Nimmi’s Crawful Camping Days by Shabnam Minwalla. Published in 2023 by Talking Cub, an imprint of by Speaking Tiger Books LLP, 125A, Ground Floor, Shahpur Jat, near Asiad Village, New Delhi 110049; website: https://speaking tigerbooks.com. Pp: 175. Price: Rs 250.
Nimmi Daruwala is an ordinary looking, angst ridden, soon-to-be-teen. Like any self-respecting prepubescent girl, she longs to be allowed to wax her legs and learn stitching so that she can shorten the length of her school uniform without her mother’s knowledge. A Scrabble champ, she is at her best with made-up words like "snastiest” (snooty + nasty).
At Vidya World School Nimmi’s journey in Grade VII begins on a more-than-damp note, pun intended. Her school principal, "Booming Mr Bakshi,” packs Nimmi’s class off on a camping adventure in the middle of nowhere on the first day of school. Through this experience of living together, he hopes that the class will develop unity and teamwork, but unfortunately every imaginable disaster occurs during the 24-hour ill-fated trip despite Bakshi appointing the reputed organization, DreamTeam, to conduct the camp.
Shabnam Minwalla: wit and vocabulary
Not only does Nimmi detest going to camp, she absolutely hates going to camp carrying the floppy, red, much-used sleeping bag in a large green Amazon Fresh plastic bag, quite unlike the cool and fancy gear that the "Evil Threevils” carry, not to mention their rainproof lip gloss and strawberry-scented mosquito repellent. To add to her misery, students are not permitted to carry any food items but must subsist on regular school fare — chicken curry and/or carrot and peas curry.
A raging storm has reduced the campsite to a muddy cluster of shabby tents without electricity putting everyone in a foul mood. DreamTeam is at a complete loss about how to conduct their team-building exercises in such conditions.
The worst awaits Nimmi when she enters tent No. 5. Everything about the tent is disgusting. It is run-down, located far from the campsite toilet, cannot be zipped closed, leaving it open to human or animal predators. It smells like "a unique blend of schezwan sauce, feet and galloping fungus.” As if both these factors aren’t enough, Nimmi is compelled to share the tent with Genghis Khan-like Alisha and her friend-turned-foe, Sophia Mehta. And to top it all, it’s raining like crazy and the sagging roof is likely to collapse and kill them all. How can Nimmi get any sleep under these conditions?
Fourth in the Nimmi Daruwala series, this book is a breezy delight for fans of Minwalla. Her sharp wit and vocabulary make one laugh out loud about the daily goings-on in the life of a Bombay schoolgirl and her classmates. Minwalla’s deep insight into the lives of children emanates both from her journalistic background as well as her role as mother to three teenagers. She plays deftly with language as only one who is skilled, can. She delights in extensive use of invented words such as crawful = crazy + awful, brustard = a shade of muddy mustard, and hyphened words such as almost-teenager.
This book is a must read for middle grade children and those adults who wish to enter the not-so-innocent world of children. Let’s hope we do not have to wait too long for the fifth book in the series.
ZARIN VIRJI
Virji is an educator and a writer who dabbles in poetry, short stories and fiction for middle grade readers. Her reading favorites are detective stories and crime thrillers.