The Selector of Souls (25 page)

When the tempo-man’s cousin-brother arrives, Damini alights. The porter greets her with “namaskar” instead of namaste, which tells her he too is a kshatriya, just poorer. He has a longer beard and whiter hair than the sage Vyasa. The wicker basket on his back is supported by a band around his forehead and pulls his bushy eyebrows into a look of constant surprise. The grey rinds of his feet are at least two centimetres thick; Damini’s trust surges.

He manages to stuff her bedroll into his basket and tie her shoulder bag on top. He squats beside the tempo and shares a beedi with his cousin-brother. Damini would like one, but she doesn’t want to buy a whole cone. When finished, he hoists his basket and sets off on the ghost-trail without a glance in her direction. Damini hastens to follow,
hitching up her salwar as she picks her way between the puddled ruts and the rain-filled gutter. Radio chatter fades behind her.

When the ruts vanish, the porter finds cart tracks, then hoof marks to guide them down a bridle path to the river. In May and June this was a mountain stream that wound its way downhill to feed the silver-grey rush of the River Sutlej, but today it could smash a body to pieces against its boulders and rocks. One year its wood-slat footbridge washed away, and her husband and all the villagers came together to rebuild it.

Damini puts one rubber-sandalled foot gingerly before the other on the footbridge. The rope-railing is slick and rough in her palms. The bridge sways as she grips one side then the other. In the middle of the foamy roar, boulders and timber toss up spray.

The railing is Lord Hanuman’s tail. She’s walking across just as Lord Ram walked the monkey bridge from India to Sri Lanka to rescue abducted Sita Mata—she murmurs the Hanuman chalisa to give herself the bounce and surefootedness of the monkey-god.

Today Hanuman is listening—Damini crosses the bridge safely.

Beyond the riverbed, the porter enters the forest, with Damini following. At this pace, it will take only four hours instead of five to climb the scraggly track that traces the mountain slopes like a balcony grafted to a crumbling tower. But she can’t keep up.

“Slow down!” she yells. “What are you trying to do, kill an old woman?”

The porter settles into a more bearable rhythm.

Up and up goes the steep footpath where the dead survive. In this dwindling jungle, the spirits of those who died a violent death linger like poems in Pahari, the ancient language of mountain tribes. Sad spirits are sustained by fear-thoughts, and many simply tethered by love.

As she breathes and paces upward, she’s taking in the shape and cry of birds, the shadows of things seen and unseen, beings revealed and hidden, the burn in her thighs, the churn of her own digestion.
The mountain seems to grow and grow as she climbs. Rock fragments skitter as she scrambles for footing.

The porter seems to make his way by unseen footholds. She can feel every stone and twig beneath the thin soles of her rubber sandals. She slithers and skids in muddy patches. The heavy scent of wet bark, rain-soaked earth and undergrowth fills the air.

Deep breath and a step up, deep breath and another step.

Piara Singh isn’t a sad ghost—at least she doesn’t think so. Once when he appeared, he said he had been reborn abroad in a place where people take birth but once. A place with no brahmins, no kshatriyas—he has fallen a little. She felt his happiness, along with her own sadness at his distance.

Muscles contract and release in her thighs and buttocks. Shadows expand and collide on the sun-dappled footpath. Every day her Leela uses this footpath to carry a headload or backload of firewood.

She can bear a lot
, Damini thinks.
She gets that from me
.

Tiny purple and pink flowers sprinkle the underbrush like the laughter of the gods. Lantana is everywhere, since the British saab-log imported it, grown beyond control.

A precipice falls to a chasm beside her.

Don’t look down, don’t look back. Small steps, smaller steps
.

Cinnamon sparrows chirp and shift through leaves as she passes. A tiger moth dances uphill. A white-eyed buzzard cocks its head at her, like the blind man in the train. For a long stretch, there’s only gloom beneath the shushing oaks. A goat bleats behind her on the muddy trail. Then another, a baby goat.

