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 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, Darjeeling and Kathmandu,
"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
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