Dec. 22: For legions of Feluda fans looking to continue with the 50th birthday party of Bengal's most famous sleuth, here is a gift in the form of an address. A Feluda-themed café is opening tomorrow at 282 Jodhpur Park.
The café - Abar Baithak -was a popular haunt even in its earlier theme-less avatar. But having shifted to a new address, it is raising a cup of steaming coffee as toast to the sleuth who first appeared on the pages of Sandesh in 1965.
"This is good news. I know the owners and have shared digital copies of some of my father's sketches with them. There is no progress on the Feluda museum that we are planning but at least there would be the cafe now, like Sherlock Holmes has one in London," said Sandip Ray, the son of Feluda's creator Satyajit Ray and the director of the current crop of films on his detective stories.
The cafe got its Feluda connection by being born on the street where Feluda lived - Rajani Sen Road. "When we opened our first cafe there in 2012, named Baithak, our tagline was 'Feluda r paray coffee thek'," recalls Shoumo Banerjee, who owns the cafe with wife Swaralipi Chatterjee. The couple are known to vernacular TV audiences, having starred in the serial Agnipariksha on Zee Bangla as Rudra and Doyel.
"But the Rajani Sen Road cafe was so small that we could not do much with the theme there. When we got this place, which is one-and-a-half times more spacious than the earlier Jodhpur Park site, the first idea that came to our head on seeing the mezzanine floor was to create a den for Maganlal Meghraj, Feluda's arch-rival," says Swaralipi.
So climb up the wooden stairs and come face to face with a wall-to-wall illustration of Maganlal reclining on the gadi. On the opposite wall is a replica of the dartboard against which Lalmohanbabu had fainted on being made the target by Maganlal's knife-thrower. The room even has a bay window through which the muzzle of a pistol is visible, just like it was in Ray's film Jai Baba Felunath.
The couple have got replicas made of iconic props used in the stories. In a showcase, there is a melochord, with the German maker Spiegler's logo. On this, Feluda had played the notes making up Radharaman Samaddar's name to reveal his hidden savings in Samaddarer Chabi.
A Perigal Repeater look-alike (from Gorosthane Sabdhan) has been purchased, as has been Lalmohanbabu's bhojali in Sonar Kella. "We found one as rusty as his Jong Bahadur," laughs Swaralipi.
The menu would be in Feluda's assistant Topshe's narrative, where the Grilled Fish Sandwich, for example, is called Machhlibaba, after the fake saint in Jai Baba Felunath. The smoking zone is titled "Buddhir goray dhnoya", using Feluda's words for his Charminar breaks. "This is Feluda's house, waiting for him to walk in," says Swaralipi.
