The Selector of Souls (33 page)
“Let the gods find her a name,” Chunilal turns to the snow peaks. “I refuse her mine.”
Three days later, Damini crosses the upper terrace to the latticed parapet. She stands beneath the unpitying stars. She gazes at the dark glimmer of the snow peaks. She has placed a sickle beneath Leela’s pillow to ward off the evil eye and prevent nightmares, but Leela has cried out a few times tonight and Damini cannot sleep.
She strikes a match and lights a beedi from the cone Vijayanthi gave her. She inhales; tobacco hits her lungs.
A live child. Clearly a girl was in this family’s bhagya and Leela should say: “Brahman, the power beyond all power, sent her.” And persuade Chunilal to give thanks. Sometimes a moment of great joy contains great sorrow.
She was not in Gurkot while Leela was growing up. Other women might have felt banished, other women might have felt more pain than she in leaving her children behind, but Damini was only twenty and full of the excitement of seeing New Delhi, navel of the world, where Jawaharlal Nehru ruled as first prime minister. The place where Mahatma Gandhi was shot by a Hindu, Nathuram
Godse, for being too friendly to Muslims and Pakistan. At twenty, she took in with matchless delight the cries of vendors, the Mughal monuments centred in roundabouts, the Republic Day parade, India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, the sounds of constant construction and the whizz of tubby Ambassador cars. And the shame of her widowhood faded as she tried to help Mem-saab overcome the shame of deafness.
But her shame is always there, waiting for a harsh word to wake it.
Could she raise the girl-baby as her own—feeding and loving her until Leela and Chunilal recover from the shock of her birth?
“What if people thought this child is not Leela’s, but yours, mata-ji?” Chunilal said today. So casually, as if asking her opinion. “What do you think would happen?”
If a widow were accused of bearing a child, she could be stoned, she could be banished. The child could be killed. Other women would do it—Chunilal wouldn’t have to raise a finger. All he’d have to do is pretend. How loudly could Leela defend Damini and the baby without endangering herself?
“Understand me,” Chunilal said. “I never intended to make this child. She happened. A terrible mistake. Look how ugly she is. That too is my doing—I’m an ugly man. Kamna is ugly too, that’s why I named her so. Desire. Cause of my troubles, from the time I was a boy.”
Two of Leela’s babies died before birth—perhaps the spirits took them. In a city, Leela could have walked into a government clinic in her first three months and said, “I can’t afford another child,” and any doctor could have performed a cleaning out—legally, easily. But events conspired to deny Leela’s wishes at every point. Not being able to leave the family to go to Shimla, not being able to cleanse the child from her body. All wrong timing, as if not one god or goddess has been listening to Leela’s wishes.
Damini fists the cinder of the beedi, containing its heat in her palm.
Lila’s breasts are now swollen and painful, but she will not feed her baby. Today all persuasion failed again, so Damini sent Kamna to
Vijayanthi’s house to ask if there is another woman in the village who can feed it.
One sweeper-woman, came the answer.
Damini threatened to bring that sweeper-woman to feed Leela’s child if Leela wouldn’t. But all Leela said was, “Let the sweeper-woman feed the child and keep her—we won’t take her back.”
What use is it to feed this girl for a few days if Chunilal and Leela refuse her love and caring thereafter? All girls need is a little love and caring, but … so many die of falling down hillsides or into wells, so many catch fevers or starve.
Petal-like eyelids beneath her fingertips—closing, closing
.
Damini inhales as if the smoke will fumigate fear. She holds it, exhales; smoke curls and dissolves in the crisp air.
Chunilal is coughing so hard, he could have TB. But TB is not as common as when she was young. And his sores … the white coating on his tongue …
Her gaze falls to a smear of hardened white paste and a broken pink plastic shell on the ground.
Ten rupees. The price of one of Chunilal’s lottery tickets. That’s all Kamna spent two days ago. Ten rupees for a sample bottle of Fair & Lovely. Chunilal snatched the skin-lightening cream, and smashed it on the parapet because she bought it without his permission. Until his anger is spent, Kamna must sleep on the lower level with the cows each night.
