CRIME
Not in the Holmes league
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
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Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's detective stories may seem tame, even naïve, to those familiar with other such stories.
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The Menagerie and other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries; Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Penguin, Rs. 295.
SARADINDU BANDYOPADHYAY (1899-1971) was a hugely popular writer of Bengali fiction. He wrote historical romances, children's stories, detective fiction around his private eye Byomkesh Bakshi and also spooky tales. He had a gift for words.
It was not what he wrote that was memorable but the manner in which he did. There were not too many writers who could write interestingly about perfectly ordinary things.
This is the second volume of Byomkesh Bakshi stories brought out in English by Penguin. Sreejata Guha has translated them from the Bengali. This collection acquaints people from other cultures and languages with Saradindu's stories about his petit bourgeois detective Byomkesh Babu and his assistant Ajit.
Those who have avidly read Arthur Conan Doyle's stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes, the master of crime detection, and his associate and chronicler Dr. Watson may find these stories tame, even naïve. Saradindu, unlike Conan Doyle, was not always an ingenious or inventive writer, although the physician-turned-storyteller from Edinburg was his role model.
Good yarn
Saradindu's audience was the ordinary Bengali middle class that was fairly literate, just about middlebrow and interested in a good yarn, which would not tax the imagination over much. His detective stories do not claim to be very well up on forensics or other police procedures but have a nodding acquaintance with them. The Menagerie, for example, goes beyond the normal expectation of an uninitiated Bengali reader and actually tells in some detail how nicotine can be extracted from tobacco to make a deadly poison.
In the same story, the two villains — a doctor with a licence revoked from the Indian Medical Association and his wife — upon being caught in the end for their evil deeds consume ampoules of cyanide. When Byomkesh is conducting the interrogation of the suspects, he notices the doctor Bhujhngadhar moving something in his mouth that he mistakes for betel nut (supari). At the climax of the scene the truth is revealed and the doctor embraces his wife and accomplice Bonolokhhi, alias Nrityakali alias Sunayana and gives her a long passionate kiss following which both of them slump down to the floor dead. The one nice touch in this episode is the description of the smell of almond oil, which is exactly the way the nose comprehends cyanide.
The Menagerie is the most successful story of the four in this volume. The narration is easy paced though not boring and the scene of crime, Golap Colony, is full of shifty characters. This propensity for unsavoury people may have come as much from Saradindu's brahminical background as from the demands of the genre. The characters created by a writer of crime fiction depend as much on his imagination, as his background, including religious beliefs usually acquired in childhood.
Saradindu's characters were usually middle class or upper-mid people who have lost their way due to some foolish action undertaken in a moment of stress. However, there are two unusual characters in this volume. The bad doctor and his wife seem to be inspired by Duvivier's "Un Carnet de bal" that had a distinctly shady doctor and his equally queasy woman companion. It is quite likely that the author may have seen the French film mentioned above, for he was a scriptwriter in Bombay Talkies from 1938 and left the city only in 1952.
One does not know how he responded to music. It is most intriguing to note that both the villainous doctor and his wife are gifted musicians in the first story and play the sitar really well. It is their playing that serves as an alibi for a moment when the time and circumstances of a murder are being re-constructed. Did Saradindu cerate these two characters as a gimmick or were they an expression of some dilemma floating deep in the unconscious?
Faltering characterisation
His sense of construction and characterisation falters in "The Quills of the Porcupine", the second long story in this collection. The baddie is a spurned lover who goes about killing people with the poisonous quills of a porcupine in order to create an alibi for himself before he attacks his friend who happens to be his ladylove's husband. The intended victim is saved because he has his heart on his right side instead of the left and the killer quill meant to pierce the organ naturally does not and only manages to seriously infect his body which, through timely medical intervention and devoted nursing by who else, his wife, recovers in time for the happy ending.
Here too the deranged killer, Prabal Gupta, happens to be a gifted singer from a rich family fallen on bad days. The fact that an artiste is the evil one in this story too is a strange co-incidence or is it?
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