Jatayu (Lal Mohan Ganguly)

Lalmohan Ganguly, alias Jatayu (), (also spelled Jotayu) is a character in the Feluda stories written by Satyajit Ray. He writes crime thrillers, but is quite weak and nervous in real life. He is fairly wealthy due to the immense sales of his books; he writes two books a year. His crime fiction stories have very interesting names, often characterised by alliterations like `Sahara-ey Shiharan', `Vancouver-er Vampire', `Honduras-e Hahakar', `Atlantic-er Atanka' etc. It may be noted that the names of several Feluda stories also exhibit this feature, for example 'Gangtoke Gondogol', 'Joto Kando Kathmandute', 'Royal Bengal Rahasya', 'Robertson-er Ruby', 'Gosaipur Sargaram', etc. The detective of Jatayu's novel, Prakhar Rudra, is a character with incredible intellect and power. Lalmohan's grandfather gave his name "Swarbogya Gongopadhyay" but Lalmohan does not use that name.

He first meets Feluda in the story Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) and from then on he accompanies Feluda and Topshe on all their major adventures. He collects weapons but is often reluctant to use them. Weapons collected by him during different adventures include boomerang, kukri (knife), smoke bomb etc. His whole demeanour is of hilarity and he regularly provides the comic relief in the stories. He has a history with the villain Maganlal Meghraj who had a circus performer throw knives at him in Joi Baba Felunath (The Mystery of the Elephant God) and fed him the drug LSD in Jato Kando Kathmandutey...
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