298 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
wry smile. “What next?” He decided to drive down to Singapore the
next day, and gave urgent instructions for a car to pick up Raghavan
and Swami from Penang and John Thivy from Ipoh, to meet him there.
Swami had been devising some stay- behind schemes in Malaya, to keep
the flag of in de pen dence fly ing after the Allied landings. A twelve- hour
drive down the Malay Peninsula on August 12 brought Bose and his
party to Singapore, at about half past seven in the evening.^138
Bose’s cabinet met continuously on the verandah of the upper floor
of the bungalow on Meyer Road. Arrangements were made to distrib-
ute suf fi cient money to INA soldiers and civilians affiliated with the
Provisional Government, to see them through at least six months. Ne-
taji’s most im por tant concerns were the five hundred women in the
Rani of Jhansi Regiment camp in Singapore and the forty- five cadets
he had sent to Tokyo for training in the army and the air force. He
spoke to the commandant of the camp, to get the women safely to their
homes with adequate funds and provisions. The commandant, in her
turn, invited Netaji to attend a play on the life of Rani Lakshmibai of
Jhansi that was being performed by her soldiers on the evening of Au-
gust 14. Bose was unwell, having had a tooth pulled that afternoon. He
sent instructions for the performance to begin, saying that he would
join the audience later. “Deafening cheers broke out,” Ayer recalled,
“when Netaji arrived earlier than expected.” At the end of the perfor-
mance, he stood with three thousand men and women of the INA
in the open- air theater as the entire gathering sang the national an-
them.^139
Throughout the cabinet meetings of August 13 and 14, Netaji him-
self was quite often the focal point of the conversation. He listened
to what was being said and took part in the discussion as if someone
else were being discussed. He and his staff wondered what the British
would dare to do with him in the event he was taken prisoner in Singa-
pore. Not that the British themselves knew this. About that time and a
bit later, Wavell and his cabinet were weighing their options and found
none of them satisfactory. How could Bose be eliminated? His in flu-
ence, they had already discovered, powerfully affected “all races, castes
and communities,” who admired him for forming an army of libera-
tion and standing up to both the British and the Japanese. If he was