Two Reds,Two Roads

Two Reds, Two Roads: How Kerala and Bengal Found Their Way to Communism

I have been reading Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to Millennium, and one passage suddenly made me stop and think.

Tharoor recalls his childhood at his maternal home in a village deep in Kerala. He was born into an upper-caste family and, as a child, discovered a rather strange village rule: he simply could not play with children belonging to lower castes.

Now imagine being a child and being told:

“You can play with him—but not with him.”

Naturally, the child asks, “Why?”

And the answer is, “Because he belongs to that caste.”

The child might reasonably ask the next question: “What is a caste?”

That, I suspect, was the beginning of many Indians' lifelong education in the subject!

What struck me was that I could not remember anything quite like that from my own childhood visits to remote villages in Bengal. I certainly knew that caste existed, but I don't remember those invisible walls, prescribed distances or the sense that one human being had to physically keep away from another because of birth.

That difference stayed in my head.

Both Kerala and Bengal became great strongholds of communism. Both produced powerful Communist movements and long periods of Left political rule. Yet the social worlds from which their communism emerged were remarkably different.

So I started digging around—with a little help from AI research, which nowadays is always ready to join an old man's argument—and discovered that the two stories are almost mirror images.

Same red flag. Different road to the red flag.

---

Kerala: When Caste and Class Sat Down Together

Pre-independence Kerala had one of the most rigid caste systems in India.

And this was not merely the familiar Indian arrangement of “You sit there, I'll sit here.”

Kerala had something much more elaborate.

Swami Vivekananda, travelling through Kerala in the 1890s, was so struck by the extraordinary rigidity of the caste system that he famously described the region as a “lunatic asylum” of caste.

It was a deliberately shocking expression, but he was reacting to a society where caste governed not merely marriage, occupation and social status, but even everyday physical movement and human contact.

Distance itself could become a caste rule.

A Pulaya, for example, was traditionally required to remain at a considerable physical distance from a Namboodiri Brahmin. The often-cited figure is 72 steps.

Seventy-two steps!

Today, if somebody tells me to maintain a distance of 72 steps, I assume either he is very angry with me or he has discovered a new Covid variant.

But in traditional Kerala, this was part of the social order.

Lower-caste people could be prevented from entering temples, using certain roads or observing ordinary social customs that upper castes took for granted. In some communities, even covering the upper body was restricted.

And here the story becomes important.

The social hierarchy was closely connected with the ownership and control of land.

The jenmi system gave enormous power to large landholders, particularly Namboodiri Brahmins, with Nairs and other groups also occupying important positions in the landholding structure. Below them were tenants and agricultural labourers, including Ezhavas, Thiyyas, Pulayas, Cherumas and others.

So if you were born at the wrong end of the social ladder, life could deliver a double punch.

You were poor.

And you were considered socially inferior.

The person who owned the land could also belong to the social group that considered you untouchable.

That is a rather combustible combination.

And perhaps this is what makes Tharoor's childhood recollection so striking. He was not describing some dusty historical chapter from a school textbook. He was remembering, as a child, being told that certain children were simply not his playmates because of caste.

A child naturally asks:

“But why?”

And society answers:

“Because that is the way things are.”

Which is precisely when society should become nervous.

Because sooner or later somebody is going to ask:

“But who decided that?”

---

Then Came the Social Reformers

Kerala did not suddenly wake up one morning and discover Karl Marx hiding behind a coconut tree.

The groundwork had already been laid by powerful social reformers.

Sree Narayana Guru challenged caste hierarchy and preached the dignity and equality of human beings. Ayyankali organised among oppressed agricultural communities and fought for education and social rights. Chattampi Swamikal questioned the intellectual foundations of Brahminical dominance.

So before Kerala became politically red, it had already begun questioning why society was arranged in such a peculiar fashion.

Then came the Communists.

Leaders such as P. Krishna Pillai, A. K. Gopalan and E. M. S. Namboodiripad found a society in which grievances were already deep, organised and increasingly political.

The Communist movement did not have to manufacture the anger.

The raw material was already lying around in abundance.

The Kayyur uprising of 1940, the Punnapra–Vayalar uprising of 1946 and the numerous agrarian struggles in Malabar reflected an explosive mixture of land, tenancy, caste and political mobilisation.

And this is where Kerala's story becomes distinctive.

Communism could present itself not merely as an economic argument about wages and land.

It could also be understood by many of its supporters as the next stage of a much older struggle for dignity.

The red flag arrived at a door where people had already been asking why the door was closed in the first place.

---

And Then I Come to Bengal

Now Bengal.

Here the story becomes rather different.

When I think of my own childhood visits to villages in Bengal, I certainly cannot claim that caste did not exist. Of course it did. Bengal had—and has—its own complicated caste hierarchy and discrimination.

But the atmosphere was different.

I don't remember that strange Kerala-style combination where caste identity and control over land appeared to sit on the same chair.

And there is a historical reason.

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 transformed Bengal's landholding structure. Zamindari rights became transferable and could effectively be bought and sold. Estates changed hands, sometimes quite dramatically.

As a result, Bengal's zamindars did not belong to one single caste.

There were Kayastha zamindars, Sadgop, Mahishya, Aguri and other Hindu landholders, Muslim landowners and merchant families who accumulated estates.

So the Bengali Brahmin was not automatically the great village landlord sitting on top of everybody else.

Quite often he was doing something much less glamorous.

He was the village tolpandit trying to keep a Sanskrit school alive.

Or the impoverished pujari waiting for his next handful of rice.

Or the schoolmaster who seemed to have been permanently appointed to poverty.

Sarat Chandra's world is full of such people.

So is Bibhutibhushan's.

The Bengali Brahmin could quite easily be poor.

Sometimes, I suspect, the poor Brahmin and the poor peasant had more in common economically than either would have liked to admit.

---

The Bengali Village Had Another Villain

If Kerala had its jenmi, Bengal had the jotedar.

