The Selector of Souls (4 page)

Madam G.’s son Rajiv became PM overnight, and promoted the police officers who allowed the massacres. And decorated the Congressmen for their role. So Mem-saab continues to fear Hindu men will come to break down the gates and she will not hear them. And Damini sleeps even closer, on a woollen foot-carpet right beside the bed—and tries to forget she is a Hindu.

Mem-saab lies down for her nap, and Damini does too, waiting till Mem-saab’s breathing becomes regular and even. Then she slips out, climbs to the third storey roof-terrace, rests her elbows on the latticed concrete balcony and waits.

A round face appears at the iron gates. Yes, those are Suresh’s bright black eyes, his beard and moustache like a close-trimmed hedge. Damini rushes downstairs to meet him. Her son has travelled three hours by bus to touch her feet in greeting, and it will take him three hours to return to the fly-bitten servant’s quarters he shares with five other men. He washes at a row of community taps, and lives on plates of pakoras and samosas from roadside chai-stalls, because he’s saving to get married as soon as he can find a girl.

Still he comes to see me
.

Damini takes the roll of rupees she’s been saving for him from between her breasts, unclenches his fist, and slips it in. Mem-saab would say she shouldn’t give him everything, and make Suresh fend for himself. But he’s a good son—he attends prayer and exercise classes of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak every morning. And he doesn’t shout at his mother like Aman does.

Suresh dips his head in thanks and counts the money. His eyelashes are almost as long as his father’s.

“Do you have any more?” he says. “I was saving for a TV, but instead I donated the money.”

“To your swami?”

“And the Bajrang Dal, and the RSS.”

“No, that’s all I have. Don’t you donate it as well.”

“I tell matchmakers I’m descended from hill rajas,” he says, squatting beside her at the edge of the Embassy-man’s lime sheen lawn. “And here you are working as a maidservant.” Gladioli and begonias offer some shade from the sun. He lights a beedi and flicks the match into the flowerbed. “You need a better job.”

Damini shrugs. Everyone needs a better job. Suresh never has suggestions as to what she can do instead. His own job doesn’t pay enough even for one person, leave alone a family, but he must find a wife and become a man. “The gods give highborn and lowborn whatever we deserve,” she says, eying his beedi.

He laughs and takes a puff. “The gods didn’t stop you from leaving Gurkot—you should have stayed there until I grew up,” he says, meaning she should have claimed his patrimony by her presence.

“If I had stayed in Gurkot,” she says, extending two fingers, “I would be ashes now.”

He places the beedi between her fingers and looks through the speared gates to the road. He never believes his uncles would have killed her.

“And you would not be in Delhi,” she says.

“Then I would never have gone to Lodi Gardens, never have heard Swami Rudransh.”

Damini takes a long, deep drag. She doesn’t want to hear how the swami has opened Suresh’s eyes to India’s real history, or how the swami is Suresh’s second father. If Suresh tells her all that again, she’ll say one father is enough—you don’t need two—even if Suresh doesn’t want to hear that.

“
You
should get a better job,” she says. “Your eyes will roll round like marbles in your head if you spend more years minding those copy machines.”

“I don’t watch the copy being made,” he says. “One video makes another inside a box.”

“When I carried Leela and you, my stomach was like that. A dark box. I couldn’t watch either one being made. Most of life is like that only—important happenings are mostly unseen.”

He grunts. Maybe she’s told him this before.

Doesn’t matter. He should hear it again
.

She passes him the beedi. “But birthing! It made me feel alive—rohm-rohm.” Through every pore and crevice of her body, as never before. Back then, she thought if she could survive childbirth and birth a son, everything else would be easy. Ha!

Suresh blows a smoke ring, and waits respectfully enough, but she knows he doesn’t want to hear how painful it was, or how she nearly died to give his atman flesh.

“I don’t have to do much,” he says, passing her his beedi. “Every videotape comes out the same.”

“How do you know?” says Damini. “Maybe each video copy tells a slightly different story—it depends who is telling, who is watching, who is listening, when the tale is told, and where.” She holds smoke deep in her lungs, feels it hit, and exhales. “I thought Leela would be my copy and that you would be just like your father. But you aren’t even like each other.”

“I should be like a woman?”

“I mean she’s so trusting and hardworking,”

“I’m not hardworking?”

“
Arey!
One word and you get angry. I only wish I knew how you and Leela grew inside me. If I had gone to college like Aman and Timcu and Kiran, I might know.”

“They know? Ha!”

“I saw a doctor on TV pointing to pink and white pictures.
Bapre-bap!
How much that man said happens inside a woman—but how does a man know? Only a woman can feel and tell what happens inside her.”

“Ask Mem-saab to read you her magazines.”

“I can read them myself, slowly, but lady-doctors don’t tell about giving birth, even in the new glossy-glossy ones. TV is better—because when I hear something, I don’t forget.”

“TV is bad for women.”

“Bad for us but not bad for you? Why were you saving to buy one, then?”

“To watch Swami Rudransh,” he says.

“Ha! You want to watch movies.”

“So? You should listen to the radio.”

His protectiveness is a comforting omen for her old age, but she says, “I can’t, now. Amanjit-saab is visiting.” She can’t tell him how afraid Mem-saab looks, or that she has a feeling trouble is coming. He’ll just say Sikhs are known to be troublemakers. He thinks Sikhs should be given a chance to revert to Hinduism or be told to leave India.

He’ll never know Mem-saab has made Damini a Sikh—boys and men seldom learn anything unspoken.

