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58 pages

English

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A boy who can recall his past life. A hint of hidden treasure. An adventure in the desert of Rajasthan . . . In one of their most hair-raising escapades ever, Feluda and Topshe set out for Rajasthan on the trail of the parapsychologist Dr Hajra and Mukul, a boy who claims he remembers his previous life. On the way they meet Jatayu, an author of popular crime thrillers, who decides to accompany them. After numerous adventures, including an impromptu camel ride across the desert, they reach Mukul s Golden Fortress, where Feluda unravels the many strands of a complex case.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	23 décembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351181019
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Satyajit Ray

T HE A DVENTURES OF F ELUDA The Golden Fortress
Translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Read the other Adventures of Feluda in Puffin
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PUFFIN BOOKS
THE ADVENTURES OF FELUDA THE GOLDEN FORTRESS
Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest filmmakers of his time, renowned for films like Pather Panchali , Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri and Ghare Baire . He was awarded the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science in 1992, and in the same year, was also honoured with the Bharat Ratna.
Ray was also a writer of repute, and his short stories, novellas, poems and articles, written in Bengali, have been immensely popular ever since they first began to appear in the children s magazine Sandesh in 1961. Among his most famous creations are the master sleuth Feluda and the scientist Professor Shonku.
*
Gopa Majumdar has translated several works from Bengali to English, the most notable of these being Ashapurna Debi s Subarnalata and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay s Aparajito , for which she won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001. She has translated several volumes of Satyajit Ray s short stories and all of the Feluda stories for Penguin Books India. She is currently translating Ray s Professor Shonku stories, which are forthcoming in Puffin.
Read the other Adventures of Feluda in Puffin
The Emperor s Ring
Trouble in Gangtok
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
The Secret of the Cemetery
The Criminals of Kathmandu
The Royal Bengal Mystery
Chapter 1
Feluda stopped reading and shut his book with a bang. Then he snapped his fingers twice, yawned heavily and said, Geometry.
I asked, Were you reading a book on geometry all this while?
The book was covered with newspaper, so I could not see its title. All I knew was that Feluda had borrowed it from Uncle Sidhu, who was passionate about books. He bought quite a few, and took great care of them. In fact, he did not like lending his books to anyone, but Feluda was an exception. Feluda knew it, so he always put a protective cover on any book that he brought from Uncle Sidhu s house.
Feluda lit a Charminar and blew out two smoke rings, one after the other. There is no such thing as a book on geometry, he told me. Any book may be seen as one because everything around us is related to geometry. Did you see those smoke rings? When they left my mouth, they were perfect circles. Now just think, There are circles everywhere. Look at your own body. The iris in your eye is a circle. With the help of the iris, you can look at the sun and the moon. If you think of them as flat objects, they are circles, but of course they are actually spheres-each a solid bubble. That s geometry. The planets in the solar system are orbiting the sun in elliptic curves. There s geometry again. When you spat out of the window a little while ago-you shouldn t have done that, it s most unhygienic and if you do it again, you ll get a sharp rap on the head, but anyway-that spit went out in a parabolic curve. Geometry, see? Have you ever looked at a spider s web in any detail? It starts with a simple square. Then two diagonal lines run through it and the square is divided into four triangles. After that, the spider starts weaving a spiral web from the intersecting point of those diagonal lines. That keeps growing in size, until it covers the entire square. If you think about it, your head will start reeling it s something so amazing!
It was a Sunday morning. The two of us were sitting in our living room on the ground floor. Baba had gone to visit his childhood friend, Subimal, as he did every Sunday. Feluda was seated on a sofa, his feet resting on a low table.
I was on a divan, leaning on a cushion placed against the wall. In my hand was a game. It was a maze, made of plastic. Inside the maze were tiny metal balls. Over the last half hour, I had been trying to make those metal balls slip through the various lanes in the maze and go straight to its centre. Now I realized that the game was a matter of complex geometry, too.
A Durga Puja was being held in Nihar and Pintu s house, which was near ours. Someone was playing a song over a loudspeaker- Yeh jo muhabbat hai from the film Kati Patang . Fine spiral grooves on a circular record. More geometry!
