“The silence was deafening and the crack of a twig to the corner of the house indicated the approach of the intruder…….” I dragged myself out of the suspense filled pages of the Famous Five I was reading and returned to the mundane reality of my mother knocking on the bathroom door.

This was my retreat when I had reached a very interesting stage of the current book I was reading and as usual my mother would tell me to get on with my studies. Oh well, only a few more exams to go and then I would be free to read as much as I wanted.

Holidays! regular trips to the library, late breakfasts, lazy days eating ice sticks, listening to the drone of the bees in the shade of our favorite haunt under the bougainvillea tree- all this was starting to get a bit boring. My friends and I were thinking of possibilities on how to liven things up a bit.

As I was settling myself into a comfortable position on the granite block I was using as a stool, the Famous Five book I was reading fell to the ground from my lap.

Ray caught sight of the book cover and this is how the ‘Three Find Outers’ originated. Ray, Sonali his sister and my classmate and my self were the members of the new found club- between the three of us we had an abundance of ideas. Most of which sounded very similar to the numerous mystery  books which was were our favorites.

We first got our selves a pocket book and a pencil each. The immediate need was to create a code language which only we would be able to transcribe and understand and this took us a day or so.

The next item on the agenda was making secret signs, even a simple good morning seemed so much more exciting in a secret hand gesture. Next we trained our selves in the art of shadowing people. Our main camouflage was the bougainvillea hanging in front of the house. We could observe the road and  the people coming and going on it without being noticed .

The next few days went by in improving our skills in shadowing people and detailed notes were kept in our pocket diaries. The funniest part was when Ray managed to fall off the wall in the process of shadowing his suspect. His frightened yell gave the poor man the fright of his life.

Now we were trained to be amateur detectives. We had a code language to communicate, we even had learned the trick of invisible writing and getting out of locked rooms but there was now one big problem- we had no mystery to solve!

After our initial training period we started getting very bored with nothing exciting happening in our neighborhood. No one was getting murdered, robbed or kidnapped. There was no secret light signaling at night not even an ordinary burglary. Our neighborhood had boring law abiding people and no one needed our expertise. We even made friends with the night Ghorka- watchman. He told us of many of the escapades he had had with thieves and sinister characters but they all seemed to have happened a depressingly long time ago.

Then it happened, what we had been waiting for, Sonali and Ray,s mother lost a valuable heirloom in the form of a water container. It was large and been in the family for more than 2 generations, and it had disappeared from right under their noses and in broad day light. This was very exciting, we immediately made a list of the evidence and clues. We had several theories on how the thief would have done the theft. The investigations went on for 2 days; several meals were picnic lunches under the bougainvillea tree.

Sonali’s mom who was aware of all the developments seemed quiet content to leave all the responsibility to us. By the end of the second day we had a list of suspects, a list of their activities and we even shadowed some of them. Even the routs the thief could have taken were carefully mapped and we enacted his movements. Any one who entered the house started feeling edgy because they were followed around by 3 kids who suddenly seemed very interested in every thing they did and kept asking them all kinds of questions.

Afternoon day three - we found the container in a disused drum in the far corner of the  garden. This drum was used to keep old unused things like gardening tools and flower pots. The thief was either planning to hide it there till he got a chance to take it out of the compound  or some kind soul felt we needed a little some thing to brighten up our holidays.

Either way I am ever grateful  to who ever it was because it made our holidays a memorable one. Even though we could not go out camping  and have adventures in exotic places like Julian, George, Dick, Anne and Timmy, we had an adventure right in our own back yard.