My Quarantine Smells Like Jasmine Rice

Sujata Massey

Scents that jolt our memories are important because we rarely smell them anymore.

Think about that for a moment.  

I can still summon the soothing aroma the Nivea lotion I used during my sixteenth summer. And the piquantly fruity smell of Haribo Gummi Bears, my favorite snack at summer camp.If I smell boiled cabbage, I step back into the hallway of my late grandmother's home in Germany. And it's only in India that I can inhale a particular mix of diesel, wood and spices. 

I am staying home, probably for a month or two, and I wonder whether there will be a scent from these days that will become a permanent reminder in my olfactory brain.

It is hard to identify the everyday smell of your own home, although anyone who visits you, probably has noticed it. I can only smell a change in my environment, and these days, that is the smell of freshly cooked jasmine rice. 

Before the quarantine, my go-to rice was basmati, a long-grain rice that originates in South Asia. I buy a 20-pound bag imported from India every 9 months or so from Sam’s Club. The rice supply inside my home bag was running low this winter, and I was too busy to replace the bag before I realized I really needed more. 

When the virus began to spread in Baltimore, I had no desire to rush to a warehouse store to look for Royal Basmati Rice along with thousands of other panicking people. Instead, I hurried through jammed neighborhood supermarkets and a gourmet grocery stores. It was Friday the 13^th, and the stores were out of lots of staples, including basmati, arborio, and long grain rice. All that was left on the shelves were small bags of sushi rice, and jasmine rice. Jasmine is a medium-length grain that is slightly moister than basmati, but still has enough of a presence that it plays well with Indian curries, and many other dishes.

Jasmine rice is grown in Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam, and probably would not be as delicious if people tried to grow it elsewhere. I love this rice varietal's sizable grain that, when it's steaming, fills the air with a sweet, almost jubilant aroma. Some say it smells like a combination of a fruit called pandan . . . and popcorn. Interestingly, jasmine rice doesn’t have a biological relation to the Asian flower, although the jasmine flower’s tiny white blossoms are used often for religious ceremonies also has a powerful smell. 

In The Sleeping Dictionary, I wrote about the rice troubles of 1943, when the rice farmed in rural Bengal was shipped out to the troops in such great quantities, that there was not enough left for Indians. About 3 million Indians, mostly Bengalis, died of starvation in the Rice Famine. The wealthy in India hoarded rice in 1943 just as people are hoarding hand sanitizer and toilet paper today. And when the poor flooded Calcutta, begging for food, aid workers had to feed them rice cooking water, because rice itself was too much for their abused stomachs to manage.

Rice is once again a war-time food; a very thrifty, filling and versatile way to keep feeding a family that cannot go shopping. Potatoes go green, bread gets hard and sometimes moldy, but rice perseveres. 

People are sometimes afraid to cook rice, but it's truly very easy.

I’ve cooked jasmine rice straight out of the bag, throwing it unranked in the rice cooker with the prescribed amount of water. You get the best result if you rinse it really well, though, with a few changes of water, before starting to cook the drained, slightly softened rice with a quarter teaspoon of salt, or to taste.

 If you don't have a rice cooker or InstantPot, it's a cinch (and faster) to add one cup of rice to a hot saucepan on the stove with a little oil on the bottom. Stir for a half minute and pour in one and a half cups of water and the afore-mentioned salt. When it comes to a boil, put a lid on and change the heat to low-medium. Check in ten minutes or so, and if the water is almost gone, turn off the burner and let the steaming finish. Add a half-cup more water if you want your rice really sticky! If you double the amount of dry rice to two cups, use three cups of water.

I think the sticky/starchy characteristic helps jasmine rice hold its own nicely in the refrigerator for up to a half week—when basmati really gets nasty after more than two days. 

I am striving not to throw away uneaten food during this quarantine period, but to repurpose it and eat it swiftly, so I am very happy I wound up with a big bag jasmine rice. I use my refrigerated leftover rice. I also use it with other ingredients in fried rice and biryani. I could do a rice pudding, or a casserole as well. Rice of any sort freezes well and can be reheated from frozen in a hot pan or the microwave. 

I have about eight pounds of jasmine rice, having cooked it about four times so far during the isolation period. I hope it holds out for however long I’m here. The memory of Asia wafting from the rice cooker reminds me of so many happy restaurant meals and far-flung travels. Right now, rice promises me that the world will go on. 

Sujata is celebrating the paperback release of The Satapur Moonstone with an online book club meeting at 7 p.m. EST (USA) on Monday, March 30. It will be a zoom meeting with real time video chat between her and the participants. You can join by signing up for her newsletter, and the invitation link will be sent to your email. 

