Rosengarten, Bern, Switzerland, 11 July 1953
Three years had passed the way years do in government, which is to say that nobody could afterwards have said where they went. The Republic had been proclaimed, and the first general election had come and gone, with its paper ballots and painted symbols and four hundred million people finding out, one polling booth at a time, what it felt like to be counted. The count had returned Anirban to office by a margin that frightened him rather more than it pleased him. Dams were rising. New Hospitals in various part of republic had trained its first class of doctors. Steel mills had stopped being foreign.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, in a Hospital in Delhi that had never quite stopped smelling of medicine, a boy and a girl had been born who was now three years old, and who, at this moment, the boy was lying on his stomach in the grass of a Swiss rose garden, utterly absorbed in a ladybird.
Anirban sat on a bench above him with his jacket folded beside him and his face turned up to the sun, and for the first time in longer than he could honestly remember, he was doing nothing at all.
The meeting had run three hours, in a panelled room on the Bundesplatz where the Swiss National Bank conducted its business in the hushed, unhurried tones of men who had made a profession of never being surprised. It had gone well. It had also left him with the particular hollow tiredness of a long negotiation won, and so, afterwards, instead of returning to the embassy, he had asked the car to stop at the Rosengarten, a hillside park on the far bank of the Aare from which the whole of old Bern could be seen laid out below like a model made by a very patient child: red roofs, the long grey spire of the cathedral, the river curving round the town in a green horseshoe, and beyond it all, on the days when the haze lifted, the white teeth of the Bernese Alps standing against the sky. It had been a clear morning. The mountains were out.
Two of his security men were somewhere among the tourists, dressed as tourists, and doing it badly. A third was on a bench by the gate with a newspaper that he had not turned the page of in twenty minutes. Aditya, who regarded all of them as part of the scenery, had so far made no comment.
"Papa." The voice came from the grass. "It has *seven*."
"Seven what?"
"Dots." A pause, for verification. "Seven dots, Papa."
"Then it is a seven-spot ladybird," Anirban said gravely, "and you should treat it with the respect due to its rank."
The boy considered this, nodded, and returned to the insect.
It was while Anirban was watching him, with the odd, helpless softness that had been creeping into his face every time he looked at his children for the past three years, that a shadow fell across the end of the bench, and a man in a pale linen suit and a Panama hat sat down without being asked, at the other end, as if the park had been arranged for the purpose.
"How has your day been?" the man said, in perfectly ordinary English, to the view.
He did not turn his head, and neither did Anirban. They sat side by side, looking down at the river, like two strangers who happened to share a bench.
"What can I say," Anirban said, after a moment. "I am clearly not a man who is permitted to spend any quality time alone." He let the corner of his mouth lift. "Tell me, what should I call you now? Our Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Abhimanyu Bose? Or INA's Netaji?"
The man in the Panama hat chuckled, low and warm, and finally took the hat off and set it on his knee. The face beneath it was thinner than it had been in the underground command post at Barasat, the hair greyer, the eyes behind the plain steel spectacles as sharp as ever.
"I prefer the new identity," said Subhas Chandra Bose. "Abhimanyu is a good name, I think. He was the boy who learned how to enter the formation and did not live to learn how to leave it. It seemed appropriate, for a man who is officially dead." He tilted his head. "And do you know, I find that being dead is an extraordinarily underrated condition for an administrator. Nobody asks you for anything. Nobody expects anything from you. They send you the most elegant invitations to the most dreadful dinners, and then they forget you at the soup."
"You hate it."
"I adore it." Bose's face did something complicated. "I hate every minute, and I adore it. It is the first time in my life I have been allowed to be of use without being watched."
Anirban laughed, quietly, and for a moment the two of them simply sat there, the revolutionary and the orphan, in the sun, with the Alps standing in the distance and the Aare turning below.
"So," Bose said, in a different voice. "Let me hear it from your mouth rather than from the cables. What are you doing in Bern with your son and no ministers?"
"Gold."
"Ah." Bose nodded slowly. "I heard something. A great deal of money from Iran, I understand. The Abadan business."
