The tale of a goodly apple (2)

Haripada dithered on democracy. We didn't know why he did so. We do know he was surrounded by men from northern and western India at all times, did they come to consult him?

These men lacked respect for Ukraine, it was intense, their sense of superiority was acute. Haripada might have realised that they neither respected the lease nor the White House in DC, the latter had allowed the lease family to settle in Ukraine.

Haripada might have considered their attitude as a contributing factor to the tumult of the 1940s.

Antara found the above situation credible, she had faced such situations in her life:

"Can you believe it, she didn't even have a purse?"

"You won't go looking like that to the English Honours Freshers' Welcome, as if you were a beggar".

"You can't go like that to the wedding, take our stuff and wear them, that's your life, 'udhaar ki zindagi'/a life lived by borrowing and debt, your underclothes were your own, right?"

Thus, stupendous wealth and garish clothes were the prerequisites to being acknowledged within society, else your political presence became negligible.

ii. The above situation made Anjali an interesting character. She could provide valued intelligence and high idealism to her younger daughter while the German defence firms and fleet service ships would provide access to privileged Houses to Antara's relatives, neighbours, classmates and the rest of the women of small-town Bengal. 

What a quandary!! Anjali knew information had no value in Indian society unless you were wealthy, so she gave the information to Antara and the wealth to Bengali women. Did Anjali dislike her younger daughter?

Anjali appeared to avoid ostentation. And yet her life's work was speaking for itself, Bengal's small towns overflowed with bakeries and patisseries, while Antara could no longer go out on her own, she prowled late in the evening with her spouse, picking up vegetables rotting from the heat of the day for their meals. 

Bengal, eat your cake, have it too, then force-stop Antara's medication and empty out every grocer and greengrocer's shelf where she lived.

iii. It was impossible for Antara to understand how Anjali actually felt about democratic governance in India. Was she one of those that felt that India's democracy shouldn't have been preceded by the Nuremberg Trials at the Palace of Justice, held from the mid-1940s? 

That people in India had not been forewarned that instigating wars was an international crime, as was a genocide against a particular group, that it would call forth an International Military Tribunal?

The above was not Antara's opinion, Anjali was not around to argue her case, but Antara's persecution went unprotested in a wealthy country like India. She'd leave it at that, she didn't know what Allied commanders thought of India. The British were frequently posted in India, surely they disliked Poland and felt closer to India. 

iv. A culture that considered the younger daughter of Ajit-Anjali as the rightful candidate to settle their scores over the Nuremberg Trials. 

A culture where every Hindu and Muslim, king and emperor and nawab, took daily recourse to the most brutal tortures of their subjects.

A culture where Indian monarchs speared 'suspected' culprits, forget trying or hanging them.

A culture where till the 19th century, Kolkata's schools had the most horrifying corporal punishments, including kneeling under the tropical sun through the day with several bricks balanced on each palm of the hand.

They were affronted by the Nuremberg Trials? They needed to be forewarned? This culture was not speaking the truth either about democracy or the Nuremberg Trials.

June 14, 2025.

The tale of a goodly apple

Those who came too late to their narrative (because of the anxieties of others, not their own fault) and yet attempted to research on the Nazi Holocaust were given nasty and repeated scares by the KSA, the German military intelligence unit that supervised Washington DC.

As it happened, the torture inflicted on Antara over the last decade was marked less by surprise but by the monotony of unceasing brutality.

Had Antara been given sudden scares by the German KSA, it was because Hessian soldiers during the American Revolutionary War had entered into an agreement with the British general William Howe, who had commanded during the Battle of Long Island in 1776. 

For every lease-signing, they had agreed to a scripted game between Hessians and the Howe family of Nottinghamshire, under William's father Emanuel Scrope Howe. 

However, things didn't go as per the script, did it, decided during the American Revolutionary War? If the last lease signing was BT's, his life remained shrouded in mystery. But say BT had to take the help of the SA/Sturmabteilung for his lease, surely it was not because they were descendants of the Hessian soldiers?

And as for Antara, she'd been unemployed for 13 years! She had no rights to buy clothes, converse with anyone, seek treatment for her illnesses, her bank account was withdrawn and citizenship papers not allowed. Did it seem like a playful and scripted run-up to any lease-signing, between a British aristocratic family and German soldiers?

ii. One of the Kapurthala royals had left home and married a Bengali woman called Priscilla Chatterjee. Their daughter was Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, India's first Health Minister, from 1947 to 1957. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur had been educated at a Dorset boarding school and then at Oxford University. One would have to check if such a half-Punjabi half-Bengali family, because of its extensive contacts in England, knew anything about the Howe family's further involvement in lease-signings.

ACJ had a batch topper called Priscilla, a few years senior to Antara. There was a Priscilla in Silicon Valley as well. It was Anjali who used to hide behind a door and surprise Antara, back in the 1980s, yelling 'howe'. 

