Many of us enjoy the occasional mystery story. We like to make our guesses and try to figure out who the bad guy is or where the treasure lies or what causes the strange noises in the night.

Some of us, however, like to create these mysteries. In our childhood home, it was Father who was the brains behind such puzzles. “Solve this,” he would say — never referring to us as “kids” but instead treating us like we were fellow sleuths as he threw a problem at us.

Sometimes, it would be a Maths problem. “If you take dash-dash rupees to the market and you buy dash-dash-dash items…” and he would quickly quote some prices off the top of his head, making us marvel at how facile he was with numbers; and then he would say, “How much would you have left with you?” At other times, he would send us on a treasure hunt. He would describe the item that was hidden or he would make a rough sketch of it and he would let us loose. Given that we had large houses with endless nooks and crannies, you can guess that we had a whale of a time searching for the “prize”.

As kids are wont to do, we sought help. Not from each other — because there was too much fierce competition there — but from Mother. She, however, said she had no time for these mysteries manufactured by her spouse. Her feet were planted firmly on the ground — and luckily for her greedy trio of kids, most often that ground was in front of the stove.

We would groan and turn away but sometimes, as we did so, we would catch a slight smile on her face and we would wonder about it.

Absent-mindedness

Was she complicit in this game? Did she know the answers to the posers? Had she helped Father hide those mysterious items he wanted us to recover? And if she had, why didn’t she just admit it and join in the game and let us think of her as a “fun mum”?

In time, of course, we learnt that those mysteries that Father had us involved in were not really the products of his creative mind. Rather, he may have done his weekly shopping and found that the money in his purse didn’t tally – and he wanted to get to the bottom of the missing small change (or even big bucks)…

As for his treasure hunts, he had not hidden stuff for us to find. He had just misplaced something and he wanted to locate it — and what was better than to draw the three of us into the “mystery” and use us as an impromptu search party?

We understood at last why Mother had had that little smile each time we were sent off on an adventure. She knew that Father was glossing over his absent-mindedness and making it into a game that could only have a win-win result!

Thus, we became adept at recovering the things Father had misplaced and as soon as he got that glint in his eye and started to spin a yarn, we would exclaim, “Just tell us straight what you have lost!”

In adulthood, all of us believed that we had taken after Mother. We were organised; we were careful; we had perfect recall of where we had kept our stuff. But now, as we hover on the brink of senior citizenship, we find that we are more like Father than we would like.

Suddenly, money goes missing from our purses or food goes missing from the fridge — or worse, appears in them when we have no recollection of where it came from...

Oh, for a group of willing children to solve these mysteries for us!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.