The Selector of Souls (16 page)

“No,” says Damini, “no letter.” And since that call in May the day after Aman arrived, almost three months ago, when she told Timcu Mem-saab was well, no phone call either. Damini considers writing to him but she cannot form English letters and is not sure he remembers how to read Devanagari script. And how can she write complaints against his brother?

Today there is a square envelope from the Embassy-man. Mem-saab reads the English note—it asks if he may come to tea with Mem-saab. Mem-saab sends Damini downstairs with a note saying yes.

Damini tells Khansama to make cake and jalebis, and knows this means Amanjit and Kiran will be notified as well.

It takes Mem-saab most of the morning to dress and prepare; she rests often to ease the pain in her chest. All afternoon, she sits watching the downpour and waiting for tea as though the Embassy-man were one of the relatives.

Khansama wheels in the trolley as usual, but he doesn’t leave the room afterwards. He stands by the door, hands clasped before him. He must have to report back to Aman.

The Embassy-man asks for tea without milk. In English. Damini pretends not to understand.

He should learn Hindi if he wants me to help him talk to Mem-saab
.

Mem-saab pours milk in the Embassy-man’s teacup.

“As you know—” the cup is small in his large hand. He gazes at the pale swirling surface, “my lease is till the end of this month.”

Mem-saab bows her elegant head and smiles. His lease has been till the end of each month for four years now.

“I have been told I will be posted back to Washington after that.” He takes a sip, puts down the cup.

Mem-saab smiles again. “How nice.”

She has not understood. “Posted back to abroad?” asks Damini.

He looks at her then. “Yes. Tell her I will be posted back to Washington—say, to America—after this month.”

Damini mouths his words to Mem-saab. Mem-saab smiles again, her expression tinged with dread. “I see,” she says.

He accepts a piece of sponge cake but declines the crisp tubes of jalebis oozing their red-gold sugar water.

Now who will stop Aman—or Timcu, if he arrives—from putting their belongings or padlocks downstairs? The judge said everything must remain the same, but change cannot be decreed away. Four years ago, Mem-saab could ask her English-speaking sons to place an advertisement in
The Pioneer
saying “foreign embassy people desired” so she didn’t have to lease to an Indian tenant. Indians can rarely afford to pay the rents embassy people pay and it can take a generation in court to evict them if they refuse to leave. But now … ?

Newspaper saabs won’t listen to this old amma. How can I ask them to write in their English paper that Mem-saab doesn’t want an Indian for a tenant?

M
ONSOON RAIN MUTES THE CLAMOUR OF STUDENTS ON
their midday break in the quadrangle as Anu climbs the stairs to Sister Imaculata’s office on the second storey of St. Anne’s Convent. Sister was welcoming on the phone, but Anu’s mouth is dust-dry; she can’t even murmur namaste.

What if Sister says she’s not serious or faithful enough? That she should find an agency—governmental or non-governmental—to take her, or go home. Anu has no home.

“Anupam, dear girl.” Sister Imaculata takes Anu’s hands in greeting. Her pale skin is almost translucent over her angular features. Those blue-green eyes twinkling from beneath sand-blond brows, are as kind as Anu remembers, her gaze as direct as a sunbeam. The puff of hair between her square forehead and her veil is grey, now. She exudes poise and dignity. No one would ever hurt, hit or rape a woman like her.

A prickly flush suffuses Anu’s neck and face. Will Sister Imaculata see any use for her?

Imaculata looks lit from within. “The good Lord has shown you the way here,” she says.

After she spoke to Vikas from Adventure Travels, Anu spent two nights in a guesthouse near the airport, checking in with her aunt
every few hours. Then she called Mr. Gurinder Singh to say she was resigning. He said, “I hope you will return after your baby is born.”

“Sir, I’m not expecting,” she said. “I just have to leave work.”

Mr. Gurinder Singh’s voice dropped to a whisper, “Your husband is not allowing you to work, na? Please send a relative to do your job.” He seemed to believe data entry skills were genetic.

Anu didn’t have time to correct him. “If my husband calls,” she said, “please say you do not know how to reach me.”

“I will. Call me if there is anything I can do.”

