Foxy Foursome

FOXY FOURSOME

In the third of the Foxy Four series, Charu, Padma, Jahan and Mandy are at it again: solving mysteries, breaking the rules, dodging eagle-eyed gatekeepers, careening around in Aunt Razia’s car, and driving their school principal crazy!

Travel with our four feisty friends to a crumbling old haveli in Bhopal; to the Kalakshetra dance school in Chennai; pandalhopping at Durga Puja; and crime-busting in the gullies of Old Delhi.

Each story is narrated by one of the girls. Mandy, the fashionista babe, reveals a surprising brain beneath that perfect hair. Padma may be a computer geek, but she knows a thing or two about classical music. Jahan seems like the coolheaded type, but even she gets the shivers in a haunted haveli. And then there’s Charu, who everyone knows, is just destined to be a writer…

FOXY FOURSOME

Subhadra Sen Gupta has written over twenty-five books for children and young readers, including detective thrillers, historical fiction, biographies, ghost stories and comic books. She lives in Delhi and can be reached at subhadrasg@gmail.com.

Other books in the Foxy Four series:

Double Click!

Star Struck!

YOUNG ZUBAAN

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First published by Zubaan 2014

Copyright © Subhadra Sen Gupta, 2014

All rights reserved

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eBook ISBN: 9789384757069

Print source ISBN: 9789383074020

This eBook is DRM-free.

Zubaan is an independent feminist publishing house based in New Delhi with a strong academic and general list. It was set up as an imprint of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, and carries forward Kali’s tradition of publishing world quality books to high editorial and production standards. Zubaan means tongue, voice, language, speech in Hindustani. Zubaan is a non-profit publisher, working in the areas of the humanities, social sciences, as well as in fiction, general non-fiction, and books for children and young adults under its Young Zubaan imprint.

Typeset by Jojy Phillip, New Delhi 110 015

Printed at Raj Press, R-3 Inderpuri, New Delhi 110 012

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Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to the Reader

Dedication

This is Me, Charu...

Mandy

Jahan

Padma

Charu

To my foxy & fabulous bestest friend

RUKMINI CHATURVEDI

with love

THIS IS ME, CHARU…

The Foxy Three are mad at me and it’s absolutely not my fault. Cross my heart and hope to die and all that…

Now you know us, right? We are the Foxy Four – Jahan, Padma, Mandy and me, Charu. You know we like to get into trouble and often end up having crazy adventures and solving mysteries. After all, you have read the books I’ve written.

My books! Oh dear lord! That’s where the trouble started.

It all began one September evening as we were having dinner at the school hostel dining hall. It was chicken curry night and I was feeling sorta moony and happy about it.

"You know guys, it’s time, I think… ummm… munch… chew… to hit the keyboard again."

Jahan frowned at me. Why? New history project?

Nah, moron! To write a new book! We’ve had so many new adventures recently and I’ve not written about any of them. And now that I have a laptop… I did a happy wriggle, …from tonight I can…

Hold it, buddy! Padma raised a palm. I have something to say. Feeling a bit puzzled, I nodded. How come you’re the only one who writes the books?

Because I’m the only one who can write?

That made Mandy sit up. Reeeally, babe? What about my poem that came out in the school magazine?

Yeah riiight. When you were what? In class six? And it’s so weird, I even remembered the lines. Pretty, pretty butterfly; flying, flying oh so high…

Where are you going? Up in the sky! Jahan completed the poem with a sneaky grin.

Hey – at least it rhymed, Mandy said defensively.

Well, to get back to what I was saying, Padma said firmly, "we all solve the mysteries and all have the adventures together and so we should all write about them."

Hah! I wasn’t giving up without a fight. Then even Aunt Razia should write a book and Sister Rose and Netra and Dildar…

Don’t be stupid, Char, Padma glared at me, pushing up her glasses, these are Foxy Four adventures and…

…and we’re the Foxy Four! Mandy finished.

My heart was sinking to my rubber chappals. "You can’t! You’ll ruin the book and my editor Anita Roy will reject it! She’s very clever and hates bad grammar!"

Padma leaned across the table, her eyes wide with surprise. "What did ya say Char? I have bad grammar?"

Well… ummm… not you… but Jahan does and Mandy’s spellings are horrible and they don’t read too many books.

Who cares about grammar? Jahan had a dreamy look in her eyes. I want to write about that ghostly adventure at our haveli in Bhopal…

And I want to do a story about my stay at Kalakshetra and about Vijayan and all the crazy things that happened to him. Padma’s eyes gleamed behind her glasses.

And what about you, fashionista babe? I turned to Mandy. We haven’t had any adventures in Bollywood or at the India Fashion Week. So what will you write about?

Mandy flapped a lazy hand in the air. Fashion? Films? Nah! she said, to our utter astonishment. I want to tell the story of Netra’s daughter, Kajari.

I sat silent, thoughtfully licking a spoon as the Foxy Three stared at me with big, questioning eyes and an identical grim expression. And then it hit me. They were really and truly mad at me!

Okay… but on one condition.

WHAT? they snapped all together.

I want to get a look at the stories first, maybe make a few corrections… you know, spellings, factual errors, that sorta stuff .

Done! said Mandy, starting to smile.

Okay! said Jahan.

Fine… Padma began, as long as you don’t interfere with my creative imagination.

Mandy began to giggle, "Oooh, you have a creative imagination? Jahan and I began to laugh too. Since when?"

