Feluda’s expression had changed the minute the parcel was handed to him. Now he opened it swiftly and exclaimed, ‘What! Where did this come from?’

A familiar smell came from the parcel. Feluda held up its content. I stared at an ancient notebook, the kind that was impossible to find nowadays. The front page had these words written on it in a very neat hand:

A Bengalee in Lamaland

Shambhucharan Bose

June 1917

‘Good heavens! It’s that famous manusprint!’ said Lalmohan Babu.

I did not bother to correct him. I could only look dumbly at Feluda, who was staring straight at something specific. I turned my gaze in the same direction. The two Japanese had gone. There was only one other person left on the tenace, apart from ourselves. It was the same old man we had seen so many times before. He was still wearing a cap and dark glasses. Feluda was looking straight at him.

The man rose to his feet and walked over to our table. Then he took off his glasses and his cap. Yes, he certainly seemed familiar. But there was something odd … something missing … what had I seen before …?

‘Aren’t you going to wear your false teeth?’ Feluda asked.

‘Certainly.’

The man took out a set of false teeth from his pocket and slipped it into his mouth. Instantly, his hollowed cheeks filled out, his jaw became firm and he began to look ten years younger. And it was easy to recognize him.

This was none other than that supremely irritable man we had visited in Lansdowne Road, Mr Naresh Chandra Pakrashi.

‘When did you get the dentures made?’ asked Feluda.

‘I had ordered them a while ago. But they were delivered the day after I returned to Calcutta from Delhi.’

That explained why Dinanath Babu had thought him old. He had not worn his dentures on the train. But he had started using them by the time we met him in his house.

‘I had guessed from the start that the attaché cases had been exchanged deliberately,’ Feluda told him. ‘I knew it was no accident. But what I did not know—and it took me a long time to figure that one out—was that you were responsible.’

‘That is natural enough,’ Mr Pakrashi replied calmly. ‘You must have realized that I am no fool.’

‘No, most certainly you are not. But do you know where you went wrong? You shouldn’t have put those newspapers in Mr Dhameeja’s attaché case. I know why you did it, though. Dinanath Lahiri’s case was heavier than Dhameeja’s because it had this notebook in it. So you stuffed the newspapers in Dhameeja’s case, so that its weight became more or less the same as Dinanath’s. When Dinanath Babu picked it up, naturally he noticed nothing unusual. But people don’t normally bother to pack their cases with papers they’ve read on the train, do they?’