Operation Epsom and playing football in Jamshedpur (3)

 

Why did the Alamo girl decide to establish herself in Delhi, not in Chennai or Hyderabad or Bangalore or any other Indian city?

The year was 1998. Antara's father (pictured above) often stayed at the Government Circuit House in Kolkata when visiting her. 

Bengali Communists didn't like it, they asked AKG in Delhi, AKG apparently asked Alamo girl and Elgin Road girl to investigate. They did so and found out that the area was teeming with Nazi sympathisers (many not Bengali.)

Here was the thing: Antara's father had no interaction with the locals nor did he choose the location of the Circuit House. When staying at the Circuit House, they occupied the rooms, shopped at nearby New Market, went home. The local population was affluent and arrogant, Antara's father had had nasty interactions with them once in a while. Do you always conflate the identity of a visitor to a hotel or Circuit House with the surroundings?

If you got used to investigating on behalf of AKG from your teenage years, you'd have a certain kind of personality. At Brabourne hostel, Alamo girl's derision knew no bounds. At every turn, she'd say, 'Goyla naki?' or 'Was he feeding on gauleiter intelligence?' That was 1998-99, so it took Antara a quarter of a century to understand that Alamo girl and her friends in Delhi were accusing her father of being a low-grade operative who used gauleiter intelligence collected from south Kolkata Marwaris to survive.

 After the 9/11 attacks, AKG obviously lost all sense of proportion. Antara got phone calls, at home in Purulia, from other Communist classmates. "It was beginning to seem no one at home had any law degree". 

Thus by 2002, Jamshedpur honcho and the Bengali Communists had decided that staying at a Government Circuit House in Kolkata was an illegality, it was a crime, and they'd take it to the Treasury and complain against Antara and her relatives.

AKG must have done it before, maybe in the 1930s-40s, complaining to the Treasury how the Franks and Edelmanns stayed at this or that hotel, to have such a level of confidence in their course of action. If you had stayed at a hotel, the Americans looked the other way as Kolkata went about...

"They were forgetting one important thing," Antara was recently reminded. "BT's contacts built the House, he found it. They were Moscow, the House was built on KGB. Those who occupied it were KGB, why BT always used the Navy. The US intelligence community would never have to investigate anything. They'd sit back and watch the fun around the House."

Antara's father and mother, Puri beach, 1997, soon after the House moved to Jamshedpur.

April 8, 2025.