Who wasn't afraid of the Morgans?

Antara was afraid of the Morgans as much as anyone else.

If you remembered her anecdote about going home from the Kolkata reporting office, how she'd start walking towards the BBD Bagh bus terminus once her work got over, well, she could have gone towards the Esplanade Metro Station as well, in 2006 it was the site of a prolonged political fasting.

But the former Clearing Houses occupied the corner realty spots, Antara didn't have her narrative, the Clearing Houses and corners looked forbidding at the late evening hour, so she went towards the bus terminus instead.

Thus, writing about railroad companies was not about 'history lessons that could prove useful' but requesting that the Morgans bring Antara up at a Clearing House, probably DTCC (the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) that cleared the US equities trade. 

Antara had also been provided an understanding of where she stood with the Morgans.

The overnight train that she used for going home (Kolkata/Howrah to Purulia), in the late 1990s, would often be delayed, it was a problem because the train was supposed to leave around 10.30 pm, delays meant it got rather late. 

Soon, even the mighty Howrah Station would be empty, only the passengers of the Purulia train waiting drowsily, most spread newspapers on the railway platform and sat on them, as did Antara and Ajit. 

One of those times, Antara had bought a back issue of 'National Geographic', it was the RMS Titanic cover, she sat on the railway platform reading it, occasionally explaining the 'collision' to her father, "They're saying that had it hit headlong, then there'd be less surface area and hence less damage, why did it turn?" as Ajit listened.

Around 11.40 pm, the Jodhpur Express would leave Howrah, so the Supriya Paul team would be ahead of Antara was known from the late 1990s, there was no suddenness about it.

Around midnight, as the lights were turned off and Howrah Station was submerged in darkness, the Purulia passengers protested, "We have no train and no lights either?"

Hence a railroad-discussing blog, people have all kinds of needs.

As for the criticism of certain individuals in Class Act blogpost of May 6, 2026 ('There went the Morgans'), they've all been close to Antara, and had been identified to certain authorities as performing 'convoy escort duties' (as in the Navy during wartime), 

"Why, so that Antara didn't make any mistake, given she didn't have her narrative? Without mistakes how would she learn?"

That was from an Asansol schoolteacher. For her wise observations, she immigrated and settled in the United States. 

Antara was left by herself, to learn from her mistakes, but who would she teach, in her turn? 

Indians wouldn't learn from her and her own people were no longer around. 

Was 'without mistakes how would she learn' another kind of H1B visa?

SFTD/Story For The Day was about keeping Antara in Kolkata city, no matter what.

Antara's instructions from Chennai were to submit an occasional feature story, keep travelling across West Bengal for days, if not weeks. 

Once she had joined the reporting office in Kolkata, the local female reporters (different publications) encouraged the idea, "Go from one West Bengal town to another, those budget hotels and inns were such a thrill, do your reporting, then settle down with a beer at the hotel etc."

Antara grew up in the Bengal districts and the possibility of staying in a shabby hotel, probably close to where her parents stayed, alone and drinking, was revolting for her. 

Hence, SFTD/Story For The Day, "Well, you couldn't go anywhere, how would you submit the SFTD?" the departmental head had told her.

Once these excursions into West Bengal districts were ruled out, why had they been suggested in the first place? 

What would have yielded had Antara constantly travelled across West Bengal? 

Who'd be providing the answer, the 'Titanic' movie director or Ms Shipley and her cronies in New Zealand?

It was unlikely that Antara was afraid of the challenges coming to the lease from New Zealand.

In any online game with multiple players, Antara had two fears, "So I'd be surveilled and I didn't even know whether I was playing against machines."

For Antara, it was the Classic Lubna Scare, it came from Ukraine, why could Ukrainians freeze the Donetsk-Luhansk region to gather advanced information about assignments and allusions, thereby coming prepared?

ACJ ought to rest easy. The Classic Lubna Scare was so fierce in Antara, she didn't even consider looking for jobs, despite the financial squeeze enforced by the spouse since summer 2025.