Geometry applies not just to objects you can see, Feluda continued. The human mind often follows geometric patterns. A simple man s mind will run along a straight line. Others who are not so simple may have minds that twist and wriggle like a snake. And the mind of a lunatic? No one can tell how that s going to run. It s a matter of the most convoluted geometry!
Thanks to Feluda, I had come across plenty of people from every category. What kind of geometric pattern did he fall into? When I asked him, Feluda said, You might call me a many-pointed star.
And I? Am I a satellite of that star?
You are merely a point, something that indicates a position, but has no significance of its own.
I like to think of myself as a satellite. The only problem is that I cannot play that role all the time. I managed to be with Feluda when we had trouble in Gangtok because that was during school holidays. Two cases had followed-one was a murder in Dhalbhoomgarh, and the other was to do with a forged will in Patna-which I missed altogether. Now my school was closed once again for Puja. I was wondering if a new case would come along. Who knew whether it really would? But then, Feluda did tell me that if one badly wants something to happen, and if one s will is strong enough, then a particular wish may well come true, more or less automatically. I quite like to think what happened that Sunday morning was simply a result of my willing it.
A song from the film Johnny Mera Naam had just started on the loudspeaker; Feluda had flicked a quantity of ash into an ashtray and picked up the Hindustan Standard ; I was toying with the idea of going out, when someone rattled the knocker on our door very loudly. Baba, I knew, would not be back before twelve o clock. This had to be someone else. I opened the door and found a simple, mild looking man, wearing a dhoti and a blue shirt.
Does a Pradosh Mitter live in this house? he asked, raising his voice to make himself heard. The loudspeaker was making quite a racket.
Feluda rose from the sofa and came to the door on hearing his name. Where have you come from? he asked.
All the way from Shyambazar, the man replied.
Please come in.
The man stepped into the living room.
Please sit down. I am Pradosh Mitter.
Oh. Oh, I see. I didn t know I mean, I didn t realize you were so young! The man sat down on a chair next to the sofa, looking visibly impressed. But the smile on his face disappeared almost at once.
What can I do for you? Feluda asked.
The man cleared his throat. I have heard a lot about you from Kailash Chowdhury. He seems to think very highly of you. He he is one of my customers, you see. My name is Sudhir Dhar. I have a book shop in College Street-Dhar & Co. You may have seen it.
Feluda nodded briefly, before saying to me, Topshe, please shut that window.
I shut the window that overlooked the street. That reduced the noise, and Mr Dhar could then speak normally.
About a week ago, there was a press report about my son. Did you ?
Press report? What did it say?
About his being a jatismar I mean
About a boy called Mukul?
Yes.
So the report s true?
You see, from the way he speaks, the kind of things he says, it does seem as if Mr Dhar broke off.
I knew what the word jatismar meant. A person who can recall events from a previous life is called a jatismar . Apparently, there are people who get periodic flashes of memory related to a life that they had lived long before they were born in their present incarnation. Mind you, even Feluda does not know whether or not there is any truth behind this whole business.
Feluda picked up the packet of Charminar and offered it to Mr Dhar, who smiled and shook his head. Then he said, Perhaps you remember what my son told the reporter? He s only eight, but he described a place which he is supposed to have seen. Yet I am sure nobody from my family-not even my forefathers-has been there, let alone my son. We are very ordinary people, you see. I only have that shop, and the book trade these days is
Doesn t your son talk of a fortress? Feluda interrupted him.
Yes, that s right. A golden fortress. There was a cannon on its roof, a lot of fighting, and several people were killed my son says he has seen it all. He used to wear a turban and ride a camel on the sand. He mentions sand quite frequently. And animals-camels, elephants and horses. Oh, and peacocks. There is a mark near his elbow. We always thought it was a birthmark, but he says he was once attacked by a peacock, and the mark shows where the bird pecked him.
Has he ever mentioned, exactly where he used to live?
No, but he does say that he could see this golden fortress from his house. Sometimes he draws funny squiggles with a pencil and says, Look, that s my house! If you look at it, well yes, it does appear to be a house.
Could he not have seen all that in a book? I mean, you have a book shop, don t you? So maybe he saw pictures of this place in a book?
Yes, that s a possibility. But other children also look at pictures in books; they don t talk incessantly about what they ve seen, do they? If you d seen my son, you d know what I mean. To tell you the truth, his mind seems to be elsewhere. His own family-his parents, brothers and sisters, other relatives-no one seems to matter to him. In fact, he doesn t even look a