Pain, Holmes, Dupin, Byomkesh and the missing women

I woke up this morning with a disconsolate, restless heart-I was experiencing, I realized within moments, an after-effect of the terrifying nightmares of the previous night. Strangely, the nightmare was populated with authors and literary characters I have endlessly daydreamed about since childhood. How did I come to be terrorized in a dream by my beloved protagonists and their creators, I began to wonder. These were my first thoughts this morning. I spent the weekend reading Monsieur Pain by the late Roberto Bolano. It is a slim volume and hence, when I began reading it on Friday evening, I had confidently told myself that I should be able to complete reading it by Sunday afternoon. I have read the author’s 2666 and Nazi literature in the Americas-both had driven me to the edge of reason, filled me with menacing premonitions and mocked my strong sense of propriety and morality. The texts in a manner jeered me for attaching so much value to liberal ethics and consequently, exhilarated me! Naturally, when I saw the title Monsieur Pain on the shelf of a book store in Calcutta last week on a rainy afternoon, I found myself being chocked by the same sense of exhilaration. The jacket stated that the novel is a ‘noir conspiracy’ evocative of the works of Poe and Borges; I immediately knew that I had to buy the book and that I had to read it soon. There are few people I have pined for as much as Edgar Allan Poe and there are few authors whose works I re-read as many times as those of Borges, painstakingly trying to make sense of every sentence he wrote but with so little success. So, I knew I had to read Monsieur Pain at the earliest yet I needed the right ambience as well to read a work like this one. I did not exactly know what would constitute a suitable ambience but when I looked out of the window next to my desk this Friday evening and saw that it was raining heavily, I knew I could begin reading. The narrative is rendered dark and mysterious by the nimbi which gathered over Paris sky in the week of 1938 in which the story unfolds; the eponymous protagonist is confronted and unsettled by downpours often and so would I be, I decided watching the sheet of rain which shrouded the evening. I read it in a state of bliss throughout Saturday and Sunday and when, I finished reading it not in afternoon but sometimes, around 11 pm in the night on Sunday, I was feeling strangely vexed. “It is all right,” I told myself. “Works of Bolano always perplex you. You would begin to enjoy it soon.“ This is what I had consoled myself to sleep that night, that Sunday when I dreamt a most terrible dream. I dreamt that the cadaver of a young woman in men’s clothes has been discovered on a pavement of a grimy, narrow street in a seedy neighbourhood of a city, I do not know which one but it was most probably, a European city. I dreamt that Monsieur Pain had stumbled upon the body and in a state of nervousness, he requested his friend and compatriot Monsieur Dupin to find out who the woman was and how did she meet her death. It was palpable that she has been murdered. But the newspapers got whiff of the matter and people wanted Mr. Sherlock Holmes to investigate the case as they were not familiar with the skills of Dupin. Both found that the woman was an Asian and most probably an Indian. Holmes and Dupin both agreed that they should also seek the assistance of the ‘bhadrolok’ detective from Bengal, Byomkesh Bakshi. I dreamt further that the woman was found to be a book collector; the detectives found that she was an aficionado of detective fiction. They found that she was an amateur detective herself and I saw them looked utterly bewildered when they discovered that she was killed when she tried to investigate a murder mystery herself, dressed as a man. I saw the dead body and to my utter horror, found that the body was mine. I was the murdered amateur detective! I don’t remember anything more about the dream, the nightmare. Perhaps there was nothing more to it; perhaps, I imagined some bits of it the next morning, this morning, to make it coherent but the visages of Holmes, Dupin, Pain and Bakshi-a beak nosed face with a pipe hanging loosely from its lips; an emaciated face with sunken eyes; a bespectacled faced with a mop of curly, unkempt hair; and a well-groomed, brown face-had all expressed sheer astonishment on discovering the cause of the murder. And I was reminded of the expression intermittently throughout the day. Why did they look so confounded, I wondered, on discovering that a woman wanted to follow their foot-steps and not merely admire them for their acumen but be like them? This might sound a wee bit melodramatic but the nightmare was a turning point of my life. I found myself asking questions which mattered to me as a lover of literature, as a fan of classic detective yarns, and as a woman. Why are the most celebrated, best loved votaries of the intellect in the universe of detective fiction invariably men? Why are Holmes, Dupin, Father Brown and Brother William so conspicuously lacking in female friends? Why do they hardly ever have women as adversaries or as collaborators? Why did these men not confront women in their adventures, more often than they did? (Of course, there have been innumerable attempts by all save Doyle himself to depict Irene Adler as the love interest of Holmes and Guy Ritchie did show Ms. Adler making her way through the underbelly of late 19th century London with remarkable finesse). But why could women not be found at the scenes of the crimes showing active interest in solving them? I heard a feeble voice inside me saying, “There is Nancy Drew of course and the girls in Famous Five.” But another stronger voice retorted harshly, “ But George behaved like a boy and Nancy Drew was well, the stereotypical American ‘chick’ who solved cases in between enjoying male attention and parents’ adoration. Remember how you despised her as a kid?” I suddenly found myself looking for the answers to my questions in the essay Feminism and Philosophy by Jean Grimshaw . The author draws attention to the proclivity of Western philosophy towards binarism-male-female, rational-emotional, natural-cultural, production-reproduction. She states how there is a hierarchy in the binarism and the privileged terms are always associated with men and treated as male characteristics. The qualities of rationality and reasoning have therefore been treated for very long as male traits whereas women were constructed to be irrational, emotional and incapable of intellectual endeavours like search for higher truths of life and at a more base level, of maintaining sang-froid in difficult situations. Is that the reason as to why not one woman was featured in literature as a gifted ratiocinator? I realized that if all my fantasies of meeting Dupin or Holmes ever could come true perhaps, these men would treated me with indifference if I expressed my admiration for them and with alarm or even disdain if I expressed a wish to work with them. Maybe, it is time for me undergo another crisis of faith. Maybe, I will emerge with new idols to worship at the end of it. Maybe, I need to initiate an internet search on women ratiocinators. Maybe, I will begin to read The No.1 ladies detective agency. I certainly need new heroes.