At the very least, if you were bent on signing the lease, you could use a new term, Hollywood had said, back in the 1920s. When the Old World and its royalty existed, you could sign a 'lease' for the New World. When the Old World was ruined, why not call it a 'spot of land' to nurture military arrogance?
It was in the backdrop of such remarks that German-origin Americans had understood that their stay in the US was not meant to be permanent, that they would be chased around the world, just for the sake of it, or so it seemed.
Before Hollywood and the Colorni gang decided to bring Antara to her present residential block in Delhi, they had studied her life and work and ideas in detail. For historical purposes, why did her interest in German Nazis stop with the end of WWII in 1945? Did she not care about the fugitives, the Holocaust perps escaping the law and hiding in Argentina? Why wouldn't she want to follow up on those cases? Did moving away from Germany mean loss of German-ness to her?
The questions seemed to be coming from the beer barons of England, but still Antara would provide the answers. She was genuinely fearful of rightwing dictatorships, which seemed to be the post-retirement option for the Nazis in South America.
"Not retirement, superannuated was the correct word," Anjali would often tell her daughters. 'Anu' was atoms in the Bengali language, Antara wouldn't want to guess if those retired Nazis also worked on 'atoms for peace'. After all, she lived in New Delhi.
Most of the former Nazis in South America were also small arms traders, a group Antara reviled. But mostly, all movies and fictional accounts of such Nazis had a born-again/waiting-for-the-messiah characteristic about them, and given what Antara's people underwent, she'd try to avoid those reminders.
On the Nazi Holocaust, Antara preferred the linear, minimalist narrative. It didn't win awards or accolades because it didn't exist as yet. Maybe the British beer barons and Hollywood interpreted Hitler's manner of death as the need for an overwrought Nazi narrative.
It was clear now that the Prussians had switched sides to the Bengali developmental economists, willing to go down with them rather than be seen as loyal to the Allied side.
As Antara and her classmates had known since school, Ukraine would be altogether absent during the lease-signing in Washington DC, busy with reconstruction work (or maybe extracting rare minerals.)
Imagine the plight of the person who'd have to finalise the lease: a single WWII narrative, compiled by a bunch of no-gooders at MI6 and the fiction-writers of Hollywood.
May 3, 2025.
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