When Writing Series, Third Time's the Charm

Sujata Massey

Daisy's checking up on the day's progress

Did anybody ever tell you that it’s easier to raise three children than two? 

I am fine with the two that I have, but I’m beginning to believe the saying could be true.

Especially when I think about books.

If each book a writer births is like a child, I have fourteen. I am like the old woman in the shoe, and all my children are troublesome in different ways.

But this week it’s been a lot easier. Every day that I’ve powered on my laptop to write, I’ve had an idea of the next sentence.  The words have been flowing now better than they have in years. That is because the book I'm writing is Untitled Perveen Mistry, the third book in a series.

Having been in print for more than a couple decades, I’m starting to draw some conclusions. Don’t hire me to teach any writing courses yet, but I'll tell you that the third book is the magical point when a writer finally gets comfortable writing a series. 

Okay, I'll admit the first book is usually the most exciting part of writing a series. Book One is totally novel. A first book lays out the protagonist's backstory and introduces me to her family, lover, friends, career, and the world where it all takes place. 

Book One for Perveen Mistry!

Because it’s a first book, there is plenty of time to flesh the characters and build the location. Editors don’t usually accept Book One without it being written in totality, so there’s not so much pressure (this was completely different for The Widows of Malabar Hill, which was written on spec for Soho Press. But the pub date stretched so I could revise it to my heart’s content). 

My very first Book One was published in 1997 and had the typical lifestyle for such a creature. I wrote it over the course of four years of suffering and was thrilled beyond my imagination when The Salaryman's Wife was accepted by HarperCollins. I will take off my hat to everyone who has finished writing a first novel, whether or not it made it to print. 

After writing this first book in my Rei Shimura series, I discovered that the second one, Zen Attitude, came surprisingly slowly. Even though I had a due date to motivate me and could reuse characters from the first book, I still felt stalled. I remember trying many drastic

behavior changes to push myself to be someone stronger and capable of writing Book Two.  I changed my diet to avoid meat (it lasted two years). I ran daily around the Hopkins track. I went on research trips, not just to Japan but to a Buddhist monastery in update New York. I was thirty-three, childless and without the curse of a day job. I had no real pressures in life outside of the book ... yet  I stared at my desktop day after day and wondered if I really could write more than one book.

The first three books of the Rei Shimura series

Rei Shimura’s Book Three, The Flower Master, was—ha, another story! I don’t remember much about the process, except I began the book in India when I was staying there due to delays with my daughter's adoption. I did not have so much as a laptop with me, so to work on Book Three I had to go to my grandfather's office where there was an old desktop with viruses galore where I could ply my trade. I had a lot on my mind—but I still was able to proceed at a reasonable pace with this book. Frankly, it was kind of mental retreat. 

I have enjoyed writing the Rei series, but as time passed, I wanted to try something new. I had spent all that time in India--and I wanted to go back. In 2006 I began writing a long historical suspense novel titled The Sleeping Dictionary. That first-book process lasted more than four years, and the book was hard to sell. By the time it came out as a Simon&Schuster paperback in 2013, I felt all the work I'd done made it a natural opener for a new series. I figured that Book Two would occur several years later, when the daughter of the protagonist in Book One could grow up to be a moody teenager caught up in the horrific violence after India’s partition. I knew my characters well and felt the plot was sound, but as I worked on this book, showing my agent revision after revision, I never got farther in than a few chapters.

Writing a second book is always a struggle, and during that time, I was busy with two children and had no energy for tricks like changing my diet or starting a new sport. Also, there was no contract for the unwritten Book 2, which translated into no time pressure to press on with it. I also understood the book’s themes of violence against women and religious intolerance were darker than anything I’d ever written. Would my longtime readers be willing to spend so much time in sadness, when I thought writing this could put me into depression? 

This "book of my heart", first in a series that might never be. 

The second book in the Daughters of Bengal series was simply too daunting for me. I chucked it. Although I did not give up on the idea of revisiting it someday.

I'm working on my third series now. It's about Perveen Mistry, Bombay's first woman lawyer working in the 1920s. I’ll admit that while The Widows of Malabar Hill (Book One) was very exciting to work on, Book Two was a pain to write. This time I could partially blame my struggles on a health issue. Lyme Disease was diagnosed after nine months and I bucked up with medicine, acupuncture, and Ayurvedic herbs. Heck, I got so excited about Ayurvedic herbs I worked them into Book 2 (because it’s set in the mountains of India, it’s not such a stretch). And this Book Two, The Satapur Moonstone, had a deadline. I turned it in a month late, it still needed serious revision, but I'd done it!

