Dr Suresh Venkita, our Group Medical Director, a senior cardiologist and an avid writer, has yet again shared this lovely story from his desk.
Roses are red; violets are blue
Around six that evening, when the doorbell rang, Eshan was busy getting things ready for the party. Wondering who had turned up so early, he grumpily went to the door. It was Nathan. “I’m here to help you,” he said with a smile. “How much can you possibly do all by yourself?” Holding forward a single rose that had a long, slender stalk, he bowed dramatically. “Congratulations. For now, you could stop being jealous,” he sneered. Eshan knew that the emphatic “all by yourself” was hardly intentional, but it bothered him.
Nathan, 6 pm.
That was not the only thing that bothered Eshan.
He took a quick look at his rose garden and focused immediately on the plant from which Nathan had so thoughtlessly plucked the rose that he was now audaciously offering him as a gift.
Next to the rose beds were the violets. For no particular reason, the nursery rhyme” Roses are red; the violets are blue” popped into his head. To him, they looked sad, as though they mourned the death of the rose.
The devoted gardener also noted that Nathan had snipped the flower by its long, slender stalk. This was an act of violence by an intruder that resulted in the sudden death of a young and beautiful flower, and loss of a child to the plant.
What kind of man would offer a rose to another man?
What kind of man would violate another person’s garden?!
His statement, “I am here to help you,” which ended with a question “How much can you possibly do all by yourself?” was equally inappropriate. Intentional or not, it bothered him; actually it downright annoyed him. Eshan was not the kind of person who was on a short fuse. He was invariably calm and quiet. Gardening did that to people. You became patient with plants, giving them time to grow and bloom, or bear fruits.
Being a meticulous gardener had also made him better and safer at his job.
He ignored Nathan’s offer, both the rose and the help, and turned away from his door.
“Hold on a second, Eshan, I have something else for you, which you cannot afford to refuse.”
Just as a matter of courtesy, he turned back.
Nathan thrust a CD into his hand. “Go in and listen. I shall wait.”
All Eshan’s senses were instantly alert. That request was unusual and unexpected. “Do not react!”- His intuition distilled from decades of experience warned him.
Silently he received the CD, went in, slipped it into his well-worn Sony portable Walkman, put the earphones on, and pushed the start button.
A heavy breathing voice, with a Pashtun accent, rasped in Urdu “We know that you work for the national security agency, R & AW. Now you will also work for us as a double agent. The man who brings you a red rose with a long stalk and makes a statement, “I’m here to help you, how much can you possibly do all by yourself” is our emissary and will hereafter be your dropbox. At the end of this transmission, this CD will self-destruct.”
The CD hissed inside the player, heated, melted, and ruined the Walkman.
As soon as the salutation in Urdu began, Eshan had immediately guessed that the recording would selfdestruct, so he had swiftly switched on his voice- recorder. He listened to the recording carefully again.
Why, Nathan?’ was the question that first rose in Eshan’s mind.
They had grown up together and had attended the same school, but no two contemporaries could be more different in attitudes and attributes.
To Nathan, success was critical, as it had its benefits. Eshan did not quite know what success was and what failure was.
To Nathan, the limelight was his lifeline. Eshan was happy working in the wings, in the shadows.
To Nathan, applause was an aphrodisiac. To Eshan, two hands that clapped close by was enough to startle him.
Nathan was a talker; all that people heard from Eshan was the mellow music he often played on a flute, to his plants.
Most of their friends could list Nathan’s achievements if he ever shut up about it and let others speak.
No one could think of anything extraordinary that Eshan had ever done.
Nathan studied commerce while Eshan went in for Mathematics. One was obsessed with money while the other devoured and digested numbers when he was not gardening.
Nathan flaunted his wealth. No one knew what Eshan did for a living.
Nathan kept dogs; Eshan did not even have a cat!
Nathan became a society man, a businessman, and a compulsive gambler. Eshan was a constant gardener.
What they had in common were only a few friends from school days who had insisted that Eshan give a party as that day was his birthday as per school records.
Nathan always assumed that Eshan was jealous of him; he was never sure but was eager to know. The answer would come his way before the night was over.
“I will see you at the party” was all that Eshan said to Nathan, and then closed the door.
Eshan: six hours to midnight
One of his unique talents was that he was an excellent amateur chef. He had his recipes, which always turned out well. So cooking for the party was not a challenge for him.
As he prepared for the arrival of the guests, his mind was preoccupied with the message he had received.
He had come to the town as a young boy. Only the kind couple who adopted him knew that Eshan was born and brought up in Lucknow as an orphan. Urdu was the first language he had heard, spoke, and loved for its richness, majestic words, poetic expressions, and magnificent imagery.
He was never sure what religion he was born into as it hardly mattered in his life. The orphanage gave him shelter, clothes, a bed, food, and primary education. The kind couple who adopted him became his parents and brought him to this town in the north west of Punjab, close to the border with a hostile neighbor.
His father and mother were teachers of language and mathematics, respectively, who were looking forward to teaching him many things, including the language they spoke-Punjabi, and introducing him to mathematics. But Urdu did not recede into dormancy in his mind. It remained alert and alive, and its pursuit was a secret joy deep inside him. No evidence existed around him that pointed to that lifelong affinity. So whoever chose that language as the medium of communication had deep-dived into his origins.
