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.
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