I've come to understand that only when I slay the dragon that is called Book Two can I get to the love affair with Book Three. And while it won’t be a romance that makes writing every series book feel like fun, it feels like being on honeymoon this week.

Book Two of the Perveen series slated for May 2019

Upcoming events: I'll chat writing with fellow author William Kent Krueger on Saturday, Oct. 13 at 11 a.m. at the Morristown, NJ Book Festival. I will also appear on an author panel on Wednesday Oct 25, 7-9p.m. at Towne Books in Collegeville, PA. Finally, I'll discuss The Widows of Malabar Hill at a holiday signing party with many Maryland mystery authors 1-3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3 at the Miller Library in Ellicott City, MD.

India in the monsoon

I've been fortunate to be in the same writing group as my guest, Sujata Massey - and what a benefit it's been to Michael and me.  Her comments and insights and suggestions have been invaluable.

Sujata, born in England to German and Indian parents, is the author of the delightful Rei Shimura series, the last of which, the eleventh by my count, Kizuna Coast, takes place in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami. 

Recently Sujata has shifted her focus and wrote a rag-to-riches story, The Sleeping Dictionary set in the mid-1900s, which tells of a young peasant girl trying to achieve independence both for herself and for her country.  It gives readers a great insight into an Indian mind while India was striving to free itself from Britain.

The Ayah's Tale is a novella also set in the mid-1900s in which an Indian woman picks up a book written by an English war hero and writer, who was a young boy she cared for when she was an ayah (nanny).  Holding the book in her hand brings back a flood of memories.

And coming out in November is the latest of Sujata's Indian novels - this one titled India Gray, which is a poignant adventure set on the 1945 battlefront of Assam.

If you've not read Sujata's works, I recommend them highly.  

Stan - Thursday

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My plan to visit India this past July through August struck most of the friends, relatives and seasoned travellers I knew as dubious.

Unless you’re staying in the cool hill country, summer in India is either hot and hellishly dry in the northwest (New Delhi, which I have experienced twice in such conditions), or hot and wet (Mumbai, Kolkata and the rest of the country). As I planned my trip in May, I tried not to react to news stories about “India’s worst heat-wave in recorded history,” which had caused the deaths of more than a thousand. This year, India had its highest recorded summer temperature—44 Celsius, or 117 Fahrenheit degrees.

But India’s summer actually ends in June or July, depending on the state you’re in. What comes straight afterward is monsoon, for periods as short as two months or long as five.

India’s rainy season sweeps upwards from the Indian Ocean into Kerala in early June, continuing a northward deluge. In mid-July, a second monsoon system rolls across the Bay of Bengal and into upper northeast India. Because I needed to visit five cities in India, it seemed an irresistible to do it once through the blur of raindrops. I was tired of reading about monsoons, but not really knowing what the atmospheric power felt like. I was also interested in the way life changed, beyond the use of umbrellas. Bollywood movies present the rainy season as a very romantic time, as shown below in a still from the film Monsoon Wedding.

We arrived at 3 a.m. in Kochi (formerly known as Cochin,) a port city in Kerala, and were quickly wetted in a search for the waiting hotel van. It rained until shortly after lunch, when we departed our hotel for a long ride into rubber tree country. On cue, the rain stopped and people strolled the streets, making Sunday afternoon visits with umbrellas tucked under their arms. Riding through twisting small-town lanes lined with emerald-green bushes and tall grasses, I couldn’t imagine a better definition of verdant, until we got on the mountain roads, passing groves of trees and waterfalls.

Kerala is best-known for its interconnected lakes and canals called The Backwaters; 300 miles of water. Of course, one would want to be by the water in the rainy season. From our small resort in the hamlet of Punamadda, we risked bad weather and committed to a four-hour boat journey on an overcast day. When it began to raining after two hours, the sound was like music on the roof of the canopy covering our kettuvallam.

And there were a lot of people out used to getting wet, such as the gigantic band of guys training in the Backwaters for the upcoming national snakeboat racing competition.

After Kerala’s cool, rainy relaxation of Kerala, I didn’t expect much rain in Udaipur, Rajasthan, where monsoon was said to have limited powers. Upon arrival in mid-July, the air was hot and heavy, and the cabbie confirmed there had been just a few scattered showers to date. But just as we were schlepping ourselves from reception at the Shiv Niwas Palace Hotel, lightening cracked the sky, thunder boomed, and the heavens opened.           

