The Selector of Souls Read online

  It was the moment the swami whispered: could she please confirm the food was cooked by a brahmin, before he tasted it? Feudal disgust of lower castes still fogged the swami’s mind. Socialism, Marxism, democracy, the Indian constitution—all had passed him by. All he had gleaned from his piety was respect for genes, bloodline and ancestry. “Yes,” she told him. “The cook happens to be a brahmin.”

  Yet Kohlisons Media will be recording Swami Rudransh discourses and duplicating the swami’s videos and CDs. They will package them and print flyers, posters, banners and magazine advertisements to sell them. And soon large billboards on rooftops and small billboards on city lampposts will be plastered with Swami Rudransh’s baby-faced grin, and Vikas’s new cable TV station will broadcast the swami’s self-righteous ego-disparaging voice, and Vikas’ magazines will publish sponsored “articles” about the swami’s ashrams.

  She should destroy Vikas just for promoting this caste-ridden ignorant rubbish.

  Anu draws the swami’s lower half; she colours in the legs of his dhoti. Meanness wrapped in saffron—colour of Hinduism, colour of martyrdom. Then his sandals. Certainly not Gandhi-sandals.

  Anu draws rockets shooting from those sandals. On paper as in life, Swami Rudransh levitates above reproach, accountable only in the cosmic ledgers of karma.

  “I will do a very special ceremony for you to have sons,” the swami promised Vikas at the end of the evening, pocketing an envelope of cash. He didn’t look at Anu who would presumably produce those sons, or thank her equally for the donation. And she just stood there smiling, a walking uterus cocooned in a sari. She, a normally competent graduate of St. Anne’s Convent, with a First Division Honours degree in Science from Delhi University.

  When Vikas’s parents and the swami had retired upstairs and Anu was getting ready for bed, Vikas said, “What eyes! Those are the eyes of an enlightened man.” His own were starry, though he’d foregone his nightly whisky to teetotal with the swami. He went into the bathroom, leaving the door half-open.

  Anu, remembering how she had trusted Vikas’s droopy dark eyes before they were married, muttered that she didn’t see anything special about the swami’s eyes. That Health magazine says you can hypnotize anyone by holding his or her gaze for several minutes.

  “What an angrez-ki-aulad you are!” Vikas said, dubbing her a descendant of Britishers. “What was your problem,” he said making rummaging sounds in the bathroom, “that you had to bring up all those foreign philosophers? Don’t you have any respect?”

  This, after a whole day in the smelter-oven kitchen in June—June!—cooking the feast he and his precious swami had just consumed. Oh, she should have reached for a cut-glass vase and smashed his head right then. Well, at least her anger goaded her to say what she shouldn’t have, and in a much stronger voice than at the dinner table. “How much respect would be enough for you and your swami?”

  He didn’t answer. After a moment, he emerged from the bathroom, holding up a silver strip in one hand. Her Ovral pills. “You dare talk about respect?” he said. She had no time to swallow her heart back down into her chest, no time to lie or deny. The pills dropped to the floor as he raised his fist.

  It felt as if a comet had landed upon her. Then more were falling, pummelling her body. Shame crawls through her muscles, shame that she could not fend him off. She is unworthy of her two running trophies, her frequent walks and cycle rides. She should have fought back harder, screamed louder. But a part of her understood his anger. She wasn’t the woman he really wanted to marry. And she understood herself as deserving punishment for some mutation that expressed an urge for extinction in place of an urge to breed.

  Anu rises, goes to the door and presses her ear to it. By now, Vikas must be complaining about her to his parents, who must have been sleeping with the air conditioner on High Cool not to hear her screaming bloody murder last night till Vikas tired, flung himself on the bed and slept like a baby. If they did hear her, and ask, Vikas will tell them she provoked him. He will say she knows he has a short temper, and she shouldn’t have tried his patience.

  And tonight he’ll watch characters in a Hindi melodrama on videotape and need a tissue for his tears.

  Anu returns to the desk and her drawings.

  Mr. Kohli says Anu’s irritations will all go away if she has a second child. Another child whose welfare will demand her presence, curtail her independence even further. A trap she avoided so far, god forgive her, by using Ovral pills.

