The Selector of Souls (35 page)

Slap-slap
. Damini flips the floppy dough from palm to palm and places the roti gently on the tava, heating it in the concave bowl of hot iron. “Then you don’t need to …”

Vijayanthi nods. “And more live children will be born.” She pauses for effect, and rubs her thumb over her forefinger. “The padri said his clinic won’t have an ultra-soon.”

“Ultra-soon?”

“What,” says Vijayanthi, “is the use of opening a clinic if village women still have to walk all the way to Jalawaaz for ultra-soon?”

“What is ultra-soon?”

“A machine that looks inside a woman,” says Vijayanthi. “With it,
there is nothing the doctor can’t see. He sees the flower of her womb, the stems that hold it, the passage, the gateway the baby will use. He takes a photo,
click
!—right through the woman’s skin—to see if a tail is growing in front of the child.”

“Can the machine see her past?”

“No. And though it foretells if a girl or boy is coming, it can’t—” Vijayanthi’s voice drops to a whisper and she shifts a squat-step closer, “it can’t foretell what the woman will do if she knows a girl is coming. Of course, doctors know what she will do, but they pretend they don’t.”

Vijanthi gropes around again, comes up with a pair of tongs, which she hands to Damini. The roti is rising slightly. Damini pokes at it with the tongs.

“And if she is told a girl is coming?”

Damini lifts the roti from the tava and places it upon the flame.

“She can have it cleaned out right there, at the Jalawaaz clinic—but first the woman needs to know.”

“Does a husband or father or brother have to go with the woman to get it cleaned out?”

“No, the woman doesn’t have to tell anyone. But it’s difficult if she doesn’t, because its so far to either Jalawaaz or Shimla. And sometimes doctors ask the woman to bring her husband with her, to prove her husband says yes. And if the woman can’t bring her husband, some doctors charge more money. If she takes you with her, you can say you’re her mother-in-law.”

The roti has begun to blister and smoke. Damini removes it from the fire and drops it onto a steel platter. Vijayanthi scoops into the glistening wheatish skin of the roti-dough, and begins another.

Damini watches, thinking. A child in the womb is unnamed flesh, and the vedas say all destruction is disappearance. Not every seed takes root, not every one that falls becomes an oak or pine. Everything is important—soil, water, wind, incline. A seed is only potential seeking the heat of a womb.

If the form is destroyed before breath, the girl’s life cannot happen. The decision to return being to non-being, return a child to brahman, should belong only to the woman who harbours a child in her womb. No government, doctor, nurse, midwife or grandmother should be a selector of souls.

Vijayanthi is saying she’s sure the new ultrasoon clinic in Jalawaaz will give Damini a commission for each woman referred. A commission that will help her pay Chunilal two hundred rupees a month so no one can say she took from her daughter’s home.

On her way home, the mountains look less forbidding to Damini. The sky has turned as turquoise as yearning; the trees are tensely green and waiting. Inside her, a nub of feeling rises to a prayer of gratitude: she will never need to do what she did again.

The ultra-soon is the answer
.

S
ISTER
A
NU FOLLOWS THE LONG STRIDE OF A RAGGED
man with a large knife tied to his walking stick like a bayonet. It’s the tenth anniversary of Bobby’s death and she needs to see the spot where he died. Her guide is the man who carried her wounded brother on his back uphill to the car and accompanied Bobby all the way to Snowdon Hospital. He leads her downhill from the Cart Road on a pocked byway that ends where a footpath begins, swivelling at intervals to assure her in lilting Himachali Hindi that the spot she seeks is just ahead. Sister Anu keeps her eyes on the footpath, determinedly ignoring the ravine beside her that plunges through December sunshine into darkness.

One more curve and the footpath opens onto a long grassy clearing flanked by ancient pines. A canopy of branches floats above Sister Anu like lances ready to thrust or parry. Monkeys chatter and screech at their approach. The guide bows to them as incarnations of Lord Hanuman, then raises his stick and feints. They scamper away.

Details—telegrams from memory.

