Antara's junior college years at Brabourne hostel in the mid-1990s was fully Tagore-dominated, so it seemed now, it was a scary experience.
The above fact was known when she returned to Brabourne hostel as an undergraduate, the hostel matrons remembered Antara didn't eat eggs, "of course we remember", one of them had said, when Antara went to remind them.
"You didn't have enough, you came back?" one of her batchmates from Geography Honours had asked her. What happened during junior college was known. However, these conversations usually took place when the Alamo Girl was not around.
However, Antara had told her parents that Brabourne otherwise had a secure, modern hostel, better than the other hostel facilities in Kolkata. Maybe because it was a government institution? Brabourne's food was a problem but Antara's parents agreed to send her back for undergraduate studies, food could be supplemented.
However, the focus on New York City that was ever-present during junior college disappeared in the undergraduate years, Antara constantly got rooms that allowed her a view of Muslim households close by, including youth on the verge of radicalisation.
These facts were known to the Alamo Girl, she could put late 1990s and NYC and radical Islam together and understand what it was about. Was she challenging Antara, if Antara had the courage to identify those responsible? Antara had done so in 2024, who planned the 9/11 attacks with such precision. Guess what, she was told that identifying those responsible started her work, it didn't end it.
ii. Antara's instinct for investigation was always there, she didn't discuss it because she had two self-declared "detectives" at home, both females. It was not clear what they "detected" or if it was a parody of something. After several years of allusions work, Antara was certain they got everything wrong, was it deliberate?
Antara was used to observing things, she kept quiet lest she was insulted, which often happened. Through the undergraduate years at Brabourne, her only concern was, "If they introduced Instrumentation Engineering as a course in India (as reported in the newspapers), why did the high school Physics teacher not let me participate in simple experiments on current electricity?"
It had influenced Antara's decision to not pursue Science, "for fulcrum, tuning fork and lenses, there was Antara but for current electricity, 'just stand and watch others complete the circuitry'"? You have to keep in mind it might have been connected to the "parody detectives" in Antara's household.
We'd have to go back a bit, mid-1980s to mid-1990s, when Antara's parents lived in Asansol. Antara and her mother often went out in the evenings for local purchases, school supplies or household items that needed replenishing. The sibling never went with them, it bored her to visit stores, so we were not discussing a lease matter or anything connected to 19th century grocery stores in the US.
While shopping locally, they often bought gifts as well, for birthdays and the nephews/nieces being born, Anjali liked the fully-kitted cosmetics supplies for infants. Her other favourite was a blankie with a pocket for the head to be tucked in. How many times had they bought those items together?
It seemed like a fully-kitted intelligence apparatus so that a particular shipping family in the US didn't have to use the regular DoD.
Antara and her mother never stopped at the chemists, all pharma was purchased by Antara's father. So Britain was probably not a factor.
iii. Antara would not provide the reasons but it didn't seemed to have anything to do with the metal bullion either. It was about the Tagores, their eastern European plans around Molotov-Ribbentrop. Antara had gone back to that Asansol gift shop in 2008, when she was married and working in Delhi, it should have been clear to the Tagores that Antara was aware of their Molotov-Ribbentrop aspirations.
But when a mighty entity like the United States Govt encouraged someone like Chetla for decades, she could neither give up Mount Lebanon nor Netaji Bose, everything seemed within grasp with the US Govt apparatus.
Immediately, the British got involved.
It was possible Chetla knew more about the 1991 Balance of Payments crisis than the rest of us, the Indian ministers of the time were no longer around, so only Washington DC would do the explaining. One visit to the RBI museum in Kolkata would not yield more than what Antara was writing on her blog. She needed her citizenship documents.
If anyone was following the blog, they'd want to know if the entire controversy was about BT and the Allied Commanders being on opposing sides/differing at the end of WWII, the Close Female Relative was already bearing that burden. Why had the Alamo Girl been brought into the picture? We have got the answer, so that the stress on Antara increased to an extent where the British would always remain involved.
Not everyone at Batanagar (the town) probably felt that the British had treated them well.
iv. The situation was turning out the following way. Antara's junior college days at Brabourne hostel were marked by a frenzy around the merchant marines as few saw in their lives. What the Alamo Girl later saw was nothing. The US Navy was dominated by the Tagores, Antara's allusions work had stated that "the merchant marines took an interest in the activities of Lipstick Building in Manhattan, New York, where Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme had unfolded".
Thus, Chetla was interested in currency matters, we had a college hostel prepped by merchant marines, a Manhattan building known for financial wrongdoing, an intelligence apparatus from the 1980s-90s for a shipping family in the US.
Where was the US Govt in any of it?
v. Chetla had apparently disliked that HT had focussed on a certain novelist's (Ibis Trilogy) absence from the Jaipur Literature Festival, "it was not HT's business to know such things".
The allusions seemed to indicate that in the absence of the Jews of Poland, if the French Jews could take over the lease was one of the investigations that couldn't be conducted at JLF, because JLF was focussed on conspiring against Austria, it kept Austria important, it had no opportunity to discuss French Jews.
December 2, 2025.
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