Alu bhaja with tea? Keep Gelusil at hand if you're a Bengali watching Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!

by Titu Biswas For many Bengalis Yash Raj producing a Byomkesh Bakshy film is like pigs flying over the Howrah Bridge. And guess what, something does fly over the Howrah Bridge in the motion poster of Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!. Although instead of pigs we see Sushant Singh Rajput’s sock covered feet. That should have given us an inkling about things to come. But still, we told ourselves, there was a Bengali director at the helm of the film. And to boot, he already had films like Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Luck Oye and Love Sex Aur Dhokha under his belt. [caption id=“attachment_2185377” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A still from Detective Byomkesh Bakshy![/caption] That reassured us that at least he would not make Satyabati wear chiffon sarees and serenade Byomkesh in the hills of Ghatsila. But in retrospect, we wish he would have done that. That would have been infinitely less painful. Here are five reasons why Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! has sent us scurrying for our Gelusil bottles. Alu Bhaja and Chaa: We Bengalis love our tea, we consume it by the gallon all through the day, not to mention a variety of snacks and savouries that go along with it. Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay also made sure that a cup of tea was never more than a shout away for Byomkesh. He consumed shingara with tea, alu chop with tea and even bone dry sandesh with tea, which was fine. But no self-respecting Bengali will ever have alu bhaja (fried potato) with tea! That’s meant to be consumed with rice and dal. However, in Dibakar Banerjee’s film, that seems to be the unofficial snack combo for the Kolkata of the 1940s. The very thought of consuming alu bhaja with tea sent shivers down our collective Bengali spines. Acidity hoye jaabe toh! ( It will lead to acidity ). Anguri Devi: There are femme fatales and there is Anguri Devi, a mysterious woman with a past who spends lazy afternoons taking dips in the muck-ridden Hooghly in bare nothings. Swastika Mukherjee is as bland as the diet that Satyavati prescribes for a stomach-flu ridden Byomkesh- rice boiled in curd water (really?). She speaks with a lazy drawl and spends most of her screen-time in a soapy bathtub. Banerjee could have drawn inspiration from a range of Bengali icons from the era, ranging from Kanan Devi to Mata Hari, but she doesn’t have the oomph of any of them. Chinese Mess: It’s great that Dibakar Banerjee decides to represent a very cosmopolitan view of Hindu , middle-class Kolkata, where a Chinese opium trader can happily co-habit with upper-caste Hindu men in a boarding house, but it’s historically inaccurate. Even a cursory reading of the literature of that time shows that the middle-class Bengali society was divided on the basis of caste, class and ethnicity. And these boarding houses were breeding grounds of such prejudices, where a beef-eating Chinese man had as much chance of finding a home as a commuter of finding an empty taxi in Howrah station. In the story Satyanweshi in fact, Byomkesh had to emotionally blackmail the landlord to get a room by telling him that a Hindu, Bengali boy would have to seek shelter in a Oriya mess if he didn’t get shelter. Japanese Dentist: Ask any Bengali old-timer and he or she will tell you that the oral hygiene of Kolkata was solely dependent on the robust Chinese community of the city. In Detective Byomkesh Bakshy there is a Japanese dentist which is bit of an anomaly. But what really takes the cake is the scene where he is shown practising martial arts at the quaint little Buddhist temple in south Kolkata. Now that is as plausible as not spotting a tube of Boroline in a Bengali’s dresser. Slow Byomkesh: Dibakar Banerjee did say that his Byomkesh is not indefatigable and we did find the bumbling, vulnerable Sushant Singh Rajput endearing, but really now, did he really have to be that slow? He spends eons in getting things that Saradindu’s Byomkesh would have got in a fraction of a second. In a crucial scene we can almost see Sushant’s carefully sculpted unibrow spring a few hundred strands while he tries to figure out a sitter. If only he had been a good Bengali boy and devoured fish head to sharpen his brain instead of gobbling Alu bhaja we might have finished this film a lot sooner.