HAVEN

BIOGRAPHY

Born in New Delhi, India, Radha Dastoor was the elder daughter of a prominent Indian couple. Her father was a Hindu international diplomat for the government and her mother was a Zoroastrian professor of philosophy. Their mixed background gave Radha a perspective on how all religions teach the same message of love and acceptance towards one's fellow man. The Dastoors provided money and support to the poor and the sick throughout India, regardless of their background. But while her family's wealth and privilege kept her physically removed from the suffering in India's poorer areas, Radha remained emotionally attuned to it. Although not a mutant, Radha was psychically sensitive from an early age, able to feel the needs and problems of others weighing on her mind. She often turned to prayer for solace, and resolved even as a child to attend to the betterment of all mankind as best she could.

At eighteen, Radha left home and began ministering to the sick and needy on the streets of Calcutta. She turned her family fortune towards the creation of the Haven Children's Hospital in those suffering streets. The thankful children soon began calling Radha herself "Haven" out of gratitude. Radha's path was permanently altered, however, when she met and fell in love with an unnamed man during her work. Radha was passionately devoted to her lover, and her charitable work faltered because of his distraction. The man was not so devoted, and soon grew tired of Radha and abandoned her, heartbroken and pregnant with his child.

Shamed and spiritually adrift by the situation she found herself in, Radha prayed as never before in search of guidance. That guidance came from the most unlikely of sources: the fetus itself. Radha's unborn child was apparently a mutant, a sentient lifeform that would never come to full term, but symbiotically bound itself to its mother, and spoke to her from within. The child was a prophet, and foretold events which Radha took as divine truth. It spoke of the Mahapralaya, the Great Dissolution, a series of disasters that would destroy 3/4s of the world and its population. From the ashes of the old world, mankind would evolve and a New Humanity would rise up into a golden era of peace and enlightenment.

Her will to live renewed by this divine vision, Radha dedicated herself to preparing humanity for the Mahapralaya. She left India for a time to receive an education at several top universities in America, while also authoring books about the New Humanity and speaking out on the lecture circuit, fully embracing the name Haven for herself. As mutantkind became more openly known and prominent in the world, "The One Within" educated Haven on how man and mutant were not two separate species vying for control of the world, but one people evolving together on the path to become the New Humanity. Thanks to her mutant fetus (which never aged or came to term, despite the passage of years), Haven experienced the life of a mutant personally, as she found she could channel her child's powers through her own body. The ability to transport herself and others through a dimension next door to oblivion proved useful on many levels. In particular, it allowed Haven to subject any potential followers to their own personal Pralaya. While the Mahapralaya would bring the destruction and transformation of humanity as a whole, a Pralaya engineered by Haven's power would bring about the "utter annihilation of self" -- a physical and spiritual journey through oblivion and, hopefully, back to reality.

Haven's faith in her child's prophecies led her to take actions she never would have considered otherwise, however. Although the fetus claimed the Mahapralaya would take the world in seven hundred years' time, it said mankind would suffer greatly in the time leading up to the renewal and the rise of the New Humanity. The fetus convinced Haven that the Mahapralaya could be triggered prematurely. By inducing worldwide chaos and disasters now, it foretold, Haven could accelerate the coming of the Mahapralaya and bring humanity to its destiny centuries early.

Believing she was acting for the greater good, Haven turned her organization of followers and converts towards committing acts of terrorism and destruction, all in the name of the Mahapralaya. At some point, her younger brother Aloba Dastoor manifested mutant powers. He joined Radha in her efforts to bring about the Mahapralaya as her enforcer named Monsoon. [X-Factor (1st series) #98, X-Factor Annual #9]

[NOTE: The truth of Haven's beliefs is, of course, suspect. No independent confirmation of the Mahapralaya or even the fetus's existence has been made. Radha could have been completely schizophrenic and delusional, imagining the One Within speaking to her. The "fetus" could have been something else entirely, a demon or other mystical entity that enjoyed fomenting chaos for its own sake. Certainly, later revelations tend to point to this conclusion, as we will see below.]

Nearly twenty years after her lover abandoned her, Radha was still seeking to bring about the Mahapralaya. Her terrorist activities struck out all over the world, including a bombing at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. She also continued publicly writing and lecturing about the more palatable aspects of her beliefs, such as her treatise Man, Mutant and the New Humanity. The Kennedy Center bombing got the attention of the U.S. government, who began briefing Forge on her activities, as the liaison to their mutant strike force, X-Factor. Aware of X-Factor and hoping to sway them to her path, Haven intervened when another branch of the government tried to kidnap Polaris as part of the Magneto Protocols. Haven transported Lorna away from her attackers and into the private limbo maintained by her child's powers. [X-Factor (1st series) #96] Haven offered the hand of friendship to Polaris, and informed her about the coming of the New Humanity. She returned Lorna safely to Georgetown, with an invitation to her next lecture at the Brahma House in Annapolis, Maryland. Most of X-Factor was in attendance at the lecture, as well as their previous government liaison, Val Cooper. [X-Factor (1st series) #97]

