hat are you thinking, Felu Babu?’ Lalmohan Babu asked. It was a Sunday morning. The three of us were sitting in our living room, chatting as usual, Lalmohan Babu having driven all the way from his house in Gorpar to join us. There had been a shower earlier, but now the sun was scorching. Our ceiling fan was moving with great gusto, since on Sundays power cuts were rare. ‘I was thinking of your latest novel,’ Feluda replied. On the first of Baisakh, Jatayu’s new novel, The Astounding Atlantic, had been released. By the fifth, four thousand and five hundred copies had been sold. ‘What about my latest novel? How can that possibly give you food for thought?’ ‘What I was thinking, simply, was this: no matter how exaggerated or unreal your plots are, you manage to get away with it simply by being able to tell a good story. Despite all their weaknesses, your books are immensely enjoyable.’ Lalmohan Babu began to look deeply gratified, and was about to say something suitable, but Feluda continued, ‘That made me wonder if any of your ancestors had also been writers.’ The truth was that we knew very little about Lalmohan Ganguli’s family. All he had told us was that his parents were no more, and he was a bachelor. ‘My ancestors? I have no idea who they were, or what they did, more than four generations ago. Nobody in the last three generations was a writer, I can tell you that.’ ‘Didn’t your father have brothers?’ ‘Yes, he had two brothers, one older and the other younger than him. The older one was called Mohinimohan Ganguli. He practised homoeopathy. When I was a child, being ill automatically meant going to my uncle and being given arnica, or rhus tox, or belladonna. My great-grandfather was Lalit Mohan Ganguli. He was a paper merchant. He had a shop called L.M. Ganguli & Sons. Both my grandfather and father looked after our family business, but after my father’s death, things became rather difficult. The shop changed hands, although the name L.M. Ganguli & Sons was retained for some time.’ ‘What about your father’s younger brother? Your uncle? Wasn’t he interested in running the business?’ ‘No, sir. I saw my uncle, Durgamohan Ganguli, only once in my life. I was born in 1936. Seven years before that, in 1929, he had become a freedom fighter, and joined the terrorists. The Assistant Commissioner in Khulna—which is now in Bangladesh—used to be a Mr Turnbull. Durgamohan tried to shoot him. He didn’t succeed in killing him, but the bullet hit Turnbull’s chin, causing a great deal of damage.’ ‘And then?’

‘Then nothing. Durgamohan disappeared. The police never found him. Perhaps the passion for adventure is something I got from my uncle.’ ‘When did you see him?’ ‘He returned home once, after Independence, in 1949. That was my first and last meeting with him. The man I saw was utterly different from the daredevil I had heard so