The Duckback Detective

It is monsoon time and the clouds are slowly gaining the much needed momentum to shower the parched earth and its inhabitants. While the clouds go about doing their job and the flowers are in bloom, the onset of monsoon season always reminds me of my childhood years in Calcutta. I must have been 11 or 12 years old and I had just graduated from Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys to Sherlock Holmes (and a little bit of Agatha Christie though I found the slow pace of her novels a tad boring at that time). To call myself a fan of detective/crime fiction would be a crime of epic proportions. I adored it and I worshipped Sherlock Holmes. I even started to save money in my piggybank to visit 221B Baker Street in the hopes of becoming an apprentice to the greatest detective in the world. 

A slight monsoon shower and the flowers bloom

And it was around this time when Dad got me one of the greatest (perhaps THE greatest) wardrobe item I could ever think of.  A light olive green double-breasted Duckback raincoat which came right down to my shins to cope with the Calcuttan rains during my daily commute to school. In function, the raincoat made sure that not a drop seeped through and kept me dry as a bone even in a heavy downpour. The downside, considering it was made of rubber (which made it smell like erm.. rubber) and heavy duty canvas, it weighed a ton and made me sweat bullets on the inside regardless of the pleasant temperatures outside. 

But to me it was more about the form and less about the function. Because in form, for me, it was the universal uniform of a detective. Like I said earlier, I had read enough fiction and had seen enough movies to know that detectives wore shabby raincoats (or tweeds, based on the continent they worked on), hats and occasional dark glasses to make themselves inconspicuous when following suspects and leads.

And now I had one such raincoat (and a matching cap) that automatically qualified me to be a detective. As if by magic (and a little bit of imagination), upon donning it over my school uniform, my portly build and round face transmogrified into a thin frame topped by a sardonic square-jawed face with a permanent deadpan expression. For me, it was a superhero costume. And Calcutta was my hunting ground! Well, make that South Calcutta. I was forbidden to go north of Kalighat without adult supervision as this was beyond my school zone. Thus started the adventures of the Duckback Detective. I loved it every time it rained and grumbled while the sun was out, for the detective came into being only when it rained. An invisible, unknown observer in an obscure raincoat who frequented playgrounds, scampered surreptitiously in the bylanes (or jumped in puddles), left no stone unturned in Tollygunge and rode trams on SP Mukherjee Road to keep the area free of crime. In between these adventures, I also found time to shadow the girl in my class on whom I had a massive crush. And that is how I realized that she lived in an area north of Kalighat. The forbidden zone. My quest and shadowing always ended at the invisible line that divided Kalighat from the rest of the northern world. And thus I never was able to discover where my Irene Adler lived. Shame! Well, you win some and lose the rest. But in all these adventures, the one that still irks me (since it remained unsolved) was the 'Park Street Pickpocket'. Till date, I have not been able to unravel that super-criminal and mysterious pickpocket who relieved me of my cherished faux leather wallet and my tram fare. I am sure it was a cohort of Dr. Moriarty (or maybe his Indian version, Dr. Morarjee). Still gives me sleepless nights. Nevertheless, life was exciting. Never a dull moment as I conjured up one adventure after the other.  

As I was just warming up to the field work of detection and the science of deduction, I also gradually began to outgrow my raincoat by becoming little more portly and a little more taller. I also began to discover the genius of Agatha Christie's Poirot who did wonders with his 'gray cells' while being impeccably dressed. And being portly. But if you'd put a gun to my head and ask me who's the greatest, I'd still swear by Holmes. The raincoat no longer fitted me after a couple of monsoons but I squeezed in whenever I could. When we moved from Calcutta, I had to finally hang up my raincoat though I badly wished we'd moved to Cherrapunji where I'd still find some use of it. Eventually, I lost my raincoat and along with it went the superpowers of deduction and observation. I became an ordinary struggling-at-Math schoolkid again. My days as a detective were officially over. Sigh!

Somewhere in my old chest of notebooks lie my greatest adventures. 'The Chowringhee Chinaman', 'Trouble at Tollygunge Railway Station', 'The Strange Incident on the Hazra Minibus 251', 'The Black Market League of Ballygunge and Lake Gardens', 'The Esplanade Escapade', 'Robbery at The Grand Hotel', 'The Diamond Harbour Heist' and the list goes on. What can I say? Those were busy times for crime-fighters. And here I must mention that since I was saving for my trip to Baker Street, I cut the cost of hiring an assistant and chronicled my own cases. So no one but me knows the fate of these cases and the villains apprehended. And in the best interests of humanity and those involved, the case files will continue to remain unpublished. Till the right time comes.