The Selector of Souls (53 page)

Suresh folds his arms across his chest with barely contained rage. “These Sikhs and Christians—always up to something against Hindus.”

“Aman-ji is a Sikh,” says Damini. “But why are you blaming Christians as well?”

“All same. Not-Hindus, that’s why.”

“Suresh, some Sikhs are good, and so are some Christians.”

“Threatening Hindus, all having too many babies, taking away land.”

Mohan looks up from his corner. “Babies. Taking baby to Shimla, put baby in car.”

Suresh turns, his face lighting up. “What did you say? Say it in Hindi, boy.”

“Be quiet, Mohan!” says Damini.

Mohan gets to his feet and shakes his head like a small elephant blundering behind the herd. “Sister said, ‘Taking baby to Shimla. Put him in the car, Mohan.’ ”

S
ISTER
A
NU IS IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE CONVENT
jeep, returning to Gurkot after a weekend in Shimla, swaying as the road curls and reading a mystifying letter from Chetna about choosing between costumes for Halloween. Rano and Chetna always seem to be choosing and deciding. It sounds exhausting. And Halloween seems dark, pagan and strange in contrast with Gurkot’s blue sky on this crisp clear morning.

Shafiq Sheikh takes a bend in the road, and slows the jeep.

Men have joined hands to form a human garland across the road at the incline to Bread of Healing. Several men are dressed in marigold turbans, many sporting vermilion teeka-marks on their foreheads, as if coming from the temple. “Is it a festival?” she asks.

“No, Sister,” says Shafiq Sheikh. “Dusshera is still two weeks away. Maybe a wedding?”

“If it were a wedding,” says Father Pashan from the front seat, “people would look more happy and gay.”

Shafiq Sheikh stops, rolls down his window and sticks his head out. “I see some women,” he says. Wedding processions are usually all-male events.

A man in a white singlet and grey pants seems to be the leader.
Men’s fists are pumping behind him as they shout slogans—death to something.

The man in the white singlet carries a large photo frame under one arm, and clasps a megaphone in the other. “My brothers and sisters! Christians are converting Hindus to Christianity,” he shouts. “They steal our babies! Sister Anupam was seen taking a baby boy away to Shimla. Ask my nephew, Mohan—he saw her. He saw the baby, he says it was a
boy
. And then the sister returned from Shimla without him. You know, we all know, that someone’s baby boy is being sold abroad.”

Men wag their heads, shouting
“Han! Han!”
as if certain that people abroad value sons as highly as they do.

The man with the megaphone comes closer, and Sister Anu recognizes Suresh. He yells, “Look at what these Christians want to do to your women.”

He lays the megaphone down by the roadside, turns the poster around and holds it overhead. He rotates slowly on the ball of one sneakered foot, allowing everyone to see. A pink poster depicts a woman in a sari, sitting on a European-style chair. One bare foot touches the floor, one rests on a footstool. She’s facing a TV, and a couple of pages of a newspaper have fallen on the floor beside her. On a low table beside the woman is a cup, perhaps of tea. The woman’s chin is raised. She’s smiling as if enjoying herself. A book in her hand is titled in Devanagari script. Her sandals lie beside her on the floor.

Suresh props the pink poster against the hillside. “Christians want all women to become like this,” he shouts.

The few women in the crowd gaze at the woman in the poster as if she were a Bollywood starlet. The men are suitably shocked.

Several people in the crowd are former patients, and others must be family members of patients. Enough! Sister Anu opens her door.

“Sister, come back!” says Father Pashan.

“Just a minute,” she says. She gets out, faces the crowd. “
Sunno!
All
of you, listen! This is a terrible misunderstanding. Please disperse. No one working at the clinic intends to hurt anyone. All of us are trying to help—you who have been our patients know that. Tell him so,” she says, pointing to their leader.

Father Pashan comes to stand beside her.

It occurs to Sister Anu that the people think Father Pashan is American or English. It’s the one blue eye. But he’s Indian as can be! Anu will have to talk to the crowd. Her Hindi doesn’t sound Anglo-Indian like Father Pashan’s.

Suresh comes forward, a snarl twisting his round face. “You were seen taking a Hindu baby boy to Shimla!” he shouts.

“No,” says Sister Anu. She stands her ground. “You are mistaken. That baby was not Hindu, he was born to Christians.”