"The Abadan business," Anirban agreed. It had been, by any reasonable standard, the most profitable piece of opportunism in the history of the republic. When the Iran had nationalised the oilfields that control by western interest and Britishers called a boycott to punish the Persians for the insolence, nobody had remembered that Iran still had crude oil and nowhere to put it. India had remembered. India had taken it, at a steep discount, before the situation arose india paid in rupees and in textiles and in cement and in the services of a good many Indian technicians who had never been paid so well, and had refined it at home and sold the spirit on to half of the world. The Iranians had been grateful. The Britishers had been furious. The Treasury had quietly accumulated a sum that Kelkar still described, in cabinet, as "embarrassing, but smiling...."
"I have placed some of it in gold bullion," Anirban said. "Here, in the vaults of the National Bank, in bars, in an account held in the name of the Reserve Bank of India and counted twice a year by men whom I trust and Swiss clerks whom I do not need to trust, which is the great charm of Switzerland. A little under forty tons. Thirty-five dollars an ounce, which is the one fixed star left in the sky of this age."
"And the pound?"
"The pound is why." He opened his hand on his knee. "They devalued once, in forty-nine, and they will do it again. Not this year, perhaps not for a long while, but empires in decline sell their own currency to pay for their pride, and the day they do, every rupee we have left sitting in London in sterling will be worth a third less than it was the morning before. I will not have the strength of the Indian rupee hostage to the humour of the Bank of England. So we keep a basket. Dollars, Swiss francs, a little sterling for trade, and gold." He looked down at the river. "Never again one master, Subhas. Not for anything we cannot afford to lose."
Bose was quiet for a moment. "There is a rather funny irony in it, you know. Of all the places on earth to put the gold of a republic that has declared war on corruption."
"I had noticed," Anirban said dryly.
He had, in fact, noticed it every morning for three weeks. Switzerland. The tidy, discreet, spotless country whose bankers had asked no questions of anyone for a hundred years, and whose vaults, in another version of this century, had been filled with the stolen money of half the dynasties he had ever written about. He had once spent three years of his life tracing, through leaked cables and corporate filings and the patient arithmetic of footnotes, exactly how a ruling family could take fifty million dollars in the eighties and turn it into a billion by the time a coal scandal was forgotten. He had called the chapter *The Swiss Arrangement.* It had been the chapter that got him killed.
He was now, in the sunlight of a different decade, putting the state's gold in the same vaults, openly, on the national books, under a seal that anyone in Parliament could read. It seemed to him that there ought to be a name for that kind of revenge, and that it ought to be a quiet one.
"Papa!" The ladybird had apparently gone. "Papa, where did it go?"
"It has flown home, Aditya. It had an engagement." Anirban raised a hand. "Come here. There is a gentleman who would like to meet you."
The boy got up from the grass with the stern, deliberate dignity of the very small, dusted off his knees, and came and stood in front of the stranger in the linen suit and regarded him with great seriousness.
"I am Aditya," he said. "I am three."
"I am extremely honoured to meet you," said Subhas Chandra Bose, with perfect gravity, and held out his hand. "My name is Abhimanyu. I am a friend of your father's."
Aditya examined the hand, decided it was acceptable, and took one finger of it in his small fist. A moment later, with the casual confidence of someone who has concluded that all adults are furniture, he climbed onto the stranger's knee and settled there, still holding the finger, and began to turn it back and forth to see how it worked.
Bose looked down at the top of the small dark head, and for a moment his face went very still.
"He has your forehead," he said, quietly.
"He has his mother's stubbornness, God help us all." Anirban watched them. "How is your time? With your family, I mean. Do you see them?"
"Less than I would like. More than I deserve." Bose did not look up. " It is very difficult, to be a father and also to be that."
"It is a strange kind of fatherhood." Anirban let himself lean back, the bench creaking, and looked at the roofs of Bern in the sun. Bose say "The world has the best of my hours, and my children have what is left over, and what is left over is not very much. I find that I have a first child who must be taught to call me by a name that is not the name on the newsreels. You understand? A man who can be on the front page of every newspaper in the world and still be a stranger when we are living together." He rubbed his eyes. "It is not a complaint. It is simply the arithmetic."