The jotedar was often a substantial local cultivator or landholder. He could own considerable acreage, lend grain or money, and have land cultivated by bargadars, the sharecroppers.

And the interesting thing was that the jotedar did not have to belong to one particular caste.

He could be Muslim in Murshidabad.

Rajbanshi in North Bengal.

Mahishya in Midnapore.

Or belong to another local community altogether.

So the conflict increasingly became one of who owned the land and who worked it, rather than simply which caste you were born into.

That distinction matters.

The Bengali Communist movement therefore found an enormous political opening in the economic relationship between landlord, jotedar and sharecropper.

And then came Tebhaga.

---

Tebhaga: Two-Thirds, Please

In 1946–47, Bengal's sharecroppers demanded two-thirds of the crop instead of the traditional half.

The argument was wonderfully simple.

“If I am doing the cultivating, why shouldn't I get a larger share?”

It was not exactly a doctoral thesis in political philosophy.

It was the farmer looking at the harvested paddy and saying, essentially:

“Brother, let us discuss the arithmetic.”

The Tebhaga movement became one of the great agrarian struggles of Bengal, and Communist organisers played a major role in it.

Here the central question was not primarily whether one man could walk on a particular road because of his caste.

It was:

Who gets the crop?

And behind that:

Who owns the land?

---

Then History Threw Partition at Bengal

Just when Bengal was already dealing with enormous political and economic tensions, Partition arrived in 1947.

Millions of people were displaced from East Pakistan.

Many arrived in West Bengal with practically nothing.

If you have ever seen Sealdah station at a busy hour, imagine it with an entire population arriving without a house to go to.

Refugee colonies sprang up around places such as Jadavpur, Dum Dum, Sodepur and Howrah.

People occupied land.

They built huts.

They formed colony committees.

They demanded rehabilitation.

They searched for employment.

And gradually many entered the industrial workforce, including the jute mills and other factories.

Here again the Communist movement found fertile ground.

The party organised among refugees, workers and the urban poor. It became involved in the food movements of 1959 and 1966 and built powerful trade-union networks.

So Bengal's Left politics acquired another powerful memory.

Not the forbidden temple road.

Not the 72-step distance.

But the refugee train.

The crowded platform.

The squatter colony.

The struggle to find a piece of land and a way of earning a living.

---

Two Reds, Two Memories

And suddenly the difference I had noticed between Tharoor's Kerala childhood and my own Bengal memories began to make sense.

Kerala's journey to communism was deeply connected with a society where caste humiliation and economic exploitation could reinforce each other.

Bengal's journey was more strongly shaped by land relations, sharecropping, economic inequality, industrial labour and the enormous disruption of Partition.

Of course, neither story is completely pure.

Kerala had class conflicts that were not reducible to caste.

Bengal had caste discrimination that cannot simply be wished away.

And Bengal's Communist movement was certainly not only a refugee movement, just as Kerala's communism was not merely an anti-caste movement.

History is rarely polite enough to stay inside our neat little boxes.

But the difference in emphasis is important.

In Kerala, the memory of oppression could be something as intimate as being told:

“You cannot play with that child.”

In Bengal, the political memory could just as easily be:

“You have cultivated this land. Why are you getting only half the crop?”

Or, after Partition:

“We have arrived. Now where are we going to live?”

Same red flag.

Different childhood memories.

Different grievances.

Different roads.

And perhaps that is why two states that eventually became among India's strongest centres of Communist politics could nevertheless have such different social histories underneath that red colour.

In Kerala, the road to the red flag passed through the temple road that some were not allowed to walk on.

In Bengal, it passed through the paddy field, the jotedar's ledger, the sharecropper's demand—and eventually Sealdah station crowded with refugees who had lost almost everything.

In the end, both stories return to one deceptively simple question:

Who owns the land, who works it, and who gets to belong there?

Perhaps Marx would have approved.

And the Bengali grandmother, looking at the harvest, would probably have approved even more—provided somebody remembered to bring the fish curry to the table.

From the skies over Kalaikunda in ’65 to a Christmas table in Australia decades later — remembering Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke, VrC. A true Bull who flew with nerve, humour, and heart. Rest easy, Sir.

Back in 1965, freshly minted out of IIT Kharagpur and still smelling faintly of lecture halls and late-night chai, I rocked up at Indian Oil’s Gauhati Refinery as a shiny new Engineer Trainee. Full of diagrams, differential equations and the quiet confidence of someone who had never yet met a real crisis. Naturally the universe decided that was the perfect moment to start a war right across the border in what was then East Pakistan.

My carefully prepared job description lasted about five minutes. One day I was poring over process flow sheets; the next I was a civil-defence volunteer, scrambling around with sandbags and wondering whether the emergency siren meant “take cover” or “lunch is ready.”

It properly kicked off on 6 August. We looked up and there they were — Pakistan Air Force fighters swooping low over the refinery like they owned the place. Luckily the army had thoughtfully parked a couple of anti-aircraft guns on the nearby hillocks. Those guns barked once, barked twice, and the uninvited guests remembered they had urgent business elsewhere. We all pretended we hadn’t been holding our breath.

By September the whole thing had turned into a full-scale drama. My junior friend Raghunathan, still stuck at IIT Kharagpur, later swore that he and the hostel boys had front-row seats to actual dogfights. Indian and Pakistani jets were buzzing past so low they were practically at eye-level with the third-floor balcony. Engineering lectures never stood a chance against that sort of entertainment.

Fast-forward a few decades and the circle closed in the most unexpected place: a Christmas lunch at Keith and Maureen Mitchell’s house in Australia. About ten years ago now. Keith, bless him, had rounded up a few Anglo-Indian expats for the usual festive feast. Among them sat a quiet, unassuming chap introduced simply as Alfred Cook. Only later did the full name drop: Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke, VrC — the same man who had been dancing with Sabres over Kalaikunda while Raghunathan and the IIT boys were watching from the rooftops.

