The Serene Invasion

Chapter TWO





AS THE TRAIN pulled into Howrah station, Ana Devi had no sense at all of coming home.

She had assumed, on the long journey north across the Deccan plain, that she would feel a certain identification with the place where, from the age of six to sixteen, she had spent all her life. She had a store of memories both good and bad – with the good, oddly enough, outweighing the bad. She supposed that that was because she had not been alone here, a street kid scraping a living on an inimical city station, but had been surrounded by a makeshift family which had shared her experiences. She had transplanted her family to central India, and the fact that they had taken on good jobs and prospered meant that, despite their harsh upbringing, they had prevailed.

The station was a strange mixture of the old and the new. Much of it she recognised with a throbbing jolt of nostalgia, and then her recollections would be confused by the position of a new poly-carbon building or footbridge. As the train slid into the station, they passed the goods yard and the rickety van where she and twenty other kids had slept at night. The yard was surrounded by containers and new buildings, and she hardly recognised the place. The train eased to a halt on the platform, and Ana smiled as she stared across at the Station Master’s office. She wondered if Mr Jangar still ruled Howrah with a rod of iron.

She stepped from the train and allowed the crowds to drain away around her until the platform was almost deserted. She glanced up at the footbridge, where she had spent many an hour as a child watching the trains come and go, and caught a fleeting glimpse of a darting figure up there on the criss-crossed girders. She caught her breath, at once dismayed that children still haunted the station and alarmed at this individual’s daring. The girder was almost twenty metres high, and one wrong step would send the kid tumbling to the tracks below. Then the figure halted suddenly, squatted and stared down at her – and Ana laughed aloud. It was not a street kid but a slim grey monkey.

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?”

She hurried from the room before he could muster a reply, and only when she reached the sanctuary of the alleyway did she break down and weep.





SHE LEFT THE hotel at ten the following morning and strolled across the city. She sat at a café, ordered a sweet lassi, and watched the passing crowds.

At the far side of the square the Serene obelisk rose, sheer and jet, into the dazzling summer sky. At first the arrival of these singular towers in all the major cities of the world had divided aesthetic opinion. Experts opined that they were the height of architectural ugliness, others that they were in their own way things of severe beauty. Ana tended to agree with the latter school of thought: she never looked upon an obelisk without being reminded of the good that the Serene had brought to Earth, and she thought of these towers as monuments to that good.

She sometimes found it hard to believe that she had been working for the Serene for ten years now. The time since leaving Kolkata seemed to have flown. So much had changed in the world – change, she realised, that sequestered with her work in the wilderness city she had hardly noticed. It was only when she fulfilled the needs of the Serene once a month, and found herself waking up in various locations around the world, that she came to realise the extent of the changes. She had seen cities transformed, slums giving way to new poly-carbon developments, impoverished citizens replaced by well-fed and well-dressed individuals; and, most of all, pessimism receding on a wave of optimism.

She had visited every continent on Earth now, and at least a hundred cities – though, over the course of the past five years, those visits had been restricted to the cities which contained the obelisks. She wondered why this was so. Every time she came to her senses, she was in the vicinity of a jet black tower. There had to be a link, though one to which she was not privy. Yet another enigma of the aliens who had changed the world.

In the early days she had found herself fearing coming to her senses in these strange and far-flung places, and she would flee to the airport and wait until the sleek Serene jet was ready to take her back to India. She was allowed a day or two to herself in these exotic cities – a reward, she supposed, for whatever work she did for the Serene while unconscious. Over a period of time, as she gained confidence, she remained in the cities and explored a little, knowing that physically she could come to no harm. She had experienced other cultures, other ways of thinking, other foods – strange, at first, after her staple diet of curry in India – and met people of all colours and creeds.

A couple of years ago it came to her that she was, truly, a citizen of the world. She had learned to speak English, was learning French, and had a smattering of Italian and German. She wondered what the ignorant girl she had been, ten years ago, would have thought of this sophisticated woman she had become, who wore Western clothing and could order food in three or four different languages.

She looked at her watch and smiled. Kapil was late, which was not unusual. Despite his many excellent qualities, punctuality was not one of them. He often kept her waiting – up to two hours on one occasion! – and he blamed it on having a mother and father who had both worked for the Indian railways, where good time-keeping was a given. He said he had grown up despising the tyranny of the clock, though Ana teased him that he was making excuses.

She had met Kapil Gavaskar at the Andhra Pradesh wilderness city two years ago when he had flown in from America on a fact-finding mission. Ana’s city had just achieved record levels of fruit production, and the world was lining up to find out how.

She had been immediately attracted to the tall, slim Indian-American, who spoke Hindi with an odd twang and professed a dislike of Indian food. She had set about remedying the latter by taking him to her favourite restaurants, and even tutoring him in how to pronounce certain Indian words without a Texan vowel extension.

They tried to see each other once a month, which sometimes didn’t happen. When their itineraries proved impossible to match – like last month – Ana felt bereft, but it only served to make their next meeting all the more exciting.

They had not talked of marriage, yet, though Ana often considered life with Kapil on a permanent basis. She had yet to meet his parents – old-school Brahmins, who would doubtless turn up their noses at her lowly dalit origins.

