The Selector of Souls (63 page)

When he stops for petrol she asks the question she could have asked a long time ago. But she wanted to see his face when she asked. “Uncle, did you send Vikas a newspaper cutting that told him where I was?”

Innocence passes instantly over his features, a look more damning than guilt. He shakes his head. “Chalo, we have a long way to go and your aunty is waiting.”

Was it a case of stupidity, or well-intentioned bungling? Who else would have given Vikas the cutting? Purnima-aunty wouldn’t. Mrs. Nadkarni certainly wouldn’t. Why does it matter now, with her divorce granted three months ago? Anu is a free woman who will now try to be independent as well.

Sharad Uncle stops the Contessa across the state border in Punjab and alights. “Wait,” he says.

By the roadside, a gunny sack lies across a tire, creating a trough. A man comes and pours some grain into it. A skewbald horse picks its way to the tire, and noses at the feed. Past the road, two boys in bright white dhotis swing a cyclamen pink turban between them, dipping it to fish in the slosh of a canal.

Sharad Uncle returns and reaches through the window, a bottle of cardamom milk in each hand. The creamy liquid is unexpectedly soothing.

“Anu,” he says, “I am very sorry to say, there is no chance of reconciliation for you now. Vikas has married again. Nisha—the daughter of an old friend of mine. Very sweet and kind, very docile.” He pauses to let the immensity of the contrast sink in. “He sent us a lovely wedding invitation—saffron and gold, with a swastik design all around.”

He offers her his handkerchief; Anu waves it away. “Did you attend?”

“No, no. But I was collecting donations for the BJP, and Vikas came to the charity performance. A variety show—very good show, with nice Hindu girls modelling saris. Very tasteful.”

“How much did he give?”

“Fifteen lakhs.”

“Fifteen—?!”

“Not to worry. It’s like American foreign aid. We have to spend it on advertising with Kohlisons Media. But he does get the credit on his taxes.”

“What was the meeting about?” Anu says, like a surgeon cutting to bone.

“Just a lot of talk about getting Christians out of India.”

“That would include me.”

“No no, not now that you’ve left the convent.”

“I just left the convent today, so I hadn’t left whenever you met him. And getting Christians out would include Mother Teresa, who’s done so much for the poor.”

“The poor, the poor! Look after yourself and family, first. Now you’ve come out,
shukar hai
! First thing, we must stop at a temple for a blessing.”

A fist clenches inside Anu. “No, not right now, Uncle. I’ll go to the temple if I want, and the church if I want. But when I want.”

“Stubborn girl, you are,” says Sharad Uncle. He swings himself back into the driver’s seat and slams the door. He starts the car and fiddles with the radio, but every station is playing wistful sitar music. Mother Teresa has died of exhaustion at eighty-seven.

As the Contessa approaches Kalka at the edge of the plains, the music gives way to discussion of Lady Diana Spencer’s virginity test; her almost-arranged marriage; her humiliations by her polo-playing Prince Charming; her glamour, charm and compassion; her many humanitarian causes; and the millions of pounds the British will spend on her funeral ceremony. At least Anu was never as desperate for male attention. The princess is being recast as a goddess …

The air conditioning strains. Her uncle stops beside a blue tarpaulin sagging above a few tables and chairs. A tripod sign beside the chai-stall reads:
Guru Nanak Number One India Restaurant
.

The restaurant named for the first Sikh guru reminds of Rano, and Rano of Chetna.

Over a lunch of masoon daal, gobi-allu and roti, Sharad Uncle says he’s learned to use a computer well enough to get his horoscope delivered by email each morning. He writes to Rano and Jatin and his sons almost every day, now. His mobile phone pings with a quick call of welcome from Purnima-aunty: she is in an NGO meeting with gynaecologists, discussing what can be done about the declining number of girls in the population.

The world whirls past Anu’s window again.

Water buffalos stand knee deep in flooded fields, and cranes sit single-legged on embankments. By the time evening tempers sunlight, the Contessa is nearing New Delhi. The outskirts take hours to traverse—the capital has gobbled village land around it for miles. Connaught Place, the shopping circle at New Delhi’s centre, mills with people and more people who have not missed a day in the life of Delhi.

