The night Calcutta learned how to hold its breath was not announced by thunder or proclamation. It arrived softly, wrapped in fog and the faint smell of coal smoke, as if the city itself had conspired to lower its voice. January of 1941 carried winter in its bones; the air bit gently at exposed skin, and the Hooghly moved with a sluggish, secretive patience, its dark waters whispering to the ghats like an old conspirator.

In a modest house on Elgin Road, under the watchful eyes of the Empire, a man sat very still. The room was dimly lit, its shadows trembling with the flame of a single oil lamp. Outside, the sound of boots passed and returned, passed and returned again, the measured rhythm of surveillance. The British sentries believed they were guarding a body; they did not know they were watching the husk of a man who had already begun to leave.

Subhas Chandra Bose listened. He listened not only to the boots, but to the deeper sounds beneath them; the uneven breath of the house, the muted cough of a servant somewhere in the back, the soft click of the wall clock marking time like a judge who never slept. He had learned long ago that history rarely announced its turning points with spectacle; more often, it whispered, and only those who listened closely survived to answer.

On the table lay three things: a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, a rough woollen cap, and a folded shawl smelling faintly of dust and distant hills. Nearby, a small leather bag waited, its contents sparse but deliberate. Papers had been burned earlier, their ash carefully scattered, their smoke swallowed by the night. There would be no evidence left behind that could testify to his departure.

In another room, his nephew waited. The boy had been told little. Only that silence was now more important than courage, that questions could kill more surely than bullets. He sat cross-legged on the floor, hands clasped tightly together, listening to the faint rustle of cloth as his uncle prepared himself. He did not cry. Children raised in the shadow of the empire learned early how to store fear deep inside, where it could not be overheard.

Bose wrapped the shawl around his shoulders and felt its weight settle upon him. It was not the weight of fabric that mattered, but the weight of erasure. Tonight, he would begin to disappear.

The first disguise was the easiest: the English-educated nationalist, the familiar face, the man the British thought they understood. That version of him would remain behind, confined to a bed, reported ill, attended by servants who had been instructed to speak carefully and slowly, as if illness dulled the tongue.

The second disguise required more courage. He stepped out into the night as Muhammad Ziauddin, a Pathan travelling from the northwest. His posture shifted subtly, his gaze lowered, his speech pared down to silence. He carried himself differently now, not as a leader accustomed to command, but as a man used to being overlooked. His beard itched slightly against his skin, a small discomfort that reminded him he was still flesh and bone, still vulnerable.

At the gate, the guards barely glanced at him. A passing shadow, nothing more. The street received him without ceremony. Somewhere in the distance, a tram screeched along its tracks, sparks flaring briefly against the dark. The city smelled of damp stone and old leaves, of extinguished fires and unspoken intentions. He walked steadily, his steps unhurried, matching the unremarkable pace of those who had nowhere urgent to be.

The Unseen Witness watched him go. He stood at a distance, half hidden by a banyan trunk, his breath fogging faintly in the cold. He had been instructed to remember the moment, not to intervene, not to follow too closely. He would later be unable to say precisely what it was that marked the man out, nothing visible, nothing dramatic, yet something in the way the night seemed to fold around him suggested that this was not an ordinary departure.

At Howrah Station, the air was thick with smoke and murmurs. Steam engines exhaled heavily, iron beasts with bellies full of boiling water, restless with anticipation. Porters shouted, hawkers called out the virtues of tea and boiled eggs, and above it all rose the restless echo of a country in motion. Bose blended into the crowd, his silence a perfect camouflage amid the noise.

The train carried him north. Through Bihar, through the long, indistinct hours where slumber came in fragments and dreams were haunted by maps and borders. At every stop, he listened for suspicion in the voices around him, for the scrape of boots that sounded too official. He kept his eyes lowered, his body relaxed, the art of invisibility perfected through discipline.

By the time he reached Peshawar, the third disguise awaited him. Here, he became mute. A deaf and dumb man, travelling with a companion who spoke on his behalf. Silence, once chosen, now became absolute. He communicated with gestures, with lowered eyes, with the patient stillness of someone long accustomed to being disregarded. The borderlands were tense, alive with rumour and betrayal, yet silence shielded him better than speech ever could.

At night, he lay awake, listening to unfamiliar sounds: the distant bark of dogs, the rustle of dry grass underfoot, the low murmur of conversations conducted in languages that carried both hospitality and threat. He felt the weight of the road in his bones now, the steady accumulation of fatigue and resolve.

