I will begin with a disclaimer - this is not a comment on either Dibakar Banerjee's filmmaking nor on Sushant Singh Rajput's acting (I loved both, despite some plotholes in the movie). It is merely the story of how I watched the Dibakar-directed crime thriller Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! in the City of so-called Joy, my first home and the fictional Byomkesh's hunting ground. (Also Read: Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!: A Sherlock in Calcutta, In Pursuit of the Truth)
I had tickets to an afternoon show of the film on a Friday exactly a week after it had been in cinemas. By sheer happenstance, a visit to Kolkata coincided somewhat with the movie's release and though it meant a delayed introduction to the Bollywood Byomkesh, it also meant I would be able to watch it with fellow Byomkesh fans, my family.
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In the two-and-a-half hours that followed, we sat eagerly through scenes of a city and a culture that we knew all too well, the difference in decades notwithstanding. Dibakar's Byomkesh operates in 1943, but at several levels the Calcutta he lived in is unchanged. Tendrils of smoke impede vision and breathing in a fictionalised version of College Street's Coffee House; rickshaws are ridden through winding bylanes; the obstacle course presented by the pavements of Bosepukur is navigated expertly; everywhere, there are ordinary Bengalis doing time-honoured Bengali things like walking home with a freshly-bought fish or rousing the rabble with revolutionary rhetoric.
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After the movie ended, we the watchers spent a happy half hour discussing Dibakar's alterations from the original stories, like Dr Anukul Guha who deals in cocaine in Saradindu Bandopadhyay's books rather than heroin, and trying to recall if the book Byomkesh also had roots in Munger. That half hour would not have been available to me in a Gurgaon or Delhi cinema. Nor would the gleeful enumeration of Byomkesh's Bengali traits have taken place.
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