The walks with Baba helped too. Those resulted in a lively exchange of ideas. Then we were living in a small town in Assam. Our house was on the outskirts of it. We will walk into the town to a newsstand and buy comics. Generally, it will be a Phantom or a Mandrake or the latest issue of Amar Chitra Katha. We bought those in Bengali, they used to come out in translation then. Perhaps, Baba preferred that I listen to those tales of heroism and magic in our own tongue and, may be, learn to imagine in it too. Upon our return, in the evening, he read those out to me. We avidly discussed every twist and turn in the plot. Even when not identified, I learnt to recognize the villain of the tale pretty early. “He is the Bad guy,” I will say, putting my finger on the illustration of the likely villain. “Hmm, seems that he is,” Baba will nod gravely. Phantom’s Dengali became real to me. It remains almost real still. I pestered him endlessly to re-read each comic countless times. The result was that he took to the practice of dramatizing them, recording the dialogues on our tape recorder. Thus, besides the world I was born in, Dengali was the first foreign land revealed to me.
What was it about the Phantom I liked? Hooded and masked, he rode a giant white stallion and was followed by his faithful wolf-dog. He lived in a cave the shape of a skull. He even had a pet stegosaurus on a far-away islet. Like all heroes he was all rippling muscles and sinews. But he was still all too human. Immortal to all but those closest to him, he was stalked by death every moment. The Phantom was a god who was very human. His flesh bled, suffered and died like ours. And yet he lived on as a myth and a man. When a Phantom died he was succeeded by his son who became the new Phantom donning the hood and the mask. Thus, this line of heroes lived a vow their forebear had taken four-hundred years ago.
The meaning of evil and villainy was still simple enough for me. Evil was when you were not bought a comics, villainy was when someone snatched your candy. They caused a catch in the throat and made the eyes well up. I understood perfectly well that the Phantom should want such ugly things removed. One has to live a while to realize that often evil and villainy come twined with so much else that it is hard to tell them apart. But I did not know this then and was better for it. I think, even as a four year old I faintly experienced the romance of Phantom’s beginnings and the epic quality of his striving. And, of course, I liked Dengali.
A post-colonial scholar will not like the place. Dengali was meant to be an African country and was inhabited by far too many stereotypes. Western gaze is the only continent this country could have belonged to. But I feel now that the creator Lee Falk routed this gaze through the store of gentle decency in him. The ‘natives’ were indeed types, the Bandar pygmies armed with poison arrows, the Llongo, the Mori who unquestioningly accepted Phantom’s immortality. But they were also noble and incorruptible. It was the white man who was generally the villain in the Phantom tales. But I have felt and known all this only after living and growing a while. When I was four Dengali was merely the land of the incredible. It was the country I wanted to visit. Actually, it was where I would have liked to grow up.
Dengali had a little of every continent and, in fact, of age. It resembled Zimbabwe and South Africa in having a white minority. To its east lay a mysterious country simply referred to as the ‘Eastern Dark.’ In their attire and ways its people corresponded to the medieval Arabs. The denizens of ‘Eastern Dark’ were particularly evil slave traders. Somewhere to the north of Dengali were the ‘misty mountains.’ This land was ruled by scores of princes. Today, they impress me as Lee Falk’s adaptation of the colonial era Indian princes. Dengali itself was a tapestry of the prosaic and the fantastical. This country had the most modern of cities. For an African country Dengali’s cities looked like the American cities far too much. They were surrounded by unbroken forests where lived the Llongo, the Mori and so many other tribes. Somewhere deep inside them stood the ‘Phantom Peak.’ Long ago, the black emperor Junkar had had it chiseled in the likeness of the Phantom’s countenance. It was a generous emperor’s gift to a friend. The ‘little people’ lived very far away, in the crater of a dead volcano. They grew no more than one’s thumb and dressed like the Greeks of classical antiquity. The Phantom was friends with them and their prince who was called Vlad. The Phantom kept his pet animals on an islet upon a river. This ‘Isle of Eden’ was a remarkable place where the fawn grazed by the lion unharmed. These beasts of prey had been raised by their master from cubs. Fed only on fish they had turned peaceable and harmed no one, not even the animals they otherwise preyed on in the wild. As a child, I wished very dearly to have a pet lion which will eat nothing but fish and will harm no one. It was on the ‘Isle of Eden’ that the Phantom kept Stegy, his pet stegosaurus. Stegy was kept company by two hominids, a male and a female; they were called Hzz and Hrz. I am afraid, I fail to recall who was the male of the two. But I do remember how desperately I wanted Dengali to exist. I still do.
