Hound of the Baskervilles

Half way through this book, I was half scared, half jittery, half dying to know what would happen next. It is one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. Of course, when you are a kid of 12, silly things like hounds can scare you senseless. You can't get scared of all that when you are a mature responsible adult.

Mostly, anyway.

So here I am, a Modesty Blaise in flesh and blood, living in a swanking apartment in a quiet neighbourhood. All is well until midnight strikes. And then, the night silence is shattered by the ominous baying of a million dogs.

Owww...Oooo.....oooooooooooooooooooooooo

Let me tell you, when the confederation of mongrels decides to hold an olympic baying match in the wee hours, it takes all your willpower to not scramble in a mad dash to hide under the bed.

So I do what any mature responsible adult does - plug my ipod in at a really really loud volume, dunk my head in half a dozen pillows and pray.

And somewhere in the midst of all that chaos, blessed sleep washes over.

The undercover agent

Shh....not so loudly. I don't want my identity to be discovered, and my cover blown. For those who came in late, I am an undercover agent.

I go undercover every night at 10 PM and am engaged in highly covert operations till about 6:30 AM in the morning. A signal from the command base gets transmitted to me every dawn to indicate the temporary ceassation of my undercover activities.

It is a tough job. Sometimes there are bed bugs that bite, sometimes there are mosquitoes. Sometimes you have to leave the warmth of the bed in search of the loo or sometimes in search of water. Sometimes you forget to set the alarm and end up doing more undercover activity than you are supposed to and sometimes you just can't get to sleep. Sometimes the bed is too hard, sometimes the blanket too thick. Sometimes the neighbourhood dog barks no end, sometimes its the neighbour's wife (you can barely make out the difference).

But despite these insurmountable odds, I religiously stick to my routine. Sometimes I am rewarded by dreams of delicious cakes and ice-creams and sometimes by dreams of becoming a millionaire.

Glamorous as it may sound, this job is extremely dangerous. You can end up crushing your hand under yourself and get a fracture, or spraining your neck, or falling off the bed completely. Worse, you may land on a huge cockroach that doesn't take too kindly to intrusions of this nature.

But me, I am the true patriot. I diligently follow my duty day in and day out. Well, more in the 'day out' part than the 'day in' part anyway.