But they may not have come to know that his teachers at school thought Eshan had significant difficulties in learning. The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, diagnosed him to be neurodiverse. He had a mixed bag of conditions that included autism, Asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia (disorders that involve difficulty in learning to read or interpret words and letters, but do not affect general intelligence) and dyspraxia ( a disease of the brain causing difficulty in coordination and movement).The diagnosis broke his parents’ heart, but soon they were somewhat assuaged to come to know that what he did not have as part of that complex syndrome, or package of disabilities, was dyscalculia (severe difficulty in making mathematical calculations). To their surprise and delight, he turned out to be a wizard in mathematics.
People with such conditions can approach problems from entirely different angles. They think differently.
As Eshan grew up, he had trouble at school with routine tasks, such as remembering how to go from the language classroom to the mathematics class. But once he was there, he was great at problem-solving.
He graduated from school to college, where he was evolving into a prodigy in mathematics who knew how to make mathematics useful in many ways.
Somehow he came under the radar of the sophisticated machinery of the government who were on the prowl for gifted mathematicians. The national security organizations were looking precisely for the kind of rare talent that Eshan had. A well-meaning teacher at school or college may have mentioned about this differently-abled but gifted young man to the scouts who came searching.
The onset of the digital revolution had forced intelligence agencies to overhaul their traditional methods and techniques. Digital surveillance, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, the internet of things, and the complexity of modern online communications were upending the way national security agencies (NSAs) were operating.
A cyber force, made up of mostly mathematicians cum computer hackers, who would initiate online operations that can infiltrate, degrade or destroy hostile computer networks, was being organized. This force would bring in a cyber-dimension to any armed conflict in the future.
He became part of an elite group tasked with solving some of the Agency’s most perplexing problems:
cryptography, cyber security, and how to analyze large data sets. NSAs had moved away from the idea of single individuals cracking questions towards teams of technologists working together to solve seemingly impenetrable digital puzzles.
At the NSA, his work involved undermining internet encryption, which he did with minimal effort. The NSA recognized that he had a sophisticated knowledge of the mathematics involved.
He was already an expert on cryptography. He evolved into a very industrious and intuitive computer hacker who strived to create codes no hostile government or organization could break.
Thus he became a kind of digital spy who monitored global counter-intelligence targets for national security reasons. He was always looking for that key that would open the door to facilitate a particular operation.
He was part of the group that conducted a major offensive cyber campaign against ISIS, suppressing the Islamist terror group’s online propaganda machine, and hindering its ability to co-ordinate attacks. He helped to develop new cyber capabilities to block terrorists’ online services and destroy equipment and networks.
National security organizations of the UK (GCHQ and MI-6) invited him to join sound analysts, and together they identified the British-born ISIS terrorist Mohammed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John, by matching disguised voice recordings from a 2014 video to British intelligence files.
He was developing a program that would identify people from the small “envelope” of skin beneath the eyes. Software like this might, he felt, be able to identify a person even if they were wearing a balaclava, a head and face cover, which most terrorists, do.
“Human beings can’t easily pretend to be something they’re not,” he spoke at one of his rare moments to a gathering of cyber-scientists. “You can fool other human beings, but it’s much harder with a computer.”
When complimented on his work, he had responded, “We’re not special people. We’re normal people doing our specific jobs.”
He had come to personify the “quiet courage and integrity” of John Le Carré’s central spying character George Smiley.
Yet no one could trace these developments to Eshan, living quietly in that small town, tending to his plants, his dearly loved parents long dead. His precision and perfection in the performance of his work and the nature of that work allowed him to get total anonymity in the digital environment.
So the questions“How” and “Why Nathan?” bothered Eshan.
He had no answer to “How?”. He would have to ask the NSA.
As for Nathan, the most likely explanation seemed to be his inexorable descent and decline into gambling, which was driving him deeply into debt. Eshan did not think it was difficult for any discerning observer from across the border to discover that vulnerability. They lived in Ferozepur; Wagah was just 74.8 km away.
It was time to inform the NSAs about this development. He sat down to it.
Nathan: midnight
Nathan was, as promised, helpful at the party later in the evening.
He kept the conversation going and saw everyone off, one by one.
He intended to stay on till he heard from Eshan.
At last, they were the only two in the living room.
Eshan walked out of the door into the moonlit night that had some nimbus clouds.
Under the moonlight the roses looked black. But the violets looked blue.
Nathan joined him. Eshan could sense him beside his shoulder, eager and hopeful, for an answer.
The nimbus clouds moved in, covering the moon. The night became very dark.
A large and unmarked car drew up to the gate.
Three lean, silent men stepped out and walked in.
Two of then ignored Eshan, walked quickly up to Nathan, flashed their National Security badges, showed him a warrant for arrest and interrogation, quickly read him his rights, and equally promptly led him to the car.
Nathan turned to Eshan for a few seconds.
Eshan told him softly, just within his hearing- “I was never jealous of you.”
The third man spoke to Eshan.
“Your cover has been blown; it is unsafe for you here. You are an asset. We are taking you to a safe house, in this or another country,” As he was talking, the nimbus clouds moved away; the moon was back.
“The department wanted to assure you. You will have a rose garden there.”
Dr. Venkita S Suresh,
Group Medical Director and Dean of Studies,
DNB and other post-graduate training programs.
