It was an SMS that announced itself with a beep in the afternoon on 29 March 2008. It read simply – Chitra ma’am died today. An SMS doing the rounds on the SPV (Sardar Patel Vidyalaya) alumni circuit. I sat back and read the SMS again and again, and then dutifully forwarded it to the numbers of all the other SPV alumni listed on my cellphone. Funnily, it was tragic news that was perfectly believable, and I remembered her tiny frame. I remembered, with a tinge of guilt, how we’d joke as Chitra ma’am shrank back nervously when tall boys would venture within half a meter radius of her, scared that they would stamp on her feet, or how we gleefully photographed her trying to climb an elephant during a class trip to the Bandhavgarh tiger reserve, her foot not reaching the first step of the ladder… how it never occurred to our enthusiastic, overconfident, smart-assed 16 year old selves that she was so small, so frail and so vulnerable.