This is not the sleepy stagnant Delhi Anu left three years ago, a city of 1970s buildings. Glass-faced high-rises, flyovers, hotels, and shopping malls say its code of frugal restraint has eroded.

Women in scanty attire advertise gymnasiums, resorts, soft drinks and cellphones from towering billboards. Public service ads exhort in huge letters below a photo of a girl in pigtails, “Save the Girl Child!”—Vikas must be making a fortune. Flooring shops displaying huge slabs of Italian marble have sprouted beside roadside chai-stalls.

What is that store selling? Health food? And what’s that beside it? A fashion school.

Mercedes and BMWs ride shoulder to shoulder with Maruti Zens, Suzukis and the old 1950s Ambassadors and Fiats. Three college-age girls waiting at a bus stop, book corners poking through their cloth satchels, are not wearing salwar-kameez, or jeans and kurtas, but denim jeans and
T-shirts
!

A woman hitches her sari to pick her way across a rutted side street. Another holds a dupatta over her nose. One steps out of a car, turns and blows a kiss at a man her own age. A kiss in public!

Unrecognizable names adorn gated residential complexes that seem to have arrived directly from Europe. Set down amid the dust and hubbub of cursing, sweating drivers, as clumsily out of place as the gated Tudor mansions erected by the British in Shimla.

The Delhi of her childhood is a vanished landscape, precious but recoverable only in imagination. This New Delhi looks West, and welcomes new colonizers.

Anu pokes her elbow from the window of the Contessa and rests her chin in its crook. And now she smells dung fires beside lean- to shacks, raw sewage from monsoon drainage ditches. And through a greeny-brown haze of smog rise notes of marigold, rose and jasmine from garlands piled for sale to templegoers.

When they arrive, Purnima-aunty rocks and holds her, crying and laughing at once. “Didn’t find a community that lives by its principles?”

“The nuns live by their principles—I just couldn’t share them.”

The centre courtyard of Sharad Uncle’s home has been roofed, Rano’s old room upstairs has been extended and a second storey added, along with a tenant. The drawing-room has sofas in place of the old divans, and the wall colours are coordinated to match the cushions. Sharad Uncle shows her his bathroom with the new tile and shower and goes to bathe. As Purnima Aunty orders samosas and tea, Anu pages through imported magazines
Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Vogue
and
Ms
.

Sharad Uncle sits down to tea and says, “All this because of Wipro,” in explanation of his sudden wealth.

Wipro, Indian partner of GE Medical Systems, the American manufacturer of ultrasound machines. Sharad Uncle is so very proud to be an investor. Well, ultrasound is a great boon that helps every area of medicine from neonatal care to breast cancer detection,
even as it helps to unbalance the population.
Ms
. says several southern states in the America require a woman to have an ultrasound twenty-four hours prior to having an abortion. The writer dubs the test anti-choice, but seems unaware that it can also promote selecting by sex.

The old cook no longer lives in the servants’ quarters behind Sharad Uncle’s house. “He got sick and returned to his village. Then we found we can’t compete with the salary offers for factory labour,” says Purnima-aunty, dipping her samosa in tamarind chutney. They do have one sweeper-woman, who commutes by bus three hours a day from the Trans-Yamuna river area for two hours of work. And a fourteen-year-old cook-boy who made the samosas.

“Your Mumma’s acre in Gurgaon is now worth several crores,” says Purnima. “I should have bought it from her when she wanted to sell it after your Dadu died. Please, call her after you’ve rested, okay?”

After tea Sharad-Uncle and Purnima-aunty show Anu her new room upstairs. It’s about the size of her bedroom in the Shimla convent, but with an air conditioner, which, Uncle explains, runs off a private generator.
Panchatantra
and Amar Chitra Katha comics Rano and Anu borrowed from each other till ownership could no longer be determined are stacked on a side table. Anu’s books:
On the Origin of Species, Gray’s Anatomy, Candide, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Discovery of India
, the
Bhagvad Gita
, the Holy Bible—stand on the bookshelf. Her photo of Mumma and Dadu stands on the desk beside Dadu’s stamp collection. Purnima-aunty returns the quilted cloth bag with her old nose ring and the rest of her jewellery. Anu finds some Vaseline, but the hole in her nose has closed.

