He sold the Taj Mahal. The Red Fort. And the Parliament House of India — all 545 sitting members included.

He did it without a gun, without a threat, without ever raising his voice. He did it with a fountain pen.

And it really happened.

Meet Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava — the man history would remember as Natwarlal. Born in a dusty Bihar village in 1928, he discovers as a boy that he can copy any signature, any seal, any official stamp alive. By the time he is a man, he has understood the one truth an entire nation has missed: in a country run on rubber stamps and letterheads, a forged signature is far deadlier than a loaded gun.

So he sells the country's monuments to men too greedy to check the paperwork. He poses as a minister, a director, a man of God. He charms fortunes out of industrialists and foreign tycoons who line up to be robbed.

And when the law finally catches him? He simply walks out. Out of prison cells. Out of hospital wards. Out of courtrooms and railway stations — more than a dozen times, never breaking a lock, never firing a shot. Sentenced to 113 years, he serves barely twenty.

Only one man refuses to stop chasing him: Inspector Anand Rathore, who will trade his marriage, his health and four decades of his life for a single pair of handcuffs that will never close.

The Signature is the witty, electric, impossibly charming story of India's greatest con artist — a period crime thriller about greed, bureaucracy, and a ghost made of ink.