The Selector of Souls

ALSO BY SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN

English Lessons and Other Stories
What the Body Remembers
The Tiger Claw
We Are Not in Pakistan: Stories

A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America
(co-author)

DAMINI

D
AMINI SITS CROSS-LEGGED ON HER ROPE-BED, HER
week-old granddaughter wailing in her lap. A bukhari glows in the corner, the shallow basin of orange-grey coals warming the room. Her son-in-law and grandson sleep in the men’s quarters next door. Her daughter, Leela, still unclean from this birth, is sleeping in the birthing room beyond the men’s quarters. The baby’s older sister, Damini’s granddaughter, sleeps on the floor below in the cow’s room.
Hé Ram!
How can any of them sleep through this child’s crying?

Damini shelters the infant beneath her sari-pallu and opens the child’s swaddling.

She is so beautiful
.

Yet tonight Leela turned away from her again, and bound a long dupatta about her breasts. And despite Damini’s pleading, her son-in-law, Chunilal, is making no preparations for her naming. She isn’t worth naming, he says.

Damini extends her legs and lays the small bundle in the groove between. She strokes the baby gently from head to toe. The wailing becomes crying, the crying turns to sobs, then at last quiet.

Damini touches the baby’s tiny eyelids with her fingertips, and strokes outward to the temples. With the balls of her thumbs, she gently pushes up on the bridge of the girl’s nose then down across
those soft cheeks. Lightly, she traces a smile on the baby’s upper and lower lips. Tenderly, she massages the backs of the baby’s delicate, shell-like ears. Now up under the baby girl’s chin till her jaw relaxes. Then down—her hands seem huge surrounding the drum of the baby’s torso.

Again the creature begins to cry, as if for the suffering of all worlds. She’s so hungry, poor thing. No baby can live on sugar water and ghutti for more than a few days.

Carefully, Damini cups the baby’s cord stump and rolls her over to compress her hunger. She turns the girl’s dark feathery head outward. Already she’s holding her head up a little—she’s strong, like her grandmother.

Slowly, Damini’s hands swoop from the girl’s neck to her small buttocks. Holding the baby’s ankles in one hand, she massages with the other, all the way down the baby’s legs. Her fingertips inscribe circles, moving down the baby’s back. But the baby still whimpers.

Damini unhooks her sari blouse and positions the child in the crook of her arm. Tiny lips pucker and pull at her nipple as Leela’s once did.

How quickly the girl has learned to suck—such a needy child
.

Damini strokes the baby’s black hair. She traces the whorl of those delicate ears.

They would look so pretty with earrings
.

Tears are drying on the baby’s cheek. She’s asleep. But when she wakes, she will need milk.

Leaving the small bundle on the bed, Damini rises and lights a Petromax lamp. She removes the sari, sari-blouse and petticoat she’s been wearing since this baby’s birthing began and steps into a fresh salwar, shivering as she pulls a kameez over her head. She drapes a thick brown shawl over her shoulder, knots it at thigh level.

When she opens the puja cupboard, Lord Golunath’s clay eyes bestow his blessings on her. When her husband was alive Damini would return the gaze of the god of justice with worship, but if a widow performs puja at home, she brings bad luck on her family.

What are the gods asking? She should try and see with her third eye. Damini turns from the cupboard, gazes at the sleeping child.

And maroon velvet jewellery boxes spring open where the child lies. They display glittering 24-karat gold necklaces, finger-length gold earrings, gold cuff-bangles, uncut diamonds, nine-jewel necklaces. Leela and Chunilal must buy jewels like these and more for the Ganesh puja, and the sangeet, mehndi, chura-kalire, and saptapadi ceremonies to dress this girl as a bride.

Beyond Damini’s reach, goldthread-bordered silk saris in plastic wrapping are stacked all the way to the ceiling, along with more jewellery and garlands made of hundred-rupee notes—presents Chunilal will give with this girl, to the groom’s family. At the end of her rope-bed, a TV set is playing an advertisement for yet another TV. Beside the TV sits a two-in-one, a radio-cassette player.

Moonlight washes the room, expanding it to ten times its size, lining it with red-gold cloth: a shamiana. Chunilal will have to rent a shamiana as large for relatives and friends invited to this daughter’s wedding.

Men in red coats and white trousers playing golden trumpets, shehnais and drums march past Damini and mount a marigold-garlanded bandstand. White-gloved men array silver tureens on long tables draped in white. They lift the lids, releasing aromas of paneer shahi korma, makhni dal, chicken floating in creamy tomato curry, saffron lamb biryani, potato gutke, bhangak khatai, madua roti and cumin-spiced raita. Guests flash their cameras. Video-wallahs zoom in, zoom out.

