The Serene Invasion (47 page)

“Namaste,” said the old man, and then. “But one more thing. If I may ask... in what do you believe, child?”

Ana thought about it for long seconds, then said, “I believe in the Serene, sir,” and turned and walked away down the alley.

S
HE TURNED ON
to the main street and walked towards the station. She would take a short-cut over the footbridge across the multiple tracks, where as a child she had perched on the girders like a station monkey.

The station was not so crowded as it had been in her childhood; more people owned electric cars now, and scooters, and consequently the platforms were almost deserted. She crossed the footbridge, noting that the nimble grey monkeys still cavorted through the girders on the lookout for unwary children with bananas.

She left the station and strolled down the busy streets, passing Bhatnagar’s restaurant. She had half a mind to stop and eat a masala dosa, but the desire to find Bilal’s address drove her on. Maybe later, and maybe accompanied by Bilal, she could stop and eat... or was she being too hopeful? Who was to say that her brother would still be at the same address? And even if he were, would he anything other than angry and resentful at her sudden reappearance after all these years?

She came to a residential area that in her childhood had been a slum but which was now an affluent district of poly-carbon apartments on wide, leafy streets.

Heart hammering, she consulted her softscreen implant and read the address she had entered there. 1025 Nanda Chowk... She summoned a map of the area, which showed her present position in relation to her destination. She was fifty metres from the turning, and her chest felt fit to burst as she hurried to the corner and turned down Nanda Chowk.

1025 was a small, neat weatherboard building with a lawn and a flower-embroidered border – not the type of house where she had imagined her brother might live.

She pushed open the gate and walked up the path. She stood before the white-painted door for a minute, working to control her breathing and marshal her thoughts. She recalled the time she had confronted Bilal in his office ten years ago, when despite all her determination not to accuse him she had done just that, and regretted it.

This time, no accusations.

She touched the sensor beside the door, stood back and waited.

She heard a sound from within, footsteps approaching the door. She was sweating. She fixed a smile in place and stared at the door where she expected Bilal’s face to appear.

The door opened and a portly Sikh in his fifties smiled down at her. “How can I help you?” he asked, suspiciously.

She began to speak, her words tripping up over themselves, then took a breath and began again, “I am trying to find my brother, Bilal Devi. I was given this address...”

“Ah, Bilal. Yes, yes. But I am afraid that Bilal moved out just last year.”

“Moved out?” Ana repeated as if she failed to comprehend the meaning of the words.

“Yes, yes,” said the Sikh. “He took up residence in his place of work.”

“And where might that be?”

“Bilal worked in the new Gandhi State Orphanage on Victoria Road, beside the river. Your brother is a fine man and does good work there.” Smiling, he reached out and took Ana’s hand in a prolonged shake. “It is a privilege to meet Bilal’s sister. When you find him, please convey my compliments, ah-cha? I am Mr Singh-Gupta, and for many years my wife and I had the honour of having Bilal lodge in our family home.”

Ana smiled and promised to convey these sentiments to her brother when she found him. Thanking Mr Singh-Gupta, Ana took her leave and hurried across the city towards the river.

Bilal worked in an orphanage? Her brother, the trendy, materialistic, Serene-hating businessman... he now worked in a state-run orphanage, doing good work with needy children?

As she hurried along the busy street, Ana wondered if the person in question was indeed her brother, or someone else entirely – then chastised herself for the thought.

Was it too much to hope that Bilal had indeed seen the error of his ways?

The Gandhi State Orphanage was an ultra-modern poly-carbon building more like a rearing ocean liner than a government building, all curving sleek lines and convex silver planes.

Taking a deep breath Ana paused before the sliding doors, counted to ten, then plunged inside.

She asked a young man at reception where she might find Bilal Devi.

“And why do you wish to see Mr Devi?” he asked.

Over her surprise that he was indeed here, she said, “I am his sister, and I have not seen my brother for many years...”

The receptionist regarded her with wide eyes. “Mr Bilal never said anything about a sister. Ah-cha. He is off duty at the moment, and you will find him through there.” He pointed to a door at the far end of the foyer, and Ana thanked him and made her way across the carpeted floor.

She pushed open the door and blinked as she found herself dazzled by sunlight. She had expected another plush room, but was standing before a big courtyard surrounded by flimsy timber shacks with swing doors like bathing cubicles. She counted twenty such cubicles and wondered which one might be Bilal’s.

She was about to return to the foyer, and ask the receptionist where precisely she might find her brother, when she heard someone speaking.

She recognised the voice, and it was coming from a shack to her right. She moved into the shadow, stood by the open window, and listened.

Bilal was saying, “... and then Mahatma, with his followers, left Sabarmati Ashram and walked to the coast...”

Through the window Ana saw six boys and girls sitting on the floor in a semi-circle, staring with rapt expressions at the man who sat on the bed, an open book on his lap.

She stared, hardly able to credit that this was indeed her brother. He seemed to have aged more than just ten years since the last time she had seen him; gone was the suit, the long hair, and the ear-ring. His hair was cropped short, and he wore a faded pair of jeans and a bleached green t-shirt.

His voice was gentle as he told the children the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s trek across Gujarat in 1930.

He paused, perhaps sensing that he was being watched, and looked up.

Ana did not pull back, but stared in through the window at her brother sitting cross-legged on the bed. He appeared thinner in middle-age, almost starved, and his expression was dumbfounded.

His lips moved, shaping her name. He spoke in rapid Hindi to the children, telling them to remain where they were; then he unfolded himself from the narrow bunk, crossed the room to the door, stepped out and confronted her.

