Six Weeks of Homesick Calls, Then She Hung Up

The worst sound in boarding-school life is your own ringtone. A father from Delhi learned this on day one, between ordering dinner at his hotel below Villars and paying for it.

He had done everything right. He had read the school’s advice about goodbyes, which is to make them loving and brief. He had flown to Geneva with his fourteen-year-old daughter and a suitcase that had been packed three times. He had seen her to her room at Aiglon, high enough up the mountain that the village looks like a model railway. He had gone back down. He had ordered.

Then the video call. Tears, a room that still smelled of its last occupant, and the sentence every parent at that school has heard at least once: she had made a mistake and would like to come home.

He rang her houseparent, who was already walking down the corridor. That was day one.

Here is the rest of the first term, in numbers.

Three packings of the suitcase, before anyone left Delhi. One by the daughter, one by her mother, one by the daughter again to remove what her mother had added.

Two goodbyes. The second one, the next morning, was worse than the first, as second goodbyes always are, because both parties now know how the first one went.

Six weeks of calls. Morning break, lunch, after sport, the ten minutes before lights out. He came to know the school timetable better than she did. He took calls in meetings and in the car and once in a lift that lost signal between floors, which he counted as a mercy and then felt guilty about.

One October break at home in Delhi, featuring a great deal of sleep and, the night before the return flight, a great deal of conversation.

One call, some days later, in which he rang her and she answered and said she could not talk, because she was with her friends. Then she was gone.

He thanked God out loud in his office. He had spent six weeks praying for the phone to stop, and nobody had mentioned that the way it stops is your daughter hanging up on you.

By Christmas the reports had changed. A club with a long name. A presentation about Diwali to a room with Norwegians in it. A trip to Montreux, summarised as a hot chocolate. She could now make eggs, a skill she announced as if it carried letters after it.

I have one child at boarding school and a phone set to vibrate in every room of the house. Last month the eldest hung up on me mid-sentence to go to rowing. I rang back to check he was all right. He let it go to voicemail, which I am told is the next stage, and which I am handling worse.