BORODER DETECTIVE - Jhilam Roy

 - Jhilam Roy

Sharadindo Bandopadhyaya. 

To be honest, since childhood, I have known him through Boroda – the charismatic bard whose story workshop is his little and eristic club room. And what a connoisseur of rich larger-than-life experiences! I am talking about witnessing saati shrines coming alive; watching the ghost lovers, Madhu and Malati, cycle away into eternity every night in Poona; lending his dog’s ectoplasm to a friendly phantom, and being victimized by the Kalo Bhomra, the harbinger of death. Yes, you are reading all right. But never ever, even by mistake, did my mother – my personal Lady Homer and the second-hand source cum translator of these stories at dinner – mention Byomkesh Bakshi. It was in a radio show, Sunday Suspense, when the story Roktomukhi Neela first aired, that I got to know that there exists in this very Bengali heartland, a married detective. In dooti-punjabi. With round-rimmed glasses. The ultimate iconic Satyaneshi.

I have never been a fan of detective stories, because somewhere exotic adventures popping up out of nowhere in a dreary office in a gloomy city seems non-relatable. On top of this, I am a book person and consequently, I have failed to develop a sophisticated taste of TV-shows, movies, or documentaries of any genre, more so of the suspense genre. Nonetheless, the dictates of age, my mother, and the school librarian compelled me to look into Gogol (Samaresh Basu), Feluda (Satyajit Ray), Kiriti Roy (Dr. Nihar Ranjan Gupta), Kakababu (Sunil Gangopadhyay), Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), Famous Five and Secret Seven (Enid Blyton), Tintin (Herge), and a few novels of Agatha Christie. Apart from Blyton’s works, most of them feature charismatic, introvert bachelors blessed with a talent for keen observation and shrewd intelligence, and weakness for addictive substances like tobacco and tea, accompanied by literary sidekicks. 

The stories were ephemerally thrilling, yet forgettable. True, Byomkesh fits all the above categories perfectly, but he stands out in the facts that he is married and his crimes are (sometimes inviolably) sexual scandals and related murders. The same could be said for Kiriti, but he never made it to our dining table. I wonder if this is the very reason my mother, upon my demanding why she left out this famed Inquisitor during the years of ‘Bengali Literature’ orientation, had shrugged and replied, ‘Tui to choto chhili. Ar Byomkesh to boroder detective!’ (‘You were a child. And he is a detective for adults!’)

Boroder detective.

In short, not every story concerning Byomkesh is for all ages. Even today, the radio broadcasters make changes before airing his audio stories. Satyabati (Byomkesh’s wife) is sometimes entirely kept out or she suffers mere mentions; any marital intimacy is ticked off, and so are the ‘vivid’ descriptions of characters overtly displaying lusty dispositions. This pattern is complemented by uneven or near-absent mentions of Byomkesh’s health and illnesses, financial difficulties, or the constant marital bickering that characterize his three-storey rented house at Harrison Road. Remove these and we are left with a bland detective whose track-record in disguises and heroic recoveries from his enemies’ assaults is not august. The more recent visual adaptations draw out the everyday chaos, choir, and chortle in this Inquisitor’s nowhere-near-perfect life and humanize him, thereby setting him apart from his peers.

Far from shapeless, the mind Lear pictures is like a huge half-inflated air-balloon, or a flyaway tent, or a suitcase flung open. A billowing thing that trails him like a ghost … He still senses, as he has throughout his life, that he lacks the experience and knowledge necessary to achieve the beginning of an understanding. As he has gained knowledge from life, he feels that it is like a puddle that spreads without gaining depth. He feels that other minds go deeper: pools, instead of puddles, even lakes. - Joe Roberts, Bengal, The Cold Weather, 1873

Byomkesh is the denizen of the mundane world, despite Ajit’s dramatic claims. He offers no respite from reality. He earns his own keep. He has ‘real-world’ problems waiting for him after he has solved his cases. Adult problems, complete misfits in the world of homework, pranks, and school nights. One of my schoolmates back in the day was a diehard fan of Feluda, and I remember a particular conversation which featured the following heart-rending statement: Feludar prithibite dhukle aar berote icche kore na! (After you enter Feluda’s world, you don’t want to come out!) I have this long-time habit of writing down daily one-liners of the people around me, and I can safely attribute a somewhat similar line to my Lady Homer. She used to say that there exist some books, which when come to ends, make the readers feel as if they have been ruthlessly banished from the worlds of the characters. At some point of time, we have all been in love with fictional characters and their worlds. We can ‘experience’ different and unknown ‘realities’ without the hazard of becoming first-hand parcels in those possible real-life scenarios. In my opinion, popular works relate to crime work more deeply than evoking thrifty thrills. We are dismissive of them under umbrella terms like ‘thriller’, ‘detective/crime stories’, or ‘film noir’. In every way, they are surmisals of possible ‘inappropriate’ psychological behavior, tactically warning (if you may) us of disingenuous folks and the twisted realities they bring with them. However, most oeuvres of crime fiction posit crimes as tidy, minor ‘This too shall pass’ disturbances in ideal, otherwise unperturbed worlds. In Byomkesh’s world, the crimes are part of the perpetual ‘unpremeditated’ disturbances. There is another relevant departure. 

