The twins aged 11 cleverer than Einstein!
Lashings of Enid Blyton and Lego (but no Instagram or video games). Meet the delightfully down-to-earth sisters who’ve just notched up the highest possible Mensa score...
NISHKA UPADHYA, who turned 11 in July, reckons that 50 per cent of her classmates at school don’t want to be there. ‘All they care about is how long it is until lunchtime,’ she says, with a mature roll of her eyes.
Her twin sister Nysa — described by their mum as the ‘born mathematician’ in the family — has one quibble: ‘In my class, it’s
70 per cent.’ Both girls clearly have strong individual identities. But they have many similarities, too. Most significantly, it was revealed this week that they scored the same number of marks — 162 — in a Mensa test.
This is the highest possible score, putting them in the top 1 per cent — the smartest people in Britain (at least when it comes to measurable IQ).
on paper, they are brighter even than Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, both of whom had an IQ of 160. And what makes their story more impressive is that they are thought to be the youngest twins to have been invited to join Mensa.
They sat the formal exam last month after reaching the minimum age of ten and a half.
Today, the pair, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor at home in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, giggle when they recall how the woman who sat behind Nysa during the test kept complaining.
Nysa explains: ‘I had a cold and kept sniffing. The woman told the supervisor that I was putting her off and she couldn’t concentrate.’
Does she ever have trouble concentrating? She shrugs. ‘No, not really.’
When the twins — top of their primary school classes in everything, pretty much — agree to let me spend an afternoon with them, it is immediately obvious that we are dealing with children who are ‘different’.
It is the first day of their summer holidays and I make a quip about how they must be happy with the idea of no school for six weeks. Nishka pulls a face. ‘But it’s boring when we don’t have school.’
And how many 11-year-olds would insist, as they do, that homework is a useful exercise rather than a hateful bind? ‘It helps you build on what you learn in class,’ points out Nysa.
She uses the same patient tone to explain the (frankly baffling) science behind the matter she’s thinking of writing to the Queen about — the existence of a device that can be inserted into car exhaust pipes to turn harmful emissions into ink.
‘I think every car in the country should have one,’ she says. ‘Maybe the Queen could help.’
This may be more a matter for the Prime Minister, I suggest, but on this Nysa points out sharply: ‘The Prime Minister hasn’t got much done since she was Prime Minister, has she?’
WoulD they consider a career in politics, since we could do with some top-class brains in Westminster? ‘No thank you,’ they chirrup, together. Very wise.
There is a distinctly old-school feel to family life.
on the table is a chess set. Nishka reels off the Enid Blyton books she loves (although she’s moved on to mostly reading about Greek mythology).
Their dad insisted that they get to grips with lego from toddlerhood. ‘I never understood it,’ says their mum. ‘But he said it was vital, and he was right. It taught them so much.’ What is absent is any hint of an XBox or an iPad. The television is resolutely off. They may belong to the selfie generation but there is no sign of such photos here. They have only just got their own phones (‘for their new schools,’ says their mum) and they are not on social media. No Snapchat. No Instagram.
‘I don’t like it,’ says Nysa. ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate for our age.’
What about the computer game Fortnite, which is taking over playgrounds across the land? They know of it, of course.
‘ugh,’ says Nishka. ‘All the boys do the dances. It’s crazy. I don’t like it. I don’t see the point.’
obviously, the fear when meeting such Wunderkinder is that they will be insufferable, regaling you with stories of how they passed their Grade 8 tuba at the age of three, while reading the entire works of Dostoevsky in the original Russian.
YET, no. There is a piano in this modest modern town house, and the girls are only too happy to show off their skills, but their mum, Keerti, 39, is quick to point out that they have only just started lessons, and have yet to do their Grade 1.
But do they have GCSE Spanish yet? or A-level Applied Mathematics, six years early? She looks confused. ‘Can you do that?’ she asks. Clearly, if this is a pushy mum, she is not following the usual script of demanding excellence in all areas.
‘Some kids have every day filled with activities, but we’ve never gone down that road,’ she says. ‘They do taekwondo (both are blue belts) and piano, but that’s about it.’
