The Selector of Souls (2 page)

There’s the minibus sign, beside the storage sheds, at the mouth of the ravine. That’s where the ghost-trail descends.

Damini gave her jee to Leela, as did all her ancestors. Chunilal’s ancestors passed their jee to him and through him to this baby. Every element combined to form the girl now sleeping quietly in the basket. Damini watched the moment this soul entered existence, with her first breath and cry, opening her eyes in this world.

Damini stops, sets her lamp down, shifts the basket to her right hip, takes up her lamp again.

One misstep …

The tree-lined abyss yawns beside her. Her toes scrunch as the path steepens. Down, down.

Leela needs me, I must not fail
.

The lamp creaks as it sways, creating shadows. She keeps her gaze on her trudging boots. Her shoulder brushes the mountainside. Small things loom, dark shapes brighten.

Edging downhill in the dark, Damini takes much longer than the usual two hours to reach the flag and trident that mark the cave of the goddess who has no name. As she enters, bats flutter. She places the basket with the sleeping baby before the huge clay pot of the unnamed goddess. Anamika Devi, namer of all the gods, namer of the unnamed, protector of Gurkot. Painted snow-leopard eyes look upon Damini and the baby, as from a place beyond karma.

Oil in a clay diya flickers as Damini holds its threaded spout to her lantern flame. Cave paintings are illuminated. Damini draws back the towel. Infant eyes turn toward the light.

Small arms rise. Little fingers clench and unfold. The crescent lines of the newborn’s lashes part. Brown eyes, twin fireflies, gaze into
Damini’s. An open gaze, as if the child sees. As if the child sees her.

Damini turns away. She must become a stone to know what a stone feels like. She must become a mountain to know what a mountain feels like. She must become ice to know what ice feels like.

Only six more days to the baby’s naming day. A name will bring her inside language, inside family. Something must be done in these fragile days, before the girl’s mind blooms, before she begins to show like and dislike, mother-love, father-love. Before sensations of this life lure her into forgetting lives past. Before anyone begins to enjoy her helplessness, her sweetness. Before her punishment for living begins.

Damini draws the paper-wrapped cone from between her breasts, takes a beedi in her mouth and bites down. Feels a jolt as raw tobacco crosses from membrane to bloodstream. She removes the soft brown wad from her mouth.

Lord Golunath, you who bring justice: allow the merits of this deed to cancel any demerits. O spirits of the prêt-lok, come and receive this atman, this jee become matter, that mistakenly entered this world
.

Anamika Devi, overcome the hungry ghosts that will haunt me if this deed be wrong. If this be wrong, let me, not my Leela, take my next birth in a sweeper’s hovel. This is my role in the movie of Leela’s life
.

When Lord Arjun could not find it in him to draw his bow against his own blood on the battlefield, Lord Krishna told him about the oneness of jee. “Knowing this is indestructible, constant, unborn, immutable, how does a man kill anyone … who does he kill?” And Lord Arjun followed his dharma, played his role as a warrior, regardless of consequences.

Return this atman to your realm, O Krishna
.

With her forefinger, Damini pushes the tobacco into the tiny mouth.

The baby’s tongue emerges. She gags, then gulps but does not swallow. Damini wipes drool from the tiny mouth.

Release this atman, girl-body. Let it return to the place that continues long before and long after this world. Let it take shape when this world is a better place for girls
.

Damini leaves the infant in the cave with the goddess and the lamp. She squats outside, waiting, breathing hard in the swirling dark. The baby begins crying from the pit of her tummy.

If this deed were right, the spirit of my dear husband would be here with me now. Maybe even Yashodra’s spirit would come
.

Damini’s mother is the only familiar spirit who joins her.
Stop your crying, Damini
, she says.
Chunilal will get better soon. They will have more children, maybe a son. He will not refuse to name a son
.

Make her crying stop, Ma-ji. Make the crying stop.

Damini shivers and shakes, unable to call on other spirits, gods, men or women for help. She cannot leave—let Anamika Devi witness Damini’s suffering with her grandchild.

Shadows move across the screen of trees, and the bulk of the mountain is a darkness behind her. Leaves whisper to the spirits that an infant girl will soon join them.