There was a restaurant in Asansol called 'Sudhamrit'. On their first visit there, sometime in 1987, Antara had wiped off an adult's portion of noodles. "You ate it all?" her parents had been surprised. 

'Sudhamrit' should have known Antara got very hungry when she couldn't locate the lease.

June 13, 2025.

Fighters and their fables

Anjali didn't like any of the systems prevalent for division of estates among princes in German noble families.

There was either primogeniture and appanage, where the younger sons were provided some designated property, so that they felt a stake in their family name.

There was secundogeniture, which provided the younger sons with a dependent estate and thereby established a cadet branch of the family, it had more prestige and material benefits than appanage.

"So much division and subdivision within families, it led to decline in quality," she'd say.

It implied that Anjali thought the royals in the Indian subcontinent managed things better. There were feuds and intrigues and rivalries, but there was also a sense of contributing to an Indian national identity, giving up their personal considerations for a larger national cause.

Hence, Anjali was no Prussian.

ii. Why would Murad and Papiya, of the Indian subcontinental diaspora, get so interested in German feudal politics of 300 years ago? A fire truck was parked across the road from where Antara lived, through much of the evening, and fire trucks were parked around Antara only when a neighbouring country's diaspora gathered under Murad. 

Apart from who would trip over monetary policy and who wouldn't, there was simply no scope for anyone to understand what was going on. Antara dealt with FAA blackmails and a bit of Boeing, air-crashes got her bogged down with a century's worth of aviation history. 

What was bothering the neighbouring country's diaspora? Your favourites were 'outflanked' in 2006 by Antara, she preferred not to harass them. It implied Antara was a better person, not a weaker one. 

iii. Of course, it was possible that the neighbouring country's diaspora didn't want Antara to continue writing on the American Revolutionary War or even the Battle of Long Island. George Washington's retreat was not the point, it was the presence of the Hessian soldier, lent as auxiliaries to the British Army through many wars, including the American Revolutionary War. 

The Hessian soldiers came from areas around Frankfurt, they'd know quite a bit of the origin of the Rothschild family. They'd discuss such things with the British soldiers, how many Houses were around where they came from, if they were all German, how each House felt about the Tagores.

iv. Hessian soldiers had apparently been a topic for Grigori Zinoviev as well, when he had been providing inputs to the German space travel enthusiasts, in the late 1920s. The latter had asked Zinoviev why Tripura kept a permanent contingent in Washington DC and Zinoviev had replied, "Tripura can never trust the Hessian soldiers, their informants and agent networks in the United States, given they fought in the American Revolutionary War."

June 12, 2025.  

Battle Games

It was beginning to seem that these write-ups, accounts, blogposts would not end anytime soon. Antara's life had become so restricted for over a decade that she had genuinely hoped that the blogposts would cause some kind of a global stir, bringing some changes in her life for the better.

Instead, certain groups chose to flaunt their clout, their high levels of infiltration into sensitive workplaces and rest assured, Antara was not about to get any reprieve. (That ought not to apply to her medication, given she had established that she was being illegally pursued and persecuted, but we'd discuss that later.)

It seemed that large groups of financiers wanted the write-ups and blogposts to continue as well. It bode ill for the global (or any other) economy if there were too many rags-to-riches narratives coming out of Asansol, Durgapur, Kolkata and similar places. The element of mystery created instabilities, it made people withdraw finances, raise interest rates for lending. 

As Antara had suggested in her June 10 blogpost on Hackney Jews, write something about yourself. It was not that easy, all of you know each other, had remained connected even if you grew up in different cities and towns, and could therefore invade Washington DC as a group. 

(Antara recently found out that the connections were through dance schools, music academies, and auditions for television programmes in Kolkata. We had been misled into thinking that The Statesman Voices Coordinators was the only interest group we were looking at. 

Imagine what would happen if similar networking existed in the United States, suddenly all piano academies and ballet schools would be marching down DC, demanding an end to the Poland-Ukraine connections and the legit lease.)

Back in Kolkata of the late 1980s, the television studio was located in a neighbourhood called Golf Green, and those who auditioned there, including half of Antara's school and much of West Bengal, believed that as soon as the golf-loving Trump would take the White House, Jesus Green/British defence firms would start their work against Poland and Ukraine and the legit lease. 

Celebrated ACJ students wrote investigative stories on golf courses, to remind the British of the cushy jobs and assignments that were due to them in Washington DC.

Who created such hopes, dreams and aspirations? Why did parents, taking their children for an audition to a Kolkata studio, think about Ukraine and Poland at all? These countries were never mentioned in Kolkata's newspapers or magazines. 