They stared at each other in silence for what seemed like a long time before he spoke. “What do you want, Ana?”

His tone was neutral, gentle.

She said, “Just to talk, Bilal.”

He uttered a sound, a low moan, pushed himself from the doorway and to her surprise hurried across the compound. He slipped between two shacks on the far side, and it was a second or two before Ana moved herself to give chase. “Bilal!” she called after him.

She turned sideways and inserted herself between the timber lean-tos. Ahead she saw Bilal turn right. She followed him and found herself on the eastern bank of the Hoogli, its vast expanse surprising her after the confines of the compound.

The bank sloped steeply at her feet, comprised of concrete walkways, piers and timber moorings.

Bilal was sitting at the very end of a timber jetty, regarding the muddy waters far below, his legs dangling. He could run no further, and Ana took her time before approaching. Her sudden appearance after so long, she realised, must have come as something of a shock. He needed time to adjust to the idea of seeing her again... She stared at him, and was reminded, in his almost abject, little-boy-lost posture, sitting there swinging his legs, of the fifteen-year-old she recalled from so long ago.

She moved from the shadows, into the blistering heat of the sun, and walked along the jetty towards him. Further down the river a dozen young boys, as naked as monkeys, were hurling themselves from a pier and crashing into the water with delighted cries and shrieks.

She sat down, a metre away from her brother, and said, “Remember when we came here to jump in and swim? And sometimes we came to fish, though I can’t recall ever catching anything.”

“Back then the river was polluted, Ana. Nothing lived in it. Now, the river is full of life.”

She murmured, “The Ganges is like the world, come to life again.”

A companionable silence came between them, but there was so much that Ana wanted to say.

Bilal showed no inclination to say anything more, so she said, “I did not expect, when I went to New York in search of you, to find you in Kolkata, working in an orphanage.”

He hugged his right knee and stared into the river. His crew-cut hair was greying. Lines radiated from his eyes. She wondered where the slick businessman had fled to. He said, “Why did you come here, Ana? To accuse me again, to point the finger and blame me?”

“No, not this time, Bilal. I came... to see you. To talk about how it was when we were young. I just wanted to say that what happened ten years ago...”

“Stop, please. I don’t want to be reminded of...” His face was twisted bitterly at the recollection.

“Then let’s not talk of that, Bilal.” She paused, then went on, “The children back there were entranced by your story-telling.”

“They are young, and love stories. For many of them, it is the first time that anyone has read to them. Would you believe, Ana, that many of them had never even heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”

“Had we, at their age? I don’t know what is more surprising, Bilal; to find you here at the orphanage, or to hear you reading stories about Gandhi-ji. He was a man of peace, after all. The Serene would have loved him.”

For the first time her brother turned and looked at her.

“I am not the person I was, Ana. I have changed.”

“What happened?”

He gave a long sigh, staring out across the wide river to the far, crowded bank, and it was a while before he replied.

“I lied when I saw you ten years ago, Ana. I lied about the time I left you when you were six. I... never had any intention of coming back to find you. I was thinking only of myself, of my survival. I’ll be honest, though it pains me to say this... I thought then that you were a burden. I wanted nothing more than to get away, to better myself, but how could I do this when I had a sister hanging onto me, dragging me down?” He stared at her. “I’m sorry if these words hurt, but they are the truth.”

“I guessed as much, Bilal.” Though that did not make the truth any less painful.

“I wanted to get away from the poverty, the beatings. I was sick of being hungry, of being treated like a rat, of being a nobody. And then I had my chance, and no one and nothing was going to hold me back. Ana... I want you to understand this, to understand the boy I was then. I wasn’t a good person, but there were reasons why I wasn’t.”

She said, “I’m not blaming you.”

“Our uncle beat me daily, which is why we left his house and fled to the station. Not because he threw us out, but because he beat me for not bringing in enough rupees to pay our way.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know. You never told me.”

He shrugged.

She said, “But you did come back to find me, like you said, five years after you left? You told me that you came back to the station, but I was not there. I knew you were telling the truth because then I was in Delhi... so I knew you had come back for me.”

She stopped as she saw him shaking his head. “I was lying, Ana. I never came back. That you were in Delhi then was just a coincidence.”

She nodded, taking this in, dismantling the memories that she had erected over the years of Bilal caring enough, once, to come in search of her.

She smiled to herself, and was not surprised that she felt no anger. His admission fitted with who he had been, back then, and who he might have become now.

“So the Bilal I met ten years ago, the champion of the Morwell Organisation, the hater of the Serene...”

“Was the person I had become because of the person I had been, the boy who had nothing one day, and then was suddenly offered the world. Please understand how that kind of promise can make a person... inhuman.”

“And now?”

“As I said, I am a different person now.”

“And I asked, ‘What happened?’”

He lodged his chin on his knees and regarded the water. He said at last, “Shortly after I... did what I did, tried to infect you with the Obterek implants... I expected retribution from the Serene. I expected some form of punishment. I don’t know what, but I lived in constant fear. James Morwell too, I know. But the strange thing was that nothing happened. We were not punished, or even admonished.”

“The Obterek never contacted Morwell again?”

“Not to my knowledge. Perhaps six months passed, and then I met a woman, an incredible woman who changed my life, little by little. I... until that point I had never been in love. I’d... I suppose, looking back, I’d used women for my own ends. But with her... things were different. She opened my eyes, made me confront my mistakes, look upon what I had done wrong, face my shortcomings and my humanity, or lack of...” He stopped, then said, “She also made me understand all that the Serene had done for us.”