Pather Kanta (2023)

Pother Kanta (Bengali: পথের কাঁটা) also spelled Pather Kanta, (Lit: A thorn on the path) is a detective story written by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay featuring the Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi and his friend, assistant, and narrator Ajit Bandyopadhyay. It is one of the first forays that Sharadindu took in the realm of creating a mature logical detective moulded in the pattern of Sherlock Holmes in the Bengali language, and one that Bengalis could immediately identify with. As such, it is not as well-drawn out as some of Sharadindu’s later works and relies heavily on Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian deductive reasoning for inspiration.

Pother Kanta starts off like many of the Byomkesh Bakshi novels while Ajit and Byomkesh are having a conversation in the living room of their Harrison Road flat. Byomkesh has noticed a rather unusual advertisement hidden away in the classifieds section of the Dainik Kalketu daily with the heading Pother Kanta (Thorn of the Road). Translated the ad reads, “If anyone wants to remove the Thorn of the Road, stand next to and hold on to the lamp-post on the southwest corner of the Whiteway-Ladley store on Saturday evening at 5:30.” Byomkesh had noticed this peculiar ad being published without fail every Friday for the previous three months. Byomkesh immediately inferred that the person posting the add went to great pains to remain anonymous and chose this cryptic message on purpose. He also selected a meeting place in the centre of Hogg’s Market in Calcutta at a very busy time of the day, so that he could pass by the responder without being detected. Byomkesh guessed that the advertiser would probably want to slip something into the responder’s pocket, perhaps some instructions, and would want to accomplish this without being detected. Ajit argued that Pather Kanta all of this was circumstantial evidence at best and challenged Byomkesh to prove it, a challenge that Byomkesh heartily accepted.

All this light banter was interrupted by the entrance of a podgy, middle-aged man who introduced himself as Ashutosh Mitra, a single businessman by profession, and a resident of Nebutola. He had come to seek Byomkesh’s service with respect to the gramophone pin mystery. Ajit describes the mystery in detail for the benefit of the reader. Basically, metropolitan Calcutta had been plagued recently by the murders of quite a few influential businessmen who had all been killed by being shot with what resembled an Edison gramophone pin embedded in their hearts. All these individuals had been killed in busy areas of Calcutta in broad daylight while crossing the street. There were no witnesses to any of the crimes and no one had reported hearing anything unusual as would be expected from the release of a projectile from a firearm. The police had been frantically trying to nab the murderer or murderers and had even cordoned off and searched all pedestrians and motorists in the area of a crime immediately after an attack, but were unsuccessful in getting any leads. The police had started to arrest anyone who they suspected might have a motive, but still the murders continued. Calcutta was gripped in a spell of panic.