The Old Fort Blackmail Incident is a failed cash handoff at the Old Fort, where Ahmed Sinai and two business associates hide money for a blackmailer, only for a monkey to tear open the bags and throw them from a turret. The men discover the damage after the collector has come and gone, then choose to retrieve the scattered rupees rather than hold to their plan to protect their business from threatened arson. The episode makes their attempt at control answerable to the unruly life of the ruin: money, paper, and human intention all tumble into the ditch together.

The appointment at the Old Fort

Three men arrive by taxi at the Old Fort just after sunset: Ahmed, S. P. Butt, and Mustapha Kemal. Each carries a bulky gray bag beneath his coat. Their destination is a blackened, crumbling fort, described as older than the Old City of Delhi itself. The scene sets a transaction in a place marked by age and decay, where a modern arrangement of telephone instructions and cash depends on a hidden stone stairway.

An anonymous telephone call has ordered the men to come that night, without police, and leave the money at the fort. The caller specifies the southwest corner of the turret, a stone staircase, and the topmost landing, then tells them to go. The bags contain the payment demanded by a blackmailer; the men have been threatened with a fire-raising attack on their godown if they do not comply. Instead of simply following the instruction and leaving, they hide in a ruined room. Above them, the three bags wait on the turret’s upper landing as the light fails.

The narrator’s foreknowledge gives this meeting a shadow of impending loss. S. P. Butt will die on a train to Pakistan, and Mustapha Kemal will be murdered in his Flagstaff Road house; the men are presented as doomed even as they weigh a practical danger in the present. That contrast makes the blackmail payment more than an isolated business problem: it is one of several turns in Ahmed’s life, seen by a narrator who already knows what awaits the men beside him.

The monkey and the falling bags

A monkey moves along the ramparts, a part of the fort it treats as its territory. The narration names him Hanuman, invoking the monkey god, and describes his arrival at the turret where the gray bags have been left. He sniffs the unfamiliar objects, pounces, and pulls at them as if they were loose stones that could be rocked free from the fortress.

Hanuman tears at the bags and scoops paper from inside them. Then he kicks all three over the outside wall. The money bags fall into the darkness and land in a ditch below, while loose paper drifts down over the fallen stones. The animal’s work is not a deliberate intervention in the men’s affairs: it is a territorial disturbance that, by chance, destroys the arrangement they have made. The men remain hidden below and do not know that the bags have been emptied and dropped.

The incident turns on the contrast between two kinds of movement at the fort. The men carry cash into the ruin with a plan to place it at a designated point; the monkey encounters the bags as foreign objects in its territory and simply tears them apart. The money that was meant to pass discreetly from one party to another is scattered into public, filthy ground. A supposedly controlled handoff becomes a physical mishap that neither side commands.

The collector and the lost payment

The appointed representative of the Ravana gang arrives dressed as a demon, wearing a ragged-pajama outfit and a papier-mâché headdress with grinning faces. From their hiding place, the three businessmen watch him enter the stairwell toward the landing. They do not know what Hanuman has done above them. A moment later, the collector emerges again, cursing, and rushes away into the darkness. His arrival ends without the expected exchange: the bags and their contents are gone.

Only after the collector has left do the men climb to the landing. They find scraps of gray cloth and a crumpled rupee. Ahmed may glimpse a dark flurry of monkey, and the evidence leads them to guess what has happened. The small remains make the scale of the loss unmistakable: the soft bags have been torn apart and the cash is no longer waiting where they left it. Their discovery comes too late to explain the disaster to the collector or to negotiate another handoff.

The collector’s costume and curses make his threatening presence grotesque, but the practical danger behind the encounter remains real. The men have paid—or intended to pay—to avert arson at their godown. Now they must choose between abandoning the scattered money and risking the blackmailers’ threatened retaliation, or scrambling to recover the cash and hoping the gang will not carry out its threat that night.

The choice in the ditch

The businessmen argue without speaking. Their immediate dilemma is money or the godown: even if they give up the cash to scavenging dogs and people, how can they stop the fire-raisers? In the end, the force of money already in hand prevails. They race down the stone stairs and across the grassy grounds, through the ruined gates, to the ditch where the bags have fallen.

There they scoop and shovel at the rupees, scrabbling among pools of urine and rotting fruit. Their recovery effort is hurried and undignified, a stark contrast to the secretive business meeting they intended to conduct. They trust, despite the danger, that the gang will fail to wreak its promised revenge for this one night. The narrator leaves the consequence hanging on that hope: the men retrieve what they can, but no resolution of the blackmail threat is given here.

The fort’s older life as a ruin also frames the incident’s irony. Monkeys already work at dislodging its stones, one after another, gradually dismantling the structure; Hanuman’s attack on the gray bags repeats that destructive motion on a smaller scale. The cash is treated like another loose stone, rocked free and sent over the wall. The men’s secretive attempt to manage danger ends instead with them chasing money through the debris, while the ancient fort continues to come apart around them.