We sent Bobby here. All of us—Dadu, Mumma, Sharad Uncle, Purnima-aunty and I. It was a month after Madam G.’s assassination and her party’s anti-Sikh killing spree and Dadu had came to Delhi to help the Home Minister shoo away questions from Sikh widows asking why the army wasn’t called in
to stop the carnage. Bobby was fifteen. We all thought a hiking trip in the hills with four other boys in the winter would knock the sissy out of him. His friends would do what we couldn’t, make him a man
.

What friends! One boy invited Bobby to his home for a party and forgot to send his car for him, so after two hours of watching Bobby wait by the gate, I flagged a scootie and escorted him there. But he was so mortified to be late, he couldn’t go in. So I brought him home. The other three had been invited to Bobby’s fourteenth birthday party—they wouldn’t have forgotten to attend if Dadu was a raja or an industrialist. Yet Bobby wanted to go to Shimla with these boys
.

Beyond the clearing, the ground falls away sharply again. The guide leads her to a group of huge boulders. “Isko Angrez log kehlate theh Council Rock,” he says. The English called this Council Rock.

Wasp-waisted women with ruffled parasols must have come here, and ordered their uniformed khidmatgars to spread blankets and Irish linen for a picnic. Those white-gloved manservants would have laid gilt-edged china and sterling place settings under these looming pines, and darted around pouring whisky from cut-glass decanters for portly men with handlebar moustaches.

Instead, Bobby and his friends went hunting chukar partridge. Friends with guns.

One friend’s gun went off on this very day in 1984—how did it just go off, she asks the guide.

“No, Miss-saab. I didn’t lead them here. They themselves came here. But I helped them take the wounded boy to hospital. That’s how I came to know there were guns.”

Did a gun threaten the one boy in the group who wasn’t man enough?

Where was Bobby standing, where was the friend standing? What might Bobby have said, what did that friend make him say? The police didn’t ask any such questions.

Because after wounding Bobby, his “friend” didn’t call an ambulance. Bobby’s friend called his father, who paid off the Himachal
State police and made arrangements for Bobby to be taken to Snowdon Hospital. Only then did anyone call Dadu.

Bobby’s friend’s father said his son didn’t mean any harm—remember, he was Bobby’s
friend
. Dadu and Mumma should not press charges, he told Dadu—there was nothing to be gained. Besides, if they did, he would fight them in court for the next twenty-five years before he would let his son pay for a careless mistake. Bobby, he told them, couldn’t have felt anything. Just one minute he was here, the next minute he was in a coma, and a week after that in the next life. “So why ruin a young boy’s life? Can you imagine a young boy of fifteen, a boy from a good background sentenced to jail along with darkie low caste criminals—just for an
accident
? What good would that do?”

Eventually, Dadu and Mumma were persuaded to go along. Dadu told the world Bobby and his friends went hiking in Shimla. That Bobby fell down the hillside and was killed. No mention of a shot, no mention of a gun.

It wouldn’t have done Dadu’s career any good if he’d reported his son’s murder. And since a murdered brother would have been a liability for Anu’s prospects of marriage, Mumma told Anu she too must say it was an ‘accident.’ For so many years, Anu has not been able to speak of it, even think of it. Yet Bobby is why she has asked to study nursing, Bobby is why she is doing her nurse’s training on the coma ward at Snowdon. But his death is also the lie that comes between her and Mumma.

Now a similar lie must be told to the world about Dadu so Mumma can save face. They all must say that his death, too, was an accident, which happened during an inspection tour of his district. Because if it wasn’t an accident, than what was Deepak Lal doing eating onion pakoras and egg karhi on the veranda of a widow’s home? Just the two of them (and her servants). Mumma said, “Everyone knows how loose and immoral widows are.”

Notified of her father’s death by her lawyer ten days ago, Anu returned to the plains for a week. Mumma said everyone in that
small town must have seen Dadu on the veranda with the widow. “Accident is a better word,” she said. “More heroic.”

Her sparrow face was suddenly worn and large-eyed. The corners of her mouth drooped. Grey gleamed at the roots of her hair, and two creases were beginning in her neck. “How could he be unfaithful to
me
?” she kept saying, as if Dadu could have been unfaithful to any other woman.

Anu dealt with the details because Mumma, who maintained English ways and spoke and taught only English in every city and town of India, could no longer speak enough Hindi to deal with them. And Anu insisted on performing Dadu’s last rites.

