198 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
Bose’s path out of Afghanistan, enabling him to avoid the ambush be-
ing plotted by British assassins. Around March 10, 1941, Mrs. Quaroni,
the aristocratic Russian wife of the Ital ian ambassador, came to Uttam
Chand’s shop with a message for Subhas Chandra Bose. He had to be
photographed and needed a new set of clothes. His photograph would
be pasted onto the passport of Orlando Mazzotta, an Ital ian diplomatic
courier, and Ziauddin would soon have a new identity. On the night
of March 17, Bose was shifted to the home of Signor Crescini, one of
the Ital ian diplomats. He handed over his po lit i cal thesis, postdated
March 22; a message to his countrymen from “somewhere in Europe”;
and a personal letter in Bengali, to be delivered by Bhagat Ram to his
brother Sarat or his nephew Sisir in Calcutta. Having acquired the
passport of Orlando Mazzotta, he set off from Kabul by car before
dawn, accompanied by a German engineer named Wenger and two
others. He traversed the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush range and
crossed the Afghan frontier at the River Oxus, before driving on to the
historic city of Samarkand. From there, Bose and his companions trav-
eled by train to Moscow. “Bose possessing an Ital ian passport under
the name of Orlando Mazzotta dropped in at the embassy today,”
Count Schulenburg cabled from Moscow on March 31, 1941, adding
that Bose intended “to call immediately at the Foreign Office” on ar-
rival in Berlin.^41
“You will be surprised to get this letter from me,” he wrote to Emilie,
“and even more surprised to know that I am writing this from Ber-
lin.”^42 He had flown into the German cap ital the previous afternoon, on
April 2, 1941. It was ironic to find Subhas Chandra Bose, the man who
had espoused left- wing socialist views as president of the Indian Na-
tional Congress in 1938 and 1939, in wartime Berlin. But the reason lay
in the prisoner- of- war camps of Germany and Italy. Bose had joined
the Indian freedom movement led by Gandhi in 1921, after his resigna-
tion from the Indian Civil Service. For two long de cades, he had seen
how the soldiers in Britain’s Indian Army had remained untouched by
anticolonial mass movements. They gladly did the bidding of their co-
lonial masters, working to extinguish the fires of anticolonial revolts
across the globe. The British Empire could count on Indian soldiers’