“No! Don’t you make excuses. You made that baby a Christian so that Christians get more votes.”

He reaches down and picks up a plastic jerry can leaning against the hillside. “See this? It’s empty. Where did the petrol go?” He sniffs in exaggerated inquiry. “I smell it—can you? I smell it all around your church.”

The crowd shuffles, sways and swarms with its own energy. Sister Anu hears herself begin to plead—two patients are recuperating in the clinic beside the chapel. She doesn’t mention that the chapel is a historical monument, that the chapel, clinic and school do not belong to the church, but to Amanjit Singh. A man intent on destruction won’t be moved by the hopes, dreams and hard work that created this complex.

“Bhaiya—” she begins, calling him brother. “Let the patients go. They are innocent.” For innocent, she chooses the word
nirdosh
, descended from Sanskrit, over the Urdu
bekasoor
, to placate his Hindu pride. She’s grovelling, but if it saves one life, it will be worth it.

Father Pashan says, “Don’t do this, son.”

“Is my name Pashan? No, my name is Suresh Singh Chauhan, descendant of a raja who ruled these hills before there were any
Sikhs, before Muslims invaded, before the British Raj. I’m not your son. We don’t want you taking our sons away.”

“Your quarrel is with me—let Sister Anu bring the patients out, at least.”

“Are the patients Hindu?” says Suresh. “If they are Hindus, I’m not stopping them. They can come out.”

All she has to do is think of the women’s names, but Sister Anu says, “We don’t ask what people believe before we treat them. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians all get the same diseases. Whether the women are Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or Christian, they don’t have enough shakti to walk without help,” she says. “Let me go in with Shafiq Sheikh, we’ll help them to the jeep. We’ll take them to Jalawaaz or Shimla.”

“Oh no no no,” says Suresh. “They can’t go with any Muslim.”

A Hindu patient should die inside rather than accept help from a Muslim driver?

Heads in the crowd are nodding. Voices shout, “No Muslims, no Muslims!” Fists are pumping, “Jai-jai Golunath, jai Ram-ji!” invoking the god of justice, invoking Lord Ram.

Suddenly, a tousled red head fights to the front of the crowd. “Suresh! What are you doing?”

Damini! Suresh looks around, then swats his hand a few times as if she’s a buzzing fly.

“Open your ears and listen: I will bring the women out,” Damini shouts. “And they will go in the car with Shafiq Sheikh.”

“You would let a Muslim …”

Damini plants her fists on her hips and glares up at Suresh. “Did you know if you were Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Sikh when you were in my koke? No. You came into this world just a human! You didn’t know till your first breath if you were Hindu or Muslim. You didn’t know till I named you, till I began your story. Come and help, Shafiq-ji.”

The dignified old man doesn’t hesitate. He steps out of the jeep, and moves to Damini’s side.

Suresh looks as if things are not going as planned. The fists have stopped pumping in the crowd, the sloganeers seem unsure what to yell. “Why should I care for the patients?” he mutters, forgetting the megaphone in his hand. “They’re just women.” His words ripple through the crowd.

Damini yells, “A woman brought you into the world!” She turns and strides away in her combat boots. “And,” she shouts, over her shoulder, “when you were in her stomach, this woman didn’t ask if you deserved to be born or not.”

She halts, returns to shout up at Suresh’s chest, “And that child Sister Anu took to Shimla—that was your son.”

A collective gasp rolls through the crowd.

“He doesn’t have your name and you’ll never call him Hindu because he came from a Christian woman’s koke, but that Moses is two-in-one: Hindu plus Christian.
Han!
And if he was in that clinic, would you allow
him
to come out?”

A man shouts from the crowd, “Hindu father makes it a Hindu baby.”

Another shouts, “Christian woman must have been a prostitute.”

“Mata-ji, so I slept with a prostitute,” Suresh says in a boy-whine.

“Lie to others, not your mother. You just took what you wanted.” Damini resumes her march uphill.

Father Pashan and Sister Anu follow her closely.

“Don’t you go anywhere,” Suresh shouts at Father Pashan. “Understand? Nowhere, unless I say so.”

The crowd is snaking behind them on the narrow road, men snickering, gawking and gossiping.

Father Pashan holds up his hands. Suresh prods him forward with a blow to his back.

Sister Anu says, “Don’t touch him!”

