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.