What would happen to the rest of us? What would happen to Antara? That was no dance form telecast on Bengali television channels, it was merely stomping one's feet or doing turns. For that, there was a British defence firm assignment in Washington DC the moment Donald Trump became US President?

When Antara's peers were dancing/stomping or singing 'vocals' in 1990-91, Antara was actually trying to learn/understand the global discourse on defence and warfare. There was no applause for her, that Antara was committed to the mainstream news while her batchmates were chasing conspiracy theories?

An Indian editor had once told Antara, "All the news was in the first two paragraphs, the rest of the story was repeat and expansion of the same". It implied all blackmails were from the two World Wars, everything since 1945 repeated and expanded on the same.

If the above had been true, Antara's peer generation wouldn't have been taught that the Battle of Long Island (1776) in the American Revolutionary War was their make-or-break moment, when George Washington had been 'outflanked' and made to retreat to Manhattan. If you had been 'outflanked', your right to declare independence (earlier on July 4) was gone. 

That same strategy was apparently being applied to Antara (with backing from Kolkata 'officials'.)

Antara didn't know about George Washington but had she been 'outflanked'? Let's go back to 2006, Antara was married and working as a news bureau reporter in Kolkata and lived with her spouse at a rented apartment. Most of her NRI friends were still in India, either not married, working low jobs or not working at all. They were waiting for the two breakthrough events of 2007: the Wolfowitz-Dershowitz lease and Putin at the Munich Security Conference. Then their lives would change.

What if Antara had declared in 2006 that both Asansol AG Church and Brabourne had been 'outflanked' by her, that they should be brought to the station and asked how the Taliban rose, 1992 onwards, once the Golf Green auditions had stopped?

June 11, 2025.

Must be a House without a view

The competition across the channel was led by a familiar face. Oh, the smugness, the attitude, the cranked-up torture through the day. Terror in Europe, the upturned, proud faces of the Delhi guys and gals.

Who was the familiar person, this specialist on metal? How would you know, did she introduce herself? Did she have a social media account, an Insta presence, that you'd know that she was comfortable with scrutiny? So more shadowy and dubious figures, hence Delhi was comfortable, the entire Delhi-NCR area could spin it any way they wanted. 

Let's say your name was Goring. Have you always been called Goring? What were you called five centuries back? Did you always live in Europe? Which parts of Europe have you lived in? What was your traditional livelihood? Some of us would keep explaining our backgrounds, over and over again, and then get punished by Mumbai tycoons for discussing the narrative. The rest could just spread rumours and influence the torture on Antara?

Write something, for heaven's sake. Such familiarity with Jews, Orthodox Jews at that, sending them over to Britain since the 18th century, settling them at Hackney, what a wonderful narrative. Yet didn't stand up to the Fuhrer and share his glorious (former) friendship with the Hasidim, it could have saved the lives of those six million that had not managed to immigrate to Hackney, London.

We get it, the officials were too confident of your Hasidim narrative to bother your privacy. You didn't need the principal, that was for those pursuing the nefarious way of becoming wealthy. You were fond of the interest, the 'sood' as they called it in Hindi. 

What were they called, Manu-bhaiya, so that's Manu-da of Bengal politics, SS Ray of the so-called Naxal troubles. Another 'sood' was Kuku-bhaiya, so the unhinged German intelligence. 

Oh, wait, wasn't Manu and unhinged German intelligence the topic of the last decade?

So more of the same thing, nothing to offer on Jews or Hasidim or the metal, delaying tactics.

What did you say? The Hackney Jews had a huge House they lent to the British royals? Why didn't the British royals have a House of their own, they've been around forever? It was a structure, a House, you couldn't lose it over a gambling debt. 

You have to clear up the confusion you have started, British knighthood types and top US intelligence officials were rushing to Bengaluru to ascertain if there was a way of avoiding Poland and Ukraine for the legit lease. 

Antara lived dangerously: those on the surveillance had already been accused of wilful complicity in her slow demise, of knowing and abetting a crime, of not following up on a single threat emanating from Asansol, Durgapur and Kolkata, aimed at Antara. 

So the British royals were sustaining their House on the American colonies, lost them in the 1770-80s, and borrowed a House from the Orthodox Jews? 

That meant your narrative was neither about the lease nor about currency. 

What went on in Bengaluru?

June 10, 2025.

That's the competition, across the channel

Everyone was waiting for the Sandhurst fraudulent lease. Antara had been alerted to it, the joint NATO military operations created a 'Band of Brothers' atmosphere. 

Antara didn't realise living within a shared space was the same as attacking the financial system of your country. She had lived in hostels and as paying guests for a decade, she never wanted to harm the central bank of her country. She didn't even know what others thought about it, except you didn't leave money lying around because the 'porter' would get it, in case someone paid your bus fare, it had to be immediately repaid, down to the last paise, being stingy was the fashion, extravagance looked down upon.