All too soon, Suresh folds his hands in namaste and rises. Damini aims her last puff at the gladioli and stubs the beedi out in their bed. Mem-saab will smell tobacco though Damini only smoked half, and say she must give it up to be a better Sikh.

In blessing and farewell, she rests her right hand on Suresh’s dark curly hair for a moment. Then she returns to Mem-saab’s room.

Mem-saab has woken from her nap. Aman is still gone.

“I will give you a massage; you will feel better,” Damini offers.

She draws the curtains and brings a steel bowl of warmed mustard-seed oil. Sweeping the line of Mem-saab’s back, Damini’s fingers seek
and press marma points where seen and unseen energies unite. Then with Mem-saab facing her and watching her lips, Damini talks about old times, golden times—eleven thousand magical years of Ram Rajya—when Lord Ram ruled, and children lived with their parents, and parents with loving, caring children and grandchildren. Her massages take a long time; anything important should be done slowly.

Damini helps Mem-saab to be beautiful, though she is a widow and her ears hear no sound. Mem-saab applies her foundation and powder on a face the colour of milky chai, not deodar wood-brown like Damini’s. Despite daily applications of Orange Skin Cream, Mem-saab’s wrinkles trail across her forehead and bunch at the corners of her eyes. Though twenty years her junior, Damini’s look almost as deep. Damini stands behind Mem-saab, and Mem-saab takes black kajal pencils from Damini’s hands to make eyebrows. Damini regards Mem-saab in the mirror and mouths how beautiful she looks.

Mem-saab’s hair, resting in Damini’s palms as she braids it, is the colour of spent fire-coals. Damini’s hair, which went white upon widowhood, looks flame-red in the mirror. For hair dye, she buys an egg each month and mixes its yolk with dark henna powder and water that has known the comfort of tea leaves.

Mem-saab goes to the door of her husband’s room and sees the padlock. She weighs it in her hands, then tugs it. She looks over her shoulder at Damini.

“Did he say when he would be back?”

“No, Mem-saab.”

“Tell me as soon as you hear him arrive.”

“Will you have dinner together?” Damini mouths. Mem-saab can pretend she knows the answer; Khansama will need to know how much food to make.

“Serve enough for two,” Mem-saab says.

Around five in the evening, when the fiery heat has tempered to sweat-crawling haze, Damini leads Mem-saab to her Ambassador car for a ride to the market.

“Hilloh,” she says to the Embassy-man downstairs, trying to sound like Timcu calling from Canada on the phone. He takes the word as Mem-saab’s greeting, but Damini enjoys that in Hindi it orders him to move.

The gora man—beardless, moustacheless, pink as Himalayan salt—folds his hands strangely, lower than his heart. Today he forgets to speak to Mem-saab in Hindi and Damini cannot help much, though she understands most of his English words. Mem-saab and he stand for long minutes, smiling, with Zahir Sheikh holding the car door open.

At the market, Damini guides Mem-saab out of the way of tooting three-wheeled scooter-rickshaws, and tells her the prices the fruit-sellers ask. When she turns her face away so that she cannot read Damini’s lips anymore, it is Damini’s signal to say: that is Mem-saab’s rock-bottom price. Mem-saab has very little money with her—just a few notes tied in the corner of her dupatta. Always thrifty, so Aman and Timcu will inherit more of their father’s wealth. Even so, she always gives Damini a fifty-rupee note to buy a marigold garland at the Hindu temple. And she waits outside with Zahir Sheikh, in the hot oven of the car, while Damini rings the bell before Lord Ganesh’s raised trunk, offers him the garland, and asks his blessing upon her children. The liquid sound of a voice intoning Sanskrit verses circles the inner sanctum with Damini. For a few minutes, she leans against the welcome cool of a marble pillar and listens to a pandit, sitting cross-legged in his corner telling the
Bhagvad Gita
. She takes a few marigolds with her as blessing and braves the dull burn of the air outside.

Mem-saab offers her usual gentle admonition as Damini takes her seat in front, beside Zahir Sheikh, “Amma, remember Vaheguru also answers women’s prayers.”

“We prayed to Vaheguru this morning,” she reminds Mem-saab.

Returning home, she helps Mem-saab put colour on her cheeks and paint her lips hibiscus-red, making her ready to receive relatives.
Ever since Mem-saab lost her hearing, she has been too ashamed to go visiting relatives herself. Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh, Sardar and Sardarni Sewa Singh—people her husband helped when their Partition-refugees’ application was all that lay between them and the begging bowl—are the only ones who still come to pay her respect.

They touch Mem-saab’s feet in greeting; she represents her husband for them. It’s been a long time since either Aman or Timcu touched Mem-saab’s feet—or Damini’s, who also was considered their mother.

“Damini-amma,” they call her, with respect because nowadays only higher-caste families have servants who live with them.

Today Khansama’s white uniform jacket is crumpled and he wears its Nehru collar insolently unhooked, but Mem-saab does not order him to change it before he wheels in the brass trolley-cart crowned with a wobbling tea cozy. She talks to her relatives in English about his “stealing”—threatening with a laugh to send him and his family back to his village.

When they leave, Damini brings Mem-saab’s prayer book. Mem-saab removes it from its silk pouch and Damini joins her in chanting the
Rehraas
. After the evening prayer, Mem-saab tells Vaheguru she was ashamed to tell her relatives about the lock on her husband’s room and the suitcase that says Aman is staying for as long as it takes.