FACSIMILE: Were you sure Antara had not been 'baited' enough?

Global financiers were not of use anyway when it came to NS Road.

One would not use profanities but you should have seen the 'baiting' that went on around Ajit when they had to visit NS Road.

NS Road had invited you to one of their parties, Ajit and his family turned up/in attendance in the evening, they were welcomed with good cheer and served food on plates, even as NS Road went about preparing more festive dishes for a dinner that Ajit and his family wouldn't be served. There were no other guests present when they were having their meal, it was obvious they'd arrive later.

On their way back home (this was Asansol), Anjali would remark, "So we got the junior batch treatment, the imbeciles and the infantiles."

If Ireland didn't consider Ajit and his family eligible for worldwide Soviet KI-intelligence apparatus, knowing financiers or being connected to them wouldn't necessarily elevate them.

ii. Antara's 'baiting' started once she went off to Kolkata for college while her parents shifted to Purulia, sometime in the mid-1990s. She'd often break the journey at NS Road, either to or from Kolkata, a necessary salute that was expected of her. Oh, how famished Antara would be from the train travel, and how she'd be offered nothing for an evening snack. You were not supposed to ask at NS Road, if they were refusing to serve you a meal, it was their discretion.

Their girls, then quite young, would come back from playing with their friends, they'd sit down to bowls of steaming Maggi/instant noodles. Someday, I'd eat all the Maggi in the world, the starving Antara would think to herself.

Ajit's presence didn't help matters either. He might be accompanying Antara, they would be served dinner, Ajit got his roti-sabzi, other relatives visiting got a warm rice-based meal (they always had visitors), Antara got leftover rice from the fridge and two slices of potatoes, obviously a curry whose main ingredients had been eaten by others.

And yet one would have to listen to Communists insisting that the American defence firms were not involved in the way Antara was treated throughout her life.

"Yes, I saw what they served to you," Ajit would later say.

Well, why didn't you protest, Ajit, why couldn't you argue when your daughter was being given the worse-than-stray-dog treatment? Were you afraid of royal families, was that your problem, Ajit? They'd be treating people with disrespect across the world, and you would pick up the blame.

The moment Antara finished her daily allusions work, you, Ajit, took the blame for everything, for letting things go that far.

Ajit got teased too, everyone in India was an engineer, the salaries were becoming what a decade's income used to be like. They even teased him at his wife's funeral, no matter where he went, they kept mentioning large sums of money to him. He shook his head, dismissed those arguments, laughed it off till the Treasury advised him to send his younger daughter to ACJ, apply for a scholarship, so that he could submit his basic pension slip.

iii. Antara got the idea, there were Kolkata and Tagore-loyalists among the legal fraternity in India, she was reminded that most of them had immigrated to the United States. And done what? Their days of Lajpat Nagar and Dhaula Kuan were over, the American legal fraternity had accepted them as their own, trusted them with America's national secrets?

Where was the crime on Antara's behalf that the threat was so severe?

"The worst insult that NS Road had heaped on Ajit was immediately after his marriage, it was so severe it couldn't be expressed in words, they had taken him to their ancestral village to insult him".

All that Antara got from the above anecdote was that Ajit was severely insulted after his contact-corroboration, that would be 1944-45, and the Treasury had no idea what had happened.

That United States, which couldn't track individuals in the middle of WWII, from where threats of "stringent action" were emanating.