  When Anu complains about Vikas’s shouting and brutality, his mother just smiles and says, “Oh, Anu, he doesn’t mean anything. Why do you take him so seriously? He loves to tease you—he loves teasing everyone. It’s all bombast. I’ve given him a shouting. I’ve told him he shouldn’t hit you. He said he’ll try to control his anger. But you know men are like that only, dear.”

  Anu grips the red pencil again. To become used to living with Vikas requires a full frontal lobotomy. Nothing changes by accepting it. In twenty years she’ll be like Mrs. Kohli, a perpetual smile carved into her face, curiosity and critical thinking banished from her brain, impervious to violence or evidence, a silver flask and three Calmpose pills at her bedside. And she too will seek comfort by doggedly performing every ceremony prescribed by Swami Rudransh, no matter the cost.

  Words appear on the wall of Anu’s mind, too shocking to speak: I want a divorce.

  Women from “good” Hindu families don’t divorce. Nor should Indian Catholics divorce or annul their marriages. Women staring boldly from covers of English-language magazines get divorces. It’s a European tradition.

  Anu plays with the black and gold beads of her mangalsutra, the marriage necklace she has worn for nine years. Which is worse—being in this jail or in Delhi’s Tihar Jail with other women? And which is a lesser sin—divorce or taking a life?

  Divorce will hurt Vikas’s parents and her own. It will hurt Chetna. It will hurt Vikas. And though he has worn Anu’s initial willingness to love down to a nub of despair, Vikas is Chetna’s father. When he raises his hand against Anu, surely it’s because of other frustrations … he was the husband she was supposed to fall in love with, to honour as a god. All those old old old ideas …

  Once Anu was strong, confident, always improving, always learning. Today she can’t make a sandwich without Vikas sneering that she’s prepared it wrong, or that he’s tasted better. How has she allowed this to happen?

  She lifts the necklace over her head. It pours to the table with a rattle that startles the stillness.

  If she stays, it’s suicide. Is that better than divorce or murder? More of a sin or less?

  Women commit suicide, literally or figuratively, everywhere. In Bollywood movies, tele-serials, novels. At the end of the Ramayan, when Ram rejects Sita Mata on suspicion of adultery, she asks the earth to open and swallow her. Real women did it en masse when the enemy was at the gate—her own grandmother, Dadu’s mother, joined eighty-four women and plunged down a well during Partition. Dadu says she was a woman of courage, but if that’s where courage leads, Anu wants less, not more.

  If she stays, she’ll be as pitiable as those women. And what kind of example will that be for Chetna?

  What kind of example will it be if Anu commits murder?

  Anu leaves the four pencils on the table and closes the tin box over the rest. She studies her doodles before crumpling and throwing them into the wastebasket.

  In imagination, Anu has left Vikas a million times. The first time she felt ready to leave him, she discovered she was pregnant and stayed. The second time, his driving landed her in hospital, scarred for life. But now, with Chetna safe in Canada she can make it happen.

  Anu consults a calendar on the wall. It’s flipped to July, when Chetna is scheduled to return. Anu cups her hand over her swollen eye: she must act before then. And before she does something worse.

  DAMINI

  IN MEM-SAAB’S DRAWING-ROOM, DAMINI’S DAMP CLOTH arcs across a table flanking a gold, raw sil
k sofa, picking up a layer of morning dust. A little girl in a sky-blue cotton dress and matching hair-bows dangles bare legs from the sofa.

  Damini’s sandals scrape trails in the cement dust on Mem-saab’s marble floor; the sweeper doesn’t seem to be doing his job, but Damini’s not going to wipe the ground for him. Everyone has his dharma.

  She crouch-walks to the next end table, momentarily obscuring the view of the pink people on TV. She could have walked behind the sofa, but it amuses her to distract Loveleen.

  Nine years ago, Mem-saab sent Damini to Bombay to help Kiran when she was expecting this girl. Damini made khichri and fresh yogurt in Kiran and Aman’s apartment kitchen, filled a large tiffin and took a bus, as directed, to the hospital. There she sat on a cane chair, waiting till Aman brought his pregnant wife in a taxi.

