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 lorry finally moved and allowed us to pass. Much relieved, we took deep breaths as our car emerged in the open. The road was lined with tail trees, many of which had weaver birds’ nests. If I looked out of the window, I could see a range of hills in

the distance. Small hillocks stood by the side of the road. We passed these every now and then. Lalmohan Babu saw all this and muttered ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’ a couple of times. Then he began humming a Tagore song, looking more comical than ever. He was totally tone-deaf as well, and inevitably chose songs that were quite inappropriate. For instance, on this cool November morning, he had started a song that spoke of the new joys of spring. He had once explained his problem to me. Apparently, he felt like bursting into song the minute he left Calcutta and came into closer contact with nature; however, his stock of songs being rather limited, he couldn’t always think of a suitable one. But there was one thing for which I had to thank him. In the last twenty-four hours, he had told me a lot of things about the circus in Bengal that I did not know. A hundred years ago, it was circuses owned by Bengalis that were famous all over the country. The best known among these was Professor Priyanath Bose’s The Great Bengal Circus. There were American, Russian, German and French artists, in addition to Indian. Even women used to take part. An American called Gus Burns used to work with a tiger. Unfortunately, when Professor Bose died, there was no one to take charge. His circus went out of business, as did many others in Bengal. ‘This Great Majestic in Hazaribagh . . . where does that come from, I wonder?’ Lalmohan Babu asked. ‘It has to be south India,’ Feluda answered. ‘They seem to have a monopoly in that line now.’ ‘How good is their trapeze? That’s what I’d like to know!’ In this new book he was planning to write, trapeze was going to play an important role. One of the artistes was going to grab the arm of another while swinging in mid-air and give him a lethal injection. His hero, Prakhar Rudra, was going to have to learn a few tricks from trapeze artistes to be able to catch the culprit. When Lalmohan Babu revealed these details to us, Feluda remarked dryly, ‘Thank goodness there is at least one thing left for your hero to learn!’ We saw the second Ambassador soon after passing a post that said ‘72 kms’. It was standing by the side of the road with its bonnet up. Its driver was bending over it, only partially visible from the road. Another gentleman was waving frantically at us. Lalmohan Babu’s driver put his foot on the brake. ‘Er . . . are you going to Hazaribagh?’ the man asked. He was probably around forty, had a clear complexion and wore