The Selector of Souls (29 page)

“Massage is better,” Damini says agreeably, confident that she knows how to massage. And she knows the proper way to use Dettol, and about the ghosts called germs. Which is more than many women in Gurkot know, but it might seem like boasting to say so.

Madhu reaches up and tugs at Damini’s dangling dupatta. Damini sets her tumbler down and helps the child stand and fall, stand and fall again.

Vijayanthi crosses the terrace to the railing, counting her steps under her breath. A bottlebrush plant arches over her head. “You won’t be much help to your daughter during childbirth,” she says, after some thought. “I try to teach my grandson’s wife, but she says she can’t learn, even though her children are no longer at her breast. She just doesn’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night to deliver a baby. Says she works hard enough already. When I first
came here as a bride, no one heard me complain, but young women these days—no dumm in them at all. They’re like this,” She reaches up, snaps a twig to demonstrate. “Still young women like your Leela—they need help. Babies—they need help.” She opens her arms wide as if taking in the immense bowl of tarnished silver sky. “Who else can help here? Doctors and nurses? Dais, ojhas, vaids, compounders—we are the only ones who help. I can tell you what to do, but I can’t do it anymore. Learn from me before I go to my next life. If Leela has any problems, you just pray to Anamika Devi.”

Standing beside Vijayanthi, Damini gazes down. The hill, verdant with monsoon splendour, slopes from the last ploughed terrace below the house to the river. Waterfalls and feeder streams glint in the folds of the ranges, as if following the bones of a giant fish skeleton.

Her eyes trace the river path as it enters a patch of trees and leads to a thin line of beach. Damini and Piara Singh used to meet there, out of sight of his parents. It was where they made Leela just the way Lord Brahma created the world—for no reason, just for play, just for delight. Hai, she must help Leela find delight again.

In this season, the river, fed by monsoon water will be flowing wide and fast, drawing its clay colour from its bed. The silver flicker of the river below dances with the flicker in her stomach. She has to broach the subject.

“Vijayanthi-ji,” says Damini. “You know my son-in-law Chunilal? He is unwell.”

Vijayanthi is looking past her, but Damini can feel her listening.

“He has been unwell for months. Leela is doing all the work. She has one daughter already, one son. Now is not the right time for Leela to have a third child. Yet she is already at seven months.”

“She should have come to me or gone to Shimla before now.”

“Yes, she should have. But she kept thinking Chunilal would get well. And then she thought maybe she would have it because she wants another son. But now … what if it’s a girl?”

Madhu crawls over. Vijayanthi lifts her great-granddaughter and settles her on her hip.

“If it’s a girl, Chunilal can’t send Leela away and marry another wife,” says Vijayanthi. “Leela is the mother of his son. It’s true, that son will be cheated by every buyer in the bazaar, but she gave him a son. What kind of son is Chunilal’s bhagya. Besides,” Vijayanthi gives a hearty cackle, “where would he send Leela—this is her village, she’s already home. So you’re thinking—what are you thinking?”

Damini pulls her cloth bag forward and takes a pink flower from its depths. She takes Vijayanthi’s calloused hand and places the flower in her palm.

Vijayanthi lets the little girl slip to the quilt and turns her face to Damini. She’s listening.

Damini says, “After Suresh was born, I told my mother, I have two children and one is a son. I don’t want more. She said if I became pregnant again, I should scrape and grind the root of a lal chita, apply it deep in my yoni, then wait for the bleeding to come. I did, and the bleeding came. Later that year my husband died, and there were no more children. Now I don’t know if I had no more children because I had no husband to plant them, or because the fire plant stopped them forever. I thought: Vijayanthi will know.”

Vijayanthi rubs the pink flower between thumb and forefinger and breathes in its scent.

“Lal chita. So long since I’ve seen one. I can’t climb to where they grow now. I used to make a liniment from it with a bit of mustard oil for stiffness in the joints. And I used it one time when we had a plague, and another time when a scorpion stung a child. Your mother told you to dry and grind the root?”

“Yes. But she never said how much to use.”

“No one knows how much is too much, or how much is too little. Are you certain Leela wants to drop this child? And in her seventh month …”

“Yes. She would have come to you herself, but she had to water the large terrace today.”

“Apply very very little, then. Not more than the thumbnail of your right hand. And feed her carrot seeds ground with jaggery—that heats the womb. Then prepare to birth a lifeless child very soon.”

