[Testimony of Padma Patil, oral history collected for Hogwarts: The Dumbledore Years (2007), edited by B. Braithwaite. Patil’s account was not included in the text; interview shared by author, accessed 2021.]
I remember for a time thinking that nearly every class in our first-year was on about Nicholas Flamel. And I said to Morag, one of the girls in my House, ‘he’s likely to be on the OWL, yes?’ She said she’d made the same note of it. It was like they’d all shifted their lesson plans a moment to talk about it. We were in the middle of Goblin Rebellions or something, something blasted boring, and then one day Binns, the History professor, just turned suddenly to ‘and then there is of course the extraordinary case of Nicholas Flamel. . .’ as if that was any sort of a sensible transition. And then we were making elementary calming draughts and the Potions professor made a comment about its compositional similarities to the Elixir of Life. And then McGonagall went on about the differences between spell transfiguration and alchemical transfiguration when we were transforming pins into nails. I thought almost like it was a game, like they were putting down clues, like in one of those murder mystery games or whatnot. Morag and I, we checked out a couple books from the library to read up on him, anyway. Just in case it would be important, you know, for our OWL. So then it was odd at the end of the year when rumours broke out that the Philosopher’s Stone had been stored at Hogwarts, and that something or other had happened to it. None of that got well confirmed, you know. I think they sent a letter out to our parents at the end of the year, some explanatory whatsit. I don’t remember, I was quite young, you know. But I did remember how we’d had those several weeks of suddenly hearing about the man, and then when the Stone turned up in rumour about the school, Morag and I at least knew exactly what it was and who had created it and – well, we never did know why it was there. But Hogwarts was always housing experiments, advanced research, such things. Maybe the 7th-year alchemy students were working with it. I never took that course as my 7th year was the Bad Year. I never did know what they got up to. But I remember it all because I found it quite queer, those – resonances. Hogwarts was full of them. I reckon that’s the magic of the place, yeah? You know, the man, Flamel, he died shortly after all of that. I remember finding out several years later. I had the most horrible thought – what if, whatever did happen there, at Hogwarts, what if that had a role in it? His death, I mean. What if something happened to the Stone? But then my sister said to me, well he’s already lived quite awhile, hasn’t he, it’s harldy a tragedy to say he died at age 583 or whatever – so that put it out of my mind, I guess. But still – all so queer. So queer.
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