Rabindranath Tagore, "Detective" (1898 / translated 2026) (Short Story)
This translation was performed using generative AI.
Compare to Barnali Saha's 2021 translation here.
Tags: Adultery, Calcutta, Marital Dysfunction, Justice system/Police
"Detective"
I was a detective officer in the police department. There were only two goals in my life—my wife and my profession.
In my earlier days, I lived in a joint family. It was because my wife did not receive the respect she deserved there that I quarreled with my elder brother and left home. My brother had been earning the family's livelihood and supporting me, so to leave his shelter so suddenly with my wife was an act of considerable daring on my part.
Yet I never lacked confidence in myself. I was certain that, just as I had won the heart of my beautiful wife, I would also be able to win over the fickle goddess of fortune. Mahimachandra was not destined to remain behind in this world.
I entered the police department in a humble capacity, but it did not take me long to earn promotion to the rank of detective.
Just as even the brightest flame produces soot, so too did my wife's love give rise to the dark stains of jealousy and suspicion. This sometimes interfered with my work. In police service, one cannot afford to consider the proper place or the proper time; indeed, one must more often concern oneself with the improper place and the inconvenient hour. As a result, my wife's natural suspicion seemed only to grow stronger.
She would say to frighten me, "You wander about at all hours and in all sorts of places. We hardly ever see each other. Don't you ever worry about me?"
I would reply, "Suspicion is part of my profession. That's precisely why I don't bring it into my home."
My wife would answer, "Suspicion is not my profession—it is my nature. Give me even the slightest reason to doubt you, and I am capable of anything."
I was firmly determined that I would become the finest detective in the force and make a name for myself. I left unread none of the books or stories I could find on the subject. But the more I read, the more my dissatisfaction and impatience grew.
The reason was that the criminals of our country were timid and foolish, and their crimes dull and straightforward, devoid of any complexity or subtlety.
A murderer in our country could never contain within himself the feverish excitement of shedding human blood. A forger, having spread his own web of deceit, would before long become hopelessly entangled in it himself; he knew nothing of the intricate art of escaping from the maze of his own crime. In so lifeless a land, detective work held neither pleasure nor glory.
Many a time, after effortlessly arresting some Marwari swindler in Burrabazar, I would say to myself, "You disgrace to the brotherhood of criminals! Ruining others is the work of masters possessed of true skill. A clumsy fool like you ought rather to have become a saintly ascetic."
And after capturing a murderer, I would silently address him: "Was the Government's lofty gallows really built for insignificant creatures like you? You possess neither bold imagination nor stern self-discipline, and yet you dare to call yourselves murderers!"
Whenever, in my mind's eye, I beheld the crowded streets of London and Paris, lined on either side with towering buildings piercing the mist-laden sky, my whole body would thrill with excitement. I would think to myself:
"Through these palaces, these streets, and these winding alleys, there flows ceaselessly the great current of humanity—the current of work, of celebration, of beauty. Yet beneath it all, everywhere, there runs another current: dark, twisted, savage, and terrible—the hidden stream of crime, carving its own secret course. It is the very nearness of that sinister undercurrent that lends European society its immense, awe-inspiring charm, making its laughter, wit, and refinement seem all the more magnificent."
"But along the streets of our Calcutta, behind the open windows of row upon row of houses, there is little beyond cooking, household chores, students poring over their lessons, gatherings over cards or chess, quarrels between husband and wife, at most disputes between brothers, or consultations over lawsuits. Looking at any one of those houses, it never occurs to one that perhaps, at this very moment, in some hidden corner of that home, the Devil himself sits huddled over his clutch of black eggs, patiently incubating them."
I often went out into the streets simply to observe the faces and mannerisms of passersby. Whenever anyone struck me as even faintly suspicious in appearance or bearing, I would secretly follow him, investigate his name, background, and history, only in the end to discover—with the deepest disappointment—that they proved to be spotless, respectable gentlemen. Indeed, even their relatives and friends never spread any serious slander about them behind their backs. Among all the passersby, the one who had struck me as the most hardened villain—the very man whom I had felt certain had just committed some outrageous crime—I investigated thoroughly, only to discover that he was the second master at a scholarship school, returning home after finishing his day's teaching.
Had such men been born in another country, they might well have become celebrated thieves or bandits. It was only for want of sufficient vitality and manly vigor that, in our country, they merely spent their lives teaching in schools and died in old age drawing a pension. After all my efforts and inquiries, the profound contempt I conceived for the harmlessness of this second master exceeded anything I had ever felt toward the pettiest pot-and-pan thief.