There we were — me (Roy), Keith (ex-RAF, so of course he had opinions about everything with wings), my son Anish, and Alfred himself — around the table while the turkey cooled and the crackers waited. Alfred started talking about 7 September 1965 as if it had happened last Tuesday. No. 14 Squadron, “The Bulls.” Hawker Hunter. Combat air patrol. Then suddenly four (or was it six?) PAF F-86 Sabres were all over Kalaikunda airfield and the sky turned into a low-level free-for-all that the IIT students later described like a cricket match they could actually see.

Anish, wide-eyed, leaned forward: “Uncle, you were only twenty-six. What on earth was going through your head?”

Alfred gave that half-smile of his. “Honestly? Mostly ‘Don’t let the wingtip hit the trees.’ We were so low I could practically read the name painted on the other chap’s helmet. Sabres turn tighter, Hunters go faster — so you use what you’ve got. One moment you’re chasing, the next someone’s on your tail, and your own anti-aircraft guns are cheerfully shooting at everyone including you. You don’t really think about being twenty-six and full of energy for the nation. You just fly the aeroplane and try not to become a permanent part of the landscape.”

Keith, never one to miss a technical opening, jumped in: “Those 30-mil Aden guns — rate of fire, ammunition load, how long before you were dry?”

Alfred chuckled. “Long enough to put one Sabre into the ground — Flying Officer Afzal Khan, I later learned — and mess up another so badly that Flight Lieutenant Tariq Habeeb just about staggered back to Tezgaon and wrote the thing off. Then the third one… well, the gun stopped answering. So I stayed on his tail anyway, waving the empty aeroplane at him until he decided East Pakistan looked safer. Ten minutes that felt like a lifetime. And I’d started the day on an empty stomach because the breakfast van had come and gone without leaving me so much as a biscuit.”

We all laughed, even though none of it was funny at the time. Anish kept asking about the adrenaline, the fear, the sheer cheek of it. Keith kept asking about energy management and deflection shooting. I just sat there thinking: this is the same sky Raghunathan watched from a hostel roof, and the same man is now politely refusing a second helping of pudding while describing how he once ran out of bullets and kept fighting with pure attitude.

Alfred later gifted that Vir Chakra back to his squadron in 2015. “It belongs to the Bulls,” he said. Classic him.

So it was with a genuinely heavy heart that I heard from Keith the other day: Flight Lieutenant Alfred Tyrone Cooke passed away on 18 September 2026 at Base Hospital, New Delhi, aged 87. The Indian Air Force paid its respects the same day. One of their finest.

From watching those first jets buzz over Gauhati as a wide-eyed trainee, to sitting at Keith and Maureen’s table ten years ago listening to the man who owned those very skies describe the dogfight while we passed the cranberry sauce — life does have a way of delivering history right to your doorstep, usually with a side of Christmas pudding.

Rest easy, Flt Lt Cooke. You flew the aeroplane. And you made the rest of us look up.

The Morning Walk Ambush

The Morning Walk Ambush — 

I discovered yesterday that one should never underestimate a morning walk around a Kolkata lake. You may think you are going out merely to improve your circulation, enjoy the fresh air and perhaps compensate for yesterday’s lunch. In reality, you may be walking straight into a political ambush.

For some time I had been getting the distinct vibration that, after the BJP came to power, the CPM was quietly preparing itself for the opposition slot. I certainly did not expect any sensible person to openly support the TMC, particularly when financial irregularities and alleged scams seem to be getting exposed with such depressing regularity.

Of course, I don't come across many vocal CPM supporters during my morning walks. The CPM's 34-year record is still fresh in the memory of most walkers, whose average age is comfortably above sixty. These people have had the unique opportunity of tasting both CPM and TMC rule in Bengal. So, judging from the general body language around the lake, I had assumed that the BJP had acquired a fairly comfortable fan club.

Yesterday I discovered how dangerously wrong an assumption can be.

My ambusher was Mr X, a retired IAS officer, known to me through my brother-in-law. He is related through his wife to the owner of a popular Bengali newspaper which, during the glorious days of Trinamool rule, appeared to be particularly enthusiastic in singing the praises of the government.

Now, I don't know whether Mr X himself ever enjoyed any of the largesse of the TMC era through this family connection. I have absolutely no evidence to make such an accusation.

But the thought did cross my mind.

Especially because, with the change of political dispensation, government advertising is no longer flowing in the same old direction, while the newspaper establishment has apparently been facing some rather uncomfortable questions about its office building.

When politics changes, the newspaper's editorial temperature can sometimes change too. And when the advertising tap changes direction, one can understand why some people may develop a sudden interest in the politics of the new government.

But let me not speculate. I am only an innocent morning walker.

And innocent morning walkers should know when to keep their mouths shut.

Mr X approached me with the expression of a retired bureaucrat who had absolutely nothing political on his mind.

That should have been my first warning.

He wanted to revive a discussion I had previously had with his wife at a social gathering. She had been vigorously criticising the government over what she felt was the shrinking of the Mughal chapter in the NEP.

My brother-in-law and I had argued that ancient Indian history itself had never received the importance it deserved in our school education. Otherwise, we would probably have known much more about Aryabhatta, Varahamihira and Maitreyi. Even the Gupta Empire, whose influence extended over a substantial part of the subcontinent and beyond, was hardly served to us on a silver platter in our textbooks.

His wife, however, was in no mood to surrender the battlefield. In her usual loud and energetic style, she continued criticising the government.

I then mischievously shifted the battlefield from history to language.

I asked how, in Bengal, our perfectly respectable Ramdhanu had somehow become Rangdhanu. And blue, which we had happily called Neel all our lives, somehow acquired the more exotic Asmani.

She seemed perfectly comfortable with these linguistic innovations.

I began wondering whether history, language and politics had all become members of the same extended family.

