The Selector of Souls (28 page)

Chunilal and Leela exchange a glance. Both shake their heads.

“A thousand rupees per month …” Chunilal marvels weakly. “And a dai takes only twenty, maybe fifty for a live birth—even for the birth of a son. That means you can get more money for cleaning a child out of a woman than helping to birth a live child.”

His breath sounds shallow and laboured. “Did you see the new latrine?” he says. “When I had a little money, I built it for Leela and Kamna. With a bathing-stall, because I heard women lose their heat and have trouble with their wombs if they bathe in open air. But no—nowadays I don’t have seven thousand.”

Damini turns to Leela. “Is the hair on your legs growing faster, now?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Have your nails been growing?”

Leela examines her fingertips. “They break,” she says. “Especially when I pull out weeds.”

“Was your sickness mild or all the time?”

“I don’t know—there was too much work to be sick.”

Damini gazes hard at Leela’s distended stomach. It looks like any other pregnant woman’s stomach. “Like a watermelon,” she decides. “Larger than a green melon. It
could
be a boy … you need another boy.”

Leela breathes the question that entered the room with Kamna and has not departed, “Yes, but what if it’s a girl?”

A weighty silence follows.

Chunilal says to Damini, “We truckers know one thing. Always, there is a shortcut.”

“I’ll talk to Vijayanthi,” Damini says, eventually. “Let’s see what she says.”

A newborn sun warms Damini’s right cheek as she sets out the next morning, her head covered by a dupatta, and wearing a shawl over her salwar and kameez. The footpath descends from Chunilal’s
farm, and wends its way down the cascade of terraced fields past homes and farms clinging to the flank of the mountain. Along the way it turns into ladders, and any shortcuts are treacherous and snake-ridden.

This hard soil grudges its bounty, but for those who work cleverly and long, it eventually yields. Meltwater flows from the mountain beside Anamika Devi’s cave and the two-inch-diameter aluminium pipeline joins home to home, angling down the bulge of the hill to the sweeping Meethi Darya. It, and the women who are already tending the fields this morning, make everything possible.
Khata-khat-khat!
Buckets clank as they fill beneath its flow.
Tha! Tha!
A woman bangs a cricket bat, softening her wash beneath its cold stream.

A farmer leading a goat uphill greets her and she scrambles off the footpath and about a metre up the hillside, so he can pass. Another farmer follows, carrying a milk canister uphill to the road—Damini clings to the pipe as he goes by.

A brown cow blinks with somnolent eyes as Damini clambers down a ladder between terraces. Her rubber sandals squelch and sink in newly watered fields, some no larger than Mem-saab’s dining room. She ducks under laundry on clotheslines, and detours to scrape Kharda moss from a fallen oak, and pick a few shocking pink flowers.

She has a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach just thinking about what people will say, could say, might say about her taking from a daughter. What will be insinuated, what will be assumed about her, and the shame for Suresh. Even so, duty requires that she stop to pay her respects to elders and chat at each home. She asks how many children each woman has left unmarried, and how many sons survive for secure old age. Women wearing their gold-studded marriage collars ply her with tea, as they once did each summer when Damini visited Gurkot with Mem-saab. This time it’s offered with sympathy, and not only for her collarless state. They don’t ask what happened in Delhi—they know. They’ve also heard about the orders Amanjit Singh has given his manager to open the Big House, have it dusted
and cleaned so he can come and inspect it. The Toothless One still remembers when Sardar-saab was alive and Mem-saab could hear and was more beautiful than any maharani; she joins a little in Damini’s grief.

Damini is all praise for her erstwhile family, and doesn’t tell them how Mem-saab’s educated son behaved. But she can’t help the little sarcastic note that creeps into her voice when she refers to them.

In each home, she hears again that Amanjit is planning to build twenty-five cottages on the forested hill below the Golunath temple. He has a permit to cut down several hundred trees, and money from the government, they say. In return, Aman has promised to build a school and a clinic for the people of Gurkot.

Damini hugs herself in secret glee: the government is requiring Amanjit to carry out Mem-saab’s wishes. Karma always catches up. That’s its beauty, that’s its terror.

At the home of one of her husband’s relatives, who can recite his lineage back to a Hill Raja, Damini holds a cup of head-clearing ginger tea with the corner of her sari. His wife Chimta—so grasping of gossipy details, she’s nicknamed for a pair of tongs—crochets a shoulder bag. “Amanjit-saab said there will be many jobs.”

“When?” says Damini.

“Now, as he redesigns his father’s home. My husband says the sawmill manager is increasing production, the trucking company manager is calling in more trucks. And later, there will be even more jobs when Vee-Eye-Pees from Delhi and En-Are-Eyes from abroad buy his cottages.”

Damini doesn’t think people like Timcu, the only non-resident Indian she knows, would buy cottages so far from Shimla airport. But they all drive imported cars now, like rajas and ranis, and those cars are smoother over potholes than Mem-saab’s old Ambassador … “What kind of jobs?” she says.

“Construction,” says Chimta. Her needle dips and flashes; the net widens.

“Those won’t last,” says Damini. “Then there will only be sweeper jobs.”

“Our family doesn’t do sweeper jobs,” says Chimta, not missing a stitch. “If that’s what he has, let him offer them to low-castes. Get some Sikhs, Christians and Muslims, or bring in workmen from Nepal and Bihar.”

Damini takes her leave and goes on to the next home.

To those who ask, and many do, Damini says she is only visiting to help Leela through her delivery, and doesn’t mention she only learned Leela was pregnant when she arrived.