Chunilal’s voice is in her inner ear …
If it’s a girl, I don’t want to see her … “Let the gods find her a name, I refuse to name her.”
Vijayanthi’s voice …
“Sometimes we have to do what is necessary for the good of a family.”
Damini was the one who said to apply the fire plant. Damini should have known how to help her daughter. But even when teachers teach girls up to class eight, they don’t tell you what you really need to know in life. Maybe they tell boys.
An answer may present itself if she gives it her whole undivided attention, if she really listens. Damini, who was a pair of ears for
thirty years, often hears things people do not intend to be heard. “Tell me your wish,” she said to Leela a few hours ago. “And remember you will have to live with your decision forever.”
Leela wept. “You know what I wish. I wish the girl had never been born.”
Threads of pink, threads of blue shuttle across the pale gold loom of the morning sky.
In whitewashed houses scattered across the wavy lines of the hills, women are stirring, lighting fires in cookrooms or walking into the forest with their scythes, to gather firewood for the day. Their life is the only life this girl will know. Not as bad as the life of a sweeper, but so difficult.
A red strand of hair falls across Damini’s face. She turns to face the cool breeze. Mist and rain clouds obscure the far snow peaks. Birdsong sounds all around her, but the gods are silent.
Damini returns to the birth chamber. She lifts the newborn from Leela’s side and takes the baby to her bed. She lies down, nuzzling close to the sleeping child, a taut ache in her chest.
Four days later, Damini sits cross-legged on her rope-bed, her granddaughter wailing in her lap. A bukhari glows in the corner; the shallow basin of orange-grey coals warms the room. Chunilal and Mohan are asleep in the men’s quarters next door. Kamna 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
.
ANU
Dearest Rano
,
Sitting in a cane armchair on the grey stone terrace of what will be the nuns’ residence in Gurkot, looking out on a panoramic view of the snow peaks. Father Pashan, Sister Bethany and I arrived yesterday to check on the renovation of the Anglican chapel, the red-roofed schoolroom and cement buildings that will become our clinic
.
Anu chews the end of her pen. Past Father Pashan’s cassocked figure seated beside her, sunlight flavours the early morning air, washing the treetops, reaching fingers of shadow down the mountains—lighting but not warming. A bird calls
kewkew
. A slight breeze stirs clusters of pine cones.
“Did you notice the rainwater harvesting tank?”
“Where, Father? My city eyes are missing half the landscape.”
Father Pashan points to one end of the terrace. He’s quite old—at least fifty-five—but has been untiring since the moment the expedition left the Shimla convent, taking turns driving the jeep on the looping roads, lighting the coals of a bukhari to warm the small house, arranging that the driver will replenish their petrol jerry cans in Jalawaaz and bring them to Gurkot, spreading sheets and quilts in the bedroom, and opening his own bedding roll in the main room,
making chapatis on the gas hotplate in the little kitchen, right along with Sister Anu and Sister Bethany. Then he sat cross-legged with them on a dhurrie, eating daal bhaat, and only stopped talking about plans for the ministry when All India Radio said Bishop Tutu and the newly appointed government of South Africa were holding seminars and workshops to help people understand a draft National Unity and Reconciliation Bill. “I wish we could have such trials in India too,” Pashan said, “to face the results of caste.”
“What made you choose this area for our mission?” Anu asks.
“The good Lord led me here,” the priest says. “I needed a flock, and Mr. Amanjit Singh wants the cemetery maintained by a Christian.” His eyes glow as if there is nowhere he would rather be.
Anu says, “Do you feel there’s something special about Gurkot? I do.”
“Jesus first spoke,” Father Pashan says, his blue eye reflecting the sky, “to the outcastes. They heard his message, they responded first. It will be so here as well. Our Catholic congregation as far as I have been able to count is about two hundred families. Two hundred dalit and tribal families thirsty for the Word. About the same number are Sikhs—some have caste, some converted from outcastes. And it may be necessary to feed the belly before we feed the soul.”