  As soon as Kiran arrived, doctors and nurses began doing things to her, making decisions for her. And normally assertive Kiran just lay there as she was told—flat on her back with her heels in cups. They didn’t give her more than an hour or two without their medicines. Kiran didn’t know the meaning of the words they used any more than Damini did, though these words could affect her life, and the life of her baby. Peeto-shin, fee-thal montor, see-sex-shun. After those medicines, Kiran’s contractions looked as if a demon was attacking her from within.

  She expected to massage Kiran to help the baby come, but the nurse, who spoke strange Hindi, acted as if Kiran was sick instead of pregnant. Soon she called a doctor-saab who made Kiran lie curled up on her side and gave her an injection with a long needle. After that, it was impossible for Kiran to move or position herself and the baby at all.

  Kiran lay like a pale candle and refused to allow any doctor to bring a razor near her. Not to shave the mound of her belly, or the hair on her yoni, because of being a Sikh. She ordered Damini to guard her to be sure no one shaved her if she lost consciousness.

  A nurse asked Kiran if she felt any pain.

  Kiran said, “I feel nothing.”

  Two nurses came in: a fat, short, smiley one in a white dress, stockings ruched up in her sandals, and a sweet-faced South Indian one in a white sari and starched white cap. Kiran let them tie leather straps across her wrists. They attached a tube to the back of her hand with a needle, and hung a clear plastic bag from a pole beside her. Damini asked the South-Indian nurse if the bag was filled with Ganges-water. The nurse said no, and pointing at Damini’s tiffin carrier, admonished her—kindly—not to feed Kiran.

  Damini had given birth twice but felt so ignorant. She, a kshatriya, a warrior-woman, was told to hunker down in the corridor beside a mop and bucket of phenyl, and wait. Obviously the nurses thought her as dirty and unclean as any sweeper-woman.

  Another doctor-saab appeared, dressed head to toe in green, hands gloved in plastic, wearing a white mask that made him look as monkeyish as Lord Hanuman.

  The ammonia smell from the bucket was sharp in her nostrils. Looking upwards, she could see everything the doctor was doing reflected in the glass upper section of the door opposite Kiran’s bed. She watched helplessly as Doctor-saab cut into Kiran’s abdomen, as metal clamps spread her wound, and then sutures tied off bleeding blood vessels.

  So this girl Loveleen came out covered in a chalky fur, instead of blood and stickiness, simply lifted between the clamps through the gaping hole in Kiran’s stomach. Born without struggle. Maybe this is why the child has so little sympathy for those who do struggle.

  After the baby came a plum-coloured thing taken from Kiran’s stomach. It must have been the Lotus. Damini watched carefully in case the force left in the Lotus rose up to strangle Kiran, because the doctors didn’t seem at all concerned—the Hanuman-faced one even turned his back to it!

  The child was scrubbed and washed quite roughly, and not given to her mother for hours, though Kiran ordered Damini to ask the nurses every few minutes.

  Kiran looked so unhappy. It was two days before she could walk and she didn’t remember the birth at all. Most of the time, she just wept because she had made a daughter. Damini hushed her, saying, “Don’t let anyone see tears. Some might say your husband can’t afford this girl’s dowry. And don’t worry, next time you’ll have a boy.”

  She gave Kiran sponge baths and fed her, yet despite what they had done to her, Kiran only trusted the men and women in starchy white. Damini called the nurses when Kiran asked for them and didn’t complain to Aman when he came at visiting hours—because what does a man know about how a birth should or shouldn’t happen? But her disapproval of the doctors and hospital must have shown because Kiran hired an expensive nursemaid very quickly. Instead of allowing Damini to massage Loveleen’s baby limbs or feed her gripe water, Kiran sent her home a week early, saying Mem-saab needed Damini’s skills more than she did.

  Which was true.

  When Damini returned to Delhi, Mem-saab rewarded Damini with a pair of solid gold flower-shaped earrings to mark the girl’s birth. When Amanjit and Kiran visited Mem-saab for Loveleen’s naming, Damini took the girl baby in her arms and showed her to Suresh, through the gate.

  Suresh said, “The way you’re looking at her, anyone might think she were your grandson.” Damini has tried to restrain her feelings since then, but Loveleen knows she is soft.

