Arts
Cheka, a young crime novelist in the making
Child literary prodigies, sadly, tend to fizzle and putter out like wet Catherine wheels after their debuts. But now and then, vital talent gets heralded by early portents which makes one go “here is something…”
Cheka Mendis
Leafing through 14-year-old Cheka Mendis’s new book Smoke and Mirrors, I was impressed- here is something more than a teenager being tempted to emulate Harry Potter or Anthony Horowitz.
Smoke and Mirrors may seem a bit generic as a title for a thriller with the classic Poirot-in-the-library style denouement- like Agatha Christie blatantly calling one of her whodunits “The Red Herring”. But the title is actually a pun as actual smoke and mirrors do feature rather dramatically within the thriller’s plot.
Cheka is a student of Ananda College, whose earliest formative years however were spent in Boston- “home of the Red Sox”, as he introduces it.
A record of those early years with all their bubbly, fizzy brightness is captured in an earlier book called Glorious Morning: My Paintings through Words (2015). This anthology of poetry with its spontaneous tumbling out of verse is adorable. The poems flow freely with an eight-year-old’s joie de vivre but also a startlingly natural sense of rhythm and cute poetic percipience. He is clearly, blissfully at home with poetry- better than a duck in water.
The second book, coming five years later, cannot of course have the same spontaneity- as Cheka’s mission is a crime novel where the missing china dog and the unexplained footsteps and the butter dish have to all add up at the end- quite a daunting plot to contrive and weave. But on the other hand, little Cheka has grown up- and with him his imagination and vocabulary (he speaks arrestingly of a ‘gibbous moon’ and the relative merits of ‘Pyrophobia’ and ‘Herpetophobia’).
The story begins with a major arson at a Boston hotel where 13-year-old Ryan gets indicated as the culprit. Being compelled to investigate, he gets sucked into a whirlpool of crime in ritzy uptown Boston- beginning with blackmail and culminating with murder at a grand mansion.
It is an ambitious and well-executed adventure. Rather intelligent- evoking a compelling American setting with a whiff of bagels and a sniff of Hollywood. It could be read compulsively- though it would have been better if some of the extra fat of narrative was pared and the story given a slimmer figure. Even though Cheka has tried to link up everything there is still a lot of detail that just makes the story bulge.
But as it is, it is a rare feat for a 14-year-old. The plot has been dexterously done- and if Cheka sticks to his guns, one feels we will maybe yet see the making of a promising Sri Lankan crime writer (clean mature mystery being an arena little explored in our island literature- after Rosalind Mendis’s nascent attempt as far back as 1928).
Cheka’s own parents- both lawyers like Ryan Neville’s- are the wind beneath his wings, always supportive of a voracious bibliophile.
The next Ryan Neville novel, says Cheka, will be set in Sri Lanka. Ryan fortuitously has a Sri Lankan mother, and his parents had met here. Given the propensity of Cheka’s hero to find himself in perilous situations and the way destiny seems to reserve all its doosras for him alone- it will certainly be something to look out for.
Ryan Neville- Smoke and Mirrors by Cheka Mendis is a Sarasavi publication- priced at Rs. 600.