As of now, we were not criticising Indians. 

They were thoughtful people when it came to the Kaplan education business of WaPo.

How often did Antara venture out alone? At any hour of the day, they put young boys coming from private coaching/private tutors, "Kaplan education business would get you when you were alone".

It had proved useful, so Antara was allowed to share what NS Road topics she worked on, all chosen by her, Antara feared her relatives, she never looked down upon them.

May 7, 2026.

****

There went the Morgans

The blogs could challenge the Russians because of the railroad services and information that the latter had once sourced from railroad companies.

The Russians owed many favours, no one went to Russia to settle those favours. In fact, most corporations were quite thankful for the muddled White House activities once Russia invaded Ukraine and western firms could leave Russia.

The excuse that one could use a pen to write a love note as well as a death verdict (we were discussing railway usage during the Nazi Holocaust transportation) was lost when the then friend/later bf/now spouse lent his notebook to Antara during Postgrad 1 at Jadavpur University, in 2000. 

Antara had missed a few classes and wanted to catch up, she found the last page of the notebook had a love poem, seemingly meant for her.

There went the Morgans, everyone understood.

That railway services had been used in the vilest way, during humanity's most wretched moment, against that we were being offered BoB/Base Office Berlin.

Antara wouldn't have gotten interested in the guy but that poem somehow changed her.

To Anjali's later inquiries, Antara had said, "I was always travelling on trains, sitting for seven-eight-nine hours on the same seat, hardly any food, that chap's family was based closer to Kolkata, in case I had to work there."

Anjali never discussed the matter further.

There were individuals like Antara, what they wouldn't do for railroad companies!

Why didn't Antara ask her parents to move to Kolkata suburbs, if the city was too expensive for a retired couple like Ajit-Anjali?

Why did she consider Ajit as "lacking the courage to assess danger levels",

Anjali as "always the rank outsider despite excellent information",

and the sibling "whose potential would never be available to me"?

The 'minders' had felt that 'set patterns' had been imposed on them by Global Communists, even when it didn't serve them. 

Antara had understood that the central problem, the White House, couldn't be reinvented, much like the proverbial wheel, no matter how Chinese-influenced it had become. 

So Antara took a chance in 2000, could anyone in the world (in the present day) say that fresh, new beginnings didn't take place in their lives in the last two decades? 

That made the likes of Antara different, their quiet ability to change everyone's lives for the better.

Antara's ability to create these changes had no effect on anyone around her.

Antara couldn't believe that her best friend in school wouldn't study Arts or Commerce, what had indicated that she was a computer whiz in a school that had no computers till the Class of 1995 completed high school?

The sibling wanted mean and conspiring small towns, then why did she create such a frantic and explosive environment at home, only to be a married wife in other small towns?

The Alamo Girl wanted an arranged marriage with a physician, then why be friends with Antara? Why scream, "Liberty, liberty" and run down the streets around Park Circus when the Monsoon Girl was away for a few days? "Wow, gulping down the fresh air", the Alamo Girl had said, because the Monsoon Girl as a hostel mate was so restrictive?

And the Paying Guest girls, over the two decades after 9/11, it didn't occur to you that you ought to have elaborate FB/social media profiles, replete with photos, so that when Antara got isolated from 2015, you could see her through? You still didn't understand what you meant to the world, just transacting through that pattern/UPI and exchanging Whatsapp messages, that's all you had ever desired?

We were criticising because the above-mentioned were successful people. 

There was no proof that any Agency favourite in the US or her career had adversely affected them. 

They were not fearful, they didn't encounter any crisis that made them reach out to Antara. 

They were different from the 'minders', who were stricken with challenges, trying to preserve the semblance of an 'order', let alone a global order.

No one liked disorder or anarchy, how would you earn a living, complete your tasks? 

They used the allusions and blogs, Antara didn't have time for writing Turkish obituaries, the sinking of the RMS Titanic created a Communism that couldn't run amok, without safeguards.

