The Selector of Souls (32 page)

Mohan is sitting at the foot of his father’s rope-bed, playing with the red-brown stuffed monkey Suresh played with, and Leela before Suresh. The white patch on Lord Hanuman’s tail waves like a bandage, and his black and white button eyes look amazed by this world.

Chunilal’s blanket flips down. Glittering eyes hold Damini’s gaze.

“Mata-ji, if that child is still rolling downhill, it’s your fault.”

“This is now in the hands of the gods,” says Damini. “You should be praying, not watching TV.”

“I am watching a holy man,” says Chunilal. He rises on one elbow with an effort. “And I’m thinking: if it’s a girl, I don’t want to see her.”

“Then what should I do?”

“Whatever is necessary,” he says. He lies down and flips the blanket back over his face.

The swami’s nasal voice fades, letters scroll too fast to read.

Young boys and girls prance across the TV screen and an announcer cries out
Jo Chahe Ho Jaye
.

“If drinking one bottle of Coke can make you young people think you can make a wish and it will happen,” says Damini, “then drinking a whole bottle of rum will make you believe all your wishes will happen.”

She continues on her way before Chunilal can retort.

The dancing people on TV, Chunilal, Suresh—all same-same
.

Inside the birthing chamber, her exhausted daughter is doing her dharma, still groaning.

It’s three in the morning when Leela’s baby emerges. She’s standing, using earth-pull, as the baby uses her as its gateway to the world. The child competed with its mother for twenty hours before Leela gave in and let it slip into the basin of water Damini held between her legs. Any longer, and the baby might have killed her.

Damini is breathing as hard as if she too had given birth. She directs Kamna to tear up an old sari for rags.

Kamna must have noticed Damini’s surprise when she saw the baby responding to larger space, stepping on air as if beginning a new dance. Kamna must have noted the sadness in Damini’s eyes when the child gave its first cry. Still Kamna is quietly efficient, helping Leela sit up, move over, lie down.

Leela covers her face, but Damini can see the glint of tears through the fabric of her sari. Did this child dream, in its soft cocoon, that it would enter the world to such a chorus of sighs, tears and recriminations? Does it see, as it opens its eyes for the first time, that condemned look on Leela’s face?

The baby is slick with blood, sticky with birth-fluid, its head and dark hair so soft against her shoulder. Damini wipes it clean gently, so gently.

No tail
.

She wipes and wipes again between its legs, looking for a penis.

None at all
.

What terrible deeds must this soul have done in a past life, to now be punished by taking form as a girl. What will she face but suffering that leads to more suffering.

Did this baby girl know, as she grew according to some intricate plan of the gods, that her incredibly complex form is yet inadequate?

Does this girl feel that she has become the node of sorrow, that she is born disabled by her womanhood? Does she know yet, from the sad melody of speech heard in her mother’s belly, just how unwanted she is?

Give her a few days, and she will know
.

Damini rubs Leela’s trembling back and shoulders in sympathy. She wipes her daughter’s eyes with her sari.

Damini waits—all wait—in the fluid quiet for the creeper-like cord to stop pulsing and the afterbirth to emerge. When it does, Damini directs Goldina to grasp the cord. Goldina binds it in two places, and cuts between, turning the Lotus almost harmless.

Damini cannot find it in herself to berate old Vijayanthi, who had cautioned against applying more than a thumbnail of the fire plant. She can only berate herself in Punjabi and Hindi, and even in English:
Are you or are you not a moron?

Goldina croons as her large dark hands slide over the baby in the basin. She lifts the baby and gives her to Damini. Damini rubs the baby’s butter-soft skin with turmeric paste.

With a kajal pencil, she makes a black dot bindi just above the bridge of the baby’s nose to ward off evil eye and bring her any luck she’s been granted in this life. She swaddles the baby in an old sari and lets Kamna hold her sister for a few minutes, while she and
Goldina bind Leela’s stomach tight to keep out bad air and demons lurking to use Leela’s emptiness.

Damini places the child beside Leela, but the exhausted mother has drifted off to sleep. She directs Goldina to clean up, and wrap the afterbirth in a paper bag. Goldina retreats outside and the door creaks closed.

“Watch the baby,” Damini says to Kamna.

Goldina hasn’t gone far—now she’ll want to be paid
.

Standing on the cement terrace, Damini fills her lungs with the cool night air. She hunkers down, her back to the wall, and gazes at the moonlit mountains. The gleaming snow on those peaks will melt before any girl crosses the many ranges between here and that far ring of mountains.

Goldina, sitting cross-legged on the ground a few feet away, proffers the shawl Damini lent her earlier.

Every time she wears that shawl it will remind her that Goldina has worn it.

This is not a city. Here someone is lower so that someone else can be higher
.

“Keep it,” she says, sounding magnanimous. In memory of their mother’s stories, told and untold, she bestows a ten rupee note on Goldina. Goldina touches the money to her forehead, but still looks expectant.

Damini rises, enters the storeroom and fetches a sack of potatoes.

“This is all?” says Goldina.

“Be grateful you got something for delivering a girl.”

“This is my fault?” says Goldina. “Plant a radish, expect a cauliflower?”

“Be more respectful,
churi
!”

Goldina mutters under her breath, “
Hein
! Do
I
get anything from being respectful … ?” but heaves the sack of potatoes over her
shoulder. She reaches for the paper bag with the afterbirth and cord.