Suresh leers, “Shall I touch you?” He grabs her arm and yanks. Off balance, she stumbles after him up the drive, swept along with the crowd. At the top of the slope, the men spread across the clearing.

Where did Suresh find so many men? His retinue clumps and throngs by the chapel. Beyond the chapel, she can see Mohan, standing on the clinic veranda, airgun at his side. What security can poor Mohan provide against his uncle?

Damini and Shafiq Sheikh emerge from the clinic, each helping a patient wrapped in blanket. Sister Anu shakes off Suresh’s grip and meets them at the gate. She and Damini help the women past Suresh, through the crowd, and to the jeep. Father Pashan’s conciliatory, persuading tones fade behind her. She helps the two women into the back seat of the jeep.

“Why didn’t you tell me your son is Moses’s father?” she hisses at Damini.

“I was ashamed,” Damini hisses back.

They race back uphill to the clinic.

Father Pashan is on the ground, hands to his belly, groaning. Sister Anu rushes to him, helps him struggle to his knees. “What happened? Where is Suresh?”

Before Father Pashan can answer, a red monkey comes jabbering and squealing out of the throng of protesters. His tail arcs back and forth, a great big white bandage burning on it. The monkey is jumping up and down.

As it tries to get the bandage off its tail, sparks fly, sparks catch and in a moment the chapel is surrounded by a moat of fire. The smell of burning petrol fills the air.

Father Pashan staggers to his feet. “The chalice!” he says. And before Sister Anu can stop him, he is racing toward the chapel. But already he cannot enter it for the lick and hiss of flames. He turns back, facing the crowd.

Over the crackle and gusts of flame come the red monkey’s mad chatter and screams as it zigzags down the clearing. The crowd scatters, but in the corner of her eye, Anu spies Mohan dashing toward the monkey. That monkey could attack the boy, set him on fire too.

And Damini is running toward Mohan, screaming, “Nahin, Mohan, Nahin!” Sister Anu shouts “No, Mohan, no!”

The boy stops a few feet from the red monkey and cocks his head. He reaches out to the monkey with one hand, the gun loosely held in the other. Sister Anu is right behind Damini as Mohan turns to his grandmother. “Monkey hurting.” Tears run down his cheeks.

The gun rises to Mohan’s shoulder and he aims at the monkey. The air seems to burst, ballooning against Sister Anu’s chest. A huge thud in her heart, and happening slows.

The monkey should fall.

The monkey doesn’t fall. The monkey dances on, jabbering, screaming.

It takes a long time to happen, yet it happens in a moment, and in that moment so many other things are happening, things she is and isn’t aware of, and the moment seems to go on forever, a crumpling and folding moment, a moment in which she is moving faster and faster, but not fast enough towards Father Pashan and the end of that moment is followed by another in which he falls and there is so much blood so much blood from his one blue eye and his side and in his hands and another moment in which he may or may not die and another in which she is holding his bloody head in the lap of her white kameez and knows he did.

S
ISTER
A
NU, STILL TREMBLY AND RAW, TAKES A SEAT
before the sub-district magistrate’s desk. She has had two hours of sleep, bathed and changed into a clean white salwar-kameez with a black dupatta about her neck, but can’t rid herself of the smell of anger, smoke and ashes from yesterday, the sight of Father Pashan running toward the blaze, the feeling of his warm blood-spatter.

The priest risked his life for the symbol of a last supper two thousand years ago. He really must have believed in his own power to transform the wine into the blood of Christ. Would she have been as prepared to die for that tradition? No. Another failing she must add to all her failings.

The owner of the damaged property, Mr. Amanjit Singh, takes the second chair. He seems dressed for a New Delhi dinner party, in navy blazer, grey pants, a tie striped red and black that matches his red turban. His beard, tightly rolled and netted, glistens in the morning sunlight pouring through the single window. Though he nods and smiles ingratiatingly at the SDM, he has an air of confident expectation—past favours are coming due.

The SDM yells to a sub-sub-assistant for tea, and flashes his Chiclet smile. He begins in English, to establish he can speak it, and continues in Sanskritized Hindi that causes both Sister Anu and
Amanjit Singh to strain for understanding. Periodically, for emphasis he returns to English laced with a South Indian accent. First of all, he says, by the Mental Health Act of 1993, he cannot charge Mohan, a fourteen-year-old mentally unfit boy, with murder. It was an accident—