I was soaked after going at top speed through the palace courtyard in the picture, but was enchanted once we reached our suite, got onto the covered balcony and saw the rain pounding Lake Pichola. Then the sky filled with flocks of birds—thousands of them—huge and active. It was like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. The next day, a local explained that they hadn’t been birds but bats celebrating the onset of the monsoon. Fortunately, they flew for us the next evening as well. But the only time we got close to them was when they slept the day away in the big, sprawling trees of Udaipur. 

Whilst in Udaipur, we read in the news that the other monsoon had swept up from the Indian Ocean into the Bay of Bengal and Kolkata. We touched down ourselves a week later and learned what a heavy monsoon felt like in a city: an obstruction that you ran from, rather than a heavenly show. However, a day of rain was an an excellent excuse for shopping and movies in a city that provides both in abundance. At the rainy days continued in Calcutta, I caught more of the rhythms of monsoon living. People were fearful of a higher risk of viruses and diseases, given the side effects of flooding on produce and the water supply. 

During monsoon, many Indians avoid street food and raw produce. However, the moisture in the air makes it a more favorable time for Ayurvedic treatment, something I’d begun in Kerala. I was intrigued to learn that the fenugreek powder sprinkled on my head after my massage and oil treatments was done to prevent my catching cold. Masala chai and ginger tea are favored beverages for maintaining good health in the monsoon, and delicious.

Toward the end of our time in Kolkata, we got word of a cyclone named Komen on its way. This storm, which arrived on the Saturday morning of our departure, turned out to be the Monsoon Moment we would never forget. Water was rising on city streets, in some areas as high as people’s thighs. Would we make it to the airport without the car stalling?

Thanks to the elevation of our SUV and a calm driver, we made it to the airport without incident. Later we were horrified to learn that more than a quarter million people in the area were dislocated by flooding. About100 people drowned in Kolkata alone, and many more in rural areas.

Even though it had been just two weeks, my family and I felt like monsoon veterans by the time our Jet Airways flight landed in Mumbai. Maharastra’s capital city, formerly known as Bombay, is located on the southwest coast, so it gets hit hard like big cities near water. Mumbai’s people had suffered a week of very heavy flooding in June, forcing the temporary shutdowns of the train system and closing businesses and schools. But we’d come after the water had drained out. It was August, and the rain clouds were almost gone. Staying in the peaceful Bandra Bandstand neighborhood on the edge of the Arabian Sea, we encountered many strong winds, but not so much rain. There was also the renewed pleasure of seeing rain on the water, all the while knowing the city was somewhere behind me.

I’d thought I just wanted to experience India’s monsoon once…but I don’t think that’s how it will turn out.

FROM ASYLUM TO INFAMY

I am delighted to welcome Sujata Massey as our guest contributor today.

Before she moved to Maryland, I was privileged to be part of a writers' group with her in Minneapolis, and say without reservation that her comments and suggestions helped to improve our Detective Kubu novels.

Sujata is the quintessential cosmopolitan!  She was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States (California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and earned her BA from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars program. After that she worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before marrying and moving to Japan. The area where Sujata once lived, an hour south of Tokyo, forms most of the settings of her Rei Shimura mysteries. The series has collected many mystery-award nominations, including the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards, and has won the Agatha and Macavity prizes for traditional mystery fiction. The Rei Shimura mysteries are published in 18 countries. The first book in the series is THE SALARYMAN'S WIFE and the tenth is SHIMURA TROUBLE.

Now Sujata has turned to India as the setting of her new novel, THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY.  In a well-deserved starred review, Booklist had this to say about this enchanting book:

“Trapped by her past and uncertain of her future, the peasant girl Kamala’s journey toward independence—personal and political—unfolds in this riveting historical novel. The award-winning author of the Rei Shimura mysteries turns to 1930s–40s India,with the British in control of the colony as Gandhi and others fight for freedom. The setting gives new life to the familiar story of an orphan girl struggling to make her way in a cruel world. Clever Kamala is front and center throughout, as Massey builds her coming-of-age tale around India as it moves toward independence, effectively combining personal narrative with the grandeur of a sweeping historical epic. The characters are easily categorized, but deft storytelling prevents them from being predictable. The book is also notable for its detail-driven depiction of the limitations imposed by caste and colonization. The Sleeping Dictionary, an utterly engrossing tale of love, espionage, betrayal, and survival, is historical fiction at its best, accessible to all audiences."