A line in the Wikipedia article on Byomkesh Bakshi verbalizes a touché, albeit clichéd: Unlike other lead characters in detective stories, Byomkesh Bakshi marries, ages, contemplates buying a car, etc. What distinguishes him is his ability to feel, to live in and survive the mundane, and sensualize it for the readers/viewers. He is the quintessential face of the middle-class Bengali intelligentsia (albeit with a fancy job). His very silhouette reeks of Bangaliana. Forget peaceful and properly decked up offices for professional brooding, he is set amidst messy piles of paper and books, in front of a table with moori and telebhaja, his Khoka’s wailing, or the radio, or both blazing in the background. He is vocal about his frustrations; he is the blemished father and husband who don’t have the leisure to spend time with his family when he is working. He is beautifully plebeian.

Interestingly, most of the creators of the visual adaptations have attempted to ‘modernize’ the leads. No such attempt has been made in case of Byomkesh. He is still stuck in the 1930s-1970s, aging as his career graph shows more complicated curves. Rooted in the social setting of a bygone, yet fundamental era, of the Bengali past, he does not evolve with the audience. He evolves in himself within the limited confines of his rationed out timeline. His stories, therefore, are not burdened with the task of provoking social awareness; alternatively, like Sherlock Holmes, these provide the much-needed anchorage to the disconnected past, and with it the opportunity to reflect and chisel out and predict identities.

Some months ago, I took to watching Bored To Death, but the tendency to whitewash the environs and character of the person who is at the crossroads of crime and conduct reared its ugly head, this time in humor. The bland invincibility followed suit and soon, in my book, Jonathan Ames lost his touch. I have always disliked the whitewashing of Byomkesh’s ‘environs’ to make him ‘accessible’, not only because it reduces the vibrancy of his very persona, but because the elimination of the ‘unwanted’, however it is engulfed in silent reduction, screams of the inability of the contemporary mindset to accept a ‘humanised’ detective. For us, sexual desire, poverty, scandals, and so forth comprise the world of adults. The reason why sentences are kept non-cryptically unfinished. And herein lays the conflict with which we, the Bengali audience, perceive and receive Byomkesh.

This conflict has been unfailingly fascinating. Bengalis have an impeachable reverence for the literati – add a pair of glasses, books, and the aura of the typical opinionated ‘maach-bhaat khaowa’ Bengali bhodrolok, and we want nothing more. The scandals in his stories pretty much provide the same entertainment as gossip, but really, what do we think of a bhodrolok, with a family, who has a special penchant for the mundane dirt of the society? Do we pause and look down upon his dealings? Do we look down our noses when he respects the wisdom instilled in criminal minds? Does he seem uneasily inappropriate in an all-too-relatable world? The whitewashing spares us these horrors, showing us what we want to see and not what Byomkesh wants to convey. I think Byomkesh’s stories are ‘fictional evidences’ that the ‘right’ exists in the ‘wrong’ and with the ‘wrong’, though necessarily, it doesn’t have to be the perfect ‘belligerent’ epitome of ‘right’ to exist as the ‘right’ amidst the ‘wrong’ (Gibberish and too many single quotes? Sorry). 

Since our childhood, we are forever oriented in the theme ‘Triumph of Good over Evil’ in crime narratives, and hence, we tend to see him as ‘beyond the ordinary’ saviour of the society or the agency with which the truth is ‘delivered’ into the hands of the guardians of law in the society. The ‘otherwise’ is non-negotiable. It eases the conflicted malady that haunts the reception of this next-door Bangali babu who weaves crime and etiquette harmoniously with a singular thread. Indeed, Byomkesh is rooted in the mundane, and to highlight this fact inspires no shame. But to ‘belittle’ his mysophilia as respection and to be comfortable in the act in itself speaks of the unwillingness to accept the fact that the Criminal exists in the Gentleman, and that too in one who is a cultural icon.