The Selector of Souls (34 page)

A power line skims the treetops and darts downhill to meet orange-painted giants carrying it to Shimla. A path down the mountain passes terraces planted with rosebushes and apple trees. She can see women on the path in salwar-kameez, sweaters and kerchiefs, some are just specks beneath cone-shaped baskets on their backs. Older women wear the full-length rejta skirt and dhattu headcovering. Young women wear the salwar-kameez and dupatta like Anu, but in many colours. Most wear sandals or sneakers—the high heels she misses would be treacherous on these slopes.

She pulls Rano’s last letter from her hip pocket. Rano says she and Jatin’s family and now Chetna too go to the Dixie-Derry gurdwara every Sunday, as if they keep a Sabbath and as if the gurdwara is a church. Rano asks for a sooji-halwa recipe—she’s taking it to a Punjabi poetry gathering. Anu writes that one from memory. What are the names of the rasas—Anu can only remember seven of the nine aesthetic emotions, and writes those. And the debut dance of a bharatanatyam dancer—jatiswaram or arangetram? Arangetram.

Rano sounds afraid India will slip away from her. Yet she says
Canada has a policy of multiculturalism that allows you to be yourself, and Indian, and Canadian in Canada. Which means Chetna won’t be asked to sacrifice being Indian. Sacrifice—blood—

She folds the letter, inserts it in an envelope. She takes her billfold from her shoulder bag and from it removes three stamps.

Only the most interesting for Rano and Chetna. She found these at Combermere Post Office in Shimla, undemanded, slightly battered since British times. She remembers these same stamps from Dadu’s collection, and the way he held them so gently with a pair of tweezers when he showed them to her.

She tucks them in, licks the envelope closed, and sticks a modern international stamp on the outside. On the back flap, she writes her new name: Sister Anupam.

“W
HAT MORE DO YOU WANT?” SAYS
V
IJAYANTHI
. “I
GAVE
you advice, boots, beedis for tobacco …”

Icy mountains loom all around. Snow patches are appearing on nearer mountains, too. Today it feels as if it will take longer for Damini to balance her karma as for wind and rain to lay the mountains low.

She follows Vijayanthi beneath the overhang. As Vijayanthi hunches to enter her cookroom, Damini too doubles over to duck under the smoke layer, crouch-walking till she can drop her bottom and sit before the four-legged bowl of the stove. Vijayanthi pushes a jute sack cushion at Damini and she takes it, gratefully—Vijayanthi is according Damini some respect, trying to make up for her harsh words.

Heat from the twig and coal fire singes her face. Her eyes smart—must be the smoke. “I didn’t think it would be so difficult,” Damini says.

Since she brought the tiny body home from Anamika Devi’s cave two weeks ago, she has been feeling weak. Ever since that small body, too young to cremate, was buried under the peach tree on the lower terrace, her heart has been jumping as if missing beats, as if she has taken too large a hit of tobacco. And she has been heavy with longing to lie down.

Lying down is impossible since Leela is still in her unclean stage, unable to cook, and too depleted to work in the field. Today Damini was washing clothes beneath the waterspout by five, collecting firewood in the forest by six, and then working with Kamna to milk the cows for Mohan to carry milk to the roadside storehouse. Muscles she never felt are informing her of their presence.

You can be thrown in a rat-infested cell for what you did. You can hang for this if someone tells
.

“Did I say it is easy, fighting for women’s wishes?”

“No.” Damini’s throat feels knotted and dry.

“You saw my Madhu—when she was born, I couldn’t do it. I told my grandson I have become too old and soft. But you are strong, still. Tell me, is Leela glad?”

“She’s … no, not glad. She is doing what needs doing.”

“But?”

“She does not speak.”

“Does she blame you? Sometimes they do.”

“She said when I left her and went to New Delhi, she began to learn never to want what she cannot have. And she says the girl’s bhagya took her early. But no, she’s not grateful.”

“Huh—what gratitude can you expect from children these days?”

“She says if Chunilal had not withheld his name, she would have fed the girl.”

“It’s too late now. Who came to mourn?”

“If I had told Chimta, Tubelight, Supari or Matki, they would have sent the men in their families. But I didn’t. As it was, the sweeper-woman, Goldina, and her husband, Samuel, came. Samuel dug the grave.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That a ghost came into the child and gave her a fever, and she died.”

“Did you pay the sweeper well, to believe you?”

“Yes—twenty rupees.” And because the thought of jail sent her into mindless panic.

“Is Leela’s husband glad?”

“He has stopped blaming Leela.”

“And how is he treating you?”

“He doesn’t refuse my care. Maybe he is trying to please me by accepting it. I had to feed him tea with a spoon today, he was so ill, and I’m tending him only because it’s my dharma. I can’t be angry at a sick man.”

“
Arey!
If you still have a roof over your head, what more do you want?”

Vijayanthi reaches around till her hand meets a brass bowl of wheat flour. She pulls it toward her and says, “People think a dai has to do something like this every time. It’s only sometimes that such acts become necessary.”

Damini draws an uneasy breath. She wants to forget the feel of that tiny body nestling close, the smile that bloomed on those tiny lips when she massaged the baby’s face. That the baby’s eyes opened, and that the child looked directly into her eyes as if she could see. What she has done is—say it, name it!—killing. The horror of that fact encases her in ice.

