Antara had recently learnt from an Indian source, "You know, all this problem the US Govt had with DOGE, it was about one of your relatives, Brother 5 or Subhash of Purulia. The Bengalis of Kolkata made such an assertion, arguing why was AT's side chosen by the Israelis given BT's frightful knowledge of the Holocaust?"
(Antara recently wrote about AT and BT in terms of the House though she was not aware that DOGE was based on it.)
Antara was not even convinced that Brother 5 was on the Israeli side. She had always thought he was STAVKA, maybe therefore Israeli. When visiting Purulia in the 1980s and 90s, Antara spent many hours at Brother 5 and wife's home, they let her go through their things, left her alone.
Apart from their subscriptions to the Soviet-era Progress Publishers and its newsletters in envelopes, there were many Russian books, translated to Bengali.
One of these was a tattered but illustrated copy of Anton Chekhov's short story, 'Kashtanka', about a mixed-breed mongrel dog. Brother 5 and his wife gave it away to Antara, she brought it home to Asansol.
Growing up, Antara didn't have a pet dog, not till the late 1990s, and 'Kashtanka' was like her own domesticated pet. The cover was in dark green and black, considerably torn, with the droopy-faced mongrel staring back.
Unless certain things were second-hand in life, who would argue for a legit lease?
April 4, 2025.
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