Teenagers Paromita Mehta, Nihal Advani, Darius Engineer and Sunidhi Menon all fall sick with chicken pox at the same time. Stuck at home and with each other, they form the Chicken Pox Club. The summer workshop on detection and investigations the three of them had signed up for is closed to them now, so they decide to do some detecting on their own. They don’t need to look far for a mystery to solve. A week back, their neighbour, Sandra Saldanha, poet and Eng Lit professor, had fallen to her death from her balcony, straight into their apartment’s swimming pool. Find out what happens next.
An Excerpt From The Body In The Swimming Pool: The Chicken Pox Club Investigates
How It All Began
The events leading up to Thursday, May 4
The Orchard by Kotecha comprises four sixty-four-storeyed, silverish, bean-shaped buildings. The buildings are arranged like the blades of a ceiling fan around a vast, round swimming pool.
Although the complex is named The Orchard, it has more buildings than trees. To make up for this, Mr Kotecha has named the buildings after trees. Banyan, Gulmohar, Cedar and Maple. (Neither a maple nor a cedar could possibly survive in the heat and dust of Parel, but Mr Kotecha is not one to bother with details like natural habitats.)
Five hundred and seven families live in The Orchard. Most of them live here, not because the buildings are impersonating trees, but because of the swimming pool and the tennis courts and the library and the grocery store and the temple and the Starbucks and the expensive French restaurant and the free shuttle to the mall and the in-house doctor.
‘Worth it for the facilities,’ the adults gloat, whenever they queue up for the lift with their Vanilla Lattes. ‘We don’t need to leave the complex only. All amenities are right here.’
Whenever I overhear such comments, I do a mental eyeroll.
Just think about it. The doctor in question is Dr Prabhu, a pasty-faced individual who mewls at the sight of blood. (Before him, it was the eighty-four-year-old Dr Saxena, who was forced to retire three months ago after he started prescribing jumbled-up mantras and cow ghee instead of medicine.)
The library in question has never heard of A Wrinkle in Time. ‘Is it a part of the Geronimo Stilton series?’ the librarian asked me last week before feebly pawing through the shelves of Dan Brown, self-help books and crumbling volumes bequeathed by the families of Mr Menon and Dr Kavaksh (both of whom died last year after being treated by the dubious, incorrect-mantra-prescribing Dr Saxena).
The swimming pool in question has made it to all the newspapers under headlines like ‘Pool of Horror’ and ‘Dive of Death’.
And the keep-children-busy-in-summer amenity is the Kotecha’s Summer Selebrations, which offers expensive workshops with misleading names like ‘Swim your way to the Olympics’ and ‘Paint like Picasso’.
Every summer, parents rush to enroll their children in the workshops, while saying in smugger-than-usual voices:
‘Keeps them occupied. Otherwise, they get so bored.’
‘Otherwise they spend the whole day on their devices. So bad for the eyes.’
‘It was for these facilities only that we moved to The Orchard.’
During the four years that I have lived in Banyan Towers, I have staunchly refused to be a part of the Kotecha Summer Selebrations. I am not interested in fitness, Bollywood dance, swimming or art. I abhor deliberate misspellings. And I can’t imagine anything more humiliating than the Summer Selebration Finale for which Mr Kotecha descends from his lofty heights— an obese penthouse protruding from the terrace of Maple Towers—and distributes certificates with one hand while holding phone to ear with the other.
I had planned to spurn the Selebrations this year too, but changed my mind when I spotted a poster in the library. The poster sported a bloody knife, a gun, and a bottle bearing the label ‘Deadly Cyanide’. This is what it said:
Summer Selebration Surprise! ‘The Clue Crew’
Presenting, for the first time, a workshop for young detectives.
In this you will learn how to:
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Examine the scene of the murder
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Listen to what the corpse is telling you
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Get introduced to new technologies
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Analyze body-language and handwriting
Unique opportunity: Meet Prakash Talwar, Mumbai’s foremost detective and ask him about his cases and his strategies.
Free upon registration: one magnifying glass, one fingerprint kit and one copy of The Detective’s Bible.
Number of sessions: 12
Course facilitator: Rehana Iqbal, MS in Forensic Science from Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Capacity: 15
Hurry to book your slot and avoid disappointment!!!!
Whenever people ask me what I plan to become when I grow up, I say that I want to be a physicist and research dark matter. But sometimes—in my more frivolous moments—I daydream about being a detective.
Extracted from The Body in the Swimming Pool: The Chicken Pox Club Investigates by Shabnam Minwalla. Published by Talking Cub (the children’s imprint of Speaking Tiger).
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