None but earth, sky and forest have witnessed Damini’s deed, and if this was predicted by the lines of her hand, or the movements of the stars, or written in her bhagya or kismat, then no other could have happened. And though no one else knows what happened here tonight, Damini knows.

How will she ever again be the woman she once was, who arrived just two months ago as Leela and Chunilal’s guest? This stain on her karma is to spare Leela’s. But before she dies, Damini will, she must, balance this deed. She will find the courage to do it.

She can barely see the path homewards. It turns and turns, rising up the moonlit gorge.

Damini tents her shawl over head and shoulders, and clutches it tight. She lays her head on her knees. Her tongue is dry, swollen, and tastes of tobacco.

Daylight is so very far away
.

DAMINI

A
MANJIT
S
INGH HAS ARRIVED ON A PRE-DAWN FLIGHT
from Bombay to find the speared iron gates at the foot of the driveway locked. He’s shouting, “Open up! Open up!” and swearing. His taxi driver’s honking, the neighbour’s dogs are barking, and mynah birds screech.

Damini snatches up her dupatta and drapes it across her chest, slips into her rubber sandals, and rushes downstairs. As she runs down the driveway, she yells again and again that she’s coming, she’s sorry, it was her fault for sleeping so soundly. As soon as she unlocks the double gates and pushes them open, he strides past her, bounds up the driveway, dashes upstairs and begins shouting at his mother.

Mem-saab is standing at the front door of her apartment, fumbling with the zip of her dressing gown. Confronted by her son’s ferocious look, she gazes first at Amanjit’s lips, then over his shoulder at Damini, her eyes huge and questioning.

This turbaned man, who Damini knew when he was still coaxing his beard with coconut oil, towers over his mother and shouts, “You knew I was coming, and you locked me out of my father’s house!”

Aman could be yawning or yelping for all Mem-saab knows. He should speak slowly. He should remember Mem-saab can’t lip-read
properly through a moustache and beard—even a tidily rolled, hair-netted beard such as his.

Damini ducks past them through the doorway, and takes her place behind Mem-saab. She lays her hand gently on Mem-saab’s shoulder. “Be more respectful, Aman-ji,” says Damini, her respectful “ji” coming with effort. “No one was trying to lock you out. See, everything is open.” She needs an excuse to come between them—she takes a dupatta from its hook behind the door, and offers it to Mem-saab to cover her head. “She’s old and left without a man to protect her.”

That should shame him. He should remember his duty to protect his mother. But there’s no shame in the look he flashes at Damini. That look says she may have been his mother’s ears since he was twenty-two, but she is only that pair of ears. “Go, Damini-amma.” His thumb jerks past her eye. “Go sit in the kitchen.”

Damini ignores that thumb as she used to ignore his tantrums, and helps Mem-saab to her room instead. Mem-saab’s grip on her arm is tighter than usual.

Aman is now shouting down the stairs for Khansama, the cook who is probably still in his servant quarters. “Bring my suitcase,” he yells. The Embassy-man, his wife and children, who rent the five bedrooms on the ground floor, must be well woken up by now. She hears the cook’s sandals slap-slap on the driveway as he runs to the gate.

Damini fetches Mem-saab’s silver water glass and her pills. Mem-saab says, “Tell Aman I am not signing any more papers. I already gave him twenty-five percent of this house last time he came.” She makes her way to the bathroom and closes the door.

Water purrs into the plastic bucket. Mem-saab’s preparing to bathe, without taking a single cup of tea.

Damini goes to deliver Mem-saab’s message but Aman has pointedly closed the door to his father’s room. She can hear him inside, unpacking. She could shout or write a note to slip under the door,
but Mem-saab’s message might make matters worse. Soon he will want breakfast.

Mem-saab has begun reciting the Japji aloud in her tuneless chant—she must have emerged from the bathroom. The prayer takes about twenty minutes. Mem-saab should eat breakfast immediately afterwards, to avoid further argument.

Damini opens the screen door to the kitchen and pops her head in so she doesn’t have to remove her sandals. The rail-thin cook looks up from his cane stool, his face grey-brown as a potato. Why doesn’t he just wear a moustache and beard? Then he won’t look like a parched lawn every morning. Hairy forearms poke from his sleep-rumpled kurta and rest upon pyjama-clad knees. Even his toes look like small potatoes.

