, touched the feet of all the elders at home and prayed to Goddess Saraswati who had been very kind to me. I then made my way to the college.

  As soon as I reached, the principal called me and gave me a key. He said, ‘Here, Ms Kulkarni, take this. This is the key of a tiny room in the corner of the electrical engineering department on the second floor. You can use this room whenever you want.’

  I thanked him profusely, took the key and immediately went to see the room. I opened the door excitedly, but alas! The room had two broken desks and there was no sign of a toilet. It was so dusty that I could not even consider entering it. Seeing me there, a cleaner came running with a broom in his hand. Without looking at me, he said, ‘I’m so sorry. Principal Sahib told me yesterday that a girl student was going to join the college today, but I thought that he was joking. So I didn’t clean the room. Anyway, I will do it right now.’

  After he had finished cleaning, I still felt that the room was dusty. Calmly, I told him, ‘Leave the broom here and give me a wet cloth, please. I will clean the room myself.’

  After cleaning the room to my satisfaction, I brushed off the dust on my clothes and went to class.

  When I entered the room on the ground floor, there were 149 pairs of eyes staring at me as though I were some kind of an exotic animal. It was true though. I was the 150th animal in this zoo! I knew that some of them wanted to whistle but I kept a straight face and looked around for a place to sit. The first bench was empty. As I was about to sit there, I saw that someone had spilt blue ink right in the middle of the seat. This was obviously meant for me. I felt tears threatening to spill over, but I blinked them away. Making use of the newspaper in my hand, I wiped the seat clean and sat on a corner of the bench.

  I could hear the boys whispering behind me. One grumbled, ‘Why the hell did you put ink on the seat? Now she may go and complain to the principal.’

  Another boy replied, ‘How can she prove that I have done it? There are 149 of us here.’

  Despite feeling hurt, I did not go to the principal to complain. He had already warned my father that if I complained, these boys might persist in troubling me further and I may eventually have to leave the college. So, I decided to keep quiet no matter how much these boys tried to harass me.

  The truth was that I was afraid of being so troubled by the boys’ activities that I would quit engineering altogether. I thought of ways to stay strong—physically and mentally. It would be my tapas, or penance. In that instant, I resolved that for the next four years, I would neither miss any class nor ask anyone for help with class notes. In an effort to teach myself self-restraint and self-control, I decided that until I completed my engineering degree, I would wear only white saris, refrain from sweets, sleep on a mat and take baths with cold water. I aimed to become self-sufficient; I would be my best friend and my worst enemy. I didn’t know then that such a quote already existed in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna says, ‘Atma aiva hi atmano bandhu aatma aiva ripu atmanah’.

  We really don’t need such penance to do well in our studies, but I was young and determined and wanted to do all I could to survive engineering.

  I had good teachers who were considerate and sought to look out for me in class. They would occasionally ask, ‘Ms Kulkarni, is everything okay with you?’

  Even our college principal, Professor Khanapure, went out of his way to inquire about my welfare and if any boys were troubling me.

  However, I can’t say the same about my classmates.

  One day, they brought a small bunch of flowers and stuck it in my plaited hair without my knowledge when the teacher was not around. I heard someone shout from the back—‘Ms Flowerpot!’ I quietly ran my fingers through my hair, found the flowers and threw them away. I did not say anything.

  At times, they would throw paper airplanes at my back. On unfolding the papers, I would find comments such as, ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen or in medical science or as a professor, definitely not in an engineering college.’

  Others would read, ‘We really pity you. Why are you performing penance like Goddess Parvati? At least Parvati had a reason for it. She wanted to marry Shiva. Who is your Shiva?’ I would keep the paper planes and refrain from replying.

  There was a famous student-friendly activity in our college known as ‘fishpond’. Rather than an actual fishpond, it was a fishbowl that carried a collection of anonymous notes, or the ‘fish’. Anybody from the college could write a comment or an opinion that would be read out later on our college annual day. All the students would eagerly wait to hear what funny and witty remarks had been selected that year. The designated host would stand on the stage in the college quadrangle and read the notes out loud. Every year, most of the notes were about me. I was often the target of Kannada limericks, one of which I can still remember vividly:

  Avva avva genasa,

  Kari seeri udisa,

  Gandana manege kalisa.

  This literally translates to:

  Mom, Mom, there is a sweet potato,

  Please give me a black sari and send me to my husband’s house,

  This is because I’m always wearing a white sari.

  Some of the romantic north Indian boys would modify the lyrics of songs from movies like Teesri Kasam:

  Sajan re jhoot math bolo

  Sudha ke pass jaana hai

  Na haathi hai na ghoda hai

  Vahan paidal jaana hai.

  This can be translated as:

  Dear, come on, don’t lie

  I want to go to Sudha

  I neither have an elephant nor a horse

  But I will go walking (to her).

  All the boys would then sneak a glance at me to see my reaction, but I would simply hold back my tears and try my hardest to smile.

  I knew that my classmates were acting out for a reason. It was not that they wanted to bully or harass me with deliberate intention as is the norm these days. It was just that they were unprepared—both mentally and physically—to deal with a person of the opposite sex studying with them. Our conservative society discouraged the mingling of boys and girls even as friends, and so, I was as interesting as an alien to them. My mind justified the reason for