After driving out of the house, Sisir and Netaji’s first stop was Rishra. Sisir and a “handsome Muslim man” stopped at their relative Ashok Nath Bose and his wife Mira’s house for dinner. From there, all four of them drove for several hours to Gomoh railway station in Bihar (now Jharkhand).
Netaji bid farewell to them and boarded the Kalka Mail. He didn’t want the others to enter the station to see him off. But Sisir insisted on pretending to be a visitor seeing off his ‘uncle’. The policemen at the railway station had no clue that India’s most sought-after revolutionary was escaping in plain sight.
Netaji journeyed to Peshawar, close to the Afghan border. He then tried to enter Russia through Afghanistan. Not knowing Pashto could have made him an easy target, so Netaji pretended to be deaf and mute and dressed up as a local tribesman. Supporters of Aga Khan III helped him enter Soviet Russia.
Netaji changed his guise and travelled to Moscow using an Italian passport. From Moscow,…