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.