‘We used to do dance,’ pipes up Nishka, ‘but we stopped when the schoolwork got heavier.’
The work ethic in this home, though, is much apparent.
‘It’s a cultural thing,’ admits their father, Verun. ‘We both come from very academic backgrounds and, in India, you have to work and work to gain that university place because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of applications for each place.’
Verun, 40, and Keerti were born and raised in central India, but moved to the uK when they married in 2006.
The girls were born here the following year, but the family went back to India for a stint, before their respective jobs (both trained as engineers; but Keerti now works as a business analyst for the lottery company Camelot, Verun in financial services) brought them back.
From babyhood, their twins were early developers.
‘They started walking at eight or nine months and were talking before they were one,’ says Keerti. ‘They were like sponges. The questions, the questions! Who, what, why? It’s calming down a little now, but there were times where we just had to let the questions waft over us.’
Naturally bright, clearly — but as soon as they started formal education they also turned into sloggers,
just like their parents. Here today, too, is Verun’s mother Usha, 67, who splits her time between England and India.
A retired teacher, she tells the girls to sit up straight when slouching, and delivers a stern look when she thinks they are being too cheeky (they are anything but).
The next challenge for them is starting at ‘big’ school in September, and sorting them out with grammar school places has clearly been a mission for their mother.
They both passed their 11-plus exams (how could they not, given that they had been studying for them for a year, in a regime planned with military precision?) and have gained entry to two of the top state grammars in the country.
Nysa will go to the selective Henrietta Barnett school (the Holy Grail for so many parents locally, thanks to its position at the top of the education tables), while Nishka heads to the equally respected Dr Challoner’s in Buckinghamshire.
Why split them up? Well, Nishka didn’t make it through to the final stages of the Henrietta Barnett selection, but anyway, says her mum Keerti, ‘they are very different, so they require different things in a school.
‘Henrietta has a more aggressive approach which suits Nysa, who is more maths orientated. Nishka gravitates more towards English and the arts, although she gets top marks in her maths, too.’
Two different schools an hour’s travel apart means extra challenges for the family. They plan to move house closer to London and be equidistant between the two schools.
Quite a sacrifice? ‘But worth it,’ says their mum. The twins had private tuition once a week in preparation for their 11-plus exams, and from an early age, their mum sat with them doing their homework every night. Encouraging learning in this house is akin to encouraging toothbrushing.
‘My wife made that her business,’ says Verun, proudly.
And after big school? Their grandmother wants one of them to go into the Diplomatic Service. ‘Maybe after a law degree?’ she suggests to Nysa.
THE girls, for now at least, have other ideas. Nishka, a recent convert to the TV legal drama Suits (formerly starring the Duchess of Sussex) has been thinking of a career in law.
Nysa was considering medicine, but is worried about how many years it takes to qualify.
‘It takes too long to earn any money,’ she says. ‘You have to train for seven years, then to specialise it’s another seven years...’ Who knows what is possible? Separately, these two could achieve anything they wanted to. Together? Blimey.
As they run to be first down the stairs and out into the garden to pose for our photographer, I wonder if the fact that they are twins has had an influence on their academic development.
I ask if they are naturally competitive and they vie to see who can shout ‘yes!’ first.
It’s a sore point that in a secondary Mensa test (a more visual one), while Nishka got full marks again, Nysa dropped a point. ‘I was ill!’, she reminds us, as her sister shoves her in glee.
Of course, only a certain type of parent will consider entering their child for a Mensa test.
Dad Verun stumbled across the possibility when looking online. ‘I’d never even thought of it before. We didn’t prep them for it — you can’t, really — so there was no pressure. But when the results came back, we were stunned,’ he says.
If the girls are stunned, they don’t show it. They have the confidence and nonchalance of youth, and seem to be taking it all in their stride.
Do you feel cleverer than your school friends, I ask Nysa?
‘I don’t think I should answer that,’ she says — a diplomatic reply which proves she is indeed a very smart cookie.