(The following piece is due to be published in an online US magazine early next year)
Every child has its heroes, who may be one of its parents, or a relative or anyone that only s/he can think of. The child wants to grow up idolising the man/woman s/he thinks can play a role in his/her life. This happens quite unknowingly in the toddler’s mind. The real idolising starts once this toddler gets out of his/her 24x7 parental care, say after about four/five years of age.
It happened to me too. My first brush with one of my childhood heroes is still fresh in my mind. The image of a ship on fire on the pages of Anandamela, a well-known Bengali fortnightly for children, is so living a memory that i often forgot that i have passed at least 24 years since that lazy winter afternoon at a steel city home. Red Sea Sharks was the first Tintin adventure i tasted with childhood delight. Who will first read the Tintin — being serialised in Anandamela with a superb translation (though i realised it much later) — was a contentious issue with my elder sister every 14 days. For me, Tintin is a journalist next door who travels from one country to another, and wherever he goes, even for a holiday, his stay there is never without any trouble.
Much the same is with Feluda. Feludar Goendagiri, the private detective’s maiden adventure, was also the first Feluda story i read in my childhood. Didi got Ek Dojon Goppo as a gift (or might be the first prize in her school, i have forgot the exact source) and we read all the stories in turn. Years later when i visited Darjeeling, i went to the mall but not for shopping but to find the bench where Topse used to sit and return with his sun-burnt left cheek! It’s amazing to read then how Feluda could know where Topse sat! I asked Didi a lot about this guy — especially how i could meet him. With years i realised it’s simply next to impossible to meet the detective in person even if i knock the 21 Rajani Sen Road, like Jatayu still does with a packet of hot samosas.
Feluda’s stories are more than adventures, unlike Tintin’s. With Tintin anyone can visualise the place where the reporter is touring. Herge had the rare sort of imagination when he could draw the near-perfect moon launcher — in Destination Moon and Tintin on the Moon — years before Neil Armstrong took the "giant leap of mankind". Some of Tintin’s tales are quite sci-fi stories too, like that of Professor Shanku — a unique character yet to be found in Bengali literature — created by Satyajit Ray. Ray made a conscious difference between Feluda and Shanku, yet at lest two generations grew with both the characters. Those of us born in early eighties were the last fortunate generation to get the fresh taste of a Feluda story or a Shanku one. Our Puja celebrations used to start at least 15/20 days before the elders could actually revel in the autumn fest. The reason was simple: Shanku on Pujabarshiki Anandamela and Feluda on Sharadiya Desh.
Ray, obviously unknowingly, helped spread my range of thought and the horizon of knowledge to a great extent. From a laboratory in Giridih, i used to travel with Shanku, the one-of-his-kind professor, to different cities in the world. With Feluda, i probably learnt to use a revolver also! From Kathmandu to Bombay to Ajanta-Ellora to Madras to Jaisalmer to Hong Kong to London (one of the last Feluda stories) to Benares — there was hardly any place that i did not chase villains like Maganlal Meghraj! I am sure that millions of other kids did the same, and they still do it. Maybe Feluda could no longer be produced on in black-and-white on paper, but the charm would remain so forever. The charm is not because they are mere hero-villain conflict like the famous series created by Ian Fleming, but it’s more than what any common writer would dare to leave an indelible mark in the delicate young minds. Ray did it marvellously, Herge too. During my first reading of Sonar Kella, i came across the term "Kati Patang", as a song, "Yeh jo mohabbat hain", could be heard from the drawing room of 21 Rajani Sen Road. The inquisitive mind in me asked my mother the simple question: What is Kati Patang? She told me it was a film released the year Sonar Kella was written. Later, i found that the film was a Rajesh Khanna blockbuster with the music of the song mentioned by Ray was composed by another legend RD Burman. Moreover, that was the year when my mother got married too! These small personal associations with the book made my reading very special. Every child has some sorts of personal attachment to every book, every character. Children of this generation were seen eagerly waiting in midnight for Harry Potter books, like we used to do that for a piece of Ray for us.
As for Tintin, i still feel no comic strips could have neatly sketched and coloured like that of the reporter’s weird adventures from Chicago to Egypt, Russia to the land of Incas. Last year, while trekking on the Himalayas amid feet of hard snow, we were discussing whether we could spot a yeti and that too waving a yellow scarf like in Tintin in Tibet! While in Class VI, i was asked my didi to fill up a slam book — a popular mode of knowing one’s likes and dislikes in the pre-Orkut/Facebook era — where I wrote that i wanted to be a journalist, a wish driven by no other than the globetrotting little man with Snowy.
Maybe i have ended up being a journalist today, but it’s far from what my childhood hero had achieved! In my profession, questioning from various angles is must — a trick i probably picked up from Feluda! But more than that, my world with them was a learning process — the way of the world, the history of mankind, the time we are living in and more importantly how we approach our future.
©Supratim Pal
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