"Arithmetic," Anirban repeated, with the ghost of a smile. "You and your arithmetic. We all are bound is not it? " Then, Bose in a gentler voice, still watching the child: "What is your plan for him, Anirban? For both of them. For the republic that comes after the republic."
Anirban was silent for a long while. The roses moved a little in the breeze. A tram rattled somewhere across the river, small and tidy as a toy.
"I do not want him in politics," he said at last.
Bose looked up, genuinely surprised. "You?"
"I mean it. I mean it more than I have meant almost anything." He kept his eyes on the spire. "He and his sister were born with political capital. Do you understand what that means? Not money, which is the least of it. A name. A face the newspapers already know. Half the country will love him before he opens his mouth, and the other half will fear him, and neither half will ever stop to ask whether he can actually do the job. They will simply assume. That is what a surname does. It lets the question go unasked." He paused and thinking in his heart. "I spent my whole life writing about exactly this, Subhas. The way power passes down, like furniture, to men who never paid for it. I wrote a whole book about it. And now I have gone and founded one."
Bose began to laugh, softly, so as not to disturb the child. "Only you," he said, "could say a thing like that, on a bench, in Switzerland, with the boy on someone else's knee."
"Is it wrong?" Anirban said. "Tell me honestly. If two entitled children, with no vision, no discipline, and no real understanding of what it costs to govern, sit down in important chairs because everyone is too polite to ask them to prove themselves — then India suffers. Indians suffer. The people who built this country with their hands will have built it for a family. I would rather burn the whole house down first."
"You are not wrong." Bose had stopped laughing. He moved his finger gently in the small fist. "But I put the question to you plainly, as a friend, not a diplomat. What if they want it anyway? What if, twenty-five years from now, he comes to you and says, Papa, I wish to stand for your seat?"
Anirban gave this the consideration it deserved.
"Then I will wish him good luck," he said. "I will not stand in his way. I will not tell him he cannot." He turned his head, finally, and looked at the boy, who had begun, with great concentration, to bite the knuckle of the finger he was holding. "But I will ask him to be the chief minister of a state first. Any state. Let him run a province, with its floods and its factions and its famine relief and its thieves, for ten years, and let him make his mistakes where the mistakes are small. Let him govern something before he is permitted to govern everything. Because to hold this country together, to manage it and not merely to preside over it, a man needs something no surname ever supplied."
He was quiet for a second, hearing, in his own head, the dry, clipped voice of a lawyer in a country that did not yet exist, speaking of an island and its people, in a sentence that every serious student of power would one day know by heart.
"Iron in the spine," Anirban said. "You cannot inherit that. He will have to forge it himself, in the fire, like the rest of us."
For a time neither of them spoke. The boy, bored at last of the finger, had slid down from Bose's knee and wandered back toward the grass, where something else, a snail perhaps, or the memory of the ladybird, had caught his attention. The sun was going over the cathedral. Below them the Aare slid round the old town, green and unhurried, and far off the Alps had begun to turn that faint, impossible pink of late afternoon, as if somebody, somewhere, had decided the day was worth a little extra light.
"For what it is worth," Bose said, standing and settling the Panama hat on his head, "I think he will be a better man than either of us. Boys with fathers who are afraid of them generally are."
"I am not afraid of him."
"Of what he might become, then." Bose glanced down, and there was something very gentle in the look. "Which is the same thing, as every father learns."
He raised two fingers to the brim of the hat, a small, ironic salute from a man who had once reviewed armies, and walked away down the gravel path between the roses, a thin, upright figure in a linen suit, nobody in particular, a diplomat out for his afternoon walk.
Anirban watched him until the path turned. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and called, in the voice that had never once in his life failed to reach the back of a lecture hall, and which now, for this one small audience, he turned as low and as soft as he knew how.
"Aditya. Come. We are going to see the bears."
The boy came running.