Yesterday, Mr X came ambled towards me.

I wished him good morning and, before he could launch his missile, asked a completely harmless question:

"By the way, did you enjoy the leftover food your wife carried home that day? You weren't there."

He said he didn't eat much.

Then came the first shot.

With a faintly cynical smile, he said:

"I learnt many new things."

Ah!

So the retired IAS officer had not forgotten our little history seminar.

I immediately understood that this was not a statement. It was a file noting.

I could almost visualise the bureaucratic format:

> Subject: Views expressed by S.N. Roy during informal interaction.

> Submitted for kind perusal and necessary action.

I decided that the safest course was to change the subject.

I asked him whether he would be in Kolkata during Puja.

That, too, turned out to be a trap.

He smiled mischievously and said:

"You are missing the new style Durga Puja."

I knew exactly where this was heading. There has been considerable discussion about changes in Durga Puja practices, including some of the practices traditionally associated with Mamata Banerjee personally.

I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

I replied:

"Good. At least there won't be DJ music."

A tactical retreat.

But Mr X wasn't ready to let me escape. He clearly wanted me to continue.

I looked at my watch.

"I'm in a hurry. I've got to go to the office."

The office, incidentally, was entirely imaginary.

But at my age, one can invoke the office just as easily as one invokes a doctor when trying to escape from an unwanted dinner.

And so I escaped.

The encounter taught me an important lesson.

Never judge a man by his innocent face.

A man's face may say:

"Good morning. Lovely weather today."

His mind may be saying:

"Now let us examine your views on Mughal history, NEP, Bengali vocabulary, Durga Puja, government advertising and the political future of Bengal."

And Bengal is particularly dangerous territory.

Here politics is not merely discussed. It is absorbed through the skin.

You can begin a conversation about tea and, within five minutes, find yourself debating Mamata Banerjee, Modi, the CPM, Mughal history, government advertising and the Gupta Empire.

So I have now prepared my own Morning Walk Conversational SOP:

Weather — Safe.

Walking speed — Safe.

Knee pain — Very safe.

Golf — Mostly safe.

Food — Proceed with caution.

History — Dangerous.

Bengali vocabulary — Explosively dangerous.

Politics — Strictly prohibited.

And retired IAS officers?

Extreme caution.

After all, during his service he must have been an expert in putting up notes to his superiors that were so beautifully ambiguous that everybody could interpret them differently—and yet nobody could accuse him of having said anything definite.

Yesterday's conversation was exactly like that.

I went for a morning walk.

I came back with a lesson in bureaucratic survival.

And next time I see Mr X approaching me with that innocent smile, I shall immediately look at my watch and say:

"Sorry, I have an urgent meeting with my knees."

The Night the Ambulance Left Deucha

The Night the Ambulance Left Deucha

Sometimes reality writes stories that no novelist would dare to submit to a publisher. The editor would probably return the manuscript with a polite note:

> “Dear Sir, this is all very exciting, but ₹28 crore in cash and 15 kg of gold? Please make the plot more believable.”

And yet, this is Birbhum.

---

It was a restless night in April 2026. Somewhere in the dusty landscape around Mohammad Bazar, where stone, sand, politics and money often appear to travel together in very comfortable company, Tulu Mondal—better known as Nazibuddin to some—was allegedly beginning to understand that the weather was changing.

Not the Birbhum weather. That is quite another matter.

The political weather.

Imagine the scene. Tulu pacing around his office. Mobile phone glued to his ear. Dumper trucks somewhere in the darkness. Men waiting for instructions. And perhaps, outside, an ambulance.

An ambulance, you see, is a wonderful vehicle. It carries patients. It carries the sick. It carries hope.

And, according to the allegations surrounding this extraordinary story, it can apparently carry other things too.

Like cash.

Lots of cash.

The story goes that instructions were issued: increase the stone loading, move the material, keep things safe. The political wind was changing and, as every experienced businessman knows, when the wind changes, one must either lower the sail—or leave the country.

Tulu, it seems, preferred the second option.

From Helper to “King”

The rise of Tulu Mondal itself sounds like something from a Bengali crime thriller.

A transport helper, according to the reports and local reputation surrounding him, gradually rose through the stone and sand business. Dumper trucks multiplied. Routes expanded. Contacts deepened. And before long, he was said to be a major name in the transport and mining network stretching across the Birbhum region.

By day, the trucks carried stone and other perfectly respectable cargo.

By night?

Well, let us simply say that in certain parts of Bengal, a truck may have a richer inner life than its registration certificate suggests.

My Taxi Driver and His Intelligence Network

This entire affair took me back to 2023, when I was travelling around Birbhum.

As usual, the best intelligence agency in India was at work.

Not RAW.

Not IB.

Not CBI.

The Indian taxi driver.

I had hired a taxi near Guskara. The young driver pointed towards a large house and lowered his voice. Immediately I knew something interesting was coming. Indians do not lower their voices when discussing the weather.

“See that house?” he said.

I looked.

“Yes?”

“Very big man. Started as a helper. Now? Sand business.”

Then came the important part.

“Black money, baba.”

That single “baba” carried more information than a 500-page chargesheet.

He explained, in his own colourful way, that under the political protection of the day, anything was possible. Trucks moved. Sand moved. Money moved. And, presumably, the people counting the money developed excellent wrist problems.

He did not need to mention the name.

In small towns, everyone knows.

Only the police, for some mysterious reason, sometimes have to conduct an investigation.

Then Came the Raid

And then, on July 29, 2026, Birbhum woke up to the sort of news that makes you put down your morning tea and read the headline twice.

Police raided the house of Minar Mondal, a retired government bus driver and brother-in-law of Tulu Mondal.

A retired bus driver.

Now, I have travelled in government buses all my life. I have seen the driver, conductor, passengers, chickens, schoolbags and occasionally three people sharing one seat designed for two.

