Chapter 11: Contumacy

Lord Tennenbaum was a general in the EIC. He had been sent to India to suppress all the pro-freedom revolutionary organisations that had been sprouting up throughout the country. He was a man with a particularly strong streak of cruelty. He believed that the white civilized people needed to rule the dark-skinned and the brown-skinned people and show them the true meaning of civilisation. According to him, the white people of Great Britain were the only civilized people and they had been born to rule over the natives of all the other nations of the world. These racist tendencies made him an extremely despicable man but being a high ranking official in the EIC, he knew how to ruthlessly clamp down on organized uprisings. He was particularly infamous for one incident in India where he along with his company had fired on an unarmed gathering of nearly thirty thousand people who were peacefully condemning the actions of the British EIC in Surat ( an Indian city ). Nearly twenty-five thousand people including men, women, pregnant women, children and infants had been killed brutally in that dreadful incident. This incident had angered all the people of the nation of India and he was a prime target of all the freedom-seeking groups throughout the country. But he was indifferent to his actions and unapologetic. After quelling all the uprisings in Surat, he had turned his eye towards Meerut, the city where Nandita resides. Nandita, like all other Indians, was seething with anger when she heard about the Surat massacre. But when she heard that Tennenbaum was coming to Meerut, she told the TSO to get ready. She along with Sanjeeva had drawn a perfect plan of action to take revenge on Tennenbaum and that's what her outfit was getting ready for. The only thing that they needed for the plan to succeed was to know the precise day and time when Tennenbaum would leave Surat for Meerut.