The Selector of Souls (24 page)

“Ay, hero … !” she yells at a long-bearded flabby trucker sporting sunglasses and a reflector-yellow turban, over his idling engine and the clunk and thunk of logs loading. Then she yells her question, and the trucker points to a purple-cabbed green truck parked at the end of the row. That’s Ustaad Chunilal’s truck, he says, calling him teacher. But he hasn’t seen Chunilal.

“How long, ji?” she asks. Chunilal used to say it felt as if his heart
had stopped whenever his truck was idle. Yet he shudders at suggestions that he should become a company-man, saying he’d lose his side income. He takes passengers like young Nepali women and their so-called aunts south to Bombay, and carries monks on their way north to higher and higher planes.

The flabby man removes his sunglasses to consider. “Three, four, maybe six months—who knows? His Second Driver and helper have found themselves a new Ustaad from whom they can learn.”

“Gone to his village, ji,” says a tempo-driver with face as pinched as the nose of his three-wheeler truck. He wipes the windshield with an oily rag. “Manager-saab was asking for him.”

He means Aman-ji’s manager, a pitiless prune of a man, who lives far better than he should on a caretaker’s income. Damini can’t imagine him asking about Chunilal’s health.

“Chunilal sent his son to get his pay—the son said Chunilal is sick.”

“Sick—all this time?” she says. “Is he in Gurkot?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Where are you going?”

“Taking this load to the sawmill,” the tempo-driver gestures at the back where two stringy-looking men are loading logs onto the flatbed. “In an hour or two,” he says, looking up at the gathering clouds.

“I’ll come with you?” She hopes she doesn’t sound too desperate.

She can tell he doesn’t want to say no, maybe out of respect for her age. He should remember his grandmother, mother and sisters. Maybe he’ll take her for free?

But the tempo-man is rubbing finger and thumb together, looking reproachful.

She can’t claim a discount for being almost-family. She doesn’t have anything he would want as barter. “But you’ll take the new road around the mountain to the sawmill,” she says. “Then I’ll have to cross the river again and walk up the north face to Gurkot. It’s too steep with my luggage …”

“I’ll take you on the old road as far as the bhoot-sarak.” He means the ghost-trail that crosses the river. “Then you can climb to Gurkot,” he suggests, going back to wiping.

“I don’t know the spirits on that path anymore,” says Damini, “What if they are disagreeable?”

“Sometimes it happens,” he says.

“And if it gets late, I may have to stop and sleep along the way. Can you please arrange a porter? Someone you know—not just anyone. An older man who will know the spirits.”

“My cousin-uncle is there, ji,” says the tempo-man. “He will carry your luggage, no problem.”

He names a price, and Damini offers half. They compromise at three-quarters.

A drop plops to her shoulder, then another and soon the mountain road acquires the silken polish of rain. In a few minutes, a bead veil sweeps across the diesel station, obscuring the bright colours of the trucks. The trip will have to wait.

Damini dines on a leaf-plate of chaat in the fume-filled air of a chai-stall. Afterwards, she takes a shawl from her shoulder bag and wraps it around her. She curls her fingers around a steaming glass of chai. Sitting on her bedroll, she listens to Lata singing on the radio and watches white mist shift and swirl between ridges and descend upon the valley town.

Thunder rolls as if a gigantic game of marbles were in progress above her—that’s Lord Indra trying to overcome Vrita, the asura of drought. That demon hoards the waters for himself each year.
Damini is here
, she breathes to Lord Indra—
Lightning is here; use me
.

A serrated flash follows as if invoked by her name. Maybe her prayer brought a moment of good karma.

Two hours later, the rain has abated. The tempo lurches forward on its single front wheel, grinding Damini’s bones. She’s squeezed into the cab beside the pointy-nosed driver, her bedroll taking up half her seat. She leans against it and rests her feet on her shoulder bag, like the woman on the pink poster.

She tries to smile that woman’s carefree smile, but anxiety will not allow it—possibly because she’s hanging on while the tempo careens down the half-disintegrated road.

She will have to face Chunilal as well as Leela and the whole village.

This is how she felt after her wedding, when she came to live in Gurkot. “When you leave home,” her mother said, “you believe everything is coming to an end. But really, it is only the beginning of your life’s battles.” Piara Singh was beside her, then.

And again now. Boyish, diamond-eyed—and now half her age. His favourite Kullu hat upon his head, the one with the rainbow band. The wiry body she came to love so dearly, covered with a pale blue muslin kurta and pyjama. His cheeks look smooth as if he’s had a shave at the barber. Those two black fringes above his lips—she can almost feel them whisking her cheeks.

I heard your name among all the others my parents proposed and said, She is the one. I said, She will be like lightning, travelling between earth and sky, plains and hills, fearing nothing. And I said lightning brings the blessing of rain. And then I met you and found you were such a fearful little thing! And remember I told you, you had nothing to fear?

Though he’s less substantial than air, his youthful energy and hope envelops her.

He was right, for his parents made her welcome, not only when she was fourteen, but for all six years she was married. In those days people said a woman from Rajasthan wouldn’t have the stamina to live in the hills, but they didn’t know Damini. At first she thought it impossible to love a place that wasn’t her own, just as she could not love her birth village. But since no one
said
she could not love her husband’s village, she did—to her own surprise.

She had returned to her birth village in Rajasthan only twice during her marriage. The last time was when she found her mother—she stops herself before the memory overcomes her.

Anyway, she was the luckiest of her sisters. Her mother-in-law would never refuse permission if Damini wanted to visit her parents;
she said Damini’s father knew his duty, which meant he sent gifts with Damini on her return. But there was never enough money, or there was too much work to be done or no one to escort her since she didn’t have a brother who could come and get her. And in those days young women did not travel alone. The question of visiting her sisters in their new homes didn’t arise—her sisters couldn’t afford to send gifts for all Damini’s in-laws.

