The Bandits of Bombay: Adventures of Feluda (9 page)

Feluda looked at me. I could tell he wanted me to do as I was told.

As I began moving towards Feluda, a different noise reached my ears. It wasn't just the noise of the train. I could hear galloping horses. Unbeknown to me, the train had reached the hills, which were now stretched on the left. By the time I could slip my hand into Feluda's pocket, the gang of bandits was moving swiftly down a hill, throwing up clouds of dust.

My fingers first found the revolver, then brushed against the key.

‘Give it to him,’ Feluda told me.

I passed the key to Sanyal. Feluda's hands were still raised.

Sanyal unlocked the bag.
Life Divine
was resting on top of everything else. Sanyal took it out.

There was the sound of hooves quite close to the window. Not one, but several horses had sped down the hill and were now galloping beside the track, keeping pace with the train.

Sanyal leafed through the pages quickly until he got to the point where many of the pages were stuck together. Then he did something most peculiar. Instead of turning the pages, he began scratching and clawing at them. At once, one of the pages tore, revealing a square ‘hollow’. A certain section had been cut out from the centre of several pages to create that hollow.

Sanyal peered into it—and the expression on his face changed at once. It was really worth watching. God knows what he was expecting to find, but what the hollow contained were about eight cigarette stubs, a dozen used matches and a substantial quantity of ash.

‘I hope you don't mind,’ said Feluda, ‘but I couldn't resist using that as an ash-tray.’

Now Sanyal shouted so loudly that I was sure the whole train could hear him.

‘You think you can get away with this? Where's the real stuff?’

‘What stuff?’

‘You scoundrel! Don't you know what I'm talking about?’

‘Of course. But I want to hear you spell it out.’

‘
Where
is it?’ Sanyal roared again.

‘In my pocket.’

‘Which pocket?’

‘The left one.’

The bandits were now just outside the window. The hill was much closer. A lot of dust was coming in through the window.

‘You there!’

I knew I would be ordered once more.

‘Don't just stand there—get it from his pocket!’

I had to slip my hand into Feluda's left pocket this time. The object that I found was something the like of which I had never held in my hand before. It was a necklace strung with pearls and studded with diamonds. Such an amazing piece of jewellery was fit to be handled only by kings and emperors, I thought.

‘Give it to me!’ Sanyal's eyes were glinting once more, not with rage, but with greed and glee.

I stretched my hand towards him. Feluda kept his hands raised. Lalmohan babu was groaning. The bandits were …

CRASH!

Something heavy had made an impact against the carriage, making it shake a little. In the next instant, Nimmo was rolling on the floor. A pair of legs had slipped in through the window and kicked him hard. The gun in his hand went off, hit a light fixed to the ceiling and shattered it. In a flash, Feluda lowered his hands and took out his own revolver.

Then the door on the left opened again, and a man dressed as a bandit climbed into our carriage. He was known to all three of us.

‘Thank you, Victor!’ said Feluda.

C
HAPTER
11

S
anyal flopped down on a bench. He was trembling once more—but with fear this time, not rage. He knew there could be no escape.

In the meantime, someone must have realized there was something wrong and pulled the cord, for the train came to an unexpected halt. It wouldn't have stopped unless the cord had been pulled.

Within seconds, we could hear a confused babel. Several voices were shouting the same name: ‘Victor! Victor! Where have you gone, Victor?’

I could hear Mr Ghoshal's voice. Victor Perumal had messed things up. He was supposed to jump on the roof of the train. Instead of doing that, he had jumped into our compartment.

Feluda leant out of the door and called, ‘Mr Ghoshal! Over here!’

Mr Ghoshal arrived, looking profoundly distressed and harassed. That was hardly surprising as any holdup in shooting such a complex scene would be liable to cause heavy losses, perhaps to the tune of thirty thousand rupees.

‘What's the matter with you, Victor? Have you gone completely mad?’ he demanded.

‘Mr Ghoshal,’ said Feluda, ‘if anyone in your film deserves to be called Jet Bahadur, it is Victor Perumal.’

‘What's that supposed to mean?’ Mr Ghoshal asked. He was now looking perplexed, but perplexity was still outweighed by annoyance.

‘Besides,’ Feluda went on, ‘the role of that smuggler should have gone to this man here, not your actor called Paramesh Kapoor.’

‘What rubbish are you talking, Mr Mitter? Who is this man?’ Mr Ghoshal glanced at Sanyal.

By this time, two vehicles had appeared on the road. One was a police jeep, and the other was a police van. The jeep pulled up next to our compartment. Inspector Patwardhan climbed out of it.

In reply to Mr Ghoshal's question, Feluda walked up to Sanyal, grabbed his beard and moustache and yanked them off, before pulling off his wig and glasses.

‘I would have been delighted,’ Feluda remarked, ‘if I could remove that scent from your body, Mr Gore. Sadly, that's something even Felu Mitter cannot do.’

∗

‘Laluda, who told you a film would remain incomplete if its producer was arrested?’

The question came from Mr Ghoshal. To tell the truth, Lalmohan babu hadn't spoken at all. He was simply sitting there, looking pensive and morose. Anyone could guess that he was worried about the future of
Jet Bahadur
.

‘No one,’ Mr Ghoshal continued, ‘can stop our film. Gore might go to prison—or hell—or wherever—but don't you see, he wasn't the only producer in Bombay? There's Chuni Pancholi; he's been pestering me for over a year to make a film for him. I'll get things going again, you mark my words. Even before you leave Bombay, you'll see me shooting the film under a new banner.’

That day, however, all shooting had ground to a halt at half past one. Gore and Nimmo were arrested and handcuffed. Nanasaheb's naulakha necklace was in police custody.