Now she’s here in the same office where she first met Sister Imaculata. In the sixth standard, condemned by another nun to writing ‘I will not read poetry in Geography class’ one thousand times, Anu had, in a tiny act of rebellion, omitted the
not
on the 554th line. Which brought her before Imaculata, who could not hide her amusement and simply told her to memorize Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as her punishment. And who listened, enchanted with nostalgia as Anu ploughed through the poem, accenting all the wrong syllables.

“What have you done to your face, my girl?” Imaculata’s white skirt and stockings swish as she crosses over to a rattan-back chair before a coffee table. She turns her back to the walnut desk that takes up half the room and angles her chair beside Anu’s. “Was it an acid-attack?”

“No, Sister—a car accident.” Anu touches the leaf-shaped scar that sits across her right cheek. “What’s an acid-attack?”

“Our sisters in Bangladesh and Pakistan say they’ve been treating women burned and blinded by sulphuric acid flung in their faces. Mercy me, but it’s a cowardly way to take revenge on women who refuse or challenge men. It hasn’t happened in India—that we know of—but they say it will.”

She leans over and slides her fingertips down Anu’s face from temple to jaw.

“When did this happen?”

Anu’s cheek tingles—she pulls back instinctively, then submits to the caring gesture. “Two years ago.”

“Plastic surgery can do wonders these days. I’m surprised it still shows.”

“I think this is the best that can be done right now in India, Sister.”

Following Anu’s accident, Deepak Lal sold half the parcel of land on which he planned to build his dream home, to pay for Anu’s surgery. Vikas, the modern Mughal, took full advantage of the old custom of accepting periodic “gifts” from a wife’s family. Once Dadu’s money ran out, and Indian surgeons were unable to go beyond the standard facelifts his mother required, Vikas didn’t offer to take Anu abroad. Anu knew better than to ask. Feeling has never completely returned to her cheek, and her face is still slightly asymmetrical.

A nun with Goan features pushes open the door with the edge of a tray. Imaculata greets and thanks her as if receiving a favour from a friend. She introduces her, but the nun’s name sails through Anu’s agitated mind as if it were foreign. A flowered china teapot, cups and saucers, a milk jug, a sugar pot and a tray of Marie biscuits array themselves before her.

When the nun departs, Imaculata says, “The good Lord must have saved you for a reason.”

“Yes, Sister.” Anu lapses into schoolgirl response. She is calm. Really.

“I was so surprised to hear from you. And that—”

“That I want to be a nun?” Saying her wish out loud may create the possibility.

“Well, yes. I didn’t know you’d been baptized. But praise be,” the sister says, crossing herself. “Lord knows how many times I wondered how your life was going, how often I prayed for your soul. We did discuss your becoming a Christian before you graduated from school, and as I recall you said you were not ready, then.”

“Yes, Sister.” Not ready, not yet, not now—diplomatic refusals, copied from her father’s bureaucratese. How she used to try to please.

Sister pours. “Sugar: one or two?”

“Two, please.”

Sister adds sugar and milk. “Father Pashan seems to have opened your heart to the Lord. You met him at Holy Family Hospital?”

Anu accepts a teacup and saucer. “When I was recuperating. And then at the Vatican Embassy.”

“Lovely man, Father Pashan. His heart is exactly in the right place, you know. He’s been assigned to the hills, I hear. Setting up medical camps, clinics, and dispensaries for the poor. Quite a change from the Vatican Embassy …” She offers the biscuits, Anu takes one. “And does your family accept your conversion? Sometimes there are problems …”

“Yes, my father was present.” At her hospital bedside, making his bargain with the priest.

Sister Imaculata raises her teacup, toasting Anu. “And how long have you known.”

“Known?”

“Known you have a calling.”

“Since my accident,” Anu says. “Father Pashan said I’d been saved for a higher purpose, and I began to wonder what that might be …”

Imaculata puts her cup down, and joins her fingertips as if holding a sphere. The ring on the fourth finger of her left hand catches the glow from the window. “And?”

“I heard the call, Sister.”

Oh to enter the convent and disappear—sweet revenge.
Give me distance, give me separateness. Give me a second virginity and I will make of it my fortress
. Subtract the whole burden of desire and creation. Become unreachable, unknowable. No longer be anyone’s wife. Liberate herself from this woman’s body. Shed this bruised and broken skin. Hide her face.
Hide so no one will know what a failure you are
. Yes, that too. Especially as a mother.

“What form did your call take?”

