When Chittoor Venkat Narain, a man whose life story and career as a middleman were yet to unfold, stepped onto the platform of Kashmiri Gate railway station in 1949, it marked the beginning of a new chapter in his life.
The distant whiff of coal stoves wafted into the railway compartment, followed by the aroma of freshly brewed milk tea that woke Coomar Narain up. Outside the Kashmiri Gate railway station, a mixture of scents such as burning coal stoves, freshly brewed tea and tobacco served as a wake-up call. India had gained independence, and the railway platforms became the first supermarkets where consumer goods, books and smuggled items from American soldiers returning home were found. Until then, he had only seen the name of the capital on envelopes that he handled at the post office in the Kamptee military cantonment. In his bleary vision of that winter of 1949, he saw the city that had become a part of his life in the past few years when he worked as a postal clerk in the military.
The first thing that caught Coomar Narain’s attention on the railway platform was the sound of the coal engine hissing. Interestingly, the steam engines were not built in India. Like most items used in the country, the steam engines were imported as Indian engineering companies did not have the licence to produce them. Narain arrived in Delhi on that early, bleary morning by train, in the city that would become his future workplace, where he would work as a consultant-general manager in a major engineering company. However, at that time, he only caught a dark, smoky glimpse of the entrance to the city.
Delhi was being mobbed by humanity. The previous year, a considerable population had arrived as refugees as the Partition gave shape to the new country. Coomar Narain was just one of the men coming into the capital. How was the city that welcomed Coomar Narain?
Coomar Narain joined the Government of India as a stenographer and in the summer of 1949 became a permanent resident in Delhi. Although he had visited the city before, he did not expect to stay there for the rest of his life. However, Coomar Narain had a unique feature that set him apart – he was not comfortable with just one name. Like Delhi, which is known by various names, such as New Delhi, Indraprastha, Hastinapur and Delhi, Narain also appeared with different names, including Narayan and Narayanan. But eventually, his second name, Narain, became more widely recognised.
Coomar Narain was fiction. Chittoor Venkat Narayanan was the reality.
That is what Shiv Dev Singh from the Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police learned when he started looking into the files. The Delhi Police approved his travel plans in the summer of 2017, and he boarded a flight to Kozhikode. Once he arrived, he found out that Coomar Narain, who had been involved in an espionage case before, was again at the centre of a police investigation. However, this time, it was a property dispute involving characters who had passed away several years ago. The life of the infamous character would be unveiled before Shiv Dev as he met with people who were initially hesitant to see him and searched obscure documents in dusty government offices. As he delved deeper, he discovered more about the life of this infamous character.
Shiv Dev’s first stop was Vadakkencherry to inquire about Coomar Narain, aka Chittoor Venkat Narayan. However, he found no information from the office of the local sub-divisional officer and district magistrate of Palakkad. According to them, there was no record of Chittoor Venkat Narayan’s family in the area, and nobody knew his father, Venkitarama Aiyar. Migrants usually do not leave any traces behind, which are anyway eventually erased by time.
Shiv Dev, a Gurgaon-born Haryanvi, felt exhausted due to the constant language barriers in the villages around Chittoor. These villages were home to the Palakkad Iyer community, a Tamil-dominated enclave within Kerala. The Palakkad Iyers originally hailed from this place. Shiv Dev visited the agraharams and temples of the Iyers, but he was in civvies and had to introduce himself as a police officer in every conversation. Unfortunately, the interaction would break down each time he revealed his Delhi Police ID card. Upon reviewing the information in the chargesheet of the case he carried in his briefcase, Shiv Dev discovered that Coomar Narain had grown up in Coimbatore. So he decided to travel to Coimbatore by bus. It was from Coimbatore that the Iyers had departed for Palakkad, where they had been granted refuge by the Zamorin of Kozhikode many centuries ago.
Coimbatore in 1925, when Coomar Narain was born, was vastly different from the Tamil Nadu city of 2017. The houses that once stood there had been replaced by high rises and markets. Additionally, roads had been widened where there were previously only little alleys. However, this expansion did not make finding Venkitarama Aiyar any easier for Shiv Dev.
Based on the age given at his death in 2000, Coomar Narain was probably born in or around 1925. His father Venkitarama Aiyer had moved from Palakkad to Coimbatore, where Coomar Narain spent his childhood. Shiv Dev searched through the alleys of the old quarters in Coimbatore to find clues about the Narains but was unsuccessful. It seems his extended family found him intimidating because of the reports of his success in Delhi, and gradually drifted away as Coomar Narain focused on his fractured life and prospering career.
During the Second World War, CV Narayanan attained majority and moved to an army cantonment near Nagpur, where he received training in the Army Postal Service from 1943 to 1947. Kamptee,2 a colonial town near Nagpur, was a beautiful place to start a career. Shiv Dev also visited it, an important colonial-era location for intelligence operatives, as it was the operating base of the Army Postal Service. Soldiers and spies sent many letters through Kamptee due to the war in Europe and Southeast Asia. As a result, important information passed through the area, which was viewed with interest. It is unclear whether Coomar Narain was introduced to the ways of the intelligence world here while he handled letters from the front. Did that kindle a sense of curiosity in the world of professional intelligence officials? It is not known definitively. But it is known that a few years later, his career would bring him into the confluence of trade, technology, lobbying and Cold War–era intelligence. His training in the postal service hinted that Narain probably was not a stranger to the intelligence network of colonial India during the declining years of the Raj.
Excerpted with permission from A Singular Spy: The Untold Story of Coomar Narain, Kallol Bhattacherjee, Bloomsbury India.