But never in my imagination had I thought:

> “Perhaps the driver is secretly sitting on ₹28 crore.”

The raid reportedly uncovered approximately ₹28.5 crore in cash and 15 kg of gold.

Fifteen kilograms!

I immediately began thinking of my own modest household jewellery and felt that perhaps I had misunderstood the meaning of “saving for the future.”

The cash was allegedly hidden in trunks, cupboards, sacks and various corners of the house. The amount was so enormous that several counting machines reportedly gave up their struggle.

Imagine being a currency-counting machine.

You are brought to the police station in the morning, ready to perform your patriotic duty.

One bundle.

Two bundles.

One crore.

Five crore.

Ten crore.

Twenty crore.

And suddenly—

Machine: “I resign.”

Five counting machines reportedly broke down.

I am told that retirement is normally a human privilege. In this case, the machines apparently retired first.

Why Gold?

The gold, of course, added a certain glamour to the whole affair.

Cash takes up space. Gold is more convenient.

Apparently, once one graduates from keeping money in cupboards to keeping crores in cupboards, one begins to think strategically.

“Where shall we put it?”

“Cupboard?”

“Already full.”

“Bed?”

“Full.”

“Suitcase?”

“Full.”

“Then buy gold.”

And so, according to investigators, cash could become bullion—compact, valuable and easier to store.

That is the advantage of financial planning.

Some of us buy fixed deposits.

Some buy mutual funds.

And some, allegedly, keep fifteen kilograms of gold biscuits.

The Man Who Had Already Gone

The most dramatic part of the story is that Tulu Mondal had reportedly vanished much earlier.

By May 4, 2026, sensing that things were becoming politically uncomfortable, he was said to have left India.

This is always the problem with political weather forecasting.

You must know when to carry an umbrella.

And when to leave the country.

By the time the big raid took place in July, the man allegedly at the centre of the network was already absent.

Police began investigating relatives, properties, associates and the wider business network. The alleged wealth trail stretched across vehicles, houses, businesses and more.

What had once been whispered about by taxi drivers had suddenly become a matter of national headlines.

From a Whisper to a Headline

That is what fascinates me most.

In 2023, a taxi driver had casually pointed to a house and whispered:

> “Black money, baba.”

Three years later, the newspapers were talking about crores of cash and kilograms of gold.

I have often wondered whether, somewhere in Guskara, that taxi driver opened his newspaper, saw the headline and simply said:

“I told you so, baba.”

And what about that ambulance?

That remains the most haunting image of the whole story.

A white ambulance disappearing into the night.

Normally, when an ambulance leaves, we pray that the patient survives.

In this case, one wonders whether the patient was actually a few hundred bundles of currency notes.

The Lesson

Tulu Mondal’s story—if the allegations and investigation establish what the police suspect—would be a very Bengal story indeed.

A man begins small.

Trucks appear.

Stone moves.

Sand moves.

Money moves.

Gold appears.

Politics changes.

An ambulance becomes unexpectedly busy.

And finally, the counting machines surrender.

For years, people may whisper. Taxi drivers may point. Local people may know the story better than any official document.

But there comes a moment when whispers become headlines.

And when that happens, even the deepest cupboard may not be deep enough.

As for me, I still remember that young taxi driver near Guskara.

Perhaps I should have asked him for stock market tips too.

An Eid Afternoon With Two Million Ghosts

# An Eid Afternoon With Two Million Ghosts (And a Coconut Ice Cream)

So here's the thing about Kolkata — you set out for lunch, and you accidentally walk into 1838.

Yesterday my wife Madhuri and I decided, very casually, very "let's-just-go-eat-something-nice-by-the-river" casually, to have lunch at a place called The Dockyard Company, right by the Ganges at Khidirpur, opposite the old Kolkata shipyard. Nothing dramatic planned. Butter chicken was the mission. History was not on the itinerary. History, however, does not care about your itinerary.

## Act One: Eid, Tajias, and a Bridge That Lifts Itself Like It Owns the Place

It was Eid Milad-un-Nabi, so the roads leading in were doing their own beautiful chaos — tajia processions moving through, colour and chanting and crowds, the whole neighbourhood in that particular festive hum only a Kolkata galli can produce. We threaded through it like two people who'd wandered into someone else's family celebration and were being very politely tolerated.

And then, right when we thought the day's quota of "wow" was met — we hit the bridge. The one that *lifts in the middle*. Like the road just decided, "actually no, a ship needs to pass, please hold." We stood there like tourists in our own city, watching this enormous swing bridge pivot at its centre and calmly realign itself with the shore, letting a tall ship glide through the Hooghly like it does this every day. Which, to be fair, it does. But nobody told my jaw that, and it stayed on the floor the whole time.

I don't know what it is about watching a bridge move — it does something to you. Makes you feel very small and very lucky simultaneously.

## Act Two: The Plaque That Ruined My Appetite (In the Best Way)

We finally reached the restaurant — right on the dock, Ganges on one side, the old shipyard silhouette on the other — and just before we sat down, there it was. A stone plaque. Unassuming. The kind of thing you'd walk past nine times out of ten while hunting for the nearest naan.

I photographed it out of pure reflex. Then I actually read it.

It commemorates the *first batch of the Indian diaspora* — Suriname Ghat, the Indenture Memorial, installed January 2011. The dates on it: 1834 to 1920.

And that's when the butter chicken had to wait, because my brain went sprinting off in a completely different direction — straight into a book I read years ago and apparently never fully left: Amitav Ghosh's *Sea of Poppies*.

Here's why 1834 matters, in case — like me a few hours earlier — you didn't know: Britain abolished slavery in 1833. And the very next year, plantations from Mauritius to Trinidad to Fiji to Guyana to Suriname suddenly had a labour-shaped hole where slavery used to be. So the British invented a new word for an old idea — *indenture*. Girmit, from "agreement," and the people who signed it became Girmitiyas. Agents fanned out into villages in Bihar, Bengal, Eastern UP — places already broken by famine and by forced poppy farming — and made promises. Five years, good money, faraway islands. Some believed it. Some had no other option left to believe in.

