Desperation and Pencil Lead
This is the beginning of a story, very loosely based on real childhood experiences, that I had been kicking around in my head for many years before a writing class exercise in 2014 demanded that I actually start to write it.
In 1995, and I imagine for much of his life afterwards, Ashok, the owly-eyed, snot-nosed poor kid, asserted his earthly presence only as the prime suspect in a nearby crime. We founded the Youth Sleuth Agency solely to materialise investigation trails leading from missing pencils, erasers, waterbottles and Reebok Pumps to his lunch-break hideout behind elephant rock, where the little bastard would be found chewing on one or another extremity of the missing object.
Our letterheads (which we bribed the Vice-Principal’s steno with half a pack of my father’s Marlboros to typeset and cyclostyle) showed Shashank, Vivek and myself as all being Chief Investigator. Privately, though, each of us either prefixed Supervising to our own titles or Assistant to those of the other two. We were the brains, the seers-of-the- bigger-picture. We were what remained at the apex of the chain of command after inferior grasps of molecular chemistry consigned everyone else to a variety of menial roles — reporting on the contents of Ashok’s desk drawer every morning, following his covetous gaze through the day (usually out of windows, up skirts, occasionally to the blackboard), and kicking dirt in his face every evening, just in case.
On case days, the three of us commandeered the chalkpowdery teacher’s desk between classes, granting the Youth Sleuth Agency’s rank and file an audience. We collated their whispers, retreated into a huddle, and fashioned the giant accusatory finger of Motive (greed, poverty, hunger, resentment, and the one time we may have got it right, in The Case of the Missing Deo Stick — body odour) and Forensic Evidence — largely confined to simple acid-base reactions. Then we pointed it at Ashok’s empty desk, and Rajiv would take over. Rajiv’s repeated membership requests had initially been turned down on account of his voice being too girly, but after he proved himself by voluntarily giving chase in The Case of the Missing Staedler 2B, tripping and tackling and pinning Ashok to freshly manured ground, holding tight while having pellet after pellet of phlegm, spit, desperation and pencil lead shot between his eyes, he had earned his title of Chief Apprehender many times over.
In the early days, these episodes ended with the vengeful owner of the stolen item punching Ashok in the stomach or spraying ink on his shirt. Out of compassion we did not know we possessed, we always placed retributive kicks to his balls off limits. Then Madhav, son of a criminal lawyer and grandson of a High Court judge, tried to elbow his way into our cerebral corner by inventing and appointing himself to the position of Legal Counsel (justifying it by throwing terms like habeas corpus at us two years before our Civics syllabus would reveal him to be the fraud we always suspected he was). He held farcical trials in which he simultaneously prosecuted, defended (less eagerly), judged and sentenced Ashok, who sat silent in a corner, flicking boogers into the hair of the boy in front. When we noticed Madhav’s theatrics were starting to divert simpering female admiration away from us, we countered by having Rajiv throw water on his pants before each trial so he’d shut up and sit down.
Eventually, we accumulated a Documentation team — three writers recommended by their full-marks-earning mid-term English compositions, and the rich twins with a Yashica camera that automatically wound the film between exposures (and whose father had already promised them a Handycam for their birthday). Our casefiles, neatly handwritten on foolscap paper and adorned with closeup shots of Ashok’s face pressed against a great variety of surfaces, had grown an inch thick in an abandoned beaker closet in the Chemistry lab.
And so it went, until at a Special Staff Meeting, I counted fourteen members organised in five departments, poised to vote on the admission of six eager new applicants. All of us, allied alongside a whole branch of science, no less, against one thieving child with a likely calcium deficiency. That was when it first occurred to me — to anyone watching from the outside, it might appear that it was Ashok who was winning.
