The Selector of Souls (21 page)
August
1994
ANU
T
HE WOMAN WITH THE HENNA-ORANGE HAIR AND LONELY
look in her eyes seemed familiar, but Anu, sitting in the back seat of the convent jeep beside Sister Imaculata, can’t place her. She breathes a prayer for the woman to find her way safely to Gurkot.
The jeep heads north as if aligned with Anu’s inner compass. Pure cool mountain air spreads like a benediction in her lungs. Healing is in these mountains, waiting to be found in contemplation, meditation, silence and service to others. She shouldn’t read as the jeep loops its way through the hills, but the letter is from Rano. Dot-matrix text jumps and blurs on preprinted flowered paper.
I’ve enrolled Chetna in a summer camp for children of landed immigrants, and the local Sikh school in September. Not that Jatin and his family are very observant Sikhs—remember he married Hindu me—but following Sikh tenets, this school doesn’t allow smoking. I can swallow a little religion so that our little girl remains drug-free
.
Most of our friends are Sikhs so they mostly have the last name Singh. She keeps asking Singh what? She wants their caste names. Some have them, most don’t. I explained that Sikhs don’t have castes. Or are not supposed to
.
She actually cried when I explained she must flush the toilet after using it, since we always have enough water for each flush. And when I explained she
has to clean the shower after using it since we don’t have sweepers, she said, “Rano Aunty, you should get a sweeper!” And then our clever puss says, “If Jatin Papa doesn’t mind, let him clean it!”
Were we as young when we began to worry about getting polluted or falling to the level of sweepers? I didn’t know how privileged I was by my religion, caste and class until I came to Canada
.
Chetna is going through the same status shock. She came home from camp asking, “Rano mummy, is India older or younger than Canada?” In India, people get respect for being one or two months older than each other, so why not countries. I said, “Older in some ways, younger in others.” She shot me her explain-how-the-world-got-this-way look
.
I told her that if you believe a country is born on the date of its flag—India is older because its flag first flew in 1947, almost twenty years before the Canadian flag. And if a country is as old as its constitution, then India had one thirty years before Canada. But if a country is as old as its earliest inhabitants, India might be only five thousand years old and Canada ten thousand. And if a country is born from the wishes of its people, then India is only forty-seven and Canada is about three hundred years old. So, I said, “It’s hard to say if India is older or younger than Canada.” She didn’t find this satisfactory—forgive me if she’s scarred for life!
When Chetna questions me, I wonder if Mahatma Gandhi had agreed to dominion status for India in 1942, would there still be a statue of a queen at India Gate and would Indians be as Anglophilic as Canadians? Would we still be a dominion as Canada is? We’d all be Christianized by now
.
Chetna has been taught about Laura Secord at her camp, and today we’re taking her to the chocolate factory of that name. She’s been making new friends by telling them that her Jatin Papa works there
.
Yesterday she gave us quite a scare—we couldn’t find her for three whole hours! I was beside myself till we found her hiding in a closet. She heard Jatin shouting while watching a game and thought he was angry. I can only imagine what she must have gone through with you. She misses you. I remind her that you and Bobby lived with us while you were growing up. I tell her she’s lucky to have so many people who love her. Even my in-laws are
delighted with her. It helps that she speaks Punjabi, of course. My father-in-law has promised her a prize if she learns the Japji prayer by heart. I think he would like to offer me the same, but you know me—I had trouble memorizing the few words of the Gayatri Mantra
.
I feel you did the hard work of birthing this child, and we are enjoying her. I can’t thank you enough, though I know how difficult it must be for you. Don’t write to her too often. I’m worried it will only confuse her and delay her adjustment to us and Canada. Okay?
The letter is signed
Second Mother
.
It is difficult. Very difficult. Repeat the mantra,
It’s for Chetna’s sake
.
The jeep passes through the foothill town of Barog and begins the climb to Shimla. A truck crammed with bundled goods looms, spewing black smoke. The driver swears under his breath as he swings the steering wheel. He leans out, yells in Urdu, “The car going uphill has right of way!” The trucker keeps coming. A horn-blast fills the jeep like Vikas’s shouting. Imaculata holds her cross to her lips, but seems otherwise quite prepared to die.
Has Anu suffered and come all this way only to be killed on the road before beginning god’s work?
The jeep skids to the verge and stops. The truck thunders by. Imaculata kisses her cross again.
“If we had crashed,” Anu says carefully, “would that be god’s will?”
“I certainly hope not,” says Imaculata. “Ask him when you get to the pearly gates, dear. And thank your guardian angel. I say give the devil credit for mishaps and let the bishops worry their heads cogitating such things.” She soon nods off, missing several more near-accidents.
She must have made this journey many times.
Anu has only made it once, with Dadu and Mumma, and was too filled with the horror of Bobby’s injury, coma and untimely death at the time, to feel the power of these precipices and waterfalls, these soaring blue pines.
Back to the letter, her only connection to Chetna right now—
You can’t believe what a feminist icon Madam G. is here, Anu. Canadians think Indians are so enlightened because India had a woman PM years before they elected Kim Campbell. They have no idea that Madam G. let her unelected son become maharaja of India, or that she had a streak of violence in her like the grey streak in her hair. They don’t know she locked away opposition leaders if they disagreed with her, or that she ordered the Indian army to enter the Golden Temple with tanks. But Sikhs in Canada certainly do. In the eighties, some Canadian Sikh guys blew up an Air India plane mostly full of Hindus as if all of us Hindus were responsible for Madam G.’s megalomania. What Indians call communalism should be called groupthink! That investigation continues, but no Sikh I know condones either Madam G.’s assassination or the bombing of 329 innocents
.