Thus, if Antara's relatives and acquaintances had not faced any severity from the Agency, they had received information regarding her from November 2012 to February 2013. 

It had implied that score-settling was to be attempted about NSDAP war criminals who were hanged at Nuremberg. 

With such an argument they agreed, which meant they either agreed that 

i. NSDAP honchos were not war criminals,

ii. or NSDAP honchos should have gotten away despite being war criminals,

iii. and a girl like Antara would be punished for an international military tribunal from the late-1940s.

This was official, the stance of Antara's relatives and acquaintances when it came to the Nuremberg Trials, it wouldn't change.

There was hardly any WWII family in the United States that didn't change its name or identity as the decades passed, such was the shame and humiliation they faced from the Communist troublemakers.

Most of them returned to the US military during the War on Terror, why didn't you figure out their WWII identities and histories instead of worrying how others spend their time?

May 6, 2026.

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Hitch-22 won't work either, Aunt Bea

Antara had always been aware that someone or the other would gossip about her television-viewing, whether it was the War on Terror operatives or someone else, if it was true she was surveilled, or if there was another way of finding out.

The friction-laden relationship she had with her parents owed to it, "All of you had watched television, now leave the room, I would be watching TV," Antara would say, dragging her father away by the hand, pushing her mother with all her might, the sibling left anyway. 

"I didn't watch when you were watching."

"We didn't prevent you from watching with us," Anjali would say, "What if we were a larger family, where everyone crowded around a single TV set? You can't watch television unless you had the entire living room to yourself."

Then the instructions started, how many feet apart Antara would have to sit, given her myopia, "Ideally, you should sit close to the wall at the back of the room" etc.

Antara sat as close to the television set as possible, right next to it, and watched her favourites, including,

i. The Sunday afternoon news bulletin for the hearing impaired, she picked up some sign language, not enough to converse with others as a lot of Indians knew how to do,

ii. She also watched the National Award-winning movies in regional languages, with subtitles of course, why her oeuvre of movies watched was dominated by south Indian movies.

iii. In sports, she loved figure-skating, gymnastics and equestrian sports, knowing she wouldn't have to try any of these, they were not available in India.

It was the late 1980s, Antara had got into the tendency to cover her nose with the palm of her right hand when she watched TV. Sometimes, if the sibling wandered into the room, she ridiculed Antara, "Why did you sit with your nose covered by your hand, who sat like that?"

Thus, before you gossiped about how Antara watched the 'Castles of Europe' on television but not the 'Palaces of Europe', before you tried to manage Golden Fleece accordingly, you should have understood 'Castles of Europe' was interesting because of the stonemasonry, not for military reasons.

You should have understood that it was pre-cable television in India which was the deal, Antara lost interest when dozens of channels were introduced from the early 1990s, with shallow programming executives.

Everyone could read their Ukraine inferences from the above. It was quite clear that Antara's allusions were not meant to flow towards a British audience but then it was not sourced from the Washington DC honchos either.

It was a mistake that the French made, in the years before Antara's allusions work started, forcefully preventing the Agency from going ahead with the Brussels plan of 2017-2018. 

The French found the Aswan Dam relocation to be of great relevance, thinking that the Washington DC honchos who provided the allusions on Ukraine had been moved away, hence 'allusions work' would get done but there would be no one to receive it or react to it. 

It was a grave misunderstanding of Antara's allusions work, its source, its destination, and therefore its relevance.

The source ought to have been obvious. It would be the steamship companies, the mighty ones crossing oceans, the smaller ones plying between American towns and cities. Who else could possibly know about the legit lease, Poland and Ukraine?

The French would argue that they didn't mean great harm. In the era of Large Language Models, no one had expected Antara's kind of allusions, what found favour only in the towns and districts of West Bengal, hence the electoral results apparently decided by Silicon Valley.

"It didn't matter if TMC lost or won or BJP made inroads, but that West Bengal was not a tech-savvy, AI-friendly place."