And though her
Gita
tells how Lord Krishna urged Lord Arjun to do his duty as a warrior without regard to outcome, even if those outcomes included the killing of his relatives, it does not say if Arjun felt as heavy-hearted, as full of remorse as Damini when he returned from battle.

“If it had been someone I didn’t know, if it had not been my granddaughter …”

And there’s the matter of her remaining granddaughter. Kamna is not speaking to her father since he smashed her bottle of Fair & Lovely. Kamna is afraid of him, though he grows sicker by the day. Damini has told her a bottle of face cream isn’t important, but today Mohan asked Kamna to dance, and she wouldn’t.

Mohan is oblivious, blowing his flute tunelessly till the cows low and roll their eyes in agony. Damini shouldn’t have bought it for him.

Vijayanthi cups her hand in the bowl. Damini follows the prompt, taking up a nearby jug. She pours water into Vijayanthi’s hand. Vijayanthi lets the water run into the flour for a few seconds, and then gestures with her other hand to stop.

“At least it was you, not some stranger, who returned this atman to brahman,” Vijyanthi says. “At least it was done with love. Tell Leela, next time the gods will send a boy. And if you can’t do what women want”—contempt rings in Vijayanthi’s voice—“don’t come anymore. I have too little time left in this life, I’ll teach someone else.”

“No, no, don’t say that.” says Damini, misery eating at her insides. “You see, my pension … 
aye-hai
! The gourmint has stopped my pension. I went to the post office in Jalawaaz—a letter from the pension office was waiting. The guormint says now my son has a job, he should now look after me.”

“Then? Did you tell Suresh?”

“I can’t.” says Damini. “When I lost my job and couldn’t give him money every month, Suresh couldn’t afford to live in Delhi anymore. So his swami found him a job in Jalawaaz as a teacher in the RSS school beside the temple. He came to see us yesterday in his new khaki shorts, white shirt and saffron scarf with Lord Ram printed on it. He’s now wearing a tail of hair from here,” she touches the crown of her head, “longer than the rest. ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ was his greeting, full of pride. But they don’t pay him a salary, only living expenses, and travel expenses when he goes to teach the sweepers and jungle people in surrounding villages. Sometimes they give him a share of the temple donations.”

“That’s more than many other men get.”

“But he needs money to find a bride from a good family, with a bit of land maybe—so how can I say, Oh please give me money?”

“You don’t need money till you go to a city. Till then, just exchange this for that.”

Vijayanthi gropes around till her fingers meet a hollow iron pipe lying beside her. She hands it to Damini. Damini blows into it,
enlivening the coal-flame beneath the stove. “I had promised Chunilal my pension. Two hundred a month,” she says. She will give it to him from her bonus money until she begins earning.

“Two hundred rupees: that’s four babies a month,” says Vijayanthi. She finishes working the dough, twirls the bowl. The flour paste turns sticky as it changes to roti dough. “In a city you’d find four babies a month. But here—only ten or fifteen a year. You can charge more if they come out boys. If they are girls, ask if the father wants to greet a marriage party or not … if he says no, you know what he is asking you to do …”

Damini blows into the pipe a few more times and the coals burn brightly. “If the baby comes out a girl,” she says, “would I be blamed just as they blame the mother?”

“Sometimes.” Vijayanthi taps her breastbone. “I tell young men, if you want sons, plant sons, then only can you reap sons and carry on your family name. Plant a daughter, reap a daughter. But they! They think a woman’s koke can turn a daughter into son or a son into a daughter.”

“I will only take fees for children I deliver live,” says Damini.

“Then you will get half the pay you could get,” says Vijayanthi. “But it’s your bijness. I can tell you what to do, the rest is up to you.”

“It’s not a bijness,” says Damini. “In our family, men do bijness, not women. I’ll take donations. People can pay what they feel my skill is worth.”

“If that’s how you want it, then you’ll need to learn to heal all sicknesses. I will teach you.” Vijayanthi pats the dough into a large ball, scrapes her fingers and adds every last morsel to the whole. “Most people only want to tell me the old ways are wrong. When I heard the padri is going to open a full-time clinic beside the church, I immediately went to ask him if I could help—a year ago I could still see quite well. But he said I’d have to learn many new things.” She reaches into the dough and scoops out a small ball.

“Learn about new medicines or new plants?”

“Neither. Medicines come from Delhi and abroad. The plants—what can he teach me that my mother-in-law didn’t? See, the padri isn’t like our ojha—the padri only prays, he doesn’t heal. And he only becomes possessed by his Lord Jesus on Sundays, no other day. And he and his followers pray only to Lord Jesus for healing, not all the gods. He needs a doctor-saab to come and do healing.

“Then what did he say you had to learn?”

“To touch strangers and clean away shit like any sweeper. He said he himself is a sweeper and all of us are just like sweepers. But I thought,
I’m not so desperate
, and came away.”

Vijayanthi rolls the dough ball between her palms, and then dredges it in flour.

“Will the new doctor have medicines to stop girl babies from coming?” says Damini.

Vijayanthi laughs with no amusement. “Ask Lord Golunath. He’s Lord Brahma’s incarnation, and only Lord Brahma can stop girls from coming,” She holds out the ball of dough. Damini takes it, looks around, finds the rolling pin and stone flat by the stove and rolls out the roti. “Medicines stop boys as well as girls from coming. But you
can
find out if an atman has by mistake entered a girl’s body, so you can clean it out. You must find out early, mind you. Not so late as Leela—that’s why I didn’t tell you before.”