Although this was my second visit, I still felt startled and strangely moved by the sight of the ghats and the streets of Benaras. We checked in at the Calcutta Lodge, where we had stayed before. Niranjan Chakravarty was still the manager there. When Feluda asked him if he had a vacant room, he said, ‘For you, sir, I will always be able to find a room. How long do you want it for?’ ‘I don’t really know. Let’s say a week.’ We were given a mini dormitory, like the last time. It had four beds in it, but the fourth was unoccupied. Since we had already had breakfast on the train, Feluda wanted to get cracking immediately. ‘What exactly are you suggesting we do, Felu Babu? Walk straight into the lion’s den?’ Lalmohan Babu wanted to know. ‘Yes, but you don’t have to come with us, if you’d rather stay here.’ ‘No, no, of course not. We are the Three Musketeers, remember?’ We had to pass the temple of Vishwanath to get to Maganlal’s house. The sights and the smells were very familiar. Nothing had changed in the past few years. Perhaps nothing would, even in the future. We left the temple behind us and reached a relatively quiet spot. It all came back to me quite clearly. A left turn from here would take us to Maganlal’s house. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to say?’ Lalmohan Babu asked. ‘No. I don’t always prepare and rehearse my lines. Sometimes it’s best to play things by the ear.’ ‘Is that what you want to do this time?’ ‘Yes.’ Here was Maganlal’s house, with paintings of two armed guards by the front door. They were standing as before, with their swords raised high, but their colour seemed to have faded a little. We slipped in through the open door and stood in the courtyard. ‘Koi hai?’ Feluda shouted. When no one answered, he said, ‘All right, let’s go upstairs. We must meet the man, so there’s no point in waiting here.’ Maganlal’s room was on the second floor. I remembered we had had to climb forty-six steps to get there. No one stopped us on our way. As we reached the second floor and emerged at one end of a long passage, we found a man sitting near the stairs, rubbing tobacco leaves in his hand. He gave us a startled look. ‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked. ‘Seth Maganlal. Is he here?’ ‘Yes, but he’s having his lunch. Why don’t you wait in his drawing room? I’ll show you where it is.’

We followed the man into a room that I recognized instantly. This was where Maganlal had made a knife-thrower throw large, vicious looking knives around Lalmohan Babu, who had fainted at the end of the ‘show’. Then, when we met him later in Kathmandu, he had dropped LSD into Lalmohan Babu’s tea. Fortunately, our Jatayu came to no harm, but the whole episode had caused us