Of course, the steamship and mail-ship allusions were not with Silicon Valley, the latter had never asked for them, hence the process to formally separate the legit lease from KGB/Moscow had started, no one had to take the initiative, Silicon Valley did the needful with the West Bengal elections. 

When we mention the legit lease, it implied the Treasury, the latter was devious, with its endless intrigues and conspiracies, till WWI started, then the Treasury became a muted figure.

The strangest thing was how Antara's fate turned out to be not that different from the Four Card Players.

The latter were politicians, artists, businessmen, interested in foreign intelligence rather than in the military, but who were provided a series of sordid and unconnected anecdotes about the lease family in Ukraine, and asked to devise military solutions to it.

It was somewhat like providing 'Chetla as a Navy puzzle' to be solved by Antara, without informing her what was done to the lease between 1981 and 1999.

The Four Card Players had realised that they were being taken down for a reason.

Antara knew that reason, it was the inability to accept others, why she stayed by herself and remained afloat.

2008: Heard Antara was on the night-shift schedule and wanted to rub your day-shift, high-paying accounting job on her face? What if we started discussing what 'global accounting' was about?

2012-13-14: Wanted to go on all-female trips to defeat Antara at 'cool'? 

Antara and her spouse took the aisle berths in airconditioned coaches on overnight trains, so that the two of them could play '20 questions' till late into the night, as the other passengers slept, the train racing through India, swathed under the moonlight.  

May 5, 2026.

****

DoD Suggestion Box: Iraq, UNIX

Antara found out that there was considerable delight in America's provinces that Bengali culture and values would now face an existential threat.

Had the provinces in America depended a little less on hearsay, it would have known that The Otter had a small toothbrush-like moustache in his youth.

Well, kind of took the joy away from laughing at the misfortunes of others, didn't it?

Now, don't get upset, The Otter ate his dinner alone, he came home late, usually close to 11 pm.

Who was to say that better days were not ahead for those neighbours/college mates/colleagues picked up while living the provincial life in the US?

Go, tell them, the American provinces would see them through their troubles.

It was clever to have elaborate business conferences in the US over the last few months, leading up to May 2026. 

It was clever to keep as wide a berth as possible with the SS Californian and Captain Lord.

Hmm, nothing that reminded Antara that while May the Fourth (be with you) was a Monday, May the Eleventh (a week later) was also a Monday.

What on earth? 

Antara wasn't invested in stock markets? 

She wasn't worried about meltdowns? 

Did something happen at Brabourne on May 11, 1999? 

Probably the university exams for BA/BSc were being written? Did the neighbours/college mates/colleagues claim that the exams brought Antara and the Alamo Girl closer?

What about all the other girls at Brabourne? Why were they constantly losing to the Alamo Girl?

Such great hopes on the SS Californian? 

All that the American provinces needed was the Alamo Girl on their side, the rest of Brabourne didn't matter?

As Moral of the Story, how did it read, "The business conferences in the US, over the last few months, had considered the possibility of denying there was ever an ocean liner called the RMS Titanic."

These US-based conferences had taken for granted the Alamo Girl's support. It might have influenced the West Bengal election outcomes.

How about this? Captain Lord had become compromised because of his closeness to the Paris bankers. An alert was sent out by American provinces to the US military, whether Captain Lord's situation could be used to empower the Ukrainians against the legit lease family?

Pure patriotism, eh?

If atrocities were committed against the legit lease family in Ukraine, the latter would rush to the US military, they'd obviously get no help, since the US military had apparently agreed to the use of Captain Lord against the lease.

In 2026, the entire arrangement was being rejigged, with an elaborate cover of being under attack and follow-up action, whereas it was still the same-old Captain Lord, his banker friends in Paris, the editorial page editors (on Elisson pay) and a humiliated Antara.

How was it that all of Brabourne didn't cooperate with that cruel entertainment emanating from the provinces of America?