Who'd say the hostel was in India, so much of it after the 9/11 attacks. Maybe they were all pretending. But careful around Porter, don't owe obligations to the Bidens, UPI was not clearly understood.

The Treasury having turned out to be a laggard because it hated Poland, Indian royals and Sandhurst, old comrades all, would make their way to the Treasury. The US officials were delaying their summer vacations for it.

ii. If Sandhurst and Indian royals went for the Treasury to file their own lease, they'd be using British women to do their currency-related research and intelligence work. Oh, now the fangs and talons were showing, what the last decade had been about. The British women were the cleverest in the world, with their knitted sweaters and casual hair-do, and they've been affronted. Coolly, that affront had been passed to the NRIs, who were earning their loyalty points by destroying Antara.

Let's compare and contrast:

a. Ability to sit for long hours, a sedentary work profile, focussing on the minutiae of challenging work:

That was Antara's life since 2013, so 12 years now, either sculpting sentences for her short stories or researching on artillery. She was also a hostage, hence she had an extremely acute Vitamin D deficiency, diagnosed last month, something that might end up taking her life.

b. Ability to withstand high pressure from Moscow:

Antara handled Moscow alone. Her parents, sibling and spouse didn't share her concern, nor did they feel threatened by Vladimir Putin, nor did they have Holocaust worries. The same was true of the country she lived in, Putin was its friend. 

If you withstood and battled and often prevailed against Putin on your own, since Munich 2007, it did imply Antara was a force equal to or sometimes greater than Moscow.

c. Infinite patience to weld and join small financial instruments:

When Antara saw small instruments, forget it, there was no need for profanity. Let's just put it this way. She had infinite patience on her own terms, not that of women from other countries or Indian cities.

d. Elaborate cover/visor/mask/Musk for metal-related work:

Antara had been under hostile surveillance forever, she had no privacy. What did the visor protect against, that sharp, blue oxyacetylene torch? Wasn't that another way of saying Agency? Hmmph, the Agency was allowing Sandhurst to go ahead and punishing Poland. 

e. The ability to do repetitive things:

That was also called Communist 'brainwashing', so no, Antara got creative, even with her metal-work, she liked and solved challenges, not what the Treasury and Sandhurst were looking for. 

A lease for the indulged Global Communist. Only for the upper-strata? 

British defence firms supplying lucrative employment and a few lackeys, and that would be passing for 'national clout'?

Why worry and torture others, British women, you lived in such a perfect world?

June 10, 2025.

Next round was to Merzie

How many kinds of British intelligence existed in the world?

In the 1980s, the Balkans got to decide on the number.

If it noticed a group moving towards the lease or the currency or the Treasury, it would call out, "That's no British group".

For the above, the Balkans spent the next decade in violent civil war, living amidst NATO bombing. That was the 1990s, first Bosnia, then Kosovo. 

No one spoke up for the Balkans, why it was being punished. For in Paris, the intellectuals knew who the Balkans had identified as fraud British intelligence, and that information had come from within the Pentagon. The 1990s turned out to be a brilliant decade, no one would forget those glory days of the US economy.

The lease family was apparently to blame for that glory ending with the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Hence the US agencies agreed to sit and watch Antara being degraded, humiliated and tortured for a decade by the Indians. "Raising two girls on so little, obviously both would hanker to marry just about anyone," Delhi officials had declared to their US counterparts.

Even in 2025, it was the official Indian line about Antara's torture and unemployment: "Should have just thrown some money at her face, none of this would have happened."

ii. Antara was not as disconsolate about her marriage as Indian officials were making it out to be. No one from her household leant on the White House in DC for obvious support. 

It meant when Austria formally protested to the White House in DC that Chancellor Merz was the real AfD and the party called AfD was controlling the Merz Govt, when Austria accused the Bidens of planning such a political disaster, Antara's household could sit at the sidelines and watch the entire show, neither with Germany nor with Austria nor with the White House nor with the Bidens.

iii. Why was the above so important? Because the next round of puzzle-solving would not lead to any UPI or online shopping. The next round of puzzle-solving was about that blind alley at Rashmela in Purulia, the one that led to the house where Antara's paternal grandparents had once stayed, the alleyway that Antara's parents feared to enter.

The next round was pure gamble, you might win some, you may lose all. 

The next round was desperate US intelligence officials seeking out disenchanted European royals with tons of gossip.

Antara remembered the smell from walking down that alleyway, sticky molasses being churned with tobacco to create a paste, used both as an addictive and to clean the teeth. "If you kept it smeared on your teeth, it killed the appetite as well," local women said, especially those low on finances.

Down that alleyway was the house where a small boy (not Antara's paternal grandfather) once had a sordid encounter with the Grand Mufti al-Husseini and his family.

June 8, 2025.