One of the reasons Antara was comfortable with Americans discussing the trade in Jewish identities while in Vienna was because of the way her life turned out over the last four or five years.
On finding out about her narrative, she realised everyone around her wanted to go to Austria and were anti-Austria, that they were part of various groups and clubs gathered under some Austrian blackmail or the other, that they had no right to ask questions about the necessity for such groups, they didn't know who headed these groups, there was no certainty about the rewards of being against Austria.
If you asked, they either started polishing their eyeglasses or declared, "...all groups belonged to Kruppe".
It implied that Antara had separated from the national existence sometime in the mid-1990s but she stayed with girls, it was not obvious that the restructuring of AT&T was an event far more destructive than the 9/11 attacks. Or that the 9/11 attacks were the symptom of a greater evil.
ii. Now read the following carefully, it was the description of the last week of Ajit's working life, before he retired in 1997. Antara's sibling had her teacher's training exam scheduled for that week as well, in Kolkata, it implied "your father's engineering career was ending, he was retiring but we wouldn't be around," Anjali had said. (Anjali and her elder daughter were away that entire week.)
Antara's sibling taught at a school in Purulia (the town where they lived). "Wasn't your younger sister home for the Class 12 Board exams prep leave, why didn't you ask her to fill in for you, we wouldn't have to look for a temp?" the school's principal had asked. Antara was 17 years old, not yet an adult, at a venue (the school) where all teachers were adults and all minors were students.
It was one thing for Cooch Behar to claim that the adults-only Condor Club in San Francisco used to run Austrian politicians through the Cold War, that the Agency had always been aware of it but quite another to claim that in a world where countries were mere provinces and all politics managed from adults-only clubs and bars, what would someone like Antara do as a legit lease heir? That question was asked by Cooch Behar in 1997.
Here's what Antara would do as a legit lease heir. First, she'd discuss what Cooch Behar was about, surely those in adults-only clubs didn't read her blogs and wouldn't mind her doing so.
iii. Back to that week in 1997, it was important to remember that Antara had already been diagnosed with tumours, the surgeons were waiting for her Class 12 Board exams to be over, she had desired so, they feared it might turn malignant. Through that week.
Antara got up at 6 am,
Reached the school where she was filling-in by 7 am,
Came back home at 1.30 pm,
Called for home delivery of a lunch service,
At 2 pm, her father returned from work, they had lunch together, he left immediately after,
At 3 pm, the diagnostic clinic assistant arrived, Antara was taking a severe injection daily for the tumours, all by herself at home, seven injections only for that week,
At 4 pm, a private tutor arrived to finish those chapters in Economics that Brabourne professors hadn't managed to, they didn't teach the entire syllabus,
From 5.30 onwards, once the tutor had left, Antara studied on her own for her exams, till her father returned from work around 8.30-9 pm. It had been a busy week for her father.
So, Cooch Behar, what the above implied was that once the severity of Communism had somewhat receded, Antara would have to find out what US Presidents, from Harry Truman onwards, had done to the global economy, what they had deliberately omitted and why.
Nothing that would come in the way of the adults-only clubs.
iv. The day Ajit retired, he came in and announced, "I was now a retired man."
Antara and her father sat down to dinner, from around 11 pm, the landline telephone started ringing. If you picked it up, the line was immediately disconnected from the other side.
Nearing midnight, the landline phone was still ringing, as they were wrapping up for the day. "Let it ring," Ajit said.
On her own, Antara couldn't sleep, the ringing telephone was reverberating around the walls of the mighty house. Antara went and finally unplugged it, but guess what, her father's office was right next door, it had the same telephone number and when Antara went back to bed, she could hear the phone ringing away in the office, all through the night.
Cooch Behar. What a DoJ honcho, an expert in anti-trust action and breaking up monopolies.
Why did the phone not stop ringing the night Ajit retired? You knew the answer, you didn't want more Nazis in the Pentagon, you wanted more Peshmergas and Kurdistan-loyalist Marxists there.
You didn't understand how clever it was? The DoJ could never be loyal to a Nazi military but a Marxist-Peshmerga-Kurdistan one, well, the Peshmergas had neither conquered European countries nor killed Jews in a genocide.
November 22, 2025.
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