Please welcome my good friend, Sujata Massey.

Stan - Thursday

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He was the kind of man who disagreed with his government—and sought to reform its operations. He broke laws to spread his messages of unrest and felt forced to flee, lest he spend the rest of his life in prison.

In search of shelter, the radical traveled undercover to countries that were unfriendly with his own.  But the path was complicated, as he could not use his passport. The travel papers he hoped that other governments might produce for him weren't forthcoming. And then, when it seemed like he’d settled into a powerless rut, the fugitive traveler popped up on another continent, in the heart of a nation willing to help him wage war on his homeland.

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden? Sorry, but that’s not the guy I am writing about. 

Snowden was preceded 72 years ago by Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian freedom fighter who outfoxed the British government of India and made it possible for a hostile army to invade his homeland. Which should make everyone think twice about what Edward Snowden can still accomplish.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Mr. Bose’s adventure began in 1897, when he was born in British India as the younger son of a wealthy upper-caste Hindu lawyer. Although he attended elite, English-medium schools in Calcutta and was tracking toward a conventional career in civil service or law, he witnessed enough discrimination to change his plan about working for the rulers of his country. The young Subhas joined Bengali political activists and rose from being a mere independence supporter to a position as an activist mayor of Calcutta. After serving a long political imprisonment and then banishment by the British government of India, he was permitted back into India in the late 1930s and promptly resumed his independence activities as president of the All-India Congress Party, and after that, his own new political party, the Forward Bloc. 

Bose, who was now admiringly called “Netaji,” or ‘honored leader,’ was enthusiastically received. Much of the population was upset at being commanded by the British to serve them in World War II when there was still no promise of a date that India might get self-rule. While the most famous independence activist of the time,  Mahatma Gandhi, counseled Indians to be patient,  Netaji demanded unconditional freedom and told his followers that violence against the British might be necessary.

The threat of Netaji disrupting war supply production was too much for India’s government. In autumn of 1940, Calcutta police arrested Mr. Bose on charges of plotting to deface the Holwell Monument, a proud symbol of British colonialism in Dalhousie Square. The activist had not actually laid a hand on the monument, but he was locked up under India’s War Rules, a measure that greatly expanded police rights to detainment. Mr. Bose felt his incarceration was unjust and undertook a hunger strike, weakening himself so much that the British were forced to bring him out of jail and into a hospital. 

Mr. Bose — who’d suffered respiratory problems since catching tuberculosis during a two-year-long imprisonment in Mandalay in the 1920s — stayed dangerously weak. His doctors proclaimed him too ill to stand trial, advising rest and recuperation at his parents’ house. The police reluctantly agreed, stationing constables to watch the family’s handsome bungalow on Elgin Road. But their round-the-clock presence wasn’t enough to defeat the clever politico who, while resting in a curtained bedchamber, grew a shaggy beard and hatched an escape plan with his nephew. On the evening of January 16, 1941, the nephew drove away from the house with what appeared to be a Muslim acquaintance, heavily bearded and dressed in the attire of the Northwest Frontier Provinces. Many days later, the house servants discovered one of the meals they’d been leaving next to Netaji’s curtained bedside hadn’t been eaten, and the alarm was raised.

The family house - now a museum

Subhas Chandra Bose had a sizeable head start on the police and, with the assistance of relatives and political supporters, traveled north by car and train through the Northwest Frontier Provinces that are now part of Pakistan. He posed as a deaf-mute, his presence explained at any checkpoints by two Pashto-speaking companions (one of whom—unknown to Mr. Bose--was a double agent informing on him for both the U.S.S.R. and Britain). The runaway reached Kabul and took shelter within a sympathizer’s home. 

Like Edward Snowden, Netaji could not travel out of Kabul using his own passport; he’d made a bet that the Soviet consul would give him travel papers, but this assumption proved wrong. Bose’s helpers spent two more months trolling various consulates before Italy granted him travel papers allowing him to travel under the name Count Orlando Mazzotta.

Following advice from their double agent, the British assumed Mr. Bose would go to Turkey, and sent assassins to wait along the border there. But he avoided that route. Using a combination of car, donkey, horse and his own feet, he was guided out of Afghanistan and across mountains to the Soviet border, where his Italian papers allowed him into the country that had shunned him months earlier. Once on Red soil, he declared his true identity, but instead of getting a warm welcome, he was offered the services of the German ambassador, who put him on a plane to Berlin.