  Once, while visiting Mem-saab, the little girl fell—children do. And Damini had swabbed Dettol on the wound. Direct from the bottle, as she had for Timcu and Aman to make them tougher. Loveleen howled and was inconsolable. Kiran confronted Damini, bottle in hand, scolding that she would kill the child with pain. Didn’t Damini know Dettol must be diluted with water?

  Usually the most powerful antidotes are required to vanquish threatening unseen energies. But, Kiran explained, there are also threatening unseen energies called germs that attack babies, children and adults. She reminded Damini of how many times the nurses in the hospital washed their hands, how the doctor wore plastic gloves. When dealing with germs, she said, handwashing and Dettol-adulteration with water are required.

  But how could Damini have known? The directions were written on the white label in English, not Devanagari script. If she wanted Damini to follow English directions, Kiran should have translated them into Hindi and read them aloud.

  Kiran had taken Loveleen from Damini’s arms, and set the child down before the TV.

  And here the girl now sits as though she’d never moved, just grown in these nine years. She gets two whole months of holy-days each year at this time. She could memorize the Ramayan, she could learn to cook, she could jump rope with Khansama’s children. Instead this little girl needs videos, maybe the ones Suresh copies, to tell her stories of pale women and clean-shaven pink men. If she doesn’t have her videos she gets Bore, a saab’s disease like Dipreyshun.

  Loveleen does not rise as Mem-saab enters her own drawing-room.

  “Darling,” says Mem-saab. “Go tell the driver to bring my car.”

  Loveleen turns to face Mem-saab so she can read her lips, and shouts, “Damini-amma, tell Zahir Sheikh to bring the car.”

  Mem-saab says gently, “No, Lovey, darling. You go and tell Zahir Sheikh to bring my car. The video can wait.”

  The girl turns her head, but does not move. “You can’t order me around,” she says.

  Offspring of a snake! Damini stands silent with shock.

  Mem-saab is looking at Damini, “What … what did she say?”

  Damini turns to her and mouths the words slowly.

  Mem-saab comes around to face Loveleen. Her small hand grips the child’s arm above the elbow. “I said, go and tell the driver to bring my car. Damini-amma has to get ready to go with me.”

  The child shakes off her hand, but goes. Damini fetches Mem-saab’s handbag and glasses.

  The sun whirls like the brass disc behind dancing Lord Shiv. The car’s back seat burns Damini’s fingertips and thighs. The fan blows hot air as soon as Zahir Sheikh starts the car. In a few minutes, her bra is a wet cord beneath her breasts.

  Outsi
de, tree branches are ridged where leaves have dried and fallen. Park fountains at the centres of roundabouts are dry. Every bright white street, every red sandstone monument seems to pulse with yearning for the monsoon.

  Mem-saab says, “Damini-amma, we are going to meet a lady-lawyer.”

  Arriving at the lady-lawyer’s office, Damini helps Mem-saab from the car, then to a one-car garage attached to a bungalow home. Inside, indistinct cries from the nearby market and rumbles from the dusty street compete with the rattle of a window-box air conditioner.

  A starched white tie dangles lopsided on a soiled string above the plunge of the lady-lawyer’s sari-blouse. Her skin would spring to the touch like Leela’s—she seems too young to have read all the maroon books that line the walls.

  Damini sits on a cane footstool while they sit in chairs, and she massages Mem-saab’s leg through her salwar as she speaks so Mem-saab will know there is someone who cares.

  The lady-lawyer listens to Mem-saab with weary though gentle respect; too many women must have cried before her. Mem-saab speaks in Punjabi, because private matters must be said. She ignores Damini’s hand signals to lower her voice; her outrage assaults them. Damini contents herself with interjecting a word or two in Hindi occasionally for the lady-lawyer.

  I am still her ears, but Mem-saab has seen much that I thought she denied.

  At last, Mem-saab has no words left.

  The lady-lawyer sees Mem-saab’s embroidered hanky has turned to a useless wet ball, and offers her own. She tells Damini to tell her, “Be strong. I will try to help you.”

  Mem-saab’s hand seeks Damini’s and grips it. Her fingers are cold despite the close heat.

  Now the lady-lawyer talks directly to Mem-saab. She tries to speak slowly, but Damini has to repeat her words sometimes for Mem-saab to read them from her lips.

  “You say your son now owns twenty-five percent of your house?”