The Unseen Witness appeared again, briefly, in a crowded bazaar. He did not approach. He merely observed from behind a stall of dried dates and coarse cloth, his ears tuned to the music of the place. He would later remember the way Bose’s stillness seemed to anchor the chaos around him, how people brushed past without seeing, how destiny often travelled disguised as anonymity.

From Peshawar, the journey became more perilous. Afghanistan unfolded like a rough sketch, its landscapes vast and unforgiving. Snow crowned distant peaks, the air thinning as they climbed. The smell of animal dung fires mingled with cold stone, and the wind carried voices across distances that made them sound like ghosts. Here, Bose was no longer merely escaping; he was crossing thresholds that could not be uncrossed. Each step forward erased another possibility of return.

At night, he wrapped himself tighter in borrowed wool and listened to the sound of his own breath, steady, controlled. He thought of Calcutta, of its narrow lanes and crowded rooms, of letters written and never sent. He thought of voices he might never hear again. The ache was sharp but contained; sentimentality was a luxury he could not afford.

In Moscow, the cold was different. It cut deeper, cleaner, stripping the world down to essentials. Buildings loomed heavy with ideology, their facades stern and unyielding. Bose moved through the city carefully, his presence recorded in no official ledger, his steps absorbed by the anonymity of crowds accustomed to secrets. The language was unfamiliar, yet the tone of caution was universal.

From there, Berlin. The city wore war openly, its streets marked by uniforms and banners, by an urgency that crackled in the air like static. The sound of marching boots was everywhere, precise and relentless. Here, Bose shed his disguises one by one, emerging into a role that demanded clarity and confrontation. Yet even here, in the heart of the Reich, he remained partly unseen.

To the Germans, he was a useful ally, a voice from the East. To himself, he was a man balancing on a narrow ridge, aware that every alliance carried its own cost. He spoke, negotiated, broadcast, his words travelling farther now than his body ever could. The radio became his instrument, its hum and crackle a new kind of breath.

The Unseen Witness heard him for the first time through static. In a cramped room thousands of miles away, he leaned close to a radio set borrowed from a neighbour, its wooden casing warm beneath his fingertips. The voice that emerged was both familiar and transformed, carrying the cadence of home and the distance of exile. He closed his eyes and listened, the sound stitching together all the fragments he had witnessed, all the moments that history would later condense into a paragraph. He did not know then how many disguises the man would yet wear, how many journeys still lay ahead. He only knew that he had seen something pass through the world that could not be contained by walls or borders.

Back in Berlin, Bose stood at a window and watched snow fall onto foreign streets. It muffled the sounds of war briefly, offering a deceptive calm. He knew better than to trust it. Silence, like disguise, was always temporary. He reached for a pen and began to write. Not a letter this time, but a plan.

Outside, the city moved restlessly, engines starting and stopping, commands shouted and obeyed. Inside, a man who had already vanished once prepared to do so again, if necessary. Freedom, he understood now more than ever, demanded not just courage, but the willingness to become invisible when the moment required it. Somewhere far away, a witness carried the memory forward, quietly, faithfully.

History would remember the escape as daring, almost cinematic. It would catalogue the disguises, the routes, the improbable success. It would not record the smell of cold wool, the ache in the knees, the sound of boots fading into the night. It would not name the watchers who saw and said nothing. But the night remembered. And so did the road.

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Stories in this Series

1st Story: The Lost Letter To RSS

2nd Storry: Three Disguises to Berlin

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Copyright © 2026 TRISHIKH DASGUPTA

This work of fictionised history, written by Trishikh Dasgupta, is the author’s sole intellectual property. It draws inspiration from documented escapes, lived silences, and the perilous thresholds crossed by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose during the Indian freedom movement. While this story can be read and experienced independently, it also forms the second part of a six story narrative arc, where each piece stands alone yet together deepens the understanding of Netaji’s choices, transformations, and the unseen paths that shaped his journey. Some characters, incidents, places, and facts may be real, while others are imaginatively reinterpreted.

All rights are reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including printing, photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, send an email to the author at trishikh@gmail.com or get in touch with Trishikh on the CONTACT page of this website.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trishikh Dasgupta

Adventurer, philosopher, writer, painter, photographer, craftsman, innovator, or just a momentary speck in the universe flickering to leave behind a footprint on the sands of time... READ MORE