Her mother Malveen, is a dentist, and her father Hardeep, is an actuary. Now, with an IQ of 160+ (the same range as Einstein and Stephen Hawking), she devours books like the Isadora Moon series, aimed at five- to eight-year-olds, or Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, reading in her head for up to an hour at a time, when most children her age are learning phonics. At seven months, she started sounding out words like “cat” and “grandma” at 11 months, she finished bedtime stories, sometimes from memory, sometimes by recognising words and by 15 months was reading independently. (Muhammad Haryz Nadzim, three, from Durham, beat her record earlier this year.) But Jeeva began impressing her parents when she was still a baby.
Jeeva was British Mensa’s youngest member when she joined just after her third birthday. ‘I like reading and learning about things in the world and how they work,’ says four-year-old Jeeva.