She must have called every pandit within a radius of a hundred kilometres—none would agree to allow a daughter to be present. But then she found one who said it was just for a daughter to perform last rites. He said the gods would countenance a woman’s performance of last rites, even if society will not—provided every man and woman in the family swore never to tell a soul his name. Thanks to that pandit, Anu sent her father to his next life as her brother would have, going to the crematorium, pressing a switch to reduce Dadu’s body to ashes.

As she had when Bobby died, Mumma took her handkerchief and swollen eyes to the darkened drawing-room to sit beside Dadu’s garlanded photograph. And just as when Bobby died, a legion of mourners entered the room, and each communed with her in silent grief. Old friends, former students, even acquaintances entered Mumma’s silence in a way Anu could not—some without exchanging more than a deep namaste and murmured greetings.

“Selling off half that plot way outside New Delhi, the plot we bought for retirement. No consideration for his wife. And what’s left? One little acre. In a market town on the way to Jaipur, nothing but the old Maruti car plant in sight. Gurgaon! Of all places, Gurgaon!” Mumma raged to Anu. Had she forgotten Dadu sold off land to pay for Anu’s surgery, or did she need Anu to feel guilty? “He
could have built a house before he died, at least. Only thinking of himself. That was your father.”

Mumma was left a son-less widow, and once bereavement befell her, no one else’s bereavement could compare. Beside her mother’s suffering, Anu’s need to mourn her father had seemed selfish. But that need has led her here on Bobby’s death anniversary.

Sister Anu pays the guide. He stomps back up the trail; his long staff is soon out of sight.

Christ, where were you? Lamb of god who taketh away the sins of the world, why didn’t you take away Dadu and Mumma’s paaps, as well? Why only Christian sins?

Could you not find it in you to love Mumma as well as me? She’s not easy to love, I know, but does she deserve her suffering? Did Dadu?

Sister Anu allows herself ten minutes of tears—any more and she’ll unravel.

Mumma’s elder brother did not come, nor did his wife. Anu told herself Mumma’s brother and his wife would come as soon as they learned of Dadu’s passing. Surely they would come. But punishing Indu Lal for marrying ‘out’ was more important than brotherly love. Purnima-aunty said, “He didn’t come when Bobby died and your mumma didn’t invite him for your wedding. Why do you expect him to be here?”

Sharad Uncle explained, “Your uncle is a fine man, completely unattached to the outcome of his actions. He’s just doing his dharma.”

Anu said, “He doesn’t care what effect his actions have on Mumma? What a cruel brother, what an unfeeling uncle.”

Purnima consoled, “Your Sharad Uncle is here, I’m here. We represent your uncle and all of Mumma’s family by our presence.”

Anu said, “No, you can’t. You only represent yourself. But you are the epitome of kindness.”

Sitting on Council Rock, she draws her knees to her chest. Red monkeys chatter and swing through the branches above her. The moon rises, plump and white-faced as the goras who once ruled India.
The sun slips away between the pines. Moon-shadows grow large and dense.

The government will allow her mother six months before she must leave the bungalow allotted to her late husband. After that, she says she plans to build an English language school on what remains of the plot of land. “No more moving every few years, no more private tuitions,” she vows. “You wait, I’ll give your convent schools some competition. I’ll open an English Academy. I’ll offer training in manners, personality development and life coaching.”

Mumma would refuse a single rupee from Anu, even if Anu had crores to offer, because Anu is a daughter. Dadu’s life was one long apology to his wife for his lower birth, but he never took one paisa from Mumma’s family or let them tell him how to live. And he wanted Bobby and Anu to define themselves, too. Bobby never stood a chance. Is Anu moving toward self-definition? Perhaps only by learning who or what she doesn’t want to be.

The stars are ancient silver rupees strewn across the sky. Take one away, does the universe implode? No, it goes on, oblivious.

People we lose are still in our neural networks. I still want to talk to Bobby and Dadu, smell them, laugh and chat with them
.

Where did their life force go? Can it return?

How long will it be till Jesus returns? Jesus resurrected Lazarus … Why was that resurrection, and not reincarnation? Oh, because Lazarus got back his same body, fixed up
.

Sister Anu prays for forgiveness for the dreams that still trouble her in which Vikas is wounded by her hand. For fantasies in which he is publicly shamed or stoned.