For young readers: A serial killer is on the loose where Nimmi is camping. What will happen to her?

Nimmi Daruwala didn’t wake up on the first day of Grade 7.

It’s impossible to wake up when you haven’t slept. And Nimmi hadn’t slept. Not for one of the 347 minutes that had passed since she’d gone to bed. (Or to be more precise, gone to sleeping bag.)

Instead, she lay on her back and made a list. The heading of the list was “Ways in Which Life Is Being
Most Unfair on Grastliest Night of Life.” Nimmi was an almost-teenager. Like many almost-teenagers, she did exaggerate on occasion. But on this particular occasion, there was no need to exaggerate. Life had laid out a five-star-hotel-style buffet of miseries.

There was Nimmi’s bladder, which was threatening to explode like the can of Coke she had forgotten in the freezer last Monday. Her eyes, which felt like they’d been attacked by a kitchen scrubber. Her feet, which had just recovered from their sixth bout of pins and needles. Her sleeping bag, which should rightfully have been called a keep-awaking bag. And, of course, the item that jumped out in bold, italicised capital letters: TENT NO 5. Because whichever way Nimmi looked at it, Tent No 5 was the supervillain of this story.

Tent No 5 wasn’t one of those picture-book tents that stand amidst nodding daisies and singing birds. It wasn’t one of those Tripadvisor-recommended abodes with mini-fridges and embroidered bedspreads. Tent No 5 was a basic affair, cobbled together with crackly grey material, rusting poles and sticky Astroturf. It sat a long way from everywhere – including the campsite loo – in the middle of muddy nowhere.

The four years that it had sat in the middle of muddy nowhere had not been kind to the tent. It had lost its zips, its velcro strips and its will to live. At the same time, it had gained an odour that was a unique blend of schezwan sauce, feet, and galloping fungus.

Nimmi disliked the smell.

She disliked the unzippable flaps and wide-open gaps. (They might as well have gone all the way and hung out a banner announcing, “We do not discriminate. All are welcome. Easy access for bears, rats and psychopaths.”)

She disliked two out of her three tentmates – and the fact that they were fast asleep, and she was not. And she disliked the flattish roof that sagged in the rain. Given that this was the rainiest night of the year, the roof of Tent No 5 was doing a lot of sagging. It was under this unreliable ceiling that Nimmi lay, waiting for the hours to plod by.

To help the hours to plod by, she counted the roars of thunder (74). She counted sheep. (17,209 or something. She kept losing count at around 713 and had to start all over again. As the night progressed, the sheep started looking more and more like Genghis Khan. The last batch of 713 sheep had even worn pointy helmets and off-with-your-head smirks. Which was not in the least helpful to someone who was trying to sleep.)

She counted the number of times Rohan and Imran walked past the tent, fantasizing about brownie thins and discussing the best thing to do if they met a bear (six).

But still the storm continued to bucket. The greedy insects and greedier maneaters continued to skulk in the darkness. And the night continued to dawdle.

Surely 17,209 sheep were enough to fill a single night? Nimmi certainly thought so. “I’m sure it’s almost morning,” she told herself. “I’m sure we’ll be getting breakfast in 15 minutes or so.”

Nimmi’s spirits zoomed upwards at the thought of sugary tea and a trip to the loo. Which is why they crashed so hard when she spotted the time on her phone. “4.47 am? How can it be only 4.47 am?” she
shrieked in her head. “This is worse than ghastly. Worse than grim. It’s...it’s...grastly. Maybe even ghim.’ Grastly and Ghim were not words that Nimmi used lightly.

Nimmi had only encountered grastly a few times in her shortish life. Once, when her bare foot crunched down on a crispy cockroach. Another time when she absent-mindedly brushed her teeth with Volini muscle relaxant. And once when Imran demonstrated a football tackle in the school lunchroom and landed in a bubbling vat of Rajma Royale. Imran and his friend Rohan were the trouble-magnets of Nimmi’s class. They were always trotting around Vidya World School in casts, stitches and maharaja-turban bandages that concealed still more stitches.

Three aspects of the Imran-in-vat-of-rajma episode had been particularly grastly:

1) Imran hobbled around for days, smelling of boiled meat and enlightening everyone – whether they wanted to be enlightened or not—about how it felt to be cooked along with seven kilograms of kidney beans.

2) According to legit sources, the school kitchen had decided to “waste not, want not” and had gone ahead and served the Nike-shoe-and- playground-spiced rajma at lunch.

3) When rumours about the recycled rajma reached the class, Groaning Grishma had started gagging with huge, ghownking sounds. This had triggered a vomiting epidemic in the class.

Grastly came along only occasionally, for which Nimmi was truly grateful.

Ghim was different from grastly. Ghim was the feeling of being trapped in a dark tunnel. It was the time when, exactly a year ago, Nimmi’s best friend had stopped being her best friend and Nimmi had worried that she would never again find someone to sit with during lunch and to giggle with on weekends.

Ghim was 4.47 a.m. on a sleepless night.

“If this is the first day of Grade 7, I can’t imagine what the rest of the year will be like,” Nimmi moped.

“Is it even possible for life to get worse?”

Nimmi had a dreadful habit of asking questions when she didn’t want answers. In this case, she really, really didn’t want answers. But she was going to get them anyway.

In the next few seconds.

At exactly 4.48 am, Nimmi was going to find out that it was possible for life to get worse. For the night to get grastlier. And for the happenings in Tent No 5 to get a whole lot ghimmer.

Before we get to that fearsome moment, however, it is essential to understand what Nimmi was doing wide awake at 4.47 am in a tent 118.3 km from home on this dark and stormy night. In short, it is essential to start from the beginning.

Excerpted with permission from Nimmi’s Crawful Camping Days, Shabnam Minwalla, Talking Cub.