His concern for social justice is contagious. And his warmth. The way he talks to her! As if he thinks she’s intelligent. Anu has never before had a friendship with an unrelated man. Growing up, she learned to flirt, admire a man’s achievements, exclaim over him, but a
friendship
? Men in her life were either gods, bosses, husbands or servants. In school and college if she so much as spoke to a “boy” older than herself, Sharad Uncle or Mumma would have made sure she was married off to him to preserve her reputation. When friendships with men were becoming commonplace for other women in New Delhi, Anu’d been afraid Vikas would find out if she said more than a few words to an unrelated man, or met a man as she was now—alone and unchaperoned.
Maybe it takes a vow of celibacy to be friends with a man
.
Pashan takes a final gulp of tea and gives the dregs to a flower bed. He goes indoors to dress. Sister Bethany has gone to meet the village headmaster, and see how the mission can supplement his efforts. She’ll return with list upon list of tasks and equipment.
Anu savours the vista for a moment, flexes cold-numbed fingers and writes:
We’re converting the chapel to Catholic—all that is needed is a crucifix and holy water for consecration. I thought holy water came from some fount in the Holy See, but it comes from a tap. Still, once blessed, it has the healing powers of Ganges-water
.
It’s strange to be out of the convent routine—prayers at five became prayers at six this morning. I don’t think we will be stopping for noon prayers …
Oh, scratch that! Prayer focuses her, allows her to peer into herself. Through it, she attempts to link herself to the bright warm light once more. She’s never succeeded even for an instant, but each attempt leaves her feeling effortlessly attentive, boundless and spacious. Rano probably wouldn’t understand.
Remember I told you Father Pashan was the priest at the Vatican Embassy in New Delhi? Well, this morning my companion Sister Bethany told me his Provincial actually banished him to the hills for giving a sermon in which he said the story of the loaves and fishes in the Bible shouldn’t be interpreted literally. He said Christ may or may not have fed five thousand people. Instead, he said Jesus was rebelling against the dietary laws of his day about unclean food. He was demonstrating sharing and justice
.
The clinic he has founded here is called The Bread of Healing. From Ecclesiastes—you remember it too, from school, I’m sure
.
She won’t. Rano went to Moral Science classes while Anu volunteered for Catechism.
“Cast your bread upon the waters … Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land.”
The lines I always liked come next—
“As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of god, the Maker of all things. Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.”
I doubt if we’ll be idle at any time of day. Our chapel is simple and elegant, with a whitewashed bell tower. The adjoining clinic is basic—very basic. My nurses’ station has a desk—we need another chair. I have the luxury of a double burner, a saucepan and a tin of Brooke Bond tea. There’s a small doctor’s office and examination room, a three-bed women’s ward, a three-bed men’s ward, an x-ray shed, two storage rooms where I will set up the lab for blood, stool and urine tests
.
Dr. Gupta, our hairy, happy, roly-poly bear of a Punjabi doctor, is already holding court (oops, office hours). I’ve been making day visits to assist him two days a week when the convent jeep and driver bring him from the nearby valley town of Jalawaaz. He’s retired and either too old or too lofty to take the minibus. He has a huge heart, but is the kind of chap to whom that organ is just a pump. We argue occasionally about matters at the cellular level. Like, what force could it be that activates a chromosome? He calls it chance. He says, In the beginning was the word, and the word was Algorithm, generator of patterns. I say, In the beginning was the Word, and maybe it was A, C, G, T, the nucleic acids that make up our DNA. I feel as you did, when you tried explaining a Faiz ghazal to a systems analyst
.
The chapel, school and clinic are on the estate of an old Sikh family, and we feel very blessed to be running it. Oh, you’ll like this: our chapel stands on the same knoll as an older Sikh gurdwara. So both faiths will share space, and Christians are invited to dine in the Sikh community dining hall after worship. Father Pashan says sitting side by side and eating “langar” breaks caste and he approves of that, but cautions he doesn’t want us becoming Sikhs!