If she thinks how far the village is, she might stop. If she thinks of mountain cats or women who have died in childbirth and become churails, she might stop. She takes a swig from her bottle—the water retains the heat of the plains—and keeps going.

A griffin with a worm wriggling in his beak swoops clear of the mountain, glides into the valley below and floats free of time. Flesh and blood seem so fragile here—she had forgotten.

Trees darken and glow. Birdchat and twitter signals nightfall.

Damini keeps her gaze on the basket bobbing with the porter’s loping gait. She matches her footfall to the rhythm of his bare heels.

The mountains loom larger, as if bursting and birthing through ground. Through gaps between the trees, whole lower peaks come into view, half flesh-toned brown, half hirsute with pine. On the horizon, snowcaps are colouring with the last rays of the sun.

Damini is beginning to shiver with worry about walking the rest of the trail in the dark. Her gaze sweeps the looping trail, looking for a familiar red flag, a vermilion-smeared stone and a trident. The very trident with which Anamika Devi, guardian goddess of Gurkot village, called forth the water. Water that draws strength from the mountain soil, and tumbles and sprints as if inspired, all the way to the Meethi Darya. The flag and trident mark a cave—and now it opens like a nostril in the mountain.

The porter stops, leans his basket against the mountainside, and removes the band from his forehead. Damini follows him inside. He strikes a match, illuminating Anamika Devi in her niche, her shakti contained in the bulbous belly of a pot.

The clay pot is robust, despite its fragility. Straightforward, practical, modest, perfectly ordinary. It reveals no great thought, likely turned roughly on an irregular wheel. Sand sticks to the pot’s surface; its firing was careless. There’s no meekness in the goddess’s painted snow-leopard eyes and arching eyebrows. Only that smile at our follies in Kaliyug, this age of greed.

She who named each god when the gods had no name, who now names every being and thing, goes unnamed—she is Anamika Devi, the goddess without name. And though she is not outwardly beautiful, her foreknowledge is trusted. You can say anything to Anamika Devi and she doesn’t answer, but her eyes say she is as empty or full as you. Some say her husband was Lord Shiva, but then who named Lord Shiva? The writers of the vedas and shastras do not say. Childless, though she could have been a mother, she offers her power to
women who wish to be mothers. She requires no elaborate rituals, no animal sacrifices—though people will sometimes slaughter a goat in her honour anyway. She does not require regularity, but most people say Thursdays are most effective for propitiation.

Damini folds her hands and bows before the graceful black eyes, nose-jewel and slightly upturned lips painted on the terracotta surface. She places a rupee before Anamika and her match illuminates cave paintings from pre-Vedic times. She lights a cone of camphor and one of the clay diyas before the goddess.

“All she needs is a little respect, then she showers her blessings,” she says to the porter.

The first time she worshipped Anamika Devi in this cave, the rupee was but a chauvani and the cone of camphor was lit by Ramkali Bai in celebration of her son’s wedding. Daughters-in-law are gold, Ramkali Bai said. Her dowry had been sufficient for the expectations of hill people, provided her labour made up the difference. And sufficient to marry off Piara Singh’s three sisters—Damini has a silver toe ring, a silver nose ring and a pair of gold-wash earrings commemorating the weddings. And her father-in-law could then divide his property between Piara Singh and his elder brothers.

Quickly, before the day dies and night cold sets in, Damini directs the porter to clear a space for sleep. “Don’t get me stung by a viper, or a scorpion,” she tells him. “And make sure there’s no goat dung.”

She returns to the footpath to wait till the porter has laid out the bedrolls.

The sky turns sapphire and burns the far razor-sharp ridges. Very soon, the hazy glow of a new moon catches between branches. Damini turns back into the shadows leaping in the womb of the cave.

The porter has spread his jute bags and is fast asleep.

Damini lies down on her side, knees drawn up, so her rupee-wad crushes into her waist.

Why did I waste that rupee? What is Anamika Devi anyway but a terracotta pot?

Sleep comes, troubled by a half-waking dream.