“Khansama,” says Damini, severely enough to pull him together, “Serve Mem-saab her breakfast.”

Back in Mem-saab’s room, she squats in front of Mem-saab’s chair and enters the chant with her. When the prayer is over and Mem-saab opens her eyes, Damini mouths soundlessly, “What does he want you to sign?”

“He wants me to give
all
of this house to him and Timcu.”

“Will they live with us?” Damini mouths. Khansama will need to know—he has four children and a wife in the one-room servants’ quarters behind the house. As for Damini, she has a son; she will never need to go begging. Unless Suresh has somehow learned disrespect, like Aman.

“No, they want to make condos in its place,” Mem-saab’s voice swoops like a bulbul bird ascending. Damini gives a hand signal for her to lower it.

“What is ‘condos’?”

“Tall buildings.”

Damini can tell Mem-saab doesn’t quite understand the word either, though she has two more years of schooling than Damini, having studied up to Class 10. At sixteen, the chauthi-lav of the Sikh
marriage ceremony ringing in her jewelled ears, Mem-saab came from Pari Darvaza, her village in the part of Punjab that was cut away to make Pakistan. Came wrapped in red silk to ornament Sardar-saab’s home in Rawalpindi as his second wife, to birth the sons his first wife couldn’t. There was one daughter who died early. Then Devinder, pet named Timcu, then Amanjit.

So respectful was Mem-saab, she never used her husband’s real name or called him the familiar tu, even after his first wife died. Always, she called him Sardar-ji. After their home in Rawalpindi was abandoned to the Muslims of Pakistan in August 1947, they fled to Delhi and built their lives along with the city.

Until Sardar-saab’s demise, Mem-saab needed only to know to pray, decorate the house, shop and give orders to servants
.

It’s about thirty rains since Damini came from Gurkot in the hills to live here—perhaps more, perhaps less, for sometimes the rains desert the land, sometimes they are ceaseless. And the saab-log have the abroad calendar, ordinary people have the harvest and temple calendar. But for about thirty years, Damini has only needed to know the art of massage and the timing that turns flattery to praise.

But now …

“Where will we live?” she asks Mem-saab.

“Aman is concerned about me here … such a big house … alone … with my poor health.”

Aman’s concern is like a farmer’s for a crop of jute—how much can be harvested and how much will it bring? And Mem-saab is not alone. Damini is here. And Khansama, the driver, two gardeners, two sweepers, a daytime security guard, the washerman, the Embassy-man’s servants—each looks after her as if she were his mother.

But we are nothing, no one for the saab-log
.

“He says a smaller house in Delhi would be better, or that I should go to the hills and live in the Big House in Gurkot.” Mem-saab means the estate Sardar-saab received as compensation from the Government of India for the loss of his home and villages in Pakistan.

“The snow there gets this high,” Damini says, bringing her palm level with her midriff. “Too cold for you. And me. Though the first year I came to Delhi, I thought I’d die of the heat.”

That year began auspiciously enough with her success in giving birth to Suresh, after only one daughter, Leela. But then Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru died, and the whole country mourned. Then her Piara Singh was electrocuted while working and Damini consigned her marriage collar to his funeral pyre after less than five years as a wife. In Gurkot, in those days, everyone did
khuss-puss, khuss-puss
whispering Damini must have done something terrible in a past life to give her widowhood in this one. That Piara Singh’s death was foretold, that Damini’s bhagya in this life was to be a living ghost. And far away in New Delhi, young Mem-saab’s ears stopped speaking to her. So at the end of peach season, Sardar-saab hired Damini to replace those ears, and Damini left Suresh and Leela with her in-laws and became an amma in Delhi.

Mem-saab sighs, “Money—the expectation of Sardar-ji’s money—is changing my sons.”

Changing? Damini remembers the first time she saw Aman: home from university hostel for the winter holidays, whipping a tonga horse who could go no faster. And his elder brother Timcu, not restraining Aman, just letting him do it! She remembers Aman a few years later, laughing when a barefoot beggar dived into a ditchful of slime to escape the swerve of his car. And Timcu in the front seat with him, estimating the amount they’d need for a police bribe to forget the poor man’s life, should it come to that. A good amma needs to forget much more than she remembers.