Exile in Europe 117
plied that he had thought there were no superstitions outside India,
“because we have bagged the whole lot of them.” Subhas wanted to
hear the latest jokes in Viennese cafés from Emilie. The new schillings
in Austria, Emilie reported, were being made of rubber—they could be
stretched, and “if the schilling falls you do not hear it.” The two ex-
changed photographs—or “snaps,” as they put it—of their natural sur-
roundings. It was clear that Emilie was the better photographer. As
winter enveloped the Hi ma la yas, Subhas’s health began to fail again. “I
was not at all well and the weather was very disagreeable,” Subhas
wrote to Emilie on December 15, 1936.^95 Two days later, he was trans-
ferred to Calcutta’s Medical College Hospital—as a prisoner, of course.
Subhas was glad to be in Calcutta, where the winter was pleasant.
The large hospital was located between Calcutta’s busy College Street
and Central Avenue. The buses, trams, and other motley forms of
transport caused a tremendous racket, and patients in pain tended to
be noisy in the general ward. After “a long period of isolation,” how-
ever, Subhas welcomed the proximity of human beings “even when
they are noisy.”^96 Close relatives were permitted to visit him regularly.
He was very happy to receive Rabindranath Tagore’s blessings in his
own hand, along with a gift of the poet’s new collection, Sanchayita.^97
Subhas ushered in the New Year, 1937, as an ailing prisoner in the fa-
miliar surroundings of his home city.
Meanwhile, the ritual of Bleigiessen, performed in Vienna on New
Year’s Eve, foretold with uncanny accuracy the future of a young Aus-
trian woman whose destiny seemed inextricably linked with the fate of
a country she would never see. As Emilie narrated the incident to Sub-
has: “Then suddenly I had the foolish idea of Bleigiessen. It is done in
this way. You melt on a spoon some metal (lead) and when it is melted,
you pour it into cold water. At once it be comes hard and gets shaped.
According to the shape, you foretell the future of the one who has
poured this spoonful of metal. I had a very funny thing, looking like
the map of India.”^98
Indian newspapers and Subhas’s letters were Emilie’s only connec-
tions with the subcontinent. Another Viennese friend, Hedy Fülöp-
Miller, was staying as a guest at Sarat’s Woodburn Park home at that
time, and visited Subhas in hospital. In a letter from Medical College