The Shelf and learning about CBI
By the time they were in the ninth standard, Shyla and Radha had developed what they privately called “The Shelf”, a shared mental library of detective fiction that formed the basis of an entire private language between them.
They had read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories until they could quote passages. Holmes’s cold brilliance, his razor observations, the way he could read a man’s entire history from the cut of his coat and the calluses on his hands, this fascinated Radha particularly. She would follow her father to the kitchen in the evenings and watch him make coffee, then announce her deductions about his day in the manner of Holmes.
“Appa, you were at a crime scene today, not just at the office. When you came in, I saw that your shoes had dried mud on the left heel only, which means you walked on uneven terrain. And you had a pen mark on your left cuff from writing in a hurry without a desk.”
Her father, Vikram, would put his coffee down and look at her with an expression that mixed exasperation with deep, quiet pride.
“Radha, you are going to be either a detective or a very irritating dinner guest.”
“Why not both?” she said.
He would laugh then, a big, comfortable laugh, and settle into his chair, feeling proud of his daughter’s observation. When Radha & Shyla were at his home and asked him politely, he would tell them things about investigations. Not everything. Not the gruesome things, those he kept from them. But he shared the procedures, the logic, the systems by which a crime was unravelled, because he believed that understanding how investigations and justice worked was not a privilege but a citizenship duty. He was happy that these girls were truly interested in the investigations and asked many relevant questions too.
Shyla and Radha would sit on either side of him, knees pulled to their chests, listening intently. “In a murder investigation,” he told them one evening, “the first forty-eight hours are everything. Evidence decays. Witnesses forget. People who were in shock begin to construct alternative memories that feel real. The CBI, the Central Bureau of Investigation, handles the most complex cases, the ones that cross state lines, the ones where local police cannot or should not investigate. It is the most demanding investigative work in the country.”
“Has the CBI ever come to Bangalore?” Shyla asked.
“Of course. Many cases involving financial fraud, criminals were handled by CBI, Kanrnataka. In 1960s and 1970s, the Bangalore branch focused strictly on rooting out corruption in high places, checking embezzlement of government funds, and preventing economic offenses like black-marketing and hoarding. Whenever there is a case of national significance, they come. Their headquarters is in New Delhi. CGO Complex, Lodhi Road.” He said the address like a landmark he had always known. “The place breathes investigation.”
The girls exchanged a glance. That glance contained an entire conversation.
Beyond Holmes, they had discovered Feluda, Satyajit Ray’s brilliant Bengali detective, whose adventures they found in a collection at the Jayanagar Public Library. Feluda was different from Holmes; he was warmer, more rooted in the subcontinent’s textures, his cases carrying the smell of Indian cities and the weight of Indian history. Reading Feluda felt like reading about a world they recognised. And then there was R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi, not detective fiction but full of human mysteries, the quiet crimes of ordinary life that were more like ‘case studies in everyday psychology.’
Their favourite shared ritual was Saturday afternoons after school at the Jayanagar Public Library, a cool, large building presided over by a librarian named Mr. Raghavendra who wore the same green sweater every day regardless of temperature and who kept a handwritten card index of every book on every shelf. They would spend an hour choosing, an hour reading, and an hour walking home arguing about what they’d read, eating Parle G biscuits that their mothers would have sent along with them.
These were the years that made them. The years of local travel in BTS (Bangalore Transport Service) buses and student passes, of cramming on the floor under the tube light, reading school books or story books, while All India Radio played Carnatic music in the kitchen, of power cuts that turned everything to candlelight and made every homework session feel like a dramatic scene from a novel.