This made me think. The thief had not yet managed to lay his hands on the real stuff. Not even by breaking into our hotel room. That precious stone was still with us. This meant we were probably still being followed, and therefore, in constant danger.

And we wouldn’t be safe even in Simla …

Heaven knows when I fell asleep. I woke suddenly in the middle of the night. It was totally dark in the compartment, which meant even Feluda had switched off the reading lamp and gone to sleep. Lalmohan Babu was sleeping on the lower berth opposite mine. I was about to switch on my own lamp to, look at the time, when my eyes fell on the door. The curtain from our side was drawn partially over the frosted glass. But there was a gap, and on this gap fell the shadow of a man.

What was he doing there? It took me a few seconds to realize he was actually trying to turn the handle of the door. I knew the door was locked and would not yield to pressure from outside; but even so, I began to feel breathless with fear.

How long the man would have persisted, it is difficult to say. But, only a few seconds later, Lalmohan Babu shouted ‘Boomerang!’ in his sleep, and the shadow disappeared.

I realized that even in the cool night air, I had broken into a cold sweat.

Chapter 8

I had seen snow-capped mountains before—Kanchenjunga in Darjeeling and the top of Annapurna from a plane; and certainly I had seen snow in films. But nothing had startled me as much as what I saw in Simla. If it wasn’t for other Indians strolling on the streets, I could have sworn we were in a foreign country.

‘This town was built by the British, like Darjeeling,’ Feluda told me, ‘so it does have the appearance of a foreign city. One Lt. Ross built a wooden cottage here in 1819 for himself. That was the beginning. Soon, the British turned this into their summer capital, since in the summer months life on the plains became pretty uncomfortable.’

We had taken a metre gauge train at Kalka to reach Simla. Nothing remarkable happened on the way, although I noticed that the old man with the earplugs travelled on the same train and checked in at the Clarkes just like us. Since the main season had not yet started, there were plenty of rooms available and Lalmohan Babu, too, found one at the Clarkes without any problem.