The gap between experience and explanation yawns. “A yearning, Sister. And then I met Father Pashan again.”

“God seldom summons twice.”

“Yes, Sister.” Anu nibbles her dry biscuit.

“Why do you not seek out an indigenous order? Why an international order?”

“Familiarity with this congregation. Your example inspires me, Sister.” The four Irish nuns who founded the Order of Everlasting Hope a hundred and fifty years ago also inspire Anu. She should remember their names, but today she just can’t.

“I would rather the Lord inspired you. But faith, it seems to me, strengthens as we do god’s work. We’re apostolic—that appeals to you?”

Anu gives Sister Imaculata a questioning look.

“Meaning we live a life of service, not contemplation and prayer.”

“That is what attracts me most.”

“Did you consider working in Calcutta? Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity are very fashionable at present.”

“I did, sister. But simplicity in Mother Teresa’s order doesn’t mean doing without luxuries. It means often doing without food, clothing and even shelter. I can’t imagine owning only one sari. Or carrying all my possessions in a bucket.”

“Can’t live as the real poor do—yes. And I hardly think Indians need to be reminded to be fruitful and multiply, despite decades of Indian government family planning urging smaller families. We haven’t followed Mother Teresa in that, because the Earth must also be considered. But like her and the Holy Father, we hold life holy and condemn contraception and abortion.”

“Yes, Sister.” If she joins the Order, Anu won’t need contraception again, and certainly not abortion.

“Mother Teresa’s nuns don’t receive much in the way of old age pensions. Our nuns do—something to consider.” Imaculata takes a sip, returns her cup carefully to the groove of its saucer.

“I hadn’t, but I’m glad to know it.”

“So am I, these days. I mention it because my Provincial tells me I should groom a successor. Young women these days don’t seem to
have leadership qualities. Oh—and another thing—you’re not a harijan, are you?”

Surprise silences Anu. Sister Imaculata has used the old term coined by Mahatma Gandhi for the lower castes. Anu would have expected her to use the term
dalit
, or oppressed—the term preferred by dalits—but Sister Imaculata is Irish and may not understand the distinction.

“It doesn’t matter to me, of course,” says the nun, “but it does matter to others sometimes, so I need to know.”

“I—I’m a kshatriya.”

“I thought so. Then let me stress that if you’re looking for a life of ease, this is not it. You will be required to clean your own toilet, wash your own clothes, make your own bed, cook when it’s your turn. Nuns do not have servants.”

“Yes, Sister.” Over the rim of her teacup, she searches Imaculata’s face for a clue to this detour.

“And as I tell women from lower castes, if you’re looking for someone to tell you what to do and how to do every little thing, this is not a place for you.”

“Yes, Sister.”

Sister Imaculata cannot know she’s describing paradise. It will be like joining an ashram or a hippie commune from the sixties. Without men. Except Lord Jesus.

Imaculata reaches for a biscuit, munches slowly. “We’re in a time of flux, you know—or more so than usual. I’ve spent fifteen years at this school, and now Mother General has given me a new role.” She gives an elaborate sigh. “Teaching young novices.”

“Congratulations, Sister.”

“Yes. Well—I’m leaving Delhi soon to become Provincial at our Shimla convent. Unfortunately, there are few novices and postulants to teach, these days. Four last year, only one postulant this year. You will be the second.” She picks her cup and saucer off the table and balances both on her knee.

“So I’d be living in Shimla.” Bobby’s accident was in Shimla. Bobby lay in a coma for a week in Shimla’s Snowdon Hospital. Anu’s hands go cold.

Imaculata nods. “To begin with. Then let’s see where the Lord’s work takes you.”

Obedience, obedience. You can’t refuse your first assignment!

She has already scaled the mountain of her marriage. God is giving her another to climb. And if he’s doing this, he’ll also show her the path.

“It’s almost impossible, now,” Imaculata is saying, “to find young Irish women with the commitment to serve god. Frankly, I’d like to find more young Indian women—they can stand the heat better—but most don’t have that fire in the belly we had.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Always the distraction of family.”

“Oh, I have no family distractions,” says Anu.

“Anupam, in a country of nine hundred and fifty million people, everyone has family, and extended family and relationships and obligations—you don’t even have to be Catholic. I’ve been serving god in this country for nigh on thirty years and I am not stupid.”