Small-town chest-puff

Narayan Debnath is a name that will not strike most Southasians as odd, surrounded as we are by friends with names like Shiva, Mohammad and Jesus, a man-god symbiosis in sound. Narayan is another name for Vishnu, while deb is 'god' and nath is 'king' or 'ruler'. The name is therefore protean in power, in the kind of productive creativity that is almost exclusive to the gods. Strange it must be, therefore, to imagine a balding, silver-haired man in a white dhoti and ganjee looking at the camera with the surprised eagerness of the first-time photographed, sitting in his middle-class living quarters in Howrah. It is generally men who tend to overestimate – in art and the dailiness of fear – the potency of their creators. Batul the superhero, Hada and Bhoda, Nontey and Phontey, the schoolfriends trying to beat boredom in school, could never have imagined how ordinary a life their creator led.

The comic-strip creator is the poster boy of anonymity. His or her name appears next to his creation everywhere, almost in the fashion of 'c/o', a bureaucratic marker of parenthood on application forms; but by the time readers have  reached the last bubble of words, that name has been crowded out by those of his creations. The comic-strip creator thus lurks in the debris of our consciousness, emerging now and then, as during a quiz competition. For a very long time, this writer continued to believe that 'Narayan Debnath' was actually the subtitle of many comic strips, something like 'The Poor Little Rich Boy' that followed the  title Richie Rich. Children have no use for names, certainly not for the names of parents of their best friends, and I cannot remember ever having spent much energy on conceiving a likely face and personality for Debnath.