At last, one evening, not far from my own residence, I noticed a man standing beneath a gas lamp. Without any apparent reason, he was pacing back and forth in the same spot with an air of restless expectancy. The moment I saw him, I had no doubt that he was engaged in carrying out some secret and sinister design.
Keeping myself concealed in the darkness, I took a careful look at him. He was young and handsome.
I said to myself, Now there is the very face made for villainy. Those whose own countenance is their greatest witness against them should carefully avoid every kind of crime. They may fail to earn success by honest deeds, but they have little hope of succeeding through wicked ones either. This young fellow's appearance was plainly his greatest asset, and for that reason I spent quite some time admiring him inwardly. I thought:
"If only you know how to make proper use of the rare advantage God has bestowed upon you, then I shall truly say, well done!"
Stepping suddenly out of the darkness, I came up behind him, slapped him on the back, and exclaimed,
"Well, how are you?"
He started violently at once and turned deathly pale.
I immediately said,
"I beg your pardon. I've made a mistake. For a moment I took you for someone else."
Inwardly, however, I thought that I had made no mistake at all—I had taken him for exactly what he was.
Still, the excessive alarm he had shown was hardly appropriate. It disappointed me somewhat. He ought to have had much greater command over himself. Yet the perfect criminal, the ideal embodiment of the profession, is rare even among criminals themselves. Nature is as sparing in producing a master thief as it is in producing greatness of any other kind.
After withdrawing into the shadows, I watched him. In evident agitation, he left the gas lamp behind and walked away. I followed him.
I saw him enter the grounds around the Gol Dighi and, reaching the edge of the tank, throw himself flat on his back upon the grass. I thought to myself, This is certainly a much better place for pondering one's plans than beneath a gas lamp. If anyone were to become suspicious, at most they might suppose that the young fellow was gazing into the dark sky, tracing the moonlike face of his beloved there to make up for the absence of the moon on a night of the waning fortnight. My interest in him grew steadily stronger.
I made inquiries and discovered where he lived. His name was Manmatha. He was a college student who had failed his examinations and was idling away the summer vacation. The other students who shared his lodgings had all gone home. During the long vacation every student usually deserted the boarding house, and I became determined to discover what malignant star it was that refused to grant this young man leave to depart.
I too disguised myself as a student and rented a room in the same house.
The very first day he saw me, he looked at my face in a curious way. I could not quite make out the expression. It was as though he were astonished; as though he had already divined my purpose. I realized that I had found prey worthy of the hunter. He was not someone who could be trapped by any simple trick.
Yet when I tried to cultivate his friendship, he offered no resistance at all. Still, I had the feeling that he, too, was studying me with keen, searching eyes, trying to discover who I really was. Such constant alertness and curiosity about human character are the marks of a master. To find so much shrewdness in one so young delighted me greatly.
I thought to myself that unless a woman were brought into the affair, it would not be easy to unlock the heart of this remarkably precocious young schemer.
One day I said to Manmatha in an emotion-choked voice,
"My dear fellow, I am in love with a woman—but she does not love me."
At first he looked at me with a trace of surprise. Then, smiling faintly, he replied,
"That is hardly an uncommon misfortune. It was precisely to provide such amusements that our playful Creator made men and women different."
"I said, 'I want your advice and your help.'
He agreed.
I proceeded to invent an elaborate story, piece by piece. He listened to every word with eager curiosity and close attention, yet said very little in return. I had always believed that when one confides a love affair—especially an illicit one—to another person, intimacy springs up rapidly between them. But in this case there was no sign of it. The young man seemed, if anything, to grow even more reserved than before. Yet it was equally evident that he had stored every word I had spoken in his memory. My admiration for the boy knew no bounds.
Meanwhile, I could not discover what Manmatha did each day behind his locked door, nor how far his secret design had progressed. That it was progressing, however, I had no doubt. The moment one looked at his face, it was apparent that he was engaged in some profound mystery, and that lately it had reached an advanced stage of maturity.
I secretly unlocked and searched his desk. There I found nothing except a notebook containing some exceedingly obscure verses, his college lecture notes, and a handful of insignificant letters from home.
The letters proved only one thing: his family had repeatedly urged him to return home, yet he stubbornly remained where he was. There must therefore have been some compelling reason for refusing to go back. Had that reason been perfectly innocent, it would surely have slipped out in conversation long before this. It was precisely because the truth was likely to be the very opposite that the boy's movements and history became so extraordinarily fascinating to me.
