Sunday evenings are grim. The light is thin and grey, the air is heavy, and the mood is as soggy as wet socks.
The evening of May 7 was all of this and more.
The sky that pressed against my bedroom window was a fluorescent purple that made me think of plastic flowers and particulate pollution. The honks and shouts from the people on the road – after too many frappuccinos in the tummy and too many hours in the mall – sounded loud and aggressive even on the 49th floor.
The scatter of boils made my arms sore and itchy. And the deliberate vagueness with which my father announced that he was heading out for a drink with “a friend” made my mood sorer and itchier. “Which friend?” I brooded, convinced that he was going out with the one person that I didn’t want him to go out with. “What’s he hiding?”
All this, though, was just the backdrop to the real crisis. The disaster du jour.
The missing scrap of paper. Which after two hours of hunting had continued to remain missing. And had no business going missing in the first place.
I had placed the piece of paper in the front right corner of my dressing table drawer last evening. (Four people had seen me do it.)
I had used a brown ceramic cow with a smug expression as a paperweight. (The same four people had seen me place the cow, and one of the four had passed sniggery remarks about my ‘OCD’ tendencies.)
Over the next twenty-four hours, I had opened the dressing table drawer just twice. Once to pull out a scrunchy. Once to put away a butterfly clip. So I was unprepared for the nasty shock awaiting me at 4 pm on Sunday evening.
I had just finished reading A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on my Kindle. (We’re not going anywhere this summer. Not even Alibag or Matheran. Which is why my father, in a fit of guilt and foolhardiness, told me that I could buy up to 125 books over the holidays. I’ve made the most of this offer. I’ve already spent as much as a round trip to Delhi and by the time summer is done, I plan to spend as much as a round trip to Singapore.)
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder had put me in a clue-cracking, case-solving mood – which is why I decided to tackle the clue that was so obligingly sitting in my dressing table drawer.
I laid out my pencil box and my old HDFC Bank diary on my desk. Then I walked to the dressing table, pulled open the drawer and blinked. Then I rummaged around the drawer and blinked some more. But no amount of rummaging and blinking changed things.
The paper had vanished. As had the left ear of the ceramic cow.
It was a puzzle – and no matter how much I pondered, I could only come up with two rather unsatisfactory solutions.
Solution One: The paper had escaped without help. It had biffed the ceramic cow on the left ear, hopped out of the drawer, and scurried away into a dusty corner. (9/10 on the Improbability Index.)
Solution Two: The paper had escaped with help. Someone had crept into my bedroom, opened my dressing table drawer, manhandled the ceramic cow, ignored my diamond earrings and ruby bracelet, and tiptoed away with the muddy, crumply scrap of paper. (10/10 on the Improbability Index.)
No matter how the paper had vanished, however, I had to find it before the next meeting of the Chicken Pox Club. Which meant that I had to pull myself together and get down to work.
Whenever I encounter a problem in Physics or English Literature or Algebra, I begin with the relevant textbook – Selina Concise Physics, Wonder of Words or whatever. When it comes to investigating, I guess the closest thing I have to a textbook is The Detective’s Bible by Alfred Roonig and Dan Hodder. So that is where I decided to start.
Pulling out my Xeroxed and spiral-bound copy of The Detective’s Bible, I leafed through the pages before alighting on a chapter called, “The Ten Rules of Sensible Sleuthing”.
The First Rule of Sensible Sleuthing is to seek clues in obvious places. So that is what I did. I hunted high and low. I examined my bookshelves and the spidery space beneath my bed. I emptied two drawers, checked behind curtains and peered under rugs. An hour later, all I had for my trouble was a dust-induced sniffle and a very bad feeling.
The Second Rule of Sensible Sleuthing is to interrogate the obvious suspects. In this case, there were only two obvious suspects. I hurried out of my bedroom and accosted both.
Meena didi was Obvious Suspect No. 1.
She sniffed and said that she never touched my things. That she had stopped touching them since the day I had called her meddlesome and colour blind. Then she sniffed some more to show that she was still offended, even though my outburst had taken place five whole months ago.
(Okay, fine! It’s true that I’d overreacted when Meena didi put my charcoal grey T-shirt in the black T-shirt pile. But it’s also true that Meena didi overreacted to my overreaction. She spent the next fortnight slamming doors, crashing pans, and doling out cold tea and warm nimbu pani. I didn’t want a repeat of the cold-tea treatment, so I didn’t question her further, even though Alfred Roonig and Dan Hodder clearly expected me to do so.)
My father was Obvious Suspect No. 2.
He pointed out that he never dared to touch my stuff. Then he suggested that I may have forgotten where I put the paper. This was so ridiculous that I could only stare at him, widen my eyes, and ask, “Really?”
To which he could only look apologetic and mumble, “Probably not.”
Anybody who has met me for ten minutes knows that I am not a misplacer of objects, a forgetter of names, a muddler of facts. Anybody who has spent a little more time with me understands why my school nickname is Meht-iculous.
I dislike nicknames. But if I must have one then Meht-iculous is better than Mehtallica or Par-abola or something. Firstly, it’s accurate. Secondly, it’s tricky to pronounce, so most people end up using my real name instead.
My real name, incidentally, is Paromita Mehta.
I am fourteen years old.
My IQ is 147, which is more than Barack Obama but considerably less than Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. (I’m working on it. It’s possible.)
I am left-brained. High on logic, low on imagination. (Which is fine by me.)
The adjectives that are most often used to describe me are bright, bossy and capable. (Which is also fine by me.)
I am four feet and ten inches tall and hoping for a growth spurt. My hair is straight and cut in a bob. (My Nani tells me I’m pretty and that I look like my mother, but I can’t see it.)
My favourite colour is a greeny aqua. My favourite fruit is mango. My least favourite vegetable is cauliflower.
My only hobby is reading.
My favourite book of the moment is Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. My favourite book of forever is The Catcher in the Rye. (I managed to borrow it from the “Only with Permission” shelf in the school library when our dragon librarian had dengue. Otherwise, I would’ve had to wait another two years to read it.
I live on the 49th floor of Banyan Towers, which is one of four buildings in a complex called The Orchard by Kotecha. (Yes. It’s the same complex that’s been on the front page of all the newspapers this week. But not the same building. The murder took place in Maple Towers, though we all share the same swimming pool. Unfortunately.)
I am a student at All Saints School. Once the school year starts, I will be in Grade 9.
On that purple Sunday evening, though, school was still forty-four days away. The summer holidays had barely begun, and I was in my green-blue bedroom, swallowing Crocin, watching the sky turn into tar, and feeling agitated.
It was to calm myself that I uncapped a black gel pen, opened the HDFC Bank diary to a blank page and began to write. Everything. No matter how insignificant. No matter how irrelevant.
I wrote about the birth of the Chicken Pox Club and our first assignment. About the grimy sheet of paper that Nihal Advani had produced from his backpack. About all the people who had floated through my apartment in the last twenty-four hours. About the conversations we had had and the observations we had made.
And, of course, I wrote about Sandra Saldanha. The Eighth Rule of Sensible Sleuthing states that the moment you start a new case, you must make detailed notes. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Chicken Pox Club had just embarked on its first case – even if I had managed to lose its first clue.
Excerpted with permission from The Body in The Swimming Pool: The Chicken Pox Club Investigates, Shabnam Minwalla, Talking Cub.