She jumped as she felt hands on her shoulders – then relaxed as he kissed the top of her head. “Ana,” he murmured, “I’ve been watching you for the past minute. You were miles away.”

She clutched his hand as he took a seat at the table. “I was thinking about you.”

“Flatterer!”

“It’s true.” She stared at his face, drinking him in. “Oh, it’s so good to see you!”

He ordered a coffee and sipped it as he stared at her. He was thin-faced, handsome, with humorous eyes and a quick smile.

He frowned. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

She had told Kapil about her childhood shortly after they’d met – thinking that it was best to get the truth out of the way early on, so that he could leave her without breaking her heart. One of the many things that made her love him was that he had listened to her admission in silence, then kissed her on the lips and said that if it was her upbringing that had made her who she was, then he could not fault it.

But she had never told him about Sanjeev Varnaputtram, and what he had done to her and countless other street kids.

She did so now, choosing her words with care, and finished by recounting their encounter yesterday.

“The bastard!” he cried. “I’ll have him arrested!”

She smiled. “He is already chemically castrated, which is punishment enough. And he is old and ill.” She shrugged. “But it was so good, Kapil, to tell him that his victims are all now prospering. I felt... empowered.”

He took her hand and kissed her fingers.

She said, “How long do we have?”

“Until the morning. I must leave for China at ten tomorrow. I’m advising them on their sustainability program.”

“One whole day!” she laughed.

“I haven’t been to Kolkata for at least fifteen years. I was thirteen, and my parents were taking me to see an ancient aunt before we left for America.”

“Perhaps I could give you a guided tour – show you Howrah station, the streets I played in, Maidan Park where I watched the rich kids flying their expensive kites.”

He looked reflective. “I might have been one of them...”

She drained her lassi, and he his coffee, and they strolled from the square hand in hand.

They spent the day wandering around the city, visiting the sites of her childhood, the station and the park, the once mean streets between them, and Ana relived memories of her childhood, but told him only of the good ones.

She took him to Bhatnagar’s that night, and she feasted again. Kapil, thanks to Ana’s expert tutoring, had come to appreciate the cuisine of his home country. They finished the meal and strolled through the warm night, bought ice creams and promenaded along the revamped sea front, watching the liners and cruise ships leave the port and head off into the Bay of Bengal.

On the way back to the hotel they passed a store selling softscreens and other hi-tech goods, and the window was a flickering panoply of visually discordant images. One caught Ana’s eye and stopped her in her tracks. Kapil stopped too and glanced from screen to screen, unable to discern which image had arrested her attention.

Ana stared, open-mouthed, at the Indian with the long ponytail and ear-stud, who was mouthing silently to the camera.

“Ana?”

She pointed.

“Ah... handsome, no?” he said.

She dug her elbow into his ribs. The young man vanished on the screen, replaced by sports news.

Ana walked on in silence, lost in thought. That was only the third time in ten years she had seen Bilal on television, and always the sight of him touched some deep regret within her.

“Well...?” Kapil prompted.

She stopped and faced him in the moonlight. “I’ve never told you this, Kapil. But I had a brother... I mean, I have a brother.” She pointed back to the shop-front. “That is him. Bilal Devi. He ran out on me when I was six.”

He guided her to a coffee house, sat her down at a quiet table, and demanded the full story.

She told him how Bilal had protected her from local children, made her cheap kites from newspaper and twine – and how, when she was almost seven and Bilal sixteen, he had vanished without a trace.

“Ten years ago I found out... from Sanjeev Varnaputtram, of all people, that he had been taken up by a philanthropist, and educated, and then selected to work for a big American corporation.”

“But he never contacted you?” Kapil asked.

She shook her head. “Never. Nothing. Not even a letter... For a long time I thought he must be dead, and I sometimes wished that it were so. Then I wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that he deserted me and never thought to get in touch.”

He gripped her hand. “And you’ve never thought to try and contact him?”

She shook her head. “And the thing is, I don’t know why. Fear, perhaps. A part of me so much wants to see him again. But... but what if he spurns me, doesn’t want anything to do with me?” She shrugged. “How would I cope with that?”

He walked her home, murmuring that she had him now, and back in their room he undressed her slowly and they made love.

Afterwards, as always, she pressed her lips against his chest and wept.

He stroked her hair and whispered, “Why, Ana? Why do you always cry?”

She laughed through her tears, reached up and caressed his cheek. She wanted to say, “Is it not little wonder? But you would never understand...”

He left for the airport at seven the following morning, and they parted before the hotel with kisses and promises to see each other in one month.

Later, back in her room as she was preparing to leave and catch the train to Andhra Pradesh, a familiar soothing voice sounded in her head.

“Ana, a flight to Tokyo at eleven, and then tomorrow a fact-finding tour of the Fujiyama arboreal city...”

She smiled to herself. She had not visited Tokyo for years, and she had read a lot about the arboreal cities.

She contacted her manager at the wilderness city and arranged for her deputy to cover her shifts, then packed her holdall and took a taxi to the airport.