One possibility was that Brabourne students of the late-1990s didn't realise how backward and sloppy they were expected to be for the Captain Lord games being planned in American towns and cities. 

There was that thin, fair girl, always in cotton shorts and T-shirt, she was from one of the steel towns, she joined Brabourne hostel in January 1998 and stayed only for a few weeks, before quitting both college and hostel. 

She had brown bobbed hair, she'd keep shaking her head, "I cannot tolerate this place (Brabourne Hostel), I cannot, I want to go home right away, I'd rather study at my hometown."

Then she'd turn to Antara and say, "Antara, do you think you could survive this horror, this unrelenting drudgery of our lives, without any freedom?"

When Antara and her then-roommate tried to reason with her, she'd say, "Oh, gosh, you two were actually going to stay here at Brabourne, let me go back to my room and cry my heart out."

These happened on Sundays, when they met that girl later at the dining room, during evening tea, that brown-haired girl would have her eyes all puffed up and red, "I had cried myself to sleep, I couldn't look at the books."

Provincial America? 

Why didn't you write it on a slip of paper and drop it at the Suggestion Box at the DoD in the late-1990s, "Our new neighbours/college mates/colleagues, those who cook so deliciously, wanted the US military to go back to Iraq." 

Why did you use Captain Lord?

Why did you use Ukraine, to make your point?

Oh, you watched the 1996 movie 'Titanic', did you?

It left out Cherbourg (France) and Queenstown (Ireland) and no one protested?

Had you not depended on hearsay and actually visited India, if you had come to Antara's university, you would have found one of her classmates saying, 

"DiCaprio was my favourite actor, Winslet was my favourite actress. 'Titanic' was the best-acted movie in the world. I have no other favourite actor than DiCaprio, I like no actress but Winslet. 'Titanic' was the greatest movie of all times."

You've got to move out of your comfort zone to find out who cared for the RMS Titanic narrative.

Lavish tent, one stainless steel vat after another on the tables, steaming curries, that's not how reality worked.

(Fyi: The headline has been amended to indicate that UNIX-based operating systems often bothered female students living in Kolkata hostels 

TSS/370 and Reagan-Kriesky of 1983-84 had not been connected by the US State Department allusions, probably to make sure Antara didn't find out about the arrangements of 1998 that excluded her or how it modified 1980-Mykolaiv, then in Japan, with no arrangements for Antara's security. 

The allusions provided to Antara were not complete.) 

May 4, 2026.

****

We tested Taiwan. It was wired. Not live yet.

The Ukrainian politician who suggested that Ajit have only one descendant, the elder girl, was born in Luhansk, matriculated from Donetsk, and came from a family of railway workers.

That was all there was to the Russia-Ukraine War, Mr Oleksandr Liashko and his supposed opinion that "merely losing the legit lease (1987) was not enough for so-and-so, she had to rise above the WWII narrative".

It seemed that the Trumps had immediately agreed with Liashko, it was around 1986.

Thus, within the Russia-Ukraine War, "denazification" had implied BT.

Leave it, lose it, win it, at least the Russia-Ukraine War didn't end on Communist terms, we managed to prevail.

Some of the obvious implications of the above would be

i. The gradual and diminishing importance of Asansol AG in global affairs. Once Liashko-Trump had been discussed, there was little left for it to do.

ii. Diminishing importance of Brabourne Junior College dorm, which had considered itself ahead of Antara because of Asansol AG and Ukraine.

Why Brabourne Junior College dorm couldn't identify a federal agency remained a mystery.

Antara didn't share her food with anyone, her fruits, her sweets, packed in the side pocket of her duffel bag, kept under her study table, from which she surreptitiously ate after dinner, while pretending to study.

(Antara: "The dorm girls didn't pay attention to her.")

Nor did Antara offer any food to the dorm girls except biscuits and chanachur/mixture, surely they'd understand who offered Austria and Ajit-Anjali to them? That those wouldn't be taken away from them either?

