The Serene Invasion (26 page)

She looked around the platform, seeking out the nooks and crannies where, ten years ago, she would have seen evidence of the street kids – or the ‘station rats’ as Mr Jangar had called them – but only commuters occupied the platform, awaiting their trains. Of course, she told herself, street kids were a thing of the past, now. Her generation had been the very last.

She pulled the silver envelope from the side pocket of her holdall and crossed to the station master’s office.

A secretary sat before a softscreen. He looked up enquiringly as Ana entered.

“I am looking for the station master, Mr Jangar,” she said. “I have an appointment with him at three o’clock.”

The young man referred to his screen and nodded. “Ana Devi?” He indicated a door to Ana’s right. “Mr Jangar will see you straight away.”

She hurried through the door and found herself in a small waiting room. She approached a door bearing the nameplate “Station Master Daljit Jangar,” and knocked.

A deep voice rumbled, “Come in.”

Ana pushed open the door, suddenly a child again, her heart thudding at the thought of meeting the feared Jangar after all these years.

She stepped into the room and he rose to meet her, the very same barrel-bellied, walrus-moustachioed, turbaned Sikh she recalled from her childhood, only a little fatter now, a little slower.

They shook hands and he indicated a seat, then sat down behind his impressively vast desk and stared at her. “Now what can I do for you, Miss...?”

“I am Ana Devi,” she said, “and I am the senior food production manager at the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city.”

He nodded, peering at her closely. “If you don’t mind my saying, Miss Devi, your face is very familiar.”

She smiled. “And so it should be, Mr Jangar. You made the lives of myself and my friends a constant misery.”

He shook his head in confusion. “I don’t quite understand...”

“As a child I lived here on the station. I begged and stole, played on the girders beneath the footbridge, slept in the van in the goods yard.”

“Ah, a station rat. You were a nuisance, I will say that much. The trouble I got from the police superintendent to clear the station of kids.” He chuckled, as if reflecting on good times.

Ana said, “We had nowhere else to live, Mr Jangar. Oh, sometimes we slept in the park, but it was a dangerous place. At least here there was food to be had, and shelter, and crowds to hide among.”

She glanced across the room to the stick propped in the corner, Mr Jangar’s dreaded lathi. She remembered one occasion, when she was seven or eight, and a ticket collector had caught her stealing biscuits from the station canteen and dragged her kicking and screaming to Jangar’s office. She had half a mind to remind him of the beating he had dealt her then, but restrained herself.

“You no longer have occasion to use your lathi?” she asked.

“Oh, I threaten dilatory workers with it from time to time, Miss Devi, but gone are the days when...”

She said, “Thanks to the Serene.”

He stared at her. “There was something to be said for a little constructive punishment, in the right place.”

Ah, she thought, so that’s what it was, that beating and others that had left her black and blue and unable to walk properly for a week: constructive punishment. Would it have pained her any less, she thought, to have known that as a tiny seven-year-old?

Jangar cleared his throat. “But I take it that you did not come here merely to reminisce, Miss Devi.”

She smiled. Part of her motive for delivering the letter – which might as easily have been sent by email – was to visit the station again and impress upon Jangar how she had overcome her lowly origins.

She slid the silver envelope across the desk and watched him slit it open and read the letter.

He harrumphed. “From the wilderness city director himself,” he muttered.

“And as the letter states, he is not impressed by the continual lateness of the Kolkata trains, Mr Jangar. We depend upon punctuality in order to maximise the distribution of our produce, as I’m sure you understand.”

“Quite, quite...”

“This could have been sent by email, Mr Jangar, but Director Chandra wanted me to stress the importance of the matter, and to say this: if things do not improve, Mr Jangar, then the matter will be presented to the city council.”

Jangar looked up, but could not bring himself to look her in the eye. “I will have my transport manager look into the matter forthwith, Miss Devi.”

“Excellent.” Ana stood, reached out and shook Jangar’s hand. “It has been a pleasure to talk of old times,” she said, and swept from the office as if walking on air.

One demon from her past confronted and exorcised, she thought.

She booked into a new hotel complex across the road from the station, showered and rested on the bed for an hour before leaving the hotel and strolling through the busy streets.

Everything
changed, she had once read somewhere, but India changed more gradually than anywhere else. She saw prosperity on the streets, where ten years ago she had seen poverty – families living in the gutters, maimed beggars on street corners, kids trapping rats and birds in order to provide their only meal in days...

Now she saw well dressed citizens promenading, and stalls selling fruit and vegetables – she felt a sense of pride in this – and new poly-carbon structures nestling alongside ancient temples and scabbed buildings. Tradesmen still plied their crafts beside the roads: cobblers and shoe-shiners alongside hawkers selling freshly-pressed fruit- and sugar-cane juice. But gone was the grinding poverty that had once given the streets an air of hopeless desperation.

She made her way to Station Road and stood outside Bhatnagar’s restaurant where, as a girl, she had pressed her nose against the window and stared at the ziggurats of gulab jamans, the slabs of kulfi and dripping piles of idli, and beyond them to the fat, wealthy diners filling their faces with food that Ana had only dreamed of eating.

Now she stepped through the sliding door – metaphorically taking the hand of the timid girl she had been – and was met by a liveried flunky who bowed and showed her to a table beside the window.

She ordered a vegetable pakora starter followed by a dal mushroom masala, then finished off with barfi and a small coffee. She glanced through the window, half expecting to see hungry faces pressed to the glass; but the children she did see out there were clutching the hands of their parents and did not spare a glance at the diners beyond the wondrous piles of sweetmeats.

As she was about to leave, Ana caught the eye of an old waiter and said, “Do you know if a gentleman by the name of Sanjeev Varnaputtram still orders food from this restaurant?”