The subdued atmosphere of the lecture hall was interrupted by the arrival of Forge and Havok, fresh from government briefings on Haven and armed with a warrant to arrest her for federal crimes. Polaris intervened on Haven's behalf, unable to believe the woman who saved her life was guilty of the various accusations Havok leveled at her.As X-Factor struggled to reach a consensus, Haven merely teleported out of their grasp, retiring to her stronghold in the mountains of northern California. Although X-Factor did not respond to her entreaties, Haven was pleased to learn that Val Cooper was willing to join her on her mission. After putting her through the Pralaya, Haven accepted Valerie into the fold. [X-Factor (1st series) #98]

With her new recruit, Haven began finalizing plans for her latest disaster: a satellite designed to electromagnetically stimulate the fault lines in California, causing geological devastation that would destroy the entire state while also winning her new converts by driving those in need of hope and solace into her arms. X-Factor arrived to confront Haven, but they were no more united than they had been at Brahma House. Their in-fighting only increased when Haven openly admitted her role in the chaos and terrorism the government accused her of perpetrating. Wolfsbane, who had become increasingly unstable ever since her manipulation at the hands of the Genoshan Genegineer, lunged at the throats of the "traitor" Val Cooper and Haven. Through the power of the Pralaya, however, Haven succeeded in casting Wolfsbane into oblivion and back, freeing her from the Mutate bonding process. Rahne's gratitude turned her into another willing recruit to Haven's cause. [X-Factor (1st series) #99]

Rahne's transformation and Haven's revelation about the satellite only further divided X-Factor. Polaris could not reconcile the woman who saved her life with the mass murderer Haven now freely admitted to being, and refused to stand beside her. Multiple Man was literally split by the decision. Suffering from the Legacy Virus,  Jamie Madrox's many selves had become more divergent over the past weeks. One Jamie abandoned his friends to join Haven, one actively opposed her teachings, and the last was so depleted by the virus he could barely stand. Haven tried to convince X-Factor to join her cause but even Lorna, who sensed Haven's compassionate nature realized that her actions made her as serious a threat as villains like Magneto and Sinister. Once the battle lines were drawn and Havok ordered the team to attack, Haven forcibly cast the defiant members of X-Factor through the Pralaya, incapacitating them in one of her cells.

To Haven's surprise, however, both Monsoon and Val Cooper turned against her. Indeed, Val had been infiltrating the organization from the beginning, after Monsoon became an informant against his sister months earlier. Although he believed in the Mahapralaya as his sister did, Aloba rejected Radha's hubris in thinking she could force fate to work on her time table. X-Factor won the day, as the combined powers of Havok and Polaris destroyed Haven's satellite before it devastated California. Haven acknowledged her loss, and ordered an end to the hostilities before calling X-Factor's attention to the suffering of one of their own.

Most of the team had been so wrapped up in their own affairs to even recognize the signs of Madrox's Legacy infection, but now he lay on the brink of death. Haven offered to use her powers in an attempt to cure Madrox's illness, just as she had reversed the changes forced upon Wolfsbane. With Madrox unconscious and unable to choose for himself, she left the decision to the team leader, Havok. Reluctant to trust Haven but desperate to save his dying friend, Havok agreed. Haven cast Multiple Man through oblivion, remade him and returned him to reality. To her shock, however, even Radha's powers were unable to stop the spread of the Legacy Virus, and Madrox died moments after returning.

Clinging to her beliefs, Haven listened to her Voice Within and remarked on how the Legacy Virus would be mutantkind's own Mahapralaya, purging and purifying the population. The grieving X-Factor weren't interested in her explanations, and forced Haven to teleport away. [X-Factor (1st series) #100]

Seeking to gain the forgiveness and understanding of Professor Charles Xavier after Madrox's death, Radha waited until Xavier reached out telepathically to locate her, and used the opportunity to forcibly pull him into her realm. She disclosed most of her origins to Xavier (and he managed to ferret out the full details about her "Voice Within" on his own), but she was unable to convince him of the righteousness of the Mahapralaya. Anticipating her own failure, Haven had also arranged that very night for the release of Professor Anthony Power from government custody. Power was a driven man obsessed with the destruction of Charles Xavier, and Haven regretfully knew that Xavier would have to be eliminated if he wouldn't stand beside her. [X-Factor Annual #9]

Whatever Haven's ultimate plans were for Xavier, X-Factor, and mutantkind, however, she was never able to complete them. The unborn fetus within her unexpectedly began to grow, forcing its way into this world. The Adversary, the great trickster of the Cheyenne people, used Haven to be reborn in our plane of reality. The Omniversal Guardian Roma came to Haven in her hour of need, but even she could not stop the Adversary from forcing its way out of Haven's body. Radha Dastoor died alone, lying in the mud and the rain, finally humbled by the knowledge that all her good intentions could not change the evil she was responsible for bringing into the world. [X-Factor (1st series) #117]

[NOTE: The Adversary's sudden rebirth through Haven was never fully explained. If the Adversary was meant to be the true intelligence behind Haven's fetus all along, some time travel would have to be involved. Radha's child was conceived years before the destruction of the Adversary during The Fall of the Mutants. Another possibility is that the fetus was merely a convenient mechanism for the Adversary's return -- an unborn force of chaos he could imprint himself on in order to regain a physical form.]