If Amar hadn’t needed a glass of water at 3 in the night and if he didn’t fall down the stairs when he went to get it and if he didn’t go to hospital the next day with his injured hand and if he didn’t have accidents there, perhaps the mystery behind National Hospital would have taken a much longer time to be resolved. Khyrunnisa A’s novels always involve this butterfly effect and you can trace the incidents in the last pages to the first, to the starting point of it all – in this case, a dream Amar has about meeting badminton stars PV Sindhu and Saina Nehwal, which wakes him up thirsty in the middle of the night.
There, badminton is the premise of this new novel in the Butterfingers series – Smash it, Butterfingers! – you tell yourself, in case the really obvious cover image had not given you the hint. But that’s the thing – badminton is just the cover. Underneath the cover is the messy world of superstitions, entangled in many people’s lives, whether they realise it or not. Amar’s English teacher realises, for instance, that she too subscribes to one form of superstition or another, she just hadn’t thought about it.
Amar, our hero, is at the most convenient age of 13 (as he always has been, and luckily for him, always will be). It is only a matter of tying the unlucky number to a game debunking superstitions. On cue arrives the email from a crazy millionaire to Amar’s very fidgety principal Jagmohan (a personal favourite, because he brings the best humour in the book without ever intending to) the very same day Amar goes to the hospital for his hand. The millionaire wants to debunk superstitions by holding a badminton match between 13-year-olds in two schools, and he wants to hold it on Friday the 13th. Jagmohan might have done nothing more than fidget a little more if the email didn’t come with the promise of attractive prize money – just the amount the school was in urgent need of.
The basics of a Butterfingers novel are now set – you have a sport, you have Amar’s class VIII A playing it, you have humour and you have mystery. The last begins at the hospital, which not only seems to have a superstitious management (number 13 missing from room numbers and bed numbers), but has rude doctors and something shady lurking about.
Amar also meets the good cop – the good doctor Nirmal in this case, who is not just nice but was also a badminton champ in his university days. While Amar has habitually been knocking down things and people in the past four novels, here at last was a doctor at hand, ready to fix the broken limbs. In a regular household Amar might be the most annoying child, but in Khyrunnisa’s novel he somehow becomes closer to the reader because of his shenanigans. Reason – he never does any of this willingly; it is not done for the sake of pranks, as certain child characters are written. Accidents just tag along with Amar wherever he goes, earning him the name Butterfingers. And going by the history of the novels, a good thing too, since it has helped solve many mysteries.
Khyrunnisa with the new set of books at Modern Book Centre, Thiruvananthapuram
If you love Amar, it is because the author does. You can see the love behind the words even as the principal and Amar’s serious father, Kishen, frown at the boy’s clumsiness. But along with his butterfingers Amar also has a pretty bright mind, observing little details like children do, which comes in handy later. Like the missing numbers at the hospital.
More elements of superstition pour in from everywhere in the days leading to the badminton match. A black cat mysteriously appears in the school, showing little regard to the people watching her. Arjun, the best badminton player in Amar’s class and an absent-minded music lover, carries a straw hat he thinks is lucky. No such thing as luck, says Kishore, the lecturing-geek that every class has. In this mix of boys are also two sensible and playful girls, Minu and Reshmi, added in previous Butterfingers novels.
In Amar’s case, however, there is a little bit of bending when it comes to luck. Though he has hurt his arm, which is now in a sling he likes to show off, Amar is somehow able to play well with his left hand. He is shown as a little superstitious in the beginning of the book, keeping himself in really uncomfortable positions during a match on TV, believing it would bring his team luck.
That’s the sort of superstition that Amar’s classmates find out they have all been indulging in, not just the obvious sort such as not walking under a ladder or excluding number 13. A whole chapter is devoted to discussing the history behind each of these superstitions, Khyrunnisa slyl
Like all of her Butterfingers books, this too qualifies as one that an average reader would find hard to put down without finding out what happens in the end. It takes some amount of skill to juggle multiple areas of storytelling – a badminton match, debunking superstitions, and solving the mystery behind the hospital. You imagine Khyrunnisa going around with a magnifying lens across a large sheet of paper on the floor, fixing her multi-layered plot. In the end it is somehow converted into a simple, enjoyable humorous format.
Just the simplicity of using humour and the setting of a children’s novel to unfold a serious problem like superstition makes it work smoothly. It makes one think, especially grown-ups who end up indulging in superstitions in their daily life without even noticing it. A lucky shirt, an unlucky sari, a ‘numerology’ name, the position of a house or a room within it – examples will pour out from all around you if you observe. Not an easy deal, letting go of these deep-rooted ideas. But the witty novel will definitely make you think about it.