I imagined him to be a member of that hidden race of antisocial beings who dwell entirely beneath the surface of the world, forever shaking the vast edifice of human society from below. This boy was no mere schoolboy; he was a limb of that ancient and worldwide brotherhood. He was a companion of the great destroyer who wanders over the face of the earth. Though outwardly he appeared to be a harmless modern Bengali student, spectacles on his nose and absorbed in college studies, I could not have regarded him as any more terrible had he stood before me as a skull-bearing Kapalika, a devotee of Bhairava. I revered him.
At last it became necessary to introduce an actual woman into the affair.
Harimati, a woman in the pay of the police, agreed to assist me. I informed Manmatha that I was the unfortunate suitor of this Harimati. It was on her account that, for several days, I stationed myself beside Manmatha near the Gol Dighi, repeatedly reciting the poem "Why has the moon risen again in the sky?" And Harimati, partly with genuine feeling and partly in playful pretense, let it be known that she had given her heart to Manmatha.
But the scheme produced nothing like the result I had expected. Manmatha observed the entire performance with a curiosity that was remote, detached, and utterly unruffled.
Then, one day at noon, I picked up a few torn fragments of a letter from the floor of his room. After painstakingly fitting the pieces together, I managed to decipher this incomplete sentence:
"Today, at seven in the evening, secretly at your lodgings..."
No matter how hard I searched, I could recover nothing more.
My heart leapt with excitement. Just as a paleontologist's imagination springs joyfully to life upon discovering a single fragment of bone belonging to some long-extinct creature buried beneath the earth, so it was with me.
I knew that Harimati was due to appear at our lodgings that night at ten o'clock. But what, then, was to happen at seven in the evening?
The boy possessed not only courage but remarkable intelligence. If one had to carry out some secret criminal enterprise, the best opportunity was surely the very day on which some conspicuous commotion was already expected in the house. First, everyone's attention would naturally be fixed upon the principal event. Secondly, when there was an unusual gathering somewhere, no one would imagine that anyone would deliberately choose that very occasion for the execution of some hidden design.
Then another suspicion suddenly occurred to me.
Perhaps this new friendship with me, and this pretended romance with Harimati, had themselves been turned by Manmatha into instruments for accomplishing his own purpose. That would explain why he neither allowed himself to be caught nor entirely escaped from my grasp. We had unwittingly screened him from scrutiny while he pursued his secret undertaking. Everyone imagined that he was wholly occupied with us—and he had no desire to dispel that illusion.
Consider the logic for yourself.
A student from another town, who, during the long vacation, remains alone in an empty boarding house despite the repeated entreaties of his family to come home, must have some compelling need for solitude—of that no one could reasonably doubt. Yet I had come to live in his lodgings and broken that solitude. I had even introduced a woman into the situation, creating an entirely new disturbance. In spite of all this, he showed no annoyance. He did not move elsewhere. He did not distance himself from our company.
And yet it was perfectly certain that he had not the slightest attachment either to Harimati or to me. Indeed, I had often watched him when he was off his guard, and I became convinced that a genuine dislike—almost a hatred—for us both was steadily growing within him.
The only possible explanation was this: if he wished to preserve the appearance of sociability while at the same time enjoying the advantages of solitude, then there could be no better arrangement than to keep a newly acquainted fellow like myself close at hand. And nothing provides a more convenient pretext for remaining wholly absorbed in one's own affairs than the presence of a woman. Before our acquaintance, Manmatha's conduct had been inexplicably suspicious; after our arrival, every trace of that suspicious behavior vanished completely.
To think that a schemer capable of reasoning so far ahead, of calculating consequences so swiftly, could have been born in our own Bengal filled my heart with exhilaration. Had Manmatha not misunderstood my intentions, I believe I should have clasped him to my breast with both arms.
The very first time I saw him that day, I said,
"I have decided to treat you to dinner at a hotel this evening at seven."
He started slightly on hearing this, then quickly regained his composure and replied,
"My dear fellow, forgive me. My digestion is in a most pitiable state today."
Never before had I known Manmatha to show the slightest reluctance toward the prospect of dining at a hotel. Clearly, today the condition of his inner organs must have become extraordinarily delicate.
That afternoon I was not supposed to remain at our lodgings. But on that day I deliberately lingered, introducing one topic of conversation after another and showing no inclination whatsoever to leave. I could see that Manmatha was growing inwardly restless. He agreed with every opinion I expressed, raised not the slightest objection in any argument, and offered no contradiction of any kind.
At last he glanced anxiously at the clock, sprang to his feet, and said,
"Aren't you going to fetch Harimati today?"