In the 1930s, Netaji had written disapprovingly of Nazi polices, although he admired the structure of their government, and socialism. Now he was facing a life-changing choice, just as Snowden had when he decided to get help from China and Russia.

A popular saying at the time, among militant Indian freedom fighters, was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps Netaji followed that reasoning when he decided to take the flight to Germany. And at first, it was wunderbar. His German hosts provided equipment for him to broadcast political addresses against the British. But almost two years passed, and Hitler still hadn’t signed his statement of India’s right to self-government. During this time Mr. Bose had also married an Austrian woman and fathered a daughter, but he had begun to question his future. And the Germans may have had their doubts too, about providing endless support to an undesirable racial type.

In 1943, the Nazis offered Bose a one-way trip out on a submarine, transferring him to a Japanese submarine near the Cape of Good Hope. It was in Tokyo that received the kind of support he’d longed for. Senior officers in the Imperial Army agreed that India should be freed from British colonial power. Together with Bose, they drew up a plan for a military force of expatriate Indians to seize their country from the British.

Japanese submariners who picked up Bose from a German submarine

The idea of an Indian National Army built from tens of thousands of captured Indian prisoners of war was something the Japanese had been thinking about since beginning their conquest of South East Asia. Their officers took care to treat their captured Indian POWs well and invited them to join a volunteer Indian National Army (I.N.A.) headed by Mohan Singh, a former Indian Army officer. However this first I.N.A disbanded after less than a year because few POWs were willing to desert their troops. But once Netaji arrived in Southeast Asia, and word spread that he would be the I.N.A.’s chief, their minds were easily changed. Over 40,000 Indians joined; not just POWs but ethnic Indian civilians living in Southeast Asia, including young women who would serve as combat soldiers and medics in a woman-commanded regiment. Supreme Commander Bose ordered the men and women to train together. He insisted that everyone to speak Hindi, erasing regional and religious boundaries. Seasoned Indian Army officers and senior enlisted men became his top officers, and they drew up strategies for entering and taking India.

But by 1944, Japan was dragging its feet. The war in the Pacific was turning, since the Americans had joined the British. Japan was running low on weapons, food, uniforms and boots - with nothing to restock. It wasn’t easy to give the I.N.A. the supplies it needed to mount a successful invasion. Finally, though, Netaji’s troops were given the all clear to invade along with the Japanese. They entered northeastern India and easily took the town of Moirang in Manipur, and after that laid sieges against the British-led Indian Army strongholds of Imphal and Kohima that lasted almost four months. In the end the Indian Army prevailed, and the Japanese and I.N.A, retreated back to Burma, many perishing along the way from injuries, starvation and exhaustion, while the survivors were captured as POWs by the Indian Army and Allies.

Surrendered Indian National Army troops at Mount Popa

The dream finally imploded after the US atom-bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Japan to surrender. On August 18, 1945, Netaji boarded a Japanese military plane with Japanese and a few Indian officers, hoping for yet another ride to a safe haven. But the overloaded aircraft crashed over Taiwan, hitting the ground hard and erupting in flames.

According to the British Indian government — which received reports from the Taiwanese hospital —Mr. Bose died from severe burns within hours of the crash. Netaji’s surviving companion on the flight vouches for this story. But because Mr. Bose’s body was never seen, most Indians didn’t believe it. Some suspected he was captured by the Soviets who, angered by his alliance with Germany and Japan, sent him to a gulag. Another theory was that he disguised himself as a monk in the Himalayas —  trekking down to attend the 1964 funeral of Jawaharlal Nehru. Such is the power of a vanished man on a country’s psyche.

India’s situation changed rapidly after World War II. Sympathy for surviving I.N.A. veterans inspired civilians and even many Indian Army soldiers and policemen to contribute cash toward their rehabilitation. When the British government announced the plan to prosecute several I.N.A. officers for treason or war crimes, riots flared nationwide. The unrest the government had always feared Mr. Bose might be able to instigate was happening. They could no longer count on Indians in their employ to support their rule — a major part of their decision to finally quit India in 1947.

Today, there are garland-draped statues of Netaji in most Indian towns, and the airport in Kolkata is named in his honor. Quite a few people around the world think that Mr. Snowden deserves the same kind of recognition for his stance against covert intelligence-gathering. But because of modern technology, he doesn’t need a world power or terrorist group to provide guns and uniforms for him. To inspire action by followers, all he needs is to fire up his laptop and send out a webcast. Or simply tweet. 

Bust of Bose, not in India, but in Renkoji temple (Japan)

Bust of Bose in India

Thanks - Sujata Massey