But much as I enjoy the Sikh community here, I swear I’m turning into a closet Hindu. Jatin says I should ignore his sisters when they talk about “idol-worshippers” even as they wake up the
Guru Granth Sahib,
put it to bed at night, circumambulate it in worship. Where do they think their rituals came from but from Hindus and Muslims? And if they really believe their book is a person, the eleventh guru, isn’t that idol worship?
Rano has predicted that Anu will be bored within days of trying to be a nun, but Rano doesn’t know her anymore. Doesn’t know Anu still dreams of killing her husband. That Anu could end up in prison or hanged if she … Who is the real Anu? How can she know when she is herself?
Several more hours of switchback driving through rain showers and flooded areas bring the jeep to the capital of Himachal State as purple shadows are gathering in the folds of the hills. Shimla—formerly Simla in the days of the British Raj.
The British viceroy moved the administration of India to this hill station every summer to escape the heat of the plains. From their
Tudor manors and offices on the central Mall Road, a few thousand Europeans bent three hundred million Indians to their will. British officers and soldiers took leave here, Victorian women promenaded on the Mall and acted at the Gaiety Theatre. And after they tore the country in three and went home, Indian refugees fled here to escape the civil war that raged across the plains. Waves of Tibetan refugees came in the fifties, to get away from the Chinese. And by the seventies, Shimla was the summer resort of the Indian elite—government officials, army officers and the landed gentry.
“The Mall Road is now called the Mehl Road,” says Sister Imaculata with gentle mockery. “The Cart Road is the Caht Road.” Sitting in a clamour of traffic at the main bus depot, she points uphill to a green and white Tudor building that looks on the verge of collapse over the mass of humanity and buses below. “Lord Ripon’s hospital,” she says. “Whenever I pass it, I think of the women doctors who were excluded from practising in England in colonial days. What courage it must have taken to book a passage to India and set up practice at that hospital.”
“Lord Ripon,” says Anu. “Like a god’s name.”
“Yes—I never remember its new Indian name. But look how it’s falling apart! Most people go to Lord Snowdon’s hospital on the other side of Shimla. Politicians renamed that one Indira Gandhi Memorial. But if you’re a poor patient who can’t bribe an official to get an appointment or a bed, or can’t read the signs, it’s a nightmare to navigate, whatever its name.”
The coma ward at Snowdon … a white shirt … brown blood …
The Mall Road is for pedestrians. Only VIPs and VVIPs are allowed to drive through the state capital, so the jeep takes the lower cart road. Past the central roundabout of Chhota Shimla, Little Shimla, where two rows of shops scissor up and downhill, the jeep rumbles uphill for another half hour before it comes to the convent gates.
Here Imaculata asks the driver to stop so they can stretch their
legs. She walks down the long level driveway, leading Anu past the shield emblazoned with the coat of arms of the Order and the motto of the convent.
Non nobis solum
—not for ourselves alone.
Past the basketball and tennis courts, Sister Imaculata points out St. Anne’s grey stone mother house, almost a hundred years old. Then a girl’s dormitory and the grey stone library, closed for the evening. Says Imaculata, pride shining in her voice, “Its holdings are on par with many private libraries in New Delhi. I pray the Good Lord doesn’t take me before I see more libraries like this all across India. Not only in schools and colleges, but can you imagine if they were open to everyone?”
“Everyone who speaks English, you mean?” says Anu.
“No, I mean everyone who can read. We have Hindi books and magazines too, now. In Ireland, public libraries have books in Gaelic as well as English; we should do the same here.”
“With eighteen official languages, we will need a larger library immediately,” says Anu, smiling.
It is the first time she has said we.
Imaculata flashes a smile. “You cannot believe how I persuaded—implored—parents and alumni to donate money for this building.” She gives a wry laugh. “I’m as good as a professional beggar on the streets of Delhi. I’m just more subtle and ask for larger amounts.”
She leads Anu around a rickshaw circle. The driver has continued past the nave of a grey stone chapel and the jeep is parked before a statue on a red sandstone pedestal, a white figure in flowing robes. Facing the statue, several two-storey red-roofed buildings painted lemon-cream with green trim snake across the flattened knoll.
Lord Jesus’s hands are raised in welcome.
“Please take the suitcases to the nuns’ quarters, Shafiq Sheikh,” Sister Imaculata says. She turns to Anu. “Would you like to say a prayer of thanks?”
Prayers seem appropriate after the hair-raising journey. Anu covers her head with her dupatta, dips her middle finger in the holy
water font by the chapel door, crosses herself and enters. She follows Imaculata up the central aisle, which gives way to flagstones as the pews give way to dhurries.
A group of women in salwar-kameezes are sitting cross-legged on the dhurries, rocking and praying, as if in a temple. The candles are like diyas, and the fragrance of sandalwood incense accompanies her genuflection at the altar. The saints stand in their niches with offerings of incense and flowers before them, just like intercessor gods. The Order of Everlasting Hope has Indianized a bit since her schooldays.
Anu kneels in a pew and bows her head beside Sister Imaculata. She gives thanks to all the gods and to Lord Jesus, whose suffering body hangs before her.