Feluda had anticipated trouble during the first day's shooting. When he'd told us in the morning that he was going out to buy cigarettes, he had actually gone to speak to Patwardhan. Gore, apparently, had spent twelve years in Calcutta. He had been not just to Don Bosco, but also to St. Xavier's. Hence he could speak Bengali very well, although in Bombay he was heard speaking only Hindi and Marathi besides English.

We were sitting on the veranda of a dak bungalow in Khandala. It was a beautiful place and there was a decided nip in the air. People from Bombay often went to Khandala for a change of air, I had heard. We had already finished the food (naan and mutton do-pyaza) we'd found in those boxes, provided by the Safari Restaurant. It was now four-thirty, so we were having tea and pakoras.

Mr Ghoshal had joined us for a while, then moved to a different table where Arjun Mehrotra was seated. Mehrotra was looking a little crestfallen, perhaps because most undoubtedly, the real hero that day was Pradosh Mitter. Plenty of people from the unit—including Micky, the villain—had asked Feluda for his autograph.

There was a second hero, and unquestionably that was Victor Perumal. It turned out that Feluda had spoken to him before the shooting started. ‘When you come riding down the hill and get close to the train,’ he had said, ‘keep an eye on the first-class compartment. If you see anything suspicious, come in through the door.’ Victor had seen Feluda standing with his arms raised. That had told him instantly that help was required, and he had swung into action.

Strangely enough, even after a heroic act like that, Victor was quite unmoved. He was back with his men, practising kung-fu, in the little field opposite the bungalow, as if nothing had happened.

‘The thing is, you see …’ Lalmohan babu finally opened his mouth. But Feluda interrupted him. ‘The thing is that you are still totally in the dark, is that it?’

Lalmohan babu smiled meekly and nodded.

‘It shouldn't be difficult to throw light on everything. But, before I do that, you must be told about Gore, and understand how he functioned.

‘The first thing to remember is that he was really a smuggler, though he was trying to pass himself off as a respectable film producer. He decided to make a film from your story. You wrote in that story that a smuggler lived in a building called Shivaji Castle. Naturally, that caused some concern. Gore wanted to find out how much you knew about the real occupants of Shivaji Castle, since he was one of them, and he was a smuggler. So he dressed as Sanyal and went to your house. But, having spoken to you, he realized that you were completely innocent and harmless, and your entire story was purely imaginary. The reference to Shivaji Castle was just a coincidence.

‘Gore felt reassured, but then it occurred to him that he could use you to transfer the stolen necklace. So he hid it in a book, and tried to pass it to someone in his own gang—possibly someone who lived on the seventeenth floor in Shivaji Castle. If you were caught, you would blame Sanyal, not Gore. Isn't that right? So Gore could safely hide behind the figure of Sanyal.

‘However, things went wrong. What you handed over to Gore's man was not a necklace worth five million, but one of your own books worth five rupees. Mr Red Shirt—or Nimmo, if you like—went to Shivaji Castle, and was taking that packet to a flat on the seventeenth floor, when he was attacked in the lift by a man from a rival group. Nimmo killed him and took the packet up, as instructed. Then, whoever opened it realized that the necklace wasn't in it. Gore was informed, and he returned at once.
He
knew what had happened. So he had to accomplish two things—one, he had to get the necklace back; and two, he had to get rid of us. Luckily for him, we hadn't handed the necklace over to the police. As soon as he'd met us, Gore realized that, somehow, Sanyal must reappear. If Sanyal had given you that packet, then only Sanyal could recover it from you. No one would then suspect Gore.’

‘But that perfume …?’

‘Wait, wait, I am coming to that. Using Gulbahar was just an example of Gore's cunning. He had prepared the ground in Calcutta. Whenever you would smell that perfume, you'd think of Sanyal, and automatically associate the two. You were convinced, weren't you, that Sanyal was following you everywhere in Bombay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. Now, just think back a little. That day, when we went to his flat, Gore left us in the living room and disappeared for a few minutes. It seemed as if he had gone to fetch your money. Isn't that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘It couldn't have been difficult, could it, to slip out in that time and sprinkle a few drops of that perfume in the lift? When I went to every floor from top to bottom, sniffed everywhere and still found no trace of that scent outside the lift, I knew at once that no one wearing it had used the lift. It was planted there deliberately. Similarly, when our car was parked outside the Lotus cinema, Gore could have asked one of his men to slip a hand through a window and spray a few drops on the seats. It was easy!’

Yes, everything seemed easy once Feluda had explained it. Lalmohan babu had clearly grasped the whole story by now, but even so, he did not look very happy. That surprised me. Why was there no smile on his face? Eventually, a question from Mr Ghoshal changed everything.

Tea was over, and the whole unit was getting ready to go back. The sun had disappeared behind the hills and now it was really quite cold. I felt myself shiver, and saw Mr Ghoshal striding towards us busily.

‘Laluda, all the posters and hoardings for
Jet Bahadur
are going up on Friday. But there's something I need to know now,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘How do you wish to be named? I mean, should we use your real name, or your pseudonym?’

‘The “pseudo”
is
the real name, my friend!’ replied Lalmohan babu with a huge grin. ‘And it should be spelt J-a-t-a-y-u!’

Read the other Adventures of Feluda in Puffin

The Emperor's Ring
Trouble in Gangtok
The Golden Fortress
The Incident on the Kalka Mail
A Killer in Kailash
The Mystery of the Elephant God
The Bandits of Bombay
The House of Death
The Curse of the Goddess
Trouble in the Graveyard
The Criminals of Kathmandu
The Royal Bengal Mystery

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