Padma lunged across the table to hit Mandy, a glass of water toppled over into the bowl of dal and our warden Mrs. Mathai yelled from the other end of the dining hall, YOU FOUR! To your room now!

So now, my dear readers, you have been warned – the four stories in this book have been written by four different Foxies. And each of us will be taking you on an exciting trip. Jahan to her family haveli in Bhopal; Padma to the dance school called Kalakshetra in Chennai; Mandy has chosen to stay in the school in Delhi and I’ll be zipping off to a Durga Puja celebration in Old Delhi.

Knowing the Foxy Three, I thought I’d do all the introductions right at the start. They’ve already started writing and I’m frankly dreading what they’ll produce. Mandy spells the American way, mixes up her apostrophes and sometimes creates her own words. Like if she finds something very exciting she says, It’s a total jang! Jang? Really? Jahan does not believe in commas or capital letters. Padma will be very grammatical but her ‘creative imagination’ resembles the mind of a robot.

Sigh… and then they’ll argue at my comments and fuss about my corrections. I think as the editor, I’m going to have a really tough time. But then they do have a point. I couldn’t be the storyteller every time, get my name on the cover of the book and grab all the limelight. We are always a team.

Now, for those of you who have not met us before, let me tell you a bit about the Foxy Four.

We are seventeen and have just been promoted to class twelve of St. Teresa Convent in Delhi. We stay in the school hostel, share a room and have been friends like forever. We really are BFF till we die. When we were in class nine we decided to give our gang a secret name, so we are the Foxy Four.

I’m not feeling modest today and so I’ll start by introducing myself. I’m Charu Roy Chaudhuri. I’m in the humanities stream with Mandy and we have history (my fave subject) and economics (not so fave). Jahan and Padma have science subjects as both of them love maths and physics, though they are not too hot on biology. You should see Jahan make a mess of all the Latin names.

What I really like doing is lying in bed with a packet of bhujia and a big, fat detective novel. If they gave me marks for reading books, I’d be top of the class. Books, oily snacks and lying around. I’m sorta, well… no other way to say it… I’m fat. At least, that is what our jogging queen Jahan says. I think I’m only plump but it does mean I have thighs that look like tree trunks and have to wear long skirts to hide them. One day, I’m going to be a really famous writer, wear dangly earrings, ethnic kurtas, dark brown lipstick, stick up my hair with wooden hair pins and look, you know… intellectual. Whenever I say this, Jahan grins and says, Some hope!

We two changed our names when we were filling in school forms in class nine. I snipped my name from Charulata to Charu and Jahan hacked away at Jahanara. Imagine me being named after some Satyajit Ray heroine who wore puff -sleeved blouses and chewed paan. And Jahan was named after a Mughal princess! Parents can be such freaks when it comes to naming their children.

No one could look less like a Mughal princess than Jahan Khan. She is 5 foot 9 inches tall, lives in tees, jeans and sneakers, and she’s cut her hair so short that from the back, she looks like a boy. She’s the school running champ, has got into the Delhi State athletics team and dreams of going to the Olympics. Right from class five, Jahan and I have been extra close. She only talks to me about really personal things like her parent’s divorce. Her mother lives in Bhopal; her father, who has married again, lives in Pune and most of the time likes to forget that he has a daughter.

Luckily, Jahan has an aunt called Razia and she’s so awesome, we all call her the Aunt Who Rocks. She lives in Delhi, teaches history in a college, has two lunatic dogs and a genius cook called Girdhar. When Jahan’s super-rich dad forgets to send her school fees – which is pretty often – it’s Aunt Razia who steps in. Somehow, she always gets involved in our adventures and she’s even better than us at getting into trouble. Our school principal, Sister Marie Rose, is an old classmate of Aunt Razia’s and she says Razia never grew up. I can like, totally believe that.

Mandy is Mandeep Ahuja and her dream is to get her photo on a magazine cover and have a zillion fans on Facebook. Right now, her FB friends are stuck at the weird number of 63 and it’s making her weep. Oh, she’s beautiful, no doubt about that; huge eyes with long eyelashes, a pouty, pale pink mouth, long wavy hair and a curvy figure I would die for. She dreams of being a fashion model and/or film star but there is the problem of her dad. He is in the Air Force and goes ballistic if she even puts on nail polish, so being Mandy-the-Supermodel anytime soon is going to be sorta tough.

Mandy may look like an Indian Barbie but in fact, she’s no dimwit. If she’s interested in something, she reads up everything about it. Films, fashion, even television stars, she’s an encyclopaedia of totally stupid facts about them all. I mean, Hello? Who wants to know if Ranbir is dating Katrina or Deepika? When Mandy is in one of her silly moods and going omeegod… omeegod hysterically about a new shade of lipstick, Padma usually marches out of the room and goes for a walk.

Padma is Padmaja Mani and if I’m fat, she’s thin. If I am all dreamy and fuzzy-headed, she is all logic and super-brainy. She wears glasses that slide down her long thin nose when she’s excited. Her only passion is computers – she went into a serious funk when Steve Jobs died. The day her parents bought her a laptop, she danced down the school driveway singing at the top of her voice.

I really irritate Padma because she says I have confused thought processes and lack logic. You would think logic and computer programming were some kind of religion. Well, they are for her. We’re like chalk and cheese and weirdly, that makes us super-friends. To explain further: say we two go on a morning