Vijayanthi’s hand, gripping the railing beside Damini’s, is large and rough. Her thumbnail, well trimmed and filed as if ready for work in a birthing chamber, is double the size of Damini’s. Damini is about to ask whose thumbnail she should use, but the old woman is musing …

“Lord Golunath knows what an ideal world might be, but one thing is certain: this is not it,” she says. “Until he brings balance, we must find many different kinds of courage to do what is necessary for our families. Sometimes we do what men want done, but don’t have the courage to do.” Vijayanthi’s fingertips graze Damini’s cheek.

Damini’s eyes have brimmed and spilled.

Foolish woman, to mourn an unborn grandchild.

Vijayanthi turns and enters the house. Madhu has crawled back to the ledge. Damini grabs the errant toddler, lifts her to her hip, and follows.

Vijayanthi leads Damini into a storeroom. She opens a trunk with an air of reverence. “I’m giving away things,” she says. Not to just anyone who needs, but to people within her clan and caste. She rummages beneath a chenille quilt, pulls, then heaves. Out comes a black boot with a bulbous rubber toe and laces, then its mate. Army combat boots.

“My father’s,” she says. “He was a miltry man: a subedar-major in the British Army, then the Indian Army. If they fit you, you can have them. You’re a kshatriya—you must fight for women’s wishes. Remember, no miltry in this world fights for women’s wishes.”

Damini sits the child down on the packed earth floor, removes a rubber sandal, folds the leg of her salwar tight and wedges her foot into a boot. It accommodates her broad instep. It clasps her heels, her toes. In Delhi, such boots would make her feet sweat, but here …

She puts on the second boot and stands. The boots grip the ground, adding an inch to her stature. With these boots, she can march from here to Shimla.

Vijayanthi cocks her head, listening to the patter and gurgle beginning on the roof. She glances over her shoulder as if sensing the white glow outside. Rain is swirling into the valley.

She pulls a large blue and white striped umbrella from the trunk. “All of Gurkot knew me by this,” she says, leading Damini back to the terrace. “People looking downhill or up will know you too. Come back every day, and I will teach you.”

All the way home, with rain dancing
tupa-tup-tup
on the large blue and white umbrella, and her combat boots repelling mud and water, Damini feels like Narada on the path of the devotee: she is a pair of ears again, listening to women. Helping women do as they want. Beginning with her own dear Leela.

S
ISTER
A
NU’S FINGERS FLY OVER BLACK AND IVORY
keys, as she accompanies the choir, rendering the minor arpeggios of “Ay Malik Tere Bande Hum.” The hymn does as it says in Hindi, surrendering her being to god. Today she even experiences a flash of all she’s been reaching for when she plays it. But what truly transports her is the postcard in the packet from Mrs. Nadkarni. The photo is of a long needle tower, bulging at the top. Overleaf, it said:

Should she reply? Would it hurt Chetna or help her?

After choir practice, in the nuns’ recreation room she opens the letter from Rano.

Anu looks up at the sunshine pouring through the window of the recreation room. Birds debate loudly in the trees outside. Girls are yelling on the basketball field, and a chorus of children is rote reciting in the distance. Her nunnery isn’t all silence.

It takes Sister Anu a few days of agonizing before she makes her choice. Then a postcard with a photo of Christ Church, Shimla’s Anglican landmark on the Mall, goes overseas to Chetna.

L
EELA IS MOVING LIKE A GIANT SNAIL, SLOWLY DOUBLING
into an extra body that with first breath could light an extra atman. She says she can feel the child twitching, punching, even turning as she gathers firewood, milks the cows or pulls weeds.

“You are mistaken,” says Damini. “The child is still.”

“I could fall or hit myself,” Leela suggests.

“If you get sick, you will only make everything worse,” says Damini.

She must prepare herself to leave after the birth or face hurtful remarks. But where can she go?

A few days after she arrived, she returned to the booth with the black and yellow sign adjoining the chai-stall. She used the battered telephone resting on a wobbly table to call the factory number for Suresh. “Tell him to phone his mother,” she said, and gave the woman with the air-conditioned voice the number, six digits Suresh would recognize immediately. She waited two hours till Suresh called.

“It’s my bad bhagya,” he said, “that you cannot live with me. But tell Chunilal it is not for long. These days, sweepers are getting all the good opportunities, but I’m still looking for a better job.” He didn’t say that better jobs are difficult to find in the capital when you can only speak one language, and it isn’t English. Most sweepers have that problem, too. “And as soon as I do,” he said, “I’ll marry a girl from a
good family to look after you. Can you send me any money at all?” Damini promised to send him a little as soon as she could predict her own future beyond a month or two. “Forget marriage right now,” she told him. “Only a very poor family would give you a bride.”

My son—always trying to do his dharma
.