Pocket Diary Book Club

Date: 19.10.2024
Time: 08:45 PM (just before the night gets dark…)
Facilitator: Anushri

Preface

But it happened long before the murder, the ball rolled on the night of Edition 40 I guess, when I asked Gautam & Rohan if they would like to plan something of their version of PDBC, something that sits on the pole opposite to romance (Edition 40 was saree, rain & gajra) and they came up with Murder Mystery Night!

Brilliant, I thought but also, sigh… in roleplay.

Fine, Let’s begin with that. We the people of PDBC, followers of criminal law, will adjust with fictional murder. They started creating the script and the victim’s name was Priya, Verma. Because Sogani would kill them instead, they realised with one look at my face.

Gautam is the apt choice to write, he captures details necessary to be a good detective & murderer, both, which one is he? I shall stay neutral…

– Priya

Acknowledgements

We wrote a murder mystery game! And what’s better, with dozens of literary references scattered across the dialogues to be in theme with books. But nothing was really done until Anushri stepped in and did all the work to make this happen, without her we really had nothing written whatsoever. Kudos to Mitesh as well for helping us with the Hindi dialogues which in all honesty we were terrible at.

Abhiraj, Meghna helped us with a practise of murder, really, it takes practise to be perfect, passion is not enough, its as important as any other skill. And finally, Chirag brought in feedback session, making us add more clues, and converting our language from refined sauce to desi tadka.

– Gautam & Priya

What’s happening?

There’s a murder in the PDBC library. And here are the people present. One of them is the killer. The rest of the lot need to figure out who the killer is.

Scene 1:
Lukkhabhai’s crime lair
The goons are deliberating on whether they should kill Priya or night in light of her finding out about her son in law’s involvement in her ex-lover’s drug empire.

Scene 2:
Priya, portrayed by Meghna, dies. The coroner’s report is read and we find out that Priya was poisoned. Who could the killer be?

Scene 3:
Inspector Khan, played with swagger by Abhiraj, enters the chat.
Everyone defends themselves. Props to Nidhi, Anagha and Prince for playing their roles beautifully and completely zoning into their character mode.

Scene 4:
People accuse each other. Anagha, completely in character, tried to tarnish Prerna to her best abilities, and dare I say, succeeded to a large extent as well.

Finally, everyone tries to solve the mystery, (Priya writes: leaving the English me written dialogues for their own hindi me improvised but really mast lines! It felt like a mix of Big Boss with Crime Patrol. I am imagining that what if Ruskin Bond was one of the game players & an accused, how would he defend himself? In his calm, composed, so subtle sarcasm that the unversed ears would miss the salt in his statement and think him to be a simple man, Inspector Khan might catch the flavour and laugh, a beat late, as is his style a.k.a Abhiraj always do that, I sometimes crack a joke in a stalemate tone of voice and then wait, 1,2, he laughs).

Gautam writes:
Kudos to Hetvi and Keyur for figuring a lot of it out, but Shivani was the one who ultimately figure out who the killer is and solve maximum number of clues leading to the killer as well, and won PDBC ka BEST DETECTIVE 2024.

Prince, Abhiraj and Meghna played their characters to conviction as well (Meghna’s uncanny method acting of the deceased exemplified by her tonnes of experience of playing possum) but Nidhi and Anagha stole the show, winning PDBC BEST DEFENDANT and PDBC BEST ACTRESS respectively.

Post the intriguing murder mystery and after the plot twists were revealed to everyone, we then started with what we usually do best: read a few books and talk about them!

Theme: Mystery, Horror, Creepy etc, etc, synonyms

Jainal read excerpts from book 50 Greatest Short Stories by Italian author Umberto Eco. It was a murder mystery, in theme with the session, but set in an Italian monastery during the medieval dark ages, creating an intriguing ambience in the session.

Keyur read The Plotters by Kim Un Su, a paragraph of which he translated from German to English on his own, to narrate it for the session.

Abhiraj read The Poison Tree, a poem that gels beautifully with the theme of the session. He also mentioned that this was one of the 3 poems that he keeps revisiting, The Road not Taken being one of them as well (which I personally found hilarious, as revisiting a road back was the opposite of the message of Robert Frost)

Meghna ended the session with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the pioneer of modern sci fi, and commented on the fact that as much as HG Wells and Issac Asimov are considered the first sci fi writers, the genre was actually created and perfected by a teenage girl, point noted.

Everyone was getting sleepy, the adrenaline rush had come down post the shouting, the drama, the laughter, the prize ceremony! So here we stopped, sorry Prince, you’ll read in next edition, and Priya said, “Let’s go for a midnight cup of tea!”

Midnight tea is the perfect dish to help sleep, because the body no longer cares after seeing so much blood & death & not grief but fun.

This was the perfect way to end a session that was all about plot twists and suspense.
(Part 2 in 2025 maybe, pls????)

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Doodlers & Sticker sticking girls: Anagha & Jainal!