In the adjoining bathroom, Anu, unused to showers, takes the low plastic stool before the bath bucket. She runs her fingertips over her eyes, feels her scar, throat, shoulders, arms. She cups her breasts and actually looks at them. She explores her waist and hips, the slippery softness between her legs, that had from violence birthed new
life—Chetna. She looks at her reflection carefully. Her face—her scar looks deeper than she remembers. And she had not noticed a few threads of silver in her hair.

Welcome back to the world, Anu
.

Purnima-aunty is beginning a new campaign: for a thirty-three percent women’s quota in Parliament. Quotas are needed because men speak fluently of equality for women yet keep them from power. Every political party has listed it in election manifestos since 1996, but it won’t happen for several years yet. Still she says, “We have to start now.” And she says girl education is working. “Women run NGOs. Women from several respected families have taken to modelling, some are becoming actresses, even learning to dance.”

“Are they paid?” says Anu, who must earn as soon as she can but dares not return to Adventure Travel in case Vikas were ever to find her. “Or are they just given pocket money?”

“No, now women are taking jobs in factories.”

“Can a woman live on what she’s paid?”

“Yes, I think so. Unless she’s employed by her father, uncle, brother, or husband. Because then she can’t argue, no?”

“And these call centres and programmer jobs—do they pay well?”

“Not as high as for men, but salaries are better than before.”

Anu’s economics is rusty—food, clothing and shelter were all paid for in the convent, and before that by Vikas. What can she contribute?

“Open a beauty parlour,” Purnima-aunty suggests. “They never fail.”

“An ex-nun with my face, opening a beauty parlour?”

“Okay-okay, what about a slimming parlour? Sell vitamins and protein shakes? These days people are all wanting to fight age, instead of getting respect from it.”

Anu shakes her head, smiling.

“Have your face redone. Now medical tourists come because Indian plastic surgeons do such wonders.”

“No, I think I’ll leave it.”

“Inner beauty—you have that. Always did.” She pauses. “Everything is possible, now. Do whatever you want, but with Sharad’s okay.”

A
FTERNOON IS LOSING LUSTRE AS
D
AMINI SQUATS ON
the road beside the general store and the chai-stall, finishing a glass of chai and a rusk and listening to a melancholy old song “Kabhi Kabhi mere dil mein …” playing on the radio.

She should have journeyed to Allahabad for the Maha Kumbh Mela last month and taken a dip in the Ganges along with fourteen million other pilgrims, the easy way to remove all paaps once and for all. But she didn’t and today her heart is very low. It could be she’s missing Suresh or Chunilal or Sister Anu—or Anamika Devi.

This morning, devotees came and Damini tried to call the goddess for their questions, sprinkling Ganga-water all around her statue, anointing her poster with vermilion. But the goddess would not come. Eventually, Damini sent the devotees away, saying Anamika must be attending to more important matters. But what will she do if the goddess never comes through her again? Leela has farming, Kamna and Mohan are away in the truck—Damini can’t sit around with no donations, just eating.

Maybe Dipreyshun has come again
.

She takes a bite of her tea-soaked rusk and hears Khetolai, her birth village, mentioned on the radio. She stands, one palm feeling the hard hot edge of her tea glass through the end of her sari, the
other seeking the solidness of the mountain. The All India Radio newscaster’s Sanskritized Hindi mentions Khetolai again.

A big-big bumb has gone off in her village. A test of the Atom Bumb, the bumb Chunilal said would end all stories in India and everywhere else.

Damini doesn’t own a single square metre of India, certainly not in Khetolai. She has been a guest in every home where she has lived, and will never feel truly at home with Leela, but she scrambles into the chai-stall and gasps out, “Why?”