(Antara: "They didn't care for such details.")

Nor did Antara host any 'muri-makha' on her dorm bed (atop a newspaper), puffed rice, mustard oil, cucumbers, green chillies, Antara did provide the occasional pickle though. Why would there be an Allusions Conference or Competition in Washington DC?

(Antara: "Because Washington DC surely had hospitals, physicians, surgeons, nurses?")

iii. With the Russia-Ukraine War resolved, it would be a good time to investigate the Ukrainian People's Republic-in-exile, from 1920-21 to 1992, initially based in Paris and later in Munich, but never in the United States?

Why was it that Ukraine managed its Treasury responsibilities and its moral integrity better within Europe than in the US?

In case it seemed that the Ukrainian People's Republic-in-exile guided Ajit-Anjali on how to keep Antara away from the US Navy, the 2012 Military Sealift episode would take on proportions which couldn't be assuaged by Taiwan and its supposed control over "Himmler, Bose the politician, litfests across the world including JLF 2012".

May 1, 2026

**** 

Banished to, wait, not Net Zero, not Jet Zero (defunct) but Base Office Berlin!

Decades ago, someone had suggested that there should have been an accompanying gallery with the classrooms at school, "That way, our parents would understand what school life was like, how gruelling and exacting (in the 1980s and 1990s), they wouldn't have these unreasonable demands of us back at home."

Antara didn't mind the above because she was one of the hapless in class, clever and good in studies but hapless, she knew her parents lived in their own world, they had little idea of how schools had evolved and changed, they had never considered whether it was a good thing or not. 

They were paying fees. You had to perform. The end of story.

'Those of us who had faced problems akin to Communism' would imply the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe after Bismarck, coming together. The Jews, of course, had disappeared, by the 1940s, the Palace didn't have to factor them in.

But the strangeness of the situation was that it was a decades-old idea from the Cold War-era, if 'those of us who were together from 1870-1950 came up with our own club', we could exclude the US intelligence community, Antara, her batchmates, a handful of young people might be included for running errands.

Having come up with that plan, the next one was a tease, "By the way, what would you (Antara, outside the 1870-1950 club) use for information/allusions?"

What were you trying to say, you didn't want people to know the reality behind the Cold War-era defections, if the defections were about the Nazi Holocaust?

Or were you not willing to admit that the Cold War defection drama over, you needed to manage the intelligence, with around 100+ junior college students, some were your favourites and others were not, some would be part of a glorious American existence while others were left in India to manage the British muck, Antara would be the imbecile who'd 'underscore' the above arrangement?

Antara as the imbecile?

How could the cleverest girl in class be the imbecile?

Did you not hear yourself when you spoke out?

"We were so afraid of you but when you spoke to us, we realised you were one of us."

That was Brabourne Junior College dorm, 1995.

No one had briefed Antara's dorm mates that she was meant to 'underscore' as they cleaned up British intelligence?

What kind of ops were these?

The girls from the hills,

"Antara, you were so fair, so good-looking."

"No, I was ugly and unattractive." 

"Who says so?"

"Everyone, relatives, neighbours."

"Antara, you were so fair, the fairest of them all."

You didn't brief the NRIs on the above? Don't be annoyed at the Golden Fleece blogposts, they thought differently at the Brabourne Junior College dorm?

The cleverness in arranging a generation of women to clean up Cold War-related problems was that 'cleaning' was difficult to assess, it was a typical example of abuse, "No, these ain't clean enough, go clean them again."

They were posted across the world, UK and US were their typical addresses.

Keep Antara unemployed for decades, she'd be raging at a group of 'former-dormmates-now-cleaners'.

After the 1985 burglary at the Aaguri Para house in Asansol, the cops had visited to inventory the missing belongings, Ajit and Bimal were there, everyone else was at NS Road.

"They showed a lot of interest, took detailed inventory, probably for their own needs, the possibility of our recovering the stolen goods didn't seem to exist," Ajit had said once the cops went away.

