When the Indian nationalist M. N. Roy entered a small Chinese restaurant in 1917’s Mexico City, he just intended to make a new friend in the strange land in which he was exiled. Instead, he would leave his lunch with aging Mexican socialist Adolfo Santibáñez with an idea, creating what would become the first Communist Party outside of Russia — an improbable twist of fate that would propel him to global fame.

Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, later known as M. N. Roy, was born on March 21, 1897, in the village of Arbelia near Calcutta. He joined the revolutionary independence organization Anushilan Samiti at the age of fourteen. Created by the Bengali barrister Pramanath Nath Mitra, the Samiti believed that a nationwide armed struggle was the only salient method to defeat the British Empire.

The outbreak of WWI made the Samiti look to Imperial Germany as a potential ally given their mutual enemy, the British. In 1914, the word came back; Germany was prepared to finance the revolution. Bhattacharya left for Japan in 1915 in what he assumed would be a short trip to meet the German consul for an, in hindsight, absurd plan. As he wrote decades later in his Memoirs, the Samiti had decided “to use German ships interned in a port at the northern tip of Sumatra, to storm the Andaman Islands, and free and arm the prisoners there,” and procure “several hundred rifles and other small arms” from Chinese smugglers to do so.