The old man appeared surprised by the enquiry. “Varnaputtram has fallen on hard times. No longer can he afford to dine on food from Bhatnagar’s.”

“So he’s still alive?”

“So I have heard, but he is old and very ill these days.”

“And do you happen to know where I might find him?”

The man laughed, showing an incomplete set of yellowed teeth. “Where he is always to be found. His house on Ganesh Chowk. He is so fat, Miss, that no one can move him!”

Smiling, Ana tipped the waiter, settled her bill and left the restaurant.

She made her way back towards the station, then turned from the main street and paced down the narrow alleyways to the house where Varnaputtram still lived.

She had tried to look ahead and guess what her feelings might be when she made this journey back into her past, and this specific walk down Ganesh Chowk to confront the monster who was Sanjeev Varnaputtram. She had assumed she would feel fear – a vestige of the dread from all those years ago – and also apprehension, but the surprising truth was that she felt none of these things: what she did feel was anger.

She came to the familiar gate in the wall and pushed it. To her surprise it was not locked – Gopal’s doing, she thought, and it had not been repaired in a decade.

She was confronted by an almost solid wall of vegetation, through which she could barely make out the narrow path. She ducked along it, batting fronds and branches from her face, and came at last to a pair of pink doors, flung open to admit the slight evening breeze.

She stepped into the tiled hallway, expecting to be stopped by Sanjeev’s lounging minions, Kevi Nan, the Sikh double-act and other hangers-on. But the hall was empty, and as she crossed the tiles towards the pink-painted timber doors to Sanjeev’s inner sanctum, she heard a querulous voice call out, “Datta? Is that you?”

She reached out, pushed open the door, and stood on the threshold.

She had assumed that Sanjeev might have shrunk over the years – following the rule that all things returned to in adulthood appear smaller – but she had assumed wrongly. Sanjeev might no longer dine on Bhatnagar’s finest take-aways, but he had evidently found an alternative supplier. He was vast, with gross rolls of fat overflowing the narrow charpoy. A towel – made tiny by comparison to his splayed thighs – covered his manhood.

A bald head sat atop the mound of his body, and tiny marble eyes peered out. He was sweating, and he stank.

“Who are you? What do you want, girl?”

She remained on the threshold, staring at her erstwhile tormentor.

“I said what do you want?” Sanjeev shrilled. “And where is Datta?”

She stepped into the room, pulled up a rickety chair, and positioned it before the bed. She sat down in silence, never taking her gaze from the appalling specimen of humanity before her.

She said quietly, “Where are your henchmen now, Sanjeev?”

His eyes, deep in their pits of flesh, stared at his with incomprehension. “What do you mean?”

“Kevi Nan, the Sikhs, the other thugs you paid to abduct street kids from the station and bring here. Where are they now, Sanjeev? Left you, moved on?”

“You haven’t heard? Kevi is dead, fell under the Delhi Express years ago. The others...” He waved a tiny hand and Ana was reminded of a seal’s twitching flipper. “I am an old man, and ill, and they have left me like the vermin they were. Only Datta remains, in the hope that when I die he’ll get the house.”

Ana felt a strange emotion somewhere deep within her, and fought to suppress it.

She said, “You have really no idea who I am?”

He peered at her. “Police? Or from the council?”

“I am Ana Devi, and ten years ago I lived at Howrah station. Six years before that, Kevi Nan captured me one day and dragged me here, and you ripped the t-shirt and shorts from my body – the only clothing I possessed at the time – and dragged me onto...” She stopped, her voice catching, and worked at withholding her tears. “Then you buggered me all night with your pathetic, tiny cock...”

She stared at him, attempting to discern the slightest sign of remorse in his features.

She said, “And then, ten years ago, just as the Serene arrived, you had me dragged back here, and again you tried to rape me, only this time...” She smiled at him. “This time, the Serene had arrived and I got away.”

He pointed with his ridiculous flipper hand. “I remember you!” He wheezed, his breath coming unevenly. “You escaped through the window. The beginning of the end! Only it was not quite the end...”

She said, “Kevi Nan abducted my friend, Prakesh, and you plied him with rum and...”

Sanjeev chuckled. “And you and your station rats came and carried him off and that, sadly,
was
the very end.”

She shook her head. “The end of the abuse?”

He lifted his fat fingers and tapped something on his upper arm. Ana stared at the square protuberance of an implant, as Sanjeev explained, “Six months after the aliens came, the authorities arrived here, burst in and issued a warrant. I had to go to court! Me, Sanjeev Varnaputtram! It was the very last time I left this room.”

“And you were found guilty, and your punishment was...”

“This! Chemical castration, they call it. Do they realise what they did to me, do they? Me, Sanjeev Varnaputtram!”

She stared at him, and that earlier, incipient emotion – pity, it had been – was washed away as she realised that he had no comprehension whatsoever of the depravity of his crimes.

She said, “It was the least you deserved. Some would say you got off lightly.”

“Get out!” he spat. “I said, get out.”

She remained sitting on the chair, staring at him.

“Before I go,” she said softly, “I’d like to tell you about some of the boys and girls you victimised over the years.” She paused, took a breath and said, “Gopal Dutt is now a train driver in Madras, with a wife and three children. Danta Malal is a botanist working with me in the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city; he is to be married later this year. Prakesh Patel is a biologist in the same place, and the father of three boys. And I... I am a senior manager working in food production in the same city.” She smiled at him. “We have survived our childhoods, we have overcome the poverty and abuse, and every one of us has moved forward and prospered.”

She stood and moved to the door, then turned and stared at him. “And you, Sanjeev Varnaputtram, what have
you
done?”