If Damini forgot important things like who was older than whom as she served family, her mother-in-law, Ramkali Bai, would forbid Damini to enter the kitchen even for a drop of water, as if she had suddenly become unclean or outcaste like a sweeper. But she never ever beat Damini. And once her new daughter-in-law was trained, Ramkali developed mysterious ailments that kept her from chopping vegetables, washing clothes, cleaning out the cowshed, milking the cows, and kneading dough for rotis. Ramkali became “house manager” and house managers do not hand-water timorous shoots or weed cauliflower beds.

Everything, everyone was full of shanti till you died
, she tells Piara Singh’s spirit.

She doesn’t mention the three times she threatened to leave and take Leela and Suresh home to her own parents, when the jooa cards stuck to his fingers and the hopsy smell of hooch stank in his clothing. But he hears her now as he never did alive.

I gambled, I drank—of course. But when Nehru-ji said big landlords had to reduce their land holdings, did I wait an instant? No—I borrowed money from every relative and went to Sardar-saab and bought our land
.

You did, you did. I tell Suresh this story often. But you didn’t borrow all the money—quite a bit of it came from my dowry. A little far uphill from Jalawaaz, it’s true, and not as fertile as your parents would have liked, but
land
.

Old Sardar-saab! He sold it, thinking it useless. And I cleared the jungle and built our house. With my own hands, and with the help of my brothers and my jooa-playing friends
.

And when the house was built, and before we moved in, we held a special ceremony for Lord Golunath, so he’d always bring us justice. And then your mother became angry because we hadn’t honoured Anamika Devi.

She would say, Anamika wishes to speak: and her body would shake and tremble and a deeper voice would come
.

Damini smiles inside. The last time the goddess spoke through Ramkali Bai she informed Ramkali’s astounded husband and remaining sons that widowed Damini would be going to the plains to work for Mem-saab. And that Ramkali would no longer be house manager, but would raise Leela and baby Suresh. This decision was, the goddess said via Ramkali, premade by the universe, stemming from their family’s ancestral loyalty to Sardar-saab’s. And if Ramkali Bai’s husband didn’t agree, Anamika Devi’s curses would ruin him.

Of course Damini’s father-in-law agreed—though he did say he would miss Damini’s cooking. That man’s decisions usually stemmed from his fears. Whereas his son, her dear Piara Singh sitting beside her in spirit form, could have been kind enough to have
more
fear, especially of heights.

Piara Singh’s grasping brothers didn’t dare object. Not then, or when they learned Ramkali Bai had reregistered Piara Singh’s house and land in Leela’s name. “If owning this land is not in Suresh’s stars,” Ramkali told Damini, who was visiting Gurkot with Mem-saab for the summer, “then neither is it in theirs.” Her gift was for Leela’s dowry, and Piara Singh’s brothers were too afraid of a dead mother’s curses to give Leela trouble.

Suresh both appreciated and resented his grandmother’s bequest—by putting the farm in Leela’s name, Ramkali Bai had gifted away her grandson’s patrimony, but relieved him of responsibility to provide a dowry for his sister. Suresh could have challenged the registration, but it would have taken years in court and more money than he’d ever seen in this life.

I didn’t live in your house long, Damini says to Piara Singh’s spirit. Your family was supposed to be my protection, my anchor. But only your mother understood that your brothers could kill me. When my life was in danger only she knew what needed to be done, what needed saying … All those years, she looked after our children in that house.

Return there, now. Live there now
.

So many relatives’ feelings to consider, not just our children: what about Chunilal’s family—Leela’s in-laws. His parents, his brothers and their wives will say we took from a daughter.

Don’t be afraid
.

Don’t go far from me.

I am with you
.

The tempo arrives where the ghost-trail begins. Two bamboo poles prop up a dingy canvas that marks a one-chair cubbyhole of a barbershop, a phone stall, and a chai-stall nestled in a cleft in the mountain.

The tempo driver alights and a burly Tibetan man leaves his pipe to set the chai kettle on the clay stove. A messenger boy is dispatched to the porter’s hut. The tempo driver sits down at one of the tea-stained tables and orders a plate of potato pakoras. A saab on the radio says not to panic but plague has broken out again in India. Another saab says England beat South Africa by eight wickets, which seems unfair—Englishmen are always winning. A third is saying it’s possible India may not sign a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty when it comes up for renewal next year, citing national security concerns. Damini only listens in hope that film music will follow.

She surveys the single-use shampoo packets hanging from the ceiling. Her gaze moves to the Liril and Lifebuoy soaps, Vicco Turmeric vanishing cream, bottles of Fair & Lovely lotion, and trial packs of Rin stacked on the counter. Large jars on the counter keep
rusks and vegetable patties safe from mosquitoes. She points at the Hajmola sweets and hands over a rupee. The four sweets will taste of the churan and betel mix her mother administered to quell hunger. The Tibetan man inquires where she’s going and doesn’t seem to remember her—years ago, men remembered Damini if they saw her even once.

The Hajmola settles her stomach. She relieves herself behind a bush, climbs back into the tempo cab and waits some more.

The ponderous energy of the rain-soaked mountain towers above her. This knoll didn’t exist when she first came to Gurkot—an avalanche formed it after the state government used dynamite to make the road cut. The Tibetan man and his wife were children of road workers back then—they’ve certainly climbed higher than their refugee parents. The wife, she recalls, wore rainbow blouses with her full-length bakus and gave teenage Suresh an extra pakora on his way home from selling vegetables in Jalawaaz market. Suresh hated taking vegetables to market. It wasn’t warrior-like, he said. Not what a kshatriya should do.