Baker Street to Bangalore

All ye who Google today, mark the silhouette of, in the man's own words, 'the only private consulting detective' in the world. Holmes, with pipe and footprints for company, on the home page. It is his maker's anniversary.

I pause, I must keep work aside. Before those pipettes and burettes, that pound of shag tobacco, before the idle scraping of fiddle on violin in a cold-blooded arm crowded with needle-marks, insurance and healthcare can wait.

Mark the elegance of the pipe. One already sees a grimy, freezing morning, with the horse-carts clopping on the cobblestone, and dim fat lamps failing in the fog, and the shuffling of gumboots and the wheezing of frock-coats in the corridor, and somewhere in a maze of unfriendly faces is a ragged consumptive man sharpening his blade, a respectable gentleman nervously oiling his revolver, waiting for the right time...

How could I describe the magic of all that, for a boy in Bangalore, all of twelve or thirteen, in a house of Kannada, rice and rasam? There was magic in every sentence. Fog. Snow. The knocker on a door. Scotland Yard. Watson's heavy walking stick. The Jezail bullet which pierced his shoulder. London, 'that cesspool of idlers and loungers'. Names like Drebber, Stangerson. Lestrade, lean and ferret-like, defeated again. Tobais Gregson sidling beside him. Holmes sniffing like a hound, pausing at taper, footmark, dust and ash. Salt Lake City, the unswerving arm of vengeance across the Atlantic and into the heart of London. There was magic in hats, in heavy coats, in leaving them on a hook when you entered a room. My uncle had a auburn cowboy hat someone gifted him, and I'd wear it on the sly, and then my grandfather's mocha raincoat and half of it trailing behind me, wading in murder, eyeing the cobwebs above, the sheddings of a broom, my grandmother's bangles, my grandfather's razor...

The first serious book I ever read (after some years of Enid Blyton's lemonade and pastry) was A Study in Scarlet, which remains, in my humble opinion, the finest Holmes novel and the finest thriller. What in the world could match the drips of Holmes's titrations, what could be more heart-thumping than setting out in a cab in the depths of the night with Watson and Holmes? Not food, not school, and at thirteen certainly not girls. Everytime I return to it, there's a steady thrill in my mind when Watson throws down that article with 'What ineffable twaddle!...I would lay ten to one against him', and Holmes's nonchalant response, 'You would lose your money. As for the article, I wrote it myself'. You can read it a thousand times, and it only gets better, the journey from dreary lodgings in London to the reddening of a lover's eyes in Utah's aridity, and back, to the story of poisoned pills, to justice for the wronging dead, and fetters for the savage lover. When you close the book, your blood is sluggish, and you move as if in water.

Of course, one could argue that the overwhelming emphasis on objectivity, on clinical methods and logical sequences of thought, are among the drawbacks of Doyle's Holmes-works, because very little of our universe can be described in the linear, objective paradigm. But that was the prevailing paradigm, and I'm prepared to let this one go as a reader, to believe in the sanctity of the empirical, in cases being spokes in one large wheel of crime. And with that, to let the moods and colours and noises confront me, boats on the Thames, the greasy arms that washed a blade, the carbuncle in a goose's gullet...

Great works stay forever, they are filled with bridges and doors, they move with ease from the 19th century to the 21st, from a Boer War veteran to a Kendriya Vidyalaya student, from London to Bangalore, 221 B Baker Street to 57th Cross Rajajinagar. And while so much is in common, while stories of love and greed and revenge and justice will find listeners everywhere, it is the magic you find in settings different from yours that make your eyes gleam like pearls while you read. It's the same, for me, with Dostoevsky's Russia, Bandhopadhyay's Bengal and Maugham's islands in the Pacific. There's beauty and nostalgia in the familiar, and intrigue in the unfamiliar, and a wavering immortality in the threshold between them.

Allow me to add, also, that the Bantam edition of Holmes, with the photograph of a dull, cold cobblestone street with a scatter of hat-wearing silhouetted men on its dark-coffee cover, is the edition, and it's in two volumes. I have consistently been intolerant of any other Holmes, how ridiculous and ersatz the others seem. It's been a while, though. I lost my childhood volumes and bought another set last month on the footpath between Churchgate and Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. So if you want a set and you're in Mumbai, you know where to head.

Look for an old, frayed copy with musty pages. Find yourself a solitary lamplit room. If you have Handel, play Handel. And open the doors...