The Selector of Souls (48 page)

This boy is surely the avatar of the baby girl Damini returned to brahman. Damini must not betray this second grandchild, son of her own son, however he came to be. The gods are giving her a chance to balance her karma.

“The boy is light-skinned,” Damini says to Kiran, “and you’re right that he looks too light-skinned to be Goldina’s. But I tell you, he’s too dark to be Mem-saab’s grandchild. Even if you rename him, no one will believe this is your son. Goldina can be thrown out of her home if you send your girl baby home with her, but you have nothing to fear. Aman-ji can afford a second daughter. If he beats you up or throws you out, you can go to a lawyer and complain. You can go to the police. You can go home to your rich parents. Goldina has only her old mother, a sweeper in Delhi.”

“I can’t believe you are taking this woman’s side. You, our ancestral servant, you who have eaten our salt. You, who are wearing my mother-in-law’s kara.” Kiran says to Sister Anu in English, “You can’t trust these women. All of them just lie and lie.”

Goldina sniffles and hugs her shins, shifting weight on her large feet. She adjusts her kerchief and glares at Kiran.

Damini says, “Kiran-ji, maybe you lied when you told Aman the ultra-soon said it’s a boy. Maybe the doctor lied. But if you take Goldina’s child, I will tell Aman-ji that a man you liked before you were married came to see you. Yes, I will tell him he was here, in Gurkot, that he came in his saffron-orange car. My son told me he saw you meeting him at the chai-stall. Maybe he came before. Maybe he came nine months ago? I saw him here once, but I just
remembered where I first saw him. His photo was in Mem-saab’s home in Delhi, in your dressing-table drawer. Remember I asked which member of your family had cut his hair besides your father, and you didn’t answer. Because he was no relative, na? Because he was a Hindu, na?”

She holds Kiran’s gaze.

S
ISTER
A
NU HAS TO SIT DOWN
.

How often did Anu wonder what Vikas’s first love looked like and what sort of woman was That-girl? Well, now she knows. That-girl is Kiran, a woman who would stoop to steal another woman’s son.

Anu could
never
have been like her. But more importantly, nor would she ever
want
to be like Kiran.

It is easy to congratulate herself, since she actually brought a daughter into the world. But did Anu act as gateway to the world from courage, or from fear of damnation?

She must collect her thoughts, set aside this discovery. For the sake of two women and two babies. Her job is to understand the pressure Kiran is under. With no mother-in-law or father-in-law, with a husband who appears to dote on his older daughter Loveleen, why has Kiran felt so much pressure to conform?

Maybe Goldina is right—we learn to want only what we can have in this life, so we tell ourselves to want only boys
.

“K
IRAN-JI, IF YOU DON’T GIVE ME THE CHILD NOW,” SAYS
Damini, “I will tell Aman he doesn’t resemble Mem-saab or him.”

Still holding the baby, Kiran reaches beneath her pillow for a small silver box. “Why should he believe you?” She flips the box open with her thumbnail and pops a pinch of paan masala into her mouth. “Just because of your age?” She closes her fist over the box. She turns to Sister Anu and says in English, “I always thought she looks like a red monkey—don’t you?”

Damini understands what Kiran said, even if she cannot answer in English.

It’s karma because of her paap, she thinks. The continuous load on her heart is her paap.

“I don’t think so,” says Sister Anu who should agree with Kiran before she disagrees.

“Amanjit-ji will believe me,” Damini says to Kiran. “Because of my years in his family, years in which I protected his family’s honour by being Mem-saab’s ears. Mem-saab’s spirit is in this clinic, and I swear to you on her spirit that I will do it.” Kiran opens her fist and stares down at the box. Damini draws close to her bedside. “And because I am faithful to her memory, and because our family has been faithful to Sardar-saab’s for so many generations, I ask you …”

Damini holds out her arms for the child and waits.

Kiran hesitates, searching Damini’s face. Damini’s nerves crackle as if in terror of the next moment

After a long long moment, Kiran extends the baby boy to Damini and then begins to weep.

This little one weighs less than Kiran’s premature girl—of course, he is Goldina’s.

Sister Anu picks up the girl and lays her beside Kiran.

“Damini-amma,” says Kiran from behind her handkerchief. “I’m almost thirty-seven now and Aman-ji is fifty-four. He wants his homes, his factories and businesses, the summer cottages he’s building to be inherited by his own blood, not a second son-in-law. He needs a son now, to grow up in time to train him into the businesses. He was planning such a celebration—and here I went and had another
girl. I just didn’t want to disappoint him—I couldn’t disappoint him. And you know, Aman-ji is fighting his elder brother for his inheritance—without a son, who will carry on the court case after him?”

“If you and Amanjit-ji really don’t want your