The Body In The Library

SURINDER MOHAN PATHAK, the king of Hindi crime fiction, casts a critical eye on the new translations of his old favourite Ibn-e-Safi

ILLUSTRATIONS: SAMIA SINGH

IT WAS 1956 and I was in class 10 when one of my classmates handed me a book to return to the neighborhood lending library. I went to a cowshed close to school, sat on a chabootra under a peepul tree, read the whole book in about half and hour and enjoyed it immensely.

The author was Ibn-e- Safi and the book was Vinod Aur Leonard. Later, I learnt that Safi was an Urdu writer who had been writing detective fiction since 1952. A new Ibn-ESafi came out every month. Vinod Aur Leonard was the first one translated into Hindi. It was an instant success and Ibn-e-Safi nee Asrar Narvi of Nara village, Uttar Pradesh had arrived with a bang.

Safi soon became more popular in Hindi than in Urdu, notwithstanding the fact that the translations were immature. The readers could afford to ignore the discrepancies in translation as they were hugely impressed by Safi’s style of writing, his lively characters like Rajesh (Imran in Urdu) who appeared to be a bumbling nincompoop. Like Inspector Clouseau, he was an object of ridicule among his colleagues, but what they didn’t know was that he was the chief of secret service, code named X2. Don’t ask how a 28-year-old who had just returned from Oxford had become the chief.

The other memorable Safi character was Col. Vinod (Col. Faridi in Urdu). Col. Vinod was a khandani rais who had inherited a big estate and a lavish lifestyle. Who ever heard of Colonel as a police designation? But such were the thrills of Safi that, nobody, including myself, took any notice of such anomalies. Safi wrote unputdownables in a literal sense of the word.

THE HOUSE OF FEAR Ibn-e-Safi Random House 228 pp; Rs 195

But the success of the crime monthly Jasoosi Duniya was not all due to its regular author Ibn-e-Safi. Its success can be traced back to the publisher, whose father was the general manager of AH Wheeler and Co., the railway book stall contractor controlling more than 400 stalls in North and West India. With an iron hand the doting father promoted sales to an enviable high. Those days people read not for knowledge but for entertainment. Those were times when television transmission was available only in Delhi—for a short duration in the evenings, in black and white.

Safi, a good writer, but by no stretch a great one, was lucky to have escaped scrutiny of his inconsistencies. The House of Fear, featuring Imran, runs into 115 translated pages. Minus the ‘smart talk’ of his principal character, the balance is merely a novel, so no wonder the author could write four of them each month. The novel opens with Imran and his usual tomfoolery which has no bearing on the story.

The story line is flimsy, the end is abrupt and the solution all guesswork. The ‘know-all’ Imran solves the case out of nowhere. The reader doesn’t know how the solution occurred to the hero in the first instance and how the culprit was connected with the strange happenings in the ‘house of fear’ or why the hero chose to scale the rear wall of the house to gain entry when the key to the main door was available to him, and the main door unlocked. The second Ibn-e-Safi novel in this two-novella set, Shootout at the Rocks, runs on similar lines and is nothing to write home about either.

Bilal Tanweer’s translations leaves much to be desired. It appears to be dictionary generated which might be the reason for the use of expressions like ‘favour forgetter’ (instead of ungrateful), ‘empty house’ (unoccupied, vacant), ‘appointed’ (deputed), ‘decided’ (settled), ‘understood’ (followed), ‘fame’ (reputation) etc.

Safi’s books fared well when the going was good. But have these two novellas withstood the test of time?

I’m not sure.