What kind of a place was Queenstown, Ireland that it took interest in RMS Titanic passengers that disembarked there but never protested about the 1996 'Titanic' movie?

They had no opinion at all about the missing passengers?

April 30, 2026

****

All grace? No (harmonium) reeds for Pratibha from the Church?

Once Antara had submitted her 'Story for the Day'/SFTD) (at the reporting office in Kolkata), there was not much for her to do.

It was somewhat like Israel. Once it had stated that both Iran's regime and its nuclear facilities were problematic, there was little the Israelis could do.  

At the Kolkata office, there was hardly any possibility of a sudden event that would reset priorities or require fresh news reports.

"Antara, even if it were to happen, neither did we make the front page in Kolkata (it was done in Chennai) nor was the Central Govt based out of Kolkata (New Delhi was the seat of power), the Delhi Bureau would grab the story. Thus, front-page news meant little to us."

Thus, Israel, with some justification, might have lost interest in the Middle East crisis, whether it was part of the Iran ceasefire talks or not, why did the British care?

Antara, after her 'Story for the Day'/SFTD had been submitted, lost interest in local news. She never called other reporters in Kolkata-based newspapers, never read what they might have uploaded. 

"Don't talk to them, Antara, it was about denigration."

But Kolkata-based reporters called once in a while, later in the evening, Antara was friendly towards them, she took those calls and chatted, later dropped hints of her popularity to the departmental head.

"Antara, you were popular in Kolkata? Well, I never..." he wouldn't complete the sentence.

After a while, "Were you sure they were not asking for details of how our workplace managed from day to day?"

"That they did," Antara would reply, "recruitment policy, salary structure, power balance within the office."

"There you go, how we worked was all they needed to know, wanted to know, and to go about it in such an elaborate way."

Israel might have felt the same way.

If Antara texted the spouse from work, she usually got sharp, caustic replies. 

As the evening wound on, she dialled the landline phone to speak to her parents in Asansol. They spoke of their day, who came, who said what, the fact that they had moved on from their younger daughter was not obvious, there was not the slightest interest in Antara's work or journalism.

At such a point, the departmental head would call her up, he sat downstairs, Antara on the mezzanine floor above. 

"Antara, go home, I request you, I order you, whichever suited you, you were not a small girl, why must you wait for your spouse's work to be over? I don't want you around, pick up your bag, leave, I implore you."

"Okay, all right, on my way," Antara would poke her head in while leaving, "there, you've got proof that I was leaving for home."

Then that long walk to the BBD Bagh bus terminus, next to the Writers' Building, they switched off the lights at the terminus, one after the other, as the evening wore on. 

Antara's parents didn't know what bus she took, from which terminus, they never asked, they were really not that into her anymore.

Antara had the answer.

It was the 1996 movie 'Titanic'.

Its plotline was apparently planned by the US military.

Ajit was helpless, Antara was gone, Anjali had won.

Then recently,

"In your life, remember June 1997, coming out of Dr Mukherjee's clinic in Asansol, no hope of curing the cancer except surgery. Waiting for an autorickshaw by the highway (National Highway 2 ran through Asansol).  One rumbling monster truck after another, what kept northern India supplied, Ajit so frail and lost in the glare of those monstrous trucks, gripping you by the hand, his face washed with tears.

And some months later, January 1998, Antara somehow managing to grab a seat at Brabourne hostel, what a comeback, the girl who had a cancer scare as a 17-year-old, wrote her Class 12 Board exams while unwell, cleared her Board Exams and the further entrance exams for English Honours, back at Brabourne as an undergraduate.

At the government circuit house, while on their way to join Brabourne Hostel, Ajit holding her tight, how much could that man cry, 'Even if no one came, don't worry, I'll come for you, gave me a break from home as well, I won't forget you'."

Oh, the ship sailed out to sea in the movie, it didn't stop at Cherbourg, France or Queenstown, Ireland. 

So quite a different journey.

April 29, 2026.

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