And they all funnelled through exactly here. Kidderpore. This ghat. Held in depots, then loaded onto ships on this very river. Over two million people, from this stretch of the Hooghly, into a diaspora that would eventually give Mauritius its Bhojpuri, Trinidad its Diwali, Guyana its chutney music. The plaque's last line says they "cherished and passed on the spirit of Indianness." Turns out that's not sentimental copywriting. That's just documented fact.

## Act Three: Where Ghosh Comes In

*Sea of Poppies* is set in 1838 — a mere four years after that plaque begins its count. And the book basically explains the *why* behind everyone this stone is saluting. The East India Company forced farmers in Ghazipur and Patna to grow poppy instead of food, which is where the title comes from and also where entire families' debts and lands quietly evaporated. The novel's real protagonist isn't even a person — it's a ship, the *Ibis*, once built for slave-trading, now repurposed for opium and indentured labourers alike, as though the vessel itself refused to change professions, only cargo. Ghosh writes the scene — people checked, washed, handed a tin pot, pushed aboard — from a ghat that could very easily have been this one.

And then there's Deeti, the widow who escapes being burned alive on her husband's pyre and becomes a girmitiya herself. Kalua. Neel, the zamindar the opium trade strips bare. Ghosh calls the people crammed into that ship's hold *jahaz-bhais* and *jahaz-behens* — ship-brothers and ship-sisters — because somewhere in that hold, caste simply stopped mattering. New family, forged in transit, out of necessity.

Standing at that plaque, eating in that spot, it hit me that the *Ibis Trilogy* is basically this one stone slab, expanded into three very long, very devastating novels.

## Act Four: Where the Ice Cream Comes In

Anyway. Grief has never once stopped me from ordering butter chicken, and it didn't yesterday either. We had naan, we had the butter chicken, we sat there with the Ganges doing its slow brown shuffle past us and a ship or two still visible from the bridge episode. And then, because the universe likes irony with dessert, we ordered something called "Ek Naryal Ped Se" — ice cream served, quite literally, looking like it grew off a coconut tree.

There's something almost funny about it, in hindsight — sitting at the exact point where two million people left everything behind on a promise of "good money in faraway islands," eating a dessert whose entire personality is "look how whimsical and abundant I am." I don't think the irony was lost on me even mid-spoon.

We didn't plan any of this. We planned lunch. We got tajias, a bridge that bows to ships, a two-hundred-year migration story carved into stone, an entire novel trilogy resurrecting itself in my head, and a coconut-shaped ice cream to close it out.

Kolkata does this to you. You go out for naan. You come back having briefly lived in 1838.

The Great Indian School Hunt

The Great Indian School Hunt: A Father, a Son and Eight Schools

There is a great deal of discussion these days about the condition of government schools in India. Before I join the chorus, let me make one thing clear: I myself am a product of a government-aided school in Delhi.

It was certainly not a modern school by today's standards. No smart classrooms, no air-conditioned laboratories, no fancy gadgets—probably not even a smartboard in anyone's wildest imagination! But the teachers were sincere. They came to school, taught their subjects and, most importantly, did their job faithfully.

And somehow, I survived the system and eventually passed out of IIT Kharagpur!

My son Anish had a rather more adventurous education. Because of my transferable job in BHEL and my involvement in power-station project execution, he changed schools eight times!

You could say he had a pan-India education without ever applying for admission to a pan-India school.

The first stop — Singrauli

After completing Kindergarten at St. Cathedral in Delhi, I was transferred to Singrauli Super Thermal Power Station. I put Anish in St. Joseph's School in the township.

During admission, the principal, a padre, interviewed Anish in English. Fortunately, the boy could answer him reasonably well.

Then came another father with his son. The principal asked him what he did.

The man proudly replied that he was a shovel operator in the coal mines adjoining the power plant.

The principal then asked, "Do you speak English at home?"

The gentleman replied, rather proudly, "Na ji, na."

I liked that school immediately. Here was a school where the son of a shovel operator could aspire to study alongside the children of engineers and officers. The father could afford the fees and, more importantly, he wanted his son to get a good education.

Anish studied there till Class II.

Back to Delhi — and the Bengali problem

Then came another transfer to Delhi.

My first choice was Kendriya Vidyalaya. No admission.

I tried another English-medium school near the Western Extension Area. Again, no admission.

By then I had taken a small flat in West Patel Nagar, close to my parents, who were living in WEA after my father had retired and had to vacate the government accommodation at Wilson Square, Gole Market.

I had run out of options.

So I did something that every Indian father understands perfectly well.

I used my influence!

I approached my old school, Raisina Bengali Higher Secondary School at Gole Market. The principal, a former Army man, kindly agreed to admit Anish.

There was, however, one small problem.

Anish didn't know Bengali.

The principal looked at me and said, "He will have to learn Bengali during the summer vacation because he will be entering Class IV."

Luckily, Mrs Gupta, who had taught me years earlier, was still living near our house. I approached her.

"Madam, I have a small problem."

She probably knew what was coming.

She agreed to teach Anish Bengali.

And somehow Anish sailed from Class III into Class IV and even managed to pass Bengali!

My son was now becoming a linguist by force rather than by choice.

Wanakbori — the English-medium school

I stayed in Delhi for about a year and was then transferred to Wanakbori in Gujarat in 1985.

There was an English-medium school at Shivalia where most of the children of my BHEL colleagues studied. I took Anish there.

The infrastructure looked good. But I had one doubt.

I discovered that many of the teachers were wives of my BHEL colleagues.

The principal sensed my hesitation.

He called a boy.

"This is Indranil. You can speak to him in English."

Indranil spoke excellent English. Smart boy, confident, fluent.