“But you should tell her to go to her in-laws for the delivery,” says Matki. Her older children used to play with Suresh and Leela and she earned her nickname—earthen pot—because she looks just like one when pregnant. “She’s lost two children because she lives separate-separate from her husband’s family.” Loyalty restrains Damini from saying that Chunilal is estranged from his father and brothers.
And everyone knows it—I shouldn’t remind them
.

Halfway down the hill, sipping tea in an inner room with a relative nicknamed Tubelight, Damini can feel the woman’s assumption that she will leave soon after Leela’s delivery.

“Is your son all right?” Tubelight asks in snide tones. From the shadows, Tubelight’s mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law watch Damini intently.

“Oh, yes,” says Damini and delivers her prepared speech: “Suresh is looking for a better job and a flat where he will have room for me and a daughter-in-law who will look after me—but it’s very difficult to find a girl from a good family.” Meanwhile, she stresses, she will look after Chunilal so Leela can work.

“Leela doesn’t have enough children to help her,” Tubelight says. “But that’s why she still looks so young. You too look young, because only two.” Why does Tubelight have to emphasize Damini’s widowhood, and resulting inability to bear more children?

She was nicknamed Tubelight because she was never very bright
.

Kamna’s name comes up; Tubelight arches an eyebrow.

Damini says, “Kamna is too young,” and does not say Chunilal cannot pay for a wedding at present.

But Tubelight, who also has a fourteen-year-old daughter says, “You’ll keep young girls safe, making two families responsible if you go by reeti.” She doesn’t have to say, Forget custom and follow law, and she’ll be with you longer. One more mouth to feed and clothe. She doesn’t have to say, And don’t forget, later marriage means higher dowry.

“She must be eighteen,” says Damini.

“Ha!” says Tubelight. “Maybe in Delhi. Our police don’t notice the bride’s age as long as you invite them to the wedding.”

Further downhill, old women tell her who has married whom, how many children they have, how old they are, whose son has left for which city, whose land is in dispute, and most important of all: which girls and boys are eligible for marriage. Good breeding, as every woman here knows, requires the best information about bloodlines and caste genealogies. They are required to breed out dark skin, cross-eyes; near-sightedness, tendencies toward deafness, weak digestion; tendencies toward laziness, hairiness, susceptibility to manipulation, mental instability, gambling, poor business sense, low ambition, over-ambition; too much influence of Mangal in the stars, selfishness, obstinacy and the like.

“Selection,” says Supari, nicknamed for the betel nut that always stains her tongue and lips, “is our work. I too have a daughter who’s almost Kamna’s age. I must plan her seeding. And we must arrange marriages for the boys in the family. But if there is one problem, ji, just one—will I ever hear the end of it from my husband or his family?”

By the time Damini arrives at Vijayanthi’s home, it is mid-afternoon and monsoon thunder is rolling across the sky. The old midwife
squats beneath a thatched awning, her purple sari matching the shutters of her home. Her marriage collar has but two studs of gold, instead of the usual six. The terraces of her home are edged with pipe-railings instead of latticed cement walls, but she is respected for achieving more years than seventy. A little girl of about eighteen months rolls bare-bottomed on a mat beside her.

Damini folds her hands in greeting and identifies herself, beginning with her in-laws, then Piara Singh. She mentions Suresh with some trepidation, remembering Vijayanthi once twisted his ears for disrespecting a boy only a few months his senior.

Vijayanthi calls to a granddaughter to bring tea. She takes a turquoise and rose-pink fertilizer sack from a pile, and spreads it before her. She shakes out the urea-smelling plastic sack and separates the warp from the weft, raising a thread to close view, then laying it either to left or right. The toddler wanders perilously close to the edge of the cement terrace; Damini grabs her, saving the girl from plunging through the pipe railings and over the precipice. Vijayanthi doesn’t notice.

Placing the little girl safely back on the mat, Damini squats beside Vijayanthi and begins to help.

“I can still tell if the threads are blue or pink,” Vijayanthi says, smoothing a sheaf of blue threads. “There’ll be one pink rope, and three blue ones.”

Vijayanthi says her seven sons now have nineteen grandsons among them, and only a few granddaughters. This one, she says of the little girl beside her, is her first great-grandchild. “Came instead of your brother,
hein
, Madhu?” she says, chucking the smiley little girl beneath the chin. “So, you have come all the way downhill to an old blind woman. Someone must be having a baby.”

“My daughter, Leela.”

“Naughty one,
han
! I remember. Married the trucker and
he
came to live here. Ttt-ttt.”

“Yes.”

“She already has a boy.
Chalo!
—maybe she will have a smarter one this time.”

Vijayanthi’s granddaughter brings Damini what must be her fifteenth steel tumbler of tea that day, and softly pads away.

“And you, have you attended a birthing before? I hear that son of yours is still looking for a girl to marry, so probably not.”

“I helped a cow once,” says Damini, taking a sip. “And once I saw a dog give birth. And I went to a hospital with Mem-saab’s daughter in law—”

“Hospitals—ha! Then you have seen what can happen.”

“Yes.”

“Never, ever let a woman go to the hospital,” says Vijayanthi. “We don’t believe in cutting.”

“Which cutting?”

“They cut the woman to let the baby out.”

“Oh, that cutting—yes.”

“They take more money for that. Then they put stitches. Then they take money to remove the stitches. And the woman is useless for many weeks. Now I—I do massage.”