194 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
renunciation theory. An anxious telegram from Mahatma Gandhi elic-
ited a three- word reply from Sarat: “Circumstances indicate renuncia-
tion.” But he would not deliberately mislead Rabindranath Tagore, who
had stood by Subhas during his po lit i cal battles with Gandhi in 1939.
“May Subhas receive your blessings wherever he may be,” was the cable
the poet received from Sarat in response to his query.^27
The police could see that Prabhabati was genuinely disconsolate.
While most of the police of fi cers and intelligence agents floundered
and blamed one another, the most astute among them, J. V. B. Janvrin,
deputy commissioner of police of the Special Branch in Calcutta, be-
lieved there were “grave reasons to doubt” that sudden religious fervor
was the “true explanation” for Subhas’s disappearance. On January 27,
Janvrin forwarded to Delhi an intercepted letter dated January 23 from
the amateurish Aurobindo to a colleague, saying the reason he could
not accept an invitation to travel outside Bengal would become evident
on January 27. But this error brought the police no closer to fathoming
what had really taken place. One report from Punjab claimed to know
of a plot to fly Subhas toward Russia. Another conjectured that Sub-
has’s friend Nathalal Parikh, who had visited from Bombay in Decem-
ber, may have got him a false passport to travel to Japan. There was se-
rious speculation that Bose may have left Calcutta on January 17 on a
ship called the Thaisung, which had sailed for Penang, Singapore, and
Hong Kong.^28
All this bungling made Viceroy Linlithgow furious with Governor
Herbert, who had ventured to suggest that if their inveterate opponent
had indeed left India, this might not turn out to be such a bad thing.
Linlithgow believed that Bose’s escape re flected very poorly on those
who were responsible for keeping him under surveillance; and if he
had left so easily, he might just as easily return to torment them.^29 Rich-
ard Tottenham, of the Home Department in Delhi, was categorical that
the government had “wanted to prevent Bose from doing harm within
India or abroad,” but that “Bose had hoodwinked the police.” “How he
arranged to escape and where he now is,” he wrote on February 13, “is
still a mystery,” and he told Linlithgow that Herbert “was by no means
proud of the performance.” Janvrin, in Calcutta, may have been out-
maneuvered, but his assessment of Subhas Chandra Bose was on the