I was impressed.

Admission done!

Later I discovered that there were about twenty students in the class, but only five had literate parents. The rest were children of labourers.

Then I became friendly with Mr Purkayastha, the project manager of the coal-handling plant supplied by MAMC. One day we visited his quarter.

And there was Indranil!

I told his wife about my impressive encounter with Indranil during admission.

She burst out laughing.

"The principal does that with every new parent!"

It turned out that Indranil had arrived in Wanakbori only a year earlier and had learnt English in his previous school.

So much for my scientific assessment of the school's English standard!

I also became uncomfortable because most of the teachers were wives of my junior colleagues. I felt they might be giving Anish marks with a little extra generosity.

A father's suspicion is sometimes more powerful than an examination result.

Baroda — boarding school at last

I decided to look for a better school in Baroda.

I visited Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. They had a hostel, and the principal understood my predicament. He admitted Anish directly to the next class.

For the next two years, Anish stayed in the hostel.

It was a massive school and, in my opinion, one of the best in Baroda at that time. There were four football fields, and playing after lunch was compulsory.

Now that was education!

Anish made friends with children of well-known artists and businessmen. Life in the hostel gave him a completely different exposure.

But something else happened there which, at the time, seemed like a minor matter.

The computer arrives quietly

In 1986, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan started an additional computer class for students who were interested. It was not part of the regular curriculum and required an extra fee.

I paid the fee and put Anish into the class.

That was the beginning of his tryst with computers.

During our Vizag days, I continued this by making him attend the summer computer classes conducted by APTECH.

So, while I was busy running around looking for schools, admission, languages and suitable teachers, his computer skills were quietly being sharpened in the background.

The irony is that I had absolutely no idea what was coming!

This was the mid-1980s. The IT revolution was still largely invisible to people like me. Computers were simply something interesting and useful for a child to learn.

I certainly did not imagine that computers would transform the world by the late 1990s and beyond.

So, quite unknowingly, I had put Anish on a road that would eventually become his career.

Vizag — three languages strike again!

In 1988, I was transferred from BHEL to Vizag Steel Plant.

Naturally, the school hunt started all over again.

I first took Anish to DAV School at Ukkunagaram, the township of Vizag Steel Plant.

At the same time, I was trying to get him into Kendriya Vidyalaya.

After some effort—and, I confess, with the help of the CMD of the Steel Plant—I managed to get him admitted to KV.

But the famous three-language formula now entered our lives.

Anish was comfortable with English and Hindi. The third language had to be either Telugu or Sanskrit.

I decided that Sanskrit was the lesser of the two evils.

Then came the next question:

Who would teach him Sanskrit?

I could teach him most subjects, but the Sanskrit I had studied at school was hardly enough to prepare him for his class.

Fortunately, my neighbour Mr Bandopadhyay came to the rescue. His father had been a Sanskrit pandit.

And so Anish's education continued—with a rotating cast of English teachers, Bengali teachers, Sanskrit teachers, hostel wardens and, of course, his permanently available father-tutor!

Farakka — finally, some stability

In December 1991, I was transferred to Farakka, just when Anish was preparing for his Class X Board examination.

Luckily, Farakka had a Kendriya Vidyalaya.

He joined there, completed his schooling and finally passed both his Class X Board examination and Higher Secondary.

At last! No more school hunting.

I think I was more relieved than he was.

And the computer class turned out to matter

Looking back now, the most interesting part of this whole story is perhaps the little computer class I put him into in Baroda.

At the time, I was simply trying to expose him to something new. Then came the APTECH summer classes in Vizag.

I had no grand plan.

I had no crystal ball.

I had no idea that the IT industry was going to explode.

But the foundation was being laid quietly.

Today, that little boy who went through eight schools, several cities, different curricula and multiple languages is a successful IT engineer in Australia. He went on to complete his Master's degree in Information Technology from Griffith University and built his career in the IT field.

Looking back, I sometimes feel that while I was busy changing his schools, the computer was quietly changing his future!

---

So where is the real problem?

That is why the current debate about government schools interests me.

The problem is not simply government school versus private school.

A good school ultimately depends on good teachers, committed management and an environment where children are encouraged to learn.

My own government-aided school in Delhi did not have fancy infrastructure, but we had teachers who took their responsibility seriously.

And my experience with Anish taught me another lesson.

Education is not merely a building, an English-medium label, smart classrooms or high marks.

It is about giving a child a strong foundation and the confidence to face the next environment.

Anish had to adjust every time we moved.

Just when he made friends, another transfer came. Just when he became comfortable with a teacher, we moved. One school taught Bengali, another expected Telugu or Sanskrit. One school had a hostel, another was in a power-station township. One curriculum differed from another.

Yet children are remarkably adaptable. Perhaps much more adaptable than their parents.

I had the advantage of being an engineer, having a transferable job and knowing people in different places. I could run from pillar to post, persuade principals, find tutors and occasionally even use a little "influence."

But what about an ordinary parent who has none of these?

That is where our education system needs to think harder.

Because if a reasonably educated father like me had to struggle so much to provide continuity of basic education to his son, imagine the struggle of a parent who has neither the information nor the connections nor the money to manoeuvre through the system.

And perhaps this is the part of the government-school debate we sometimes miss.

We should not judge education only by buildings and facilities. We should ask whether the teacher is sincere, whether the child is learning, whether he is being encouraged to think—and whether the system gives every child a fair chance.

My own journey from a government-aided school to IIT taught me that.

Anish's journey through eight schools taught me something else: a child's education is sometimes less about the school he attends and more about the opportunities he encounters along the way.

And finally, there is one more lesson.

Sometimes parents think they are carefully designing their children's future.

In reality, we often just open a few doors and hope they walk through the right one.

In 1986, I paid an extra fee for a computer class without having the faintest idea where computers would take us.

