Half an hour ago, we boarded a train at the Agra Fort station to go to Bandikui. We had about three hours to kill in Agra. So we went to see the Taj Mahal again—after ten years—and Feluda gave me a short lecture on the geometry of the building. Yesterday, before leaving Calcutta, we had to attend to some important business. Perhaps I should mention it here. Since the Toofan Express left at 9.30 in the morning, we were both up quite early. At around six o’clock, after we’d had tea, Feluda said, ‘We ought to visit Uncle Sidhu before we go. If he can give us some information, it will really help.’ Uncle Sidhu lives in Sardar Shankar Road, which is only five minutes from our Tara Road. Uncle Sidhu is a strange character. He spent most of his life doing various kinds of businesses, earning a lot of money, and then losing much of it. Now he has retired. His main passion is books. He buys them in large numbers, and spends some of his time on reading, and the rest on playing chess all by himself. Sometimes, he consults a book on chess in between making moves. His other passion is food—or rather, experimenting with food. He likes mixing one item with another. According to him, yoghurt mixed with an omelette tastes like ambrosia. To tell the truth, he is not related to us. He used to live next door to us back in our ancestral village (which I have never seen). So he’s like an elder brother to my father, and we call him ‘uncle’. When we reached his house, he was seated on a low stool, blocking the entrance through his front door, and having his hair cut by his barber, although he has no hair except for some around the back of his head. Upon seeing us, he moved his stool a little and allowed us to go through. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ he said. ‘Yell for Narayan, he’ll give you some tea.’ Uncle Sidhu’s room was very simply furnished. There was only a divan, two chairs and three very large bookcases. Books covered half the divan. We knew that the little empty space on it was where Uncle Sidhu liked to sit, so we took the two chairs. Feluda had remembered to bring the book he’d borrowed, which was still covered with newspaper. He slipped it back into an empty slot on a shelf. The barber continued to work on Uncle Sidhu’s hair. ‘Felu,’ said Uncle Sidhu, ‘you are a detective. I hope you’ve read up on the history of criminal investigation? It doesn’t matter what you specialize in. If you know something about the history of your profession, you’ll gain more confidence and find your work much more interesting.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ Feluda replied politely. ‘Who was the first to discover the technique of identifying a criminal through his fingerprints? Can you tell me?’ Feluda winked at me and said, ‘I can’t remember.