I exclaimed, as though suddenly remembering,
"Yes, yes! I had completely forgotten. Brother, you get dinner ready. I'll bring her here at exactly half past ten tonight."
With that, I took my leave.
A kind of intoxicating excitement coursed through every vein in my body. The eagerness Manmatha displayed for the arrival of seven o'clock was scarcely greater than my own. Concealing myself not far from our lodging, I kept looking at my watch every few moments like a lover feverishly awaiting the arrival of his beloved.
As twilight deepened and the time came for the gas lamps to be lit along the streets, a closed palanquin entered our compound.
The thought thrilled me beyond measure. Within that curtained palanquin, borne so effortlessly upon the shoulders of a handful of palanquin bearers amid their loud, rhythmic cries, there might be entering the lodging of a college student a veiled, tear-stained sin—a living embodiment of tragedy. The very imagination of it sent a strange and exquisite shiver through my entire being.
I could delay no longer.
A short while later, I slowly climbed the stairs to the upper floor. My intention had been to remain hidden and quietly observe and listen, but that proved impossible. In the room directly facing the staircase sat Manmatha, looking toward the stairs; at the far end of the room, facing away from him, sat a veiled woman, speaking in a low voice.
The moment I realized that Manmatha had seen me, I strode quickly into the room and said,
"My dear fellow, I left my watch in my room. I've come back to fetch it."
Manmatha was so overwhelmed that it seemed as though he might collapse to the floor that very instant. My amusement and excitement knew no bounds.
I asked, "My dear fellow, are you feeling unwell?"
He was unable to utter a single word.
Then I turned to the rigid, motionless, veiled woman and asked,
"And who are you in relation to Manmatha?"
There was no reply.
But I saw that she was not related to Manmatha at all.
She was my own wife. What happened afterward is already known to everyone.
Thus ended my very first capture as a detective.
A little later, I said to Detective Mahimachandra, "It is possible that your wife's relationship with Manmatha was not, after all, contrary to social propriety."
Mahim replied, "That may very well be so. This letter from Manmatha was found in my wife's box."
So saying, he handed me a letter, which is reproduced below.
My virtuous Sucharita,
Perhaps by now you have completely forgotten the unfortunate Manmatha.
When, in our childhood, I used to visit my maternal uncle's house in Kazibari, I would always go from there to your house, where we spent many happy hours playing together. That little world of childhood games, and the bond that grew out of them, has long since been broken.
I do not know whether you are aware of it, but there came a time when, casting aside both my patience and my shame, I even tried to arrange a marriage between us. But because we were almost the same age, the elders on both sides would not consent under any circumstances.
After your marriage, I lost all trace of you for four or five years.
Five months ago, I learned that your husband had been transferred to Calcutta in connection with his duties in the police department. On hearing the news, I made inquiries and succeeded in discovering your address.
I cherish no vain hope of meeting you, and the Searcher of Hearts knows that I have no wicked intention of intruding like a disturbance upon the happiness of your married life.
Every evening I stand beneath the gas lamp in front of your house like a worshipper of the setting sun. At precisely half past seven, you unfailingly place a lighted kerosene lamp before the glass window of the south-facing room on the upper floor of your house. For that single fleeting moment, your form, illumined by the lamplight, appears before my eyes. That alone is the extent of my offense against you.
In the meantime, by chance, I have become acquainted with your husband, and our acquaintance has gradually ripened into intimacy. From what I have seen of his character, I can no longer doubt that your life is not a happy one.
I possess no social claim upon you. Yet the Providence who has made your sorrow my own has also laid upon me the duty of trying to relieve it.
Therefore, forgive my boldness. If, next Friday evening at exactly seven o'clock, you could come secretly to my lodgings in a palanquin for only twenty minutes, I wish to tell you certain confidential matters concerning your husband. If you cannot believe me—and if you have the courage to bear it—I can even produce proof. I should also like to offer you some advice. Keeping God in my heart, I earnestly hope that, if you follow that advice, you may one day find happiness.
My purpose, however, is not altogether selfless.
I also long, if only for a few moments, to see you face to face, to hear your voice, and to sanctify my humble dwelling forever by the touch of your feet, so that it may remain filled with the memory of that blessed dream.
If you cannot trust me, and if you wish to deny me even this small happiness, then please write and tell me so. In that case, I shall explain everything in a letter.
And if you cannot even trust me enough to write, then show this very letter to your husband. After that, whatever I have to say, I shall say directly to him.
Your constant well-wisher,
Sri Manmathanath Majumdar
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- Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore: A Collection Amardeep Singh