A shiny red motorcycle stands on a rotating platform for all to see. A wedding cake appears—white as the ones in movies. Chunilal is presenting his son-in-law thousands of rupees for a honeymoon in Shimla. On the TV a four-door Gypsy with black-glazed windows is climbing the Himalayas. A gold pennant flutters from its antenna, with a 125,000-rupee price tag emblazoned on it. The TV flashes pictures of the cows, quilts and bedsteads Chunilal will have to give.
Plus a Timex, a wall clock, a Godrej steel cupboard and a refrigerator. And there’s the bride—grown up, caparisoned in red and gold silk. Rose petals fill the air as she is given to her new family and sent where she may never see snow peaks or her parents or Damini again.

Damini gazes down at her sleeping granddaughter. An ojha or a doctor might take thousands of rupees to cure her son-in-law’s ailment; who knows when Chunilal will drive his truck again. Then how will he and Leela afford such a wedding—and after they’ve already paid for Kamna’s? They’ll have to sell the truck, the cows, and the land, and become labourers.

Damini’s children were larger than this little girl at birth, so were Leela’s two, Kamna and Mohan. This infant feels little more than 2,500 grams. How much will it cost to feed her? From the third child onward, babies are always sickly. What kind of work can a sickly little body grow up to do?

Women’s work. Servant’s work without a rupee of pay. A tiny step above sweeper-work, if she has good bhagya. She’ll become like Leela, tired out before she’s ever seen New Delhi.

The baby’s lashes lie so gently on her cheek. Perhaps she dreams
.

Last night Damini dreamed she was in her father’s home, a girl before marriage. She was back in a village that clings to the edge of the Thar Desert between Jaisalmer and Bikaner. Sandy scrub, hot as the coals of a bukhari, beneath her thin sandals. And she was hungry, so hungry. In her dream, her eldest sister, Yashodra, went away again. Not to be married, no. That year, hunger felt like rats’ claws in the sack of Damini’s belly. So Damini’s mother and Yashodra said they were fasting and gave food to the little ones from their share. Gave to little Damini, mostly—she was youngest of five.

Yashodra’s eyes are before her again—black as jamun-berries. Her sister’s petal-like eyelids are beneath her fingertips—closing, closing. A death of normal causes in that time in the desert. No violence to be seen, just a quiet release from the punishment of living. Yashodra’s
spirit is peaceful, since she never appears, even when Damini asks her advice or begs her to return.

The baby begins to sob, as if expecting no one can console her. Damini picks her up, rocks her, pats her back till she quietens again.

No one should know such hunger, not even an animal. If you’re someone, you may survive the hungry times. But the word for someone,
koi
, is not for girls. So girls and women—even women like Mem-saab—can only borrow and use it with permission from men. So girls and women are no one.

Naming this baby will proclaim her a girl. From that moment, she’ll know herself weaker and smaller. She’ll be like a roti, a chair, a sandal, a pencil, a dhurrie, a rope-bed, a furrow, a lentil seed, a small box, a pot.

A pot. Yes
.

Damini places the baby on the bed and wedges a quilt all around. She takes her towel, steps into open air and descends a steep stone stairway to the lower terrace. Beyond the latticed cement parapet, forested ranges and distant snow peaks of the upper ranges of the Himalayas are tinted blue. It’s Amavas, the time of the growing moon, auspicious for offerings. Fireflies spark on terraced fields below her. A few lights wink in the valleys.

Damini fetches a shallow basket, lines it with the towel and returns to the baby girl. The child shifts, tiny lips yawn, but she doesn’t wake as Damini lifts her into the basket and covers her with the towel. From her bedroll, she takes a paper-wrapped cone of rolled beedis and slips it between her breasts.

Damini jams her feet into her boots, lifts the basket to her hip. Lamp in hand, she leaves the house, climbs the steep stairway up to the road. She places her lamp on the stone parapet, stiffens her neck muscles and lifts the basket onto her head. The lantern swings as she picks it up and continues uphill.

The energy of all souls, atmic energy, exists long before the moment of birth. This child’s jee was already here, everywhere—Lord Krishna tells Lord Arjun so in the
Gita
.

Why did this atman incarnate? Only the gods know. Jee doesn’t ask for birth. The purush-energy of fathers like Chunilal pulls it into existence. And so this soul came, bringing all the desires of a being. Because it became a girl, along with it came all the expectations and demands of her someday husband and family.