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.