Sleuths in Scabs: The Chicken Pox Club’s Deadly Discovery
Mumbai is a city that oozes mayhem, murder and mischief. The layered island city is an apt setting for young adult detectives whose summer has been hemmed in by a contagious, pockmarking disease: chicken pox. One of the pleasures associated with chickenpox is that one can mingle with afflicted others. In The Body in the Swimming Pool by Shabnam Minwalla, “The Chicken Pox Club” investigates the horrific drowning of a sweet, old lady in one of Mumbai’s high rise complexes, even as its members collectively progress through the various stages of varicella (the scientific name for chicken pox).
They collect clues and list suspects as red bumps give way to fluid-filled blisters and crusty scabs. Perhaps, a neighborhood murder is what any doctor needs to order. The early sullenness of being-stuck-at-home evaporates when Paromita Mehta and her fact-hunting peers ponder over a chilling puzzle: who pushed the affable and popular Sandra Saldhana from her 56th floor balcony into the head-shattering depths of the centrally-located pool?
Mehta, whose nickname is “Meht-i-culous” has the makings of a skillful sleuth. To begin with, she’s “bright, bossy and capable.” Moreover, she delves into textbooks to burnish her murder-cracking know-how. Like into The Detective’s Bible by Alfred Roonig and Dan Hodder or A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. Combining her own list-making, logical left brain with three other determined and curious crime busters makes for a team cleverer than the famously bumbling police. Besides books, the young sleuths also sign up for a summer workshop for would-be detectives, to ensure some adult oversight on their zealous and treacherous digging around.
Minwalla’s twinkly-eyed wit pervades her pages. For instance, of another club member, the bouncy Sunidhi Menon, Paromita observes: “I’ve never gotten along with giggly, popular, American-accented girls and they’ve never gotten along with me. I see them as fakes and flakes. They see me as a geek.” Layers of the maximum city are laid bare. At first, in a somewhat expected, perhaps intentionally cliched fashion, the driver is suspected and even arrested. But he’s also released, for lack of evidence.
It’s also a book about books. Clues are sometimes found in pages tucked into library books. Where the text on the page number might matter as much as cryptic inscriptions on poetry fragments and bills. One of the takeaways is that one must beware of murdering readers. And writers. Because surely they will leave textual trails that the canniest killers would be hard put to obliterate. Better still if the to-be-murdered enroll in libraries. Clues can be slid into ordered titles or scattered among unshelved piles.
Linking the murder to the long-ago disappearance of two students, an incident that had clearly shaken the literature professor (Sandra Saldhana) enough to pen an article in a newspaper, the children start interviewing Saldhana’s friends. And discover connections between an unresolved past and a menacing present. They even visit a cemetery to study the grave of a previous death. Capturing the import and even necessity of gossip, the narrative also exposes the frissons of class, gender and age.
Tall, securitized towers accord a view of the heaving city, and also of a pristine pool. At the end though, just as the pasts tend to leak into the present, boundaries between outside and inside are always more porous and tenuous than residents would like to think. And sometimes it takes the young to rip through adult fallacies. We could do with more chicken pox clubs to delve into the many and various mysteries that stitch up our cities.
About the Author: Shabnam Minwalla was formerly a journalist who’s wandered across various parts of Mumbai. She’s authored many other books for young readers and in her works, the city shines through with an acuity that only a true insider can beget.
References
Shabnam Minwalla, The Body in the Swimming Pool, Talking Cub, Speaking Tiger Books, 2024