Life, as usual, knew better than I did. 😄

And perhaps Anish deserves a special certificate:

"Successfully completed schooling after surviving eight schools, several cities, multiple curricula, three languages, one overenthusiastic engineer-father—and one accidental introduction to the IT revolution."

I wonder whether any university offers a degree for that! 😄

Some conversations are brewed, not planned."

It was raining in the morning, and rain has a strange effect on me—it makes going to the office appear almost like a violation of human rights. I therefore decided that office could manage without me for one day.

Madhuri, however, had a more constructive suggestion.

"Let us go shopping at Spencer's in South City."

Now that sounded considerably more dangerous than going to the office.

After lunch, Gopal drove us to South City and parked the car in the basement. Madhuri picked up a shopping trolley and marched into Spencer's with the determination of a field commander.

We were there for a very simple mission: vegetables, rice, dal and a few other household necessities.

But Spencer's had other plans.

To reach the humble vegetables and dal section, we had to negotiate an obstacle course of biscuits, mixtures, chocolates, breakfast cereals, sauces, noodles and what seemed like the entire packaged-food industry. And, as if that wasn't enough, every beauty-product brand appeared to have stationed a young sales girl at its border.

The moment we entered their territory, they started advancing.

"Sir, would you like to see our new…"

"No, thank you."

"Madam, we have a special offer…"

"No, thank you."

We dodged them like seasoned political campaigners avoiding questions from journalists.

Finally, after crossing what felt like several international borders, we reached the promised land—vegetables, rice and dal.

Mission accomplished, we proceeded towards the bakery counter. Madhuri selected some pastries for home, while I spotted something far more important—a cup of Darjeeling tea.

I ordered one and occupied a table in the seating area outside.

The tea arrived hot and fragrant. Madhuri didn't order tea, but naturally, after watching me enjoy mine, she took a sip from my cup. Marriage has many such invisible taxes.

A lady who looked distinctly Southeast Asian then occupied the chair opposite me. Her driver was busy doing the shopping. She ordered a cup of tea and initially seemed a little hesitant when I struck up a conversation.

Then she noticed that I had left the two little sachets of sugar untouched.

She laughed.

"I will put both of them in my tea, though my doctor has strictly told me not to take sugar. I am diabetic."

I laughed.

"Then enjoy life while you can!"

That broke the ice.

I asked her whether she was of Chinese origin. Kolkata has a long association with the Chinese community, so it was not an entirely unreasonable guess.

She burst out laughing.

"No, I am from the Philippines."

The moment she said Manila, my mind—which has a talent for wandering off on its own errands—shot straight to Ferdinand Marcos, martial law, and that whole extraordinary spectacle of 1986 when the strongman finally fled the Malacañang Palace and the world discovered, with some astonishment, that his wife Imelda owned somewhere in the neighbourhood of three thousand pairs of shoes. I did some quick and slightly rude mental arithmetic—if she was in her late fifties or sixties now, she would have been a schoolgirl during the People Power Revolution, perhaps old enough to remember the tanks on EDSA, or perhaps young enough that it was just a story her parents told over dinner. I decided against asking. Some historical curiosities are best kept for Wikipedia rather than tea-table conversation with someone you have known for ninety seconds.

From there, the conversation changed character completely.

She started talking—and I realised that she had probably been waiting for an opportunity to talk to someone who would simply listen.

It is curious how people sometimes pour out their hearts to complete strangers. Perhaps there is a strange freedom in speaking to somebody whom you know you may never meet again.

She told me she had been married to Captain Ghosal, a ship captain, for 32 years. He had passed away in 2024.

Then her voice became serious.

Her husband, she told me, had been deeply affected by the gruesome murder of the young doctor at R G Kar.

"How can any human being do such a thing?" she asked. "What kind of person can commit such butchery?"

There was no need for me to answer. Some questions are better left hanging in the air.

Naturally, I wanted to know how she had met Captain Ghosal.

She told me that she had been working for a shipping company in Manila when a friend introduced her to Captain Ghosal. There was a three-month courtship—and then marriage.

"Only three months?"

She smiled.

Apparently that was quite enough.

She told me she had never wanted to marry a Filipino man. According to her, among Filipino men, having relationships with other women was, in her experience, rather socially tolerated. Wives might know that after office hours their husbands could visit another woman—even a prostitute—and it was not necessarily treated as a family catastrophe.

I remembered having seen *Too Late the Hero*, the Michael Caine film set in the Philippines, and wondered whether that rather liberal social atmosphere had something to do with what she was describing.

While listening to her, my thoughts wandered to my friends Jaggi and Sikka. With conversations like this, one never knows where the mind will travel!

Then she suddenly laughed.

"You Indians have such a strange system of arranged marriage. Two complete strangers are brought together and told to get married!"

I had to agree that, when put that way, it does sound rather dramatic.

She then narrated what had apparently amused her enormously.

She had once asked the wife of one of Captain Ghosal's three brothers:

"When did you first meet your husband?"

The answer was:

"At our marriage ceremony."

She gave a tremendous laugh.

"Imagine! Two complete strangers meeting for the first time at their wedding and then sleeping together that night. How embarrassing!"

I tried to explain that our ancestors had probably developed a very efficient system for eliminating unnecessary dating expenses.

But by then we were both laughing.

After that delightful and rather unexpected conversation, Madhuri and I took leave of our new acquaintance.

On the way out, I suddenly noticed the wine shop.

Well, after spending an afternoon negotiating supermarkets, beauty-product sales girls, Filipino marital philosophy, a stray detour through Marcos-era history and the mysteries of arranged marriage, I felt I had earned a little something.

So I ducked into the shop and bought a bottle of Sangam, an Indian whisky I had heard was quite good.

After all, every intellectual discussion deserves a suitable conclusion.

And mine had started with rain, passed through Darjeeling tea, made a brief stopover in Malacañang Palace, and ended with Sangam.

A perfectly ordinary shopping trip—by Indian standards.