It was being suggested that Bengali women of Kolkata didn't have any particular envy for the legit lease arrangement. India had always been a wealthy country, the land of the maharajahs, so wealth and valuables, their transfer and storage, was part of the cultural heritage of the country.
For some uncertain reason, Antara didn't have any sense of India before the 20th century. Where did her ancestors live? In a village called Auschgram in Bardhhaman district, Anjali would always say. Antara had never tried to ascertain if such a village actually existed.
"How the CPM attacked in Auschgram, took away all the land and drove them away," Anjali would discuss with relatives during the visits to Purulia. (If AT and BT were brothers, both had to belong to the somewhat mythic village called Auschgram.)
The Purulia relatives, on their part, would smile in an uncertain way, probably not knowing how to respond to Anjali. Let's leave it at that, a village called Auschgram in West Bengal, Antara's ancestors fleeing Communists who were after German intelligence and their property.
ii. In Antara's reading of Bengali literature, including fairy tales and folklore, for children and adolescents, the plot always emphasised the hunt for hidden treasure (within India), mostly comprising jewels and others precious objects, stored in earthen pots, buried deep beneath the earth. The stories would describe treasure-hunters and burglars, carrying spade and other digging equipment, a motif of the Indian cultural landscape.
Not in any of these narratives did Antara come across the concept of a lease or collateral backing or promissory notes, not till the English East India Company had established itself, its transactional history inspired by ideas that had inspired the 1790 lease.
If you had definitive proof of the use of promissory currency notes in India from earlier times, you could alert Antara to it. It wouldn't affect the legit lease in the least.
iii. Bengali women were offended that in order to approach what was an ordinary financial arrangement or the legit lease (and there was no guarantee Antara would play a role in it), she had started her work with the 9/11 investigation. It was not possible to delve into the details of the matter, except that Antara's journalism career--where she never got a penny's worth of raise in any Indian media organisation or any promotions--had turned the focus to the 9/11 attacks.
By 2010-11, Antara's stagnating career was read only in terms of the 9/11 attacks, especially when the capture and death of Osama bin Laden in the Abbottabad raid didn't change Delhi media's attitude that Antara needed to be suppressed. Thus, Antara would investigate 9/11 was decided in 2011, she started her work in 2022. Had Indians stayed in contact with Antara, the element of surprise would have been less.
Did Antara hope that her 9/11 investigations would ease a possible visit to Europe, given the CPUSA and Obama-Clinton machinery would never allow her to set foot in the United States? As discussed earlier, Anjali's grandfather Motilal Sarkar had used the Patrouille de France blackmail ('Was Antara unfortunate without Aadhaar? Did she discuss Chairman Mao?') to connect Anjali to the Hanseatic League.
Worse, the Europeans themselves divided Antara and her spouse in such a way that Antara's backers (if there were any) were part of one kind of Freemasonry lodges in Europe while the spouse's backers belonged to rival factions. That the two of them would go hand in hand to Europe had been prevented by the politics of the Indian elite and Indian cities, it would have led to mayhem all over Europe.
As usual, the Nordic countries had made maximum use of the rivalry among Freemason lodges, given Washington DC's lack of trust in these countries, they had taken in as many Indian immigrants as they could.
iv. The Indian elite and Indian cities had wanted Antara reduced to the status of Pratibha Das, their bete noire, whom they disliked, the woman who had nothing to go back to. They had missed the decades that had passed between Pratibha and Antara, that Antara couldn't be Stateless and deserved to live and earn a livelihood in India. When the discrepancy was pointed out, that Antara was the citizen of a democratic India, she could never be Pratibha, Delhi media honchos started asking each other, "How much of the Indian State do we actually use?" If citizens were divided into groups with corporate loyalties, if Antara was left out of all of those, wouldn't she become Stateless such that Indians could enjoy her plight and desperation?
The above was the crisis, not merely a political and military one, where resources were spent in keeping China and Taiwan separate, create a war scenario and use that to keep Antara 'Stateless' in India. It was also a spiritual and moral crisis, about why dislike for Pratibha would last for centuries. Given no one uttered her name in Ajit-Anjali's household, Antara didn't know why Pratibha was hated, what she had done to others.
One possibility was that Pratibha was from another country, one that Indians distrusted. Other details would emerge as the Pentagon delved deeper into discussing the career of Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman of the Royal Air Force.
Anjali had mentioned that Pratibha had passed away at 29 years of age.
It was corrected by the 'minders', "It meant 1929 killed her, she was probably in her early 30s when she passed away".
1929 was the year of the Wall Street crash.
1929 was the year of the Palestine Riots, violent confrontations between the Jewish and Arab communities around the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
1929 was probably the year RAF's Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman had crash-landed in a mountainous part of Afghanistan.
September 13, 2025.
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