The Kumar Picture Company had never found itself in so much trouble before. Not for counterfeiting, not for piracy, not even for burning down the rival Kumar MotionPicture Company’s video parlour, thereby monopolizing the market. All that was accepted business practice, something that the senior (rival) Kumar acknowledged in his Diwali letter bomb.

‘So this is the culprit,’ said Banerjee. ‘Pilates of the Caribbean. And in small print: stay fit at seventy.’

‘It was screened in over two hundred theatres in Hoshiarpur, sir,’ explained the junior Kumar. ‘So much money we made.’

‘And now that money has come back to haunt you, no doubt,’ said Banerjee. ‘Which is why you called me. Or is it this one?’ he picked up another disc. ‘Return of the Jade Eye. Again, in small print, a journey to the heart of Manchuria. Come to think of it, it was perhaps the small print that saved you, eh?’

‘Krohlberg and Kravis worked out the details. Not important. This is the problem we need you to solve.’

It was a blu-ray disc with the title Two Hours on a Balcony

‘What’s the problem with it?’

‘Well, the first problem is that the film is two and a half hours long. Can you imagine what havoc a misleading title like that could cause? The loss of thirty minutes each time the movie was screened. Missed appointments, cancelled weddings, flight delays, and if people reset their watches at the end of the movie, and then meet other people who saw the movie after them and synchronized their watches with theirs, and so on, the thing could easily spiral out of control.’

‘It already has, in fact,’ informed the senior Kumar. ‘We launched it in America last month, and have not recovered our investment.’

‘Our distributors recall signing the contract next week, no question of advance payment.’

‘Why don’t you change the title?’

‘We tried two and a half hours on a balcony, but that name’s taken by a Mexican movie and its many sequels. The closest available match was Five minutes on a balcony, so our legal firm went ahead and true to its brief, changed the name.’

‘That made it worse.’

‘Well, to give you an idea: last week the President of the United States issued an ultimatum to Hitler that if Germany were not to surrender in the next 48 hours, he would drop a weapon of unimaginable destruction on Berlin.’

‘We have our business interests in Berlin,’ said the senior Kumar. ‘We would like the President to look at some other country, say Japan, like last time?’

‘Which is why we called you,’ explained the junior Kumar. ‘Can you speak to the Americans on our behalf?’

Banerjee nodded gravely. ‘You said that the title was the first problem. What’s the second?’

‘Piracy. Unauthorized prints of our film are circulating in Punjab under various copycat names, making a mockery of our justice system. But we have engaged a crack team of the Bhatinda police to solve that problem.’

‘And here he is,’ inspector Kalra announced his arrival. ‘The prints have been seized, but we are having a slight problem in tracing them ever since the SHO of Mukerian quit his job and went into film distribution.’

‘We will find them soon enough,’ assured Constable Selvakumar, ‘and in the meantime, have collected some other suspicious prints we found in the market.’

‘The Umpire Strikes Back: memoirs of Pilloo Reporter, The Dark Night: an investigation into the phases of the moon, and would you believe this – Return of the Jade Eye,’ said Inspector Kalra.

‘Taken them off the market. Anyone found renting them out goes straight to jail. Never mess with the Bhatinda police.’

'No doubt, no doubt,' murmured the senior Kumar in a conciliatory tone.

Banerjee opened his laptop and went into a hyper intelligent trance. Numbers raced on a blue-green screen.

‘Your principal worry is that America might bomb Germany. Now if my calculations are correct, then America would in the next few weeks find itself in the nineteenth century, without nuclear weapons of any sort. In fact, shortly after the President delivered his ultimatum, I would think, the airplane had not been invented. So the bomb is being delivered, if at all, by a sailing ship.’

‘The problem then is for us to locate the ship. If my calculations are right, then the ship would be somewhere off the coast of Florida, where a hurricane is raging even as we speak.’

‘In such a hurricane, it is not possible for the ship to survive. The bomb has therefore either exploded, which would have been detected by the Mexicans…or washed ashore on some country, which has now become the world’s newest nuclear power. It is a matter of national importance to determine which country this is. And here it is: the ocean currents have taken the bomb over the Atlantic ocean to somewhere close to the West coast of Africa, where the cold Benguela current has swept it southwards, round the cape, and, given the direction of the trade winds at this time of year, up the mouth of the Limpopo river into the heart of Lesotho.’

‘The President of Lesotho is calling on our Minister of Education next week,’ noted Inspector Kalra.

‘The newest nuclear state in the world! We must upgrade our welcome. The meeting has to be with the Prime Minister himself, followed by a state dinner. What do you say, Inspector Kalra?’

‘Brilliant, Banerjee, brilliant.’