Lalmohan Babu looked up from his book and said, ‘Rammohan Roy’s grandson owned a circus. Did you know that?’ Feluda was leaning back, his face covered with a handkerchief. He shook his head. Our car had been standing, for the last ten minutes, behind a huge lorry which was loaded with bales of straw. Not only was it blocking our way, but was emitting such thick black smoke that we were all getting choked. Our driver had blown his horn several times, but to no avail. I was tired of being able to see nothing but the painting of a setting sun and flowers on the back of the lorry, and all that a lorry usually said: ‘Ta Ta’, ‘Horn Please’, ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Thank You’. Equally bored and tired, Lalmohan Babu had started to read a book called The Circus in Bengal. His next book was going to be set in a circus, so he had taken Feluda’s advice and decided to do a bit of reading on the subject. As a matter of fact, we had stopped in Ranchi earlier in the day and seen posters advertising The Great Majestic Circus. It was supposed to have reached Hazaribagh which was where we were going. If we happened to be free one evening, we had decided to go and see the circus. Winter had only just started. All of us wanted a short break. Lalmohan Babu’s latest book—The Vampire of Vancouver—had been released last month and sold two thousand copies in three weeks, which naturally pleased him no end. Feluda had objected to the title of the book, pointing out that Vancouver was a huge modern city, a most unlikely place for vampires. For once, Lalmohan Babu had overruled Feluda’s objection, saying that he had been through the atlas of the world, and Vancouver had struck him as the most appropriate name. Feluda, too, was free for the moment. He had solved a case in Bihar last September. His client, Sarveshwar Sahai, had been so pleased with Feluda’s work that he had invited us to his house in Hazaribagh. He did not live there permanently. It remained empty for most of the time. There was a chowkidar, whose wife did the cooking. We could stay there for ten days. All we would have to pay for would be the food. The offer seemed too good to miss. We decided to go by road in Lalmohan Babu’s new Ambassador. ‘Let’s see how it performs on a long run,’ he said. We might have gone via Asansol and Dhanbad, but chose to go through Kharagpur and Ranchi instead. Feluda drove the car until we got to Kharagpur, then the driver took over. We reached Ranchi in the evening and stayed overnight at the Amber Hotel. This morning, we had left Ranchi at nine o’clock, hoping to reach Hazaribagh by a quarter past ten. But, thanks to the lorry, we were definitely going to be delayed. After another five minutes of honking, the