Character-speak

1. The name ‘V Kulla’ is displayed on the door of my apartment. My job with Milton security got me involved in the investigation of a 40-year-old disappearance. My online pseudonym is ‘Wasp.’

2. I study at the Albert Mission School. My closest friend Rajam lives in Lawley Extension and we are both jealous of Sankar, who is the topper in our first form class.

3. The son of a garage mechanic, I left home when I was 12 and took a double major in Patrick Henry University. I was designing a revolutionary car for the Twentieth-Century Motor Company but decided to leave them when they changed company policy. The world wants to know who I am.

4. I am the son of a Bundelkhandi Raja, also related to Tipu Sultan. I lost my family in 1857 and decided to devote myself to scientific research. I am fluent in French, English, German and Latin, an accomplished organ player and one of the most fascinating characters in fiction.

5. I was born to a gypsy tribe and abandoned in front of a famous European cathedral. I was named for the first Sunday after Easter. Most of my misdeeds were at the behest of my master Claude Frollo.

6. I was expelled from Eton and ended up in Sedleigh, a minor public school. After finishing there I was sent to work at the New Asiatic Bank. I temporarily ran the US magazine Cosy Moments. Coming back to the UK, I found true love with Eve Halliday.

7. I was born in the 10th month of the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era on the planet Helicon in the Arcturus sector, where my father worked as a tobacco grower in a hydroponics plant. My prodigious mathematical talents catapulted me to an important place in galactic history.

8. The oldest living child of Gerald and Ellen, I belonged to a Catholic family of Irish and French ancestry. I was thrice married, and the central character in the only novel written by my author.

9. I am a Canadian army nurse who lost my lover during World War II and decided to never get emotionally attached to the people I treated. But I refused to abandon an unrecognisably burnt man even when the Germans were advancing.

10. I am not very good at all this autobiographical stuff, but I got thrown out of Pencey Prep and decided to spend the weekend in New York. The only person I can really relate to is my sister Phoebe, and watching her on the carousel in Central Park zoo was the highlight of my great escape.

Answers

1. Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Series

2. Swami, in RK Narayan’s Swami & Friends, adapted to television as Malgudi Days

3. John Galt, in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

4. Captain Nemo, in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island

5. Quasimodo, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

6. Psmith, in the Psmith series by PG Wodehouse. Like Psmith, Wodehouse also went to a minor public school and worked in HSBC

7. Psychohistorian Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series

8. Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind

9. Hana, in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which won the Booker Award in 1992

10. Holden Caulfield, in JD Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye

Joy Bhattacharjyais a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup

Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj

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