Who is fiction’s most loved detective? Sherlock Holmes, without doubt. Why not Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple?—you may ask. Many would proffer many reasons—Holmes is the pioneer, his skills of deduction are superior, and more.
There is another. Poirot and Marple are about murders. Murders are about arsenic, cyanide and blood spilled all around. Depressingly dirty and dismal. Decent people like me and the murderer in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case abhor blood.
Holmes, on the other hand, caught felons—jewel thieves, con artists and bank robbers. All delightful people, none dismal. Some of them could even be nice men to know, as was the blue-blooded bank robber in The Red Headed League. He insisted on being addressed ‘sir’ even by the policeman who was handcuffing him. Class!
The world loves felons. There is a charming ingenuity about their rascality. Look at the number of Hollywood and Bollywood hits that have been churned out about jewel thieves, con artists, train robbers and bank robbers—from the old wagon heists of the American wild west and The Great Train Robbery of England to our desi Dev Anand’s Jewel Thief, MGR’s Ninaithadhai Mudippavan, Dharmendra’s Shalimar, Amitabh Bachchan’s Mr Natwarlal, and several of the recent Akshay Kumar films. The ‘heroes’ in those films are all rascals; they conned men, hoodwinked landlords, outsmarted tycoons, robbed banks yet stole our hearts, as also of comely maidens. All men of ingenuity and a lovable streak of daredevilry.
Kerala discovered one such smart alec a couple of years ago, one Monson Mavunkal, who sold such lemons as Moses’s staff, young Krishna’s butter-pot and Tipu’s throne to the most literate state’s powerful politicos, police brass, mandarins and moneybags. Give him a few more years of free run and he would have sold them King Arthur’s Excalibur, Aladdin's lamp, Arjuna’s Gandiva, the Holy Grail and even a piece of the Pinaka which Lord Rama broke to win Sita’s hand.
There’s another set of lovable rascals—jail-breakers. Ever since Alexandre Dumas got the young French sailor Edmond Dantes out of the Château d'If in fiction’s greatest prison break, and rewarded him with a treasure trove and the title of The Count of Monte Cristo, jail-breakers, too, have been stealing our hearts. No wonder, the daring escape by Frank Morris, Clarence and John Anglin from Alcatraz in 1962 gave birth to a Clint Eastwood hit, a television movie and more, though we still don’t know whether the trio made it to safety or drowned in the San Francisco Bay. No wonder, with all the blood of bikini blondes on his hands, Charles Sobhraj is remembered more for his jail break from Tihar.
Indian jailbirds—Sobhraj is no Indian—have been dull in the department of imagination. At best they have only arranged shootouts in courts and escaped when they were brought to trial. Once convicted, they largely stay tight behind bars, or break free by bribing the guards or staging riots. Too timid, or too violent. No imagination, no finesse, no poetry, no touch of genius.
Now, Indian felons seem to be catching up and how! Last week, two jailbirds are said to have scaled the walls of a Haridwar jail while a Ramlila was being staged in the prison. The duo wore the monkey costumes brought for the actors playing the vaanara troopers in the play, and simply scaled the walls like the vaanaras did up Ravana’s walls. All along, the jailers simply sat and watched the fun.
Asrani of Sholay, move over! There are newer claimants to your throne.
prasannan@theweek.in