A naked young woman with flowing river-black curls drifts across her inner eye. Her perfect body sits in lotus position, eyes half-open, in blissful trance. A tree rooted in her yoni rises to merge with her torso. Where does the woman end and the tree begin? Her veins and arteries fork and net beneath her skin, her breasts, and within her arms and these are also branches, branches of the tree. The life-tree’s face is serene as a goddess. Her hair is a halo of coiled springs and for the tree becomes a canopy.

Swaddled newborns surround her, swimming in the air like fish in a sea. This is the goddess whom Damini called just a terracotta pot. Anamika Devi, the source of all being, origin of the world. Damini tries, but cannot call to her familiar spirits for protection.

The goddess says in a low voice, as if imparting a secret, “What comes through you changes you, what comes through you creates you.”

The words resonate in Damini as if her heart were a pounding gong.

She wakes with a bitter taste of foreboding in her mouth.

She washes her hands and feet in the nearby spring, brushes her teeth with a neem twig. If she could taste sweetness, this living water would be sweeter than ever before. The tree woman is still vivid, still with her.

To one who doesn’t believe, a pot is just a pot. But to one who believes, a pot becomes the goddess
.

Returning to the cave, Damini gazes at Anamika.

You too are daughter, sister, mother, grandmother
.

I placed so many offerings before Lord Golunath for the long life of my husband. But did that god of justice listen? No. Only a goddess like you would come to a widow in dream
.

O mother of sound, mother of language, you who name each newborn being. O goddess of flowing, who washes away sorrow in her streams and rivers. May I always hear your music, may you ever protect my son
.

She places a second rupee before Anamika Devi.

Outside the cave, mud and meltwater soak her sandals and the legs of her salwar. The porter shoulders his way into a muslin curtain of dawn, and Damini follows.

Two hours later, Damini crests the ridge, and straightens to her full height in the brisk mountain air. She takes in the blue of the sky as Mem-saab used to, drinking it in with her eyes. The tarred smoothness of the new Gurkot road feels warm beneath her sandals. A paint-dripped sign set in the grey stone embankment reads “Meeni-bus” in Devanagari script. A dog is barking, a goat bleating.

From here, she should see the back lawns of Sardar-saab’s massive bungalow, the tennis courts, a bit of the cricket pitch, and a stone fountain or two, and the stately columns supporting the back veranda. But all she can see is a very long green fence and the flare of red slate roofs and skylights. On the next peak the white cone of Lord Golunath’s temple is unmoved; Sardar-saab’s house is exactly where it is supposed to be. The fence is new.

“Don’t go too close,” says the porter. “Big-big dogs. Aman-saab ordered his manager to buy them.”

“You’re making me walk all the way around the house?” says Damini. “Remember I’m old.”

“Sorry, mata-ji.” He’s trying to be as respectful as if she were his mother. “There’s no other way. Aman-saab says ‘yeh priy-vate hai’ and doesn’t allow us on his property anymore.”

A yowling and barking chorus strikes up behind the fence.

“Then maybe farmers shouldn’t allow him to cross their farms when he goes to fish in the river.”

The porter permits himself a wry smile. “Aman-saab crosses where he wants to cross,” he says, and sets off around the fence to the front of the house.

“It’s a good road,” Damini says grudgingly, stepping on the tarred surface.

“Yes, it helps farmers take their fruits and vegetables to market before they spoil. But motorcycles, trucks and buses also use it. Very bad for us porters.”

“How come the village council allowed a double lane?”

“
Huh!
The village council voted for single lane, but Aman-saab paid the sub-district magistrate under-the-table to authorize a double. He said the government should make a double lane now—why tear up the hillside again later?”

The white glistening crests of the distant snow peaks soar above cloud patches floating in their valleys. Mountains so high, no bird can fly above them. With a sudden rush of feeling for these hills, Damini stops. How each struggles up to its ordained height in the face of lashing winds and rain. If she were standing on any one of those peaks, she could barely linger a few minutes.