He smiled to himself. He felt powerful; for the first time in twenty years, he had power and the ability to use it.
He stared through the window at the city of Kolkata sprawling far below.
Somewhere out there was the man who had betrayed him, Lal Devi, and he was about to die.
Smiling to himself, James Morwell left the hotel and crossed the teeming city.
CHAPTER FIVE
TO GET FROM the Serene obelisk in the centre of the city to the address which Ben Aronica had given her, Ana had to pass the railway station and the warren of alleyways where Sanjeev Varnaputtram had made his home all those years ago. As she negotiated the potholes and roaming, khaki-coloured cows, she thought back to her last encounter with him. He had been a sad, fat, pathetic figure, deserted by his followers, self-righteous and self-piteous. She wondered if she would find him alive still. If so he would be in his late seventies now — but she doubted he had survived for long after their last meeting.
She came to the pale green timber door in the crumbling wall. It stood ajar, and the riot of vegetation behind it formed a resistant pressure against the gate as she pushed it open.
She battled her way through the jungle and came to the house. The door stood ajar, its timbers rotten. An aqueous half light prevailed within, and Ana stepped cautiously over the mossy tiles of the hallway and approached the double doors to Sanjeev’s bedroom.
She reached out a tremulous hand and pushed open the door.
She had expected to find an empty room, stripped of all possessions, with little evidence of its former occupant and little to remind her of the crimes committed within.
She gasped as her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she took in the contents of the room.
Garish movie posters adorned the walls, moulded and ripped, and a table stood beside the charpoy where, when Ana was ten, Sanjeev Varnaputtram had…
She shut out the thought.
Lying on the bed was a skeleton.
Ana took a step forward, and then another, and stared with disbelief at all that remained of the monster, Sanjeev Varnaputtram.
She recalled him as vast — larger than life — with an attendant malignity that had seemed, to the child she had been, to make him all the bigger. Now, astoundingly, he had been reduced to a skeleton, and Ana found it hard to believe that his bones were no larger than any others.
His skull had slipped sideways, its orbits regarding her lop-sidedly. Its lower mandible hung comically open. He had been dead for so long, she thought, that there was no longer any smell or any sign of the putrescence that must have attended his death.
She considered his death — and the fact that he had lain like this ever since, his remains forgotten and unmourned, a fitting end to a life spent persecuting those less powerful than himself.
She was about to turn away when she saw, pinned to the flaking plaster of the wall beside the charpoy, the photograph of a young girl.
Her breath caught and she gave a small sob of shock.
The image of herself as a girl of fifteen or sixteen smiled out at her — the photograph of her on the station platform all those years ago. To think that he’d had it with him to the very end… The idea almost made her sick, as if the evil man had possessed some small part of her down all the years.
Now she reached out and pulled the picture from the wall, and stared at the girl she had been.
She raised the photograph to her lips and kissed the faded image.
SHE LEFT THE house for the very last time and made her way through the tangle of creepers and vines that choked the pathway. She was about to reach out and pull open the gate when someone on the other side pushed it towards her.
She stood back quickly, expecting to see an aging Sikh or another of Sanjeev’s erstwhile minions.
A Buddhist monk in a bright orange robe stood smiling before her.
“Oh,” she exclaimed in surprise.
The beaming, bald-headed man — a diminutive figure she guessed to be in his eighties — gestured with palms pressed together at his chest and said, “Namaste, child.”
“Namaste,” Ana responded, raising her hands in a shadow gesture.
“May I ask what brings you here?”
In response, before she realised what she was doing, she raised the photograph of her younger self and showed it to the monk. She murmured, “When I was a child, one day the owner of this house…”
The monk raised a hand. “I have been told about what Mr Varnaputtram did here.”
She smiled and, emboldened, asked, “And what brings you here, sir?”
“You have heard of the Buddhist concept of contemplation, the practice of beholding the act of bodily decay?”
She nodded. At least, in death, the corpse of Sanjeev Varnaputtram had served some use.
“Sanjeev Varnaputtram died eight years ago, and since that time I come here every month and look upon his remains… There is a chai stall along the alley. Would you care to join me?”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
They sat on rickety wooden chairs in the alley, while children and rats played around them, and Ana said, “My name is Ana Devi, and now I live on Mars.”
“Mars!” exclaimed the old man, as if the fact of her residence so far away was a miracle. “Mars… but as a child you lived here, in this city.”
And she found herself telling the old monk all about her life on the station, her beatings at the hands of Mr Jangar, the station master, and Sanjeev Varnaputtram’s abuse of her and her friends.
“I last came here ten years ago, sir, and confronted Varnaputtram, and told him what I and the other children had achieved in life, and I thought that was the end of the affair.”
“And you were mistaken.”
“I think so. I realise now that this is the end, to have seen his bones, to have reclaimed this from his possessions.” She showed the monk her photograph again, and he took it in fingers as brown as cassia bark.
“I can see that you were a kind child, and strong, and you have grown into the woman this child promised to be. Tell me, what do you do on Mars?”
“I work in administration for the Martian legislature, and also… I am a representative of the Serene.”
“Ah, the Serene…”
Ana hesitated, then asked, “I would like to know what you think of the Serene, sir.”
He smiled, and nodded for so long that Ana thought he might never stop. At last he said, “I think the Serene were at one time like ourselves, child — that is, they were Buddhist.”
“And now?”
“Now, they have achieved satori and they have brought their ways to our world.”
They sat in silence for a time, drinking their sweet, milky chai, and Ana asked at last, “And Sanjeev Varnaputtram, sir? What of him?”
“Mr Varnaputtram was not enlightened, child. He was driven by ignorance, and a lack of empathy. He was also a very unhappy man.”
“I hated him for many years.”
“But no longer?”
She looked into her heart, and said truthfully, “No longer.”
“That is good.” He reached out and clasped her hand. “I am so happy for you, for hatred is corrosive; it sours the heart; it achieves nothing. You are wise beyond your years, child.”
Ana smiled, and wanted to tell him that she was thirty-six years old, but the truth was that, sitting here in the presence of the ancient monk, she did indeed feel like the child she had been.
“And now?” he asked.
“Now I must search for my brother.” And she told the monk all about Bilal and what had happened ten years ago.
“I feel that you will find him,” he said. “And then?”
“I don’t know. I… I would like to tell him that I forgive him what he did to me, but to do that I think I must first try to understand why he did what he did.”