“Bury it deep,” says Damini. “Don’t let stray dogs dig it up.”

Goldina cocks her head in assent, and melts into the shadows past the terrace.

Back in the birthing chamber, milk is beginning in Leela’s breasts. Damini massages to rid Leela of it, then binds Leela’s breasts temporarily because her mother-in-law, Ramkali Bai, always cautioned first milk is impure.

“Go Kamna,” says Damini. “Tell your father he has another daughter.”

Leela turns her face away and sobs and wails.

“S
TUPID WOMEN,”
C
HUNILAL YELLS
. “Can’t do anything right.”

I should have faced him myself, but I was tired. Poor Kamna
.

“Even if I win the lottery, where will I find money for two dowries? Even if I find enough for one wedding, even if I find enough for one dowry—these days a son-in-law’s family keeps asking and asking for more every year. I don’t need the ojha to come and foretell our future—I see moneylenders gathering like vultures. I’ll have to sell my truck. Soon Mohan will have nothing left to his name—my name. What use are girls?”

Damini parts the wooden doors between the two rooms and yells, “Chot lagi pahard se, torde ghar ki sil!” Your hurt was caused by the mountain, don’t take it out on the grindstone!

“I’m only telling the truth,” he says. And coughs and coughs—he’s going to cough out his lungs.

Kamna is standing there, a look of shock on her face.

Kamna must learn what women learn
.

Kamna strokes her father’s back as he spasms. “Don’t worry, baba,” she says. “I won’t get married.”

“What? You want to stay a girl forever?” her father spits out.

“I’ll just look after you,” says Kamna.

“You will get married and go to your real home,” says Damini.

“This is not my real home?”

“It is, it is,” says Damini, unable to face the hurt in Kamna’s eyes, “till you get married.”

“Why do I have to get married?”

“Dharma.”

“Whose dharma?”

“Your father’s.” That’s Chunilal’s role in the movie of his life.

“I will have to find you a lesser family. We will have to sell the farm. Or Mohan will have to look after you.” Chunilal is almost weeping, as if all these calamities are arriving tomorrow.

“I will look after Mohan,” says Kamna, setting her chin as Leela used to.

Damini hides a smile. Truly, Leela has taught her daughter little. Even if she does look after her brother, Kamna should know by now to pretend her brother looks after her.

“I can be a dancer
and
drive your truck.”

“You? Drive my truck? Ha! The first time you break a bangle you’ll come running home, crying.”

Kamna is undaunted. “
And
I can look after the farm as well.”

She shouldn’t tell any man she can do so many things—he’ll only sit back and let her do all of them. The girl looks as if she’s going to challenge her father again.

“Chal!”
Damini takes Kamna by the shoulders and shoos her toward the door.

With her back to Chunilal, she hears him say, “Who ever heard of a woman farming?”

“Leela is,” Damini objects before she can stop herself. “When you are playing filum songs in your truck, who do you think farms these three terraces? Leela hacks and carries loads of wood from the forest every day on her head. Leela cooks the cows’ feed, Leela milks them. Leela stacks the bricks to repair each terrace retaining wall. Till two days ago she was bending in the field, giving each onion shoot a handful of water at a time.”

From just outside the doorway, Kamna says, “Ma-ji cooks for us—two meals a day.” Her indignation is tinted with mischief. “She wields the hoe, she weeds, she knits, she sews our clothes and washes them.”

“You women,” Chunilal shouts. “Always complaining, complaining … never finish complaining. See if any of you can stand the heat of the plains, do battle with death hour after hour on the road, go sleepless, alone-alone, day after day, breathing kerosene and diesel. See if you can judge where to pay a fee and where to pay a fine, where there’s a speedbump and where there’s a cow, which fuel is diesel and which is kerosene … all of you just sitting here, eating and waiting till I come back.”

Damini should not say more. Anything more will only set a bad example and encourage wrong tendencies and rebelliousness in Kamna. She sinks to her haunches and rests her head on her knees for a moment. Guests should be like rice grains that take on the flavour of a curry. Chunilal may be sick, but he is still a man and master of the house. She is a guest. But she is also Leela’s mother.

She lifts her head. “Leela does puja every day to the gods for your health. She sows seed potatoes, harvests them. And the brinjal, cabbage, peas and cauliflower … And she has children. While you’re watching TV, she never sits down from morning to night.”

Leela calls weakly, from the next room. “See what lies in store for this girl too.”

A protracted silence follows, waxes, and approaches the threshold of discomfort.

“See?” Chunilal sticks his feet out from his blanket and wiggles his toes. “She agrees.”

“If you didn’t want more children, you should have left her alone,” says Damini. “Even children know about wearing the topi … Or you should have allowed her to go to Shimla several months ago.”

“Did I apply the brakes? I said she should go. She’s the one who kept saying, Then who will look after you? And I didn’t want her
to go alone—I said, I should be with her so the doctor-saabs can’t ignore her.”

Damini stops herself from saying more. The impact of her bitter words should be softened by sweet, even if she isn’t feeling sweet. “
Chalo
!” she says. “We’re all tired, we don’t know what we’re saying. It’s five in the morning and we haven’t slept in two days. Kamna, you sleep beside your mother. I’ll take the girl in a minute, and feed her some sugar water.” She raises her voice to be heard in the next room. “Leela, rest now, and I’ll give you the baby in a few hours. Chunilal, don’t worry. You make preparations for this child’s gauntrila ceremony. Think, what will you name her?”