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Chandigarh: Being an Assistant Master in my early twenties at Mayo College, Ajmer, was both a privilege and an adventure.

Few institutions could rival Mayo’s peculiar blend of grandeur, history and eccentricity: a sprawling campus of magnificent buildings, sweeping avenues, intriguing traditions and enough accumulated lore to keep generations of masters and students equally riveted. But the challenge, at least for a young bachelor like myself, overflowing with the exuberance, optimism and overconfidence of youth, was of a rather different nature.

The College was then very much a male universe and, for all its grandeur, history and companionship, it had one unavoidable limitation: there was almost no female company. This was the conservative India of the Seventies and any unattached master seeking to broaden his social horizons had little option but to look beyond the school’s imposing red sandstone and marble walls.

Fortunately, I was not destined to confront this deficiency alone after a first term of enforced social austerity. At the beginning of my second term, Howard Solverson – or Howie, as he soon became known – arrived from Canada. At the time, Mayo had an arrangement with Canadian Crossroads International, a volunteer organisation that sent young Canadians overseas to participate in educational and community projects as part of a broader cultural exchange programme.

Howie was unlike anyone Mayo had previously encountered. Tall, lanky and permanently dishevelled, with a drooping moustache, he had the unmistakable appearance of a hippie who had somehow taken a wrong turn and ended up in Rajasthan. Back in Canada, he travelled the country with little more than his guitar, earning his living by singing folk and country songs wherever audiences listened.

Within days of arriving in Ajmer – and after his first impromptu guitar session in Rajasthan House, where he was billeted – he had, quite understandably, become a minor celebrity among the College boys. And, despite our diverse backgrounds, Howie and I shared a remarkably similar outlook and became friends almost immediately. It soon also became equally obvious that we shared the same predicament: Mayo offered distinguished company, a splendidly accoutred campus and stimulation in many respects, but it was not especially conducive to the social and romantic ambitions of two unattached young men.

The problem was further compounded by the times. This was an India where finding the companionship of women outside the familiar boundaries of family and established social circles was neither simple nor straightforward, particularly for two young bachelors stationed in an almost entirely male world in a traditionalist town like Ajmer.

There were no dating apps, no social media platforms, no algorithms promising to locate one’s soulmate within a five-kilometre radius and certainly no possibility of swiping one’s way out of loneliness. Opportunities to broaden one’s social horizons were neither plentiful nor straightforward and often demanded a level of planning more commonly associated with military campaigns, involving reconnaissance, strategy, timing, contingency planning and a readiness to endure occasional reverses.

It was precisely this spirit of strategic thinking – applied, perhaps, with rather more enthusiasm than wisdom – that soon led Howie and me towards Sophia College, an undergraduate girls’ institution then situated on the outskirts of Ajmer, along the highway to Jaipur. Being respectable and upright Mayo schoolmasters, we naturally concluded that any interaction with Sophia’s senior undergraduates would have to be pursued under the most impeccable principles of education, culture and institutional cooperation.

Thus began what we regarded, at the time, as a carefully planned diplomatic initiative.

In our minds, this combined the finest traditions of educational........

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