‘After some years had gone by, Llewelyn’s anger was rekindled. His own career was floundering and he urgently needed some dramatic incident, a new bloodbath, with which to recapture the attention of the London authorities and restore his reputation as the panther of Bengal. His solution was clear: to put pressure on Chandra but this time using different weapons.
‘For years Llewelyn had been investigating the engineer, and finally his henchmen sniffed out the series of crimes linked to Jawahal. Llewelyn almost let the case come to light. Then, just at the point when your father was more enmeshed than ever in his Jheeter’s Gate project, he intervened, closing down the case but threatening to reveal the truth unless your father created a new weapon for him, a deadly instrument of repression that would put an end to the riots that the pacifists and pro-independence campaigners kept strewing in Llewelyn’s path. Chandra had to comply, therefore the Firebird was born, a machine that could turn a city or a village into an ocean of flames in a matter of seconds.
‘Chandra developed the railway and the Firebird side by side, under constant pressure from Llewelyn, whose greed, together with the suspicions he was starting to arouse among his superiors, threatened to expose him. A man who until then had been considered calm, even-tempered and dutiful was now showing himself to be an obsessive maniac whose desire for success and recognition blocked his own chances of survival.
‘Chandra realised that Llewelyn’s downfall was only a matter of time, so he played along with him and made him believe that he would hand over the finished project sooner than planned. This only increased Llewelyn’s mania and tore apart what little sanity he had left.
‘In 1915, a year before the opening of Jheeter’s Gate and the railway line extending from it, Llewelyn ordered the slaughter of a defenceless crowd, with no possible justification, and was thrown out of the British army in a scandal that even reached the House of Commons. His star would never shine again.
‘His madness now took on new dimensions. Llewelyn gathered a group of officers who were loyal to him – like Llewelyn, they had been stripped of their rank and instructed to give up their weapons. With this horde of butchers he set up a sinister paramilitary squad that operated in secret. They sported their old uniforms and medals in a grotesque parody, congregating in Llewelyn’s former residence so that they could maintain the fiction that they were a secret elite unit and that it would not be long before they would force out the very men who had signed their expulsion orders. Needless to say, Llewelyn never admitted that he’d been downgraded and disciplined. According to him and his collaborators, they had all resigned in order to found a new military order.
‘Soon your father received death threats against himself and his pregnant wife if he did not deliver the Firebird. As the project was clandestine, Chandra had to handle it with great care. If he asked the army for help, his past would eventually come out. His only option was to make a pact with Llewelyn and his men.
‘Amid all that tension, two days before the projected opening of Jheeter’s Gate – and not afterwards, as I told you before – Kylian gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl. Your sister Sheere and you, Ben.
‘A symbolic journey had been planned for the inauguration of Jheeter’s Gate. The first train would transport three hundred and sixty-five orphaned children – one for each day of the year – from Calcutta to the orphanages of Bombay. What Chandra proposed to Llewelyn and his men was this: he would load the Firebird onto the train and, taking advantage of a technical stop that he would arrange about a hundred and fifty kilometres after departure, in the vicinity of Bishnupur, the soldiers would be able to unload the device and make off with it. Llewelyn accepted. Chandra was planning to disable the machine and get rid of Llewelyn and his men before the train had even sounded its whistle. But Llewelyn was secretly suspicious of the arrangement and ordered his men to get to the station early.
‘Your father had arranged to meet the soldiers inside Jheeter’s Gate, a labyrinth that only he knew, and under the pretext of showing them the Firebird, he led them into the tunnels. Llewelyn, however, had taken his own precautions, and before going to meet the engineer he had kidnapped your mother, and both of you with her. Just as Chandra was about to eliminate his blackmailers, Llewelyn revealed that he was holding you and your mother, and he threatened to kill all of you unless your father handed over the Firebird. Chandra was forced to surrender. But this wasn’t enough for Llewelyn. He ordered his men to chain your father to the engine, planning to cut him to pieces when the train began its journey, and then, right in front of your father, he cold-bloodedly plunged a knife into Kylian’s throat. He let her bleed to death slowly, hanging her from a noose in the central vault of the station. He told her he would leave you, Ben and Sheere, in the tunnels to be devoured by rats.
‘Leaving Chandra chained to the engine, Llewelyn ordered his men to start the train and take the Firebird with them. Meanwhile he was going to hide the babies in a tunnel where nobody would ever be able to find you. But things did not go according to plan. That idiot Llewelyn was overconfident and had supposed that Chandra Chatterghee would simply hand over a machine with the exterminating capability of the Firebird to an assassin like him. But Chandra had taken every precaution imaginable and had fitted the Firebird with a secret timer, known only to himself, that would release all the destructive power of the machine after a few seconds if anybody but him tried to use it.
‘As Llewelyn and his cohort of thugs boarded the train, the gang leader made a decision: as a parting gift and a prelude to the revenge he was planning to exact on the city once he had mastered the deadly invention, he would destroy the station, letting the fire raze Chandra’s work and the lives of all those who had gathered to witness its launch. However the moment Llewelyn ignited the Firebird, he also signed the death sentence of every single person on that train, including himself. Five minutes later an inferno was unleashed, taking with it the bodies and souls of both the innocent and the guilty.
‘You will be wondering why I lied to you about the prison where Jawahal was held or why his name was never mentioned in the records. Before I continue, and this is the most important thing, I want you to understand that, whatever you may hear, Chandra was a great man. A man who loved his wife and who would have loved his children if he’d had the opportunity to be a father to them. Now that I’ve said that, I will reveal the truth …
‘When your father was young and fell ill with fever, he did not end up in a shack by the river where a boy looked after him until he was better, as I told you. Your father was brought up in an institution called Grant House that still exists in South Calcutta. You’re too young to have heard the name, but there was a time when it was infamous. Your father arrived at Grant House after witnessing a terrible event when he was barely six years old. His mother, who was unwell and earned her living by selling her body for a pittance, set fire to herself in front of him, offering herself up as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. Grant House, where Chandra grew up, was a home for the mentally ill – what you’d call a lunatic asylum.
‘For years he was confined to the corridors of that place, with no parents or friends other than people whose lives were defined by delirium and suffering. People who cried out that they were devils, gods or angels only to forget their own names the following day. By the time he was old enough to leave the institution, Chandra’s entire childhood had been coloured by the most profound horror and human misery Calcutta had ever witnessed.