By now, every serious movie buff who enjoyed watching the Malayalam movie Drishyam, will know that the writer-director of the film may have been inspired by the plot of The Devotion of Suspect X. The book was written by Japanese author, Keigo Higashino and features Detective Galileo, a fictional character who is to the Tokyo police force, what Sherlock Holmes was to the Scotland Yard. “Galileo” is the nickname of Prof. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist at the Imperial University in Tokyo. He is an astute reader of people as well. (Science history buffs will recognize that the sleuth’s name is a nod to theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel laureate. He won the award in 1949.)
So, who is Detective Galileo, the Japanese Holmes, up against in The Devotion of Suspect X? Tetsuya Ishigami, high school teacher of mathematics. A veritable monk, this man is moved to help his neighbor who has killed her abusive ex-husband, a lowlife who has been harassing her and her teen daughter (by a second husband). Ishigami gives the mother and daughter ironclad alibis, so they can both escape any further investigation by the police. Ishigami, it turns out, is Galileo’s classmate from college. Back then, he was known as Ishigami, the Buddha, destined for glory in mathematical research. Professors had said that Ishigami has the kind of first-rate mind that comes along maybe once in a century, a Srinivasa Ramanujan-like figure. He is also physically strong and practices martial arts at the dojo — so he is not just a brainy monk.
In Drishyam, the protagonist, George Kutty, is a self-made man, an orphan who has not even completed primary school. As the owner of a small cable television business, he watches movies, all day long, at work. Being a movie buff, he has picked up plenty of practical information from films. Using this and his street smarts, the man manages to devise the perfect cover up for an inadvertent murder.
Unlike Detective Galileo, Ishigami never had time for the arts– maybe he has never even been to the cinema is the impression we get. Ishigami, the Buddha, had planned to devote his life to mathematics but for various reasons, he could not complete his Ph.D. Now, he is stuck teaching mathematics at a school where his students couldn’t care less about learning the subject. He is forced to dumb things down and set very low-level tests, so all the students can pass. So much so, he wonders if it wasn’t enough to let these students know “there was this incomprehensible thing out there called mathematics and leave it at that?” instead of pretending that they had picked up even the rudiments of mathematics.
Ishigami has no family. The neighbor, whom he had come to care about, turns out to be in love with someone else. When Ishigami turns himself in, you console yourself thinking — maybe he is better off in jail, freed from a terrible job. Finally, he will have leisure to work on his high-level math problems. But the neighbor’s teenaged daughter cannot get over the trauma of the murder. The mother too breaks down when she realizes what her benefactor has actually done for her and confesses to the police.
The book ends with a primal sob of the man who realizes he had turned into a murderer for nothing. It is a wonderful novel, but if the writer-director of Drishyam had stuck to that plot, all we would be left with is an “award-padam,” as we used to say in Madras parlance. Doordarshan screened such movies on Sunday afternoons – depressing movies which the only cinema critics can love. Instead, Jeethu Joseph, the writer-director, has given us an edge-of-the-seat Malayalam thriller, where the murder and his family get off the hook. The film was remade in four other Indian languages and was a hit in every one of them. Now, Drishyam has spawned this amazing sequel. Enough ink has been spilled over Drishyam vs Devotion of Suspect X. Can we just accept that the genius was in Jeethu Joseph’s adaptation and be grateful for whatever movie goodness has come in its wake?
If someone reading this has the contact information of Keigo Higashino, they should ask the Japanese author to watch Drishyam 2 on Amazon. Perhaps, Higashino will be inspired to write another good thriller because any good piece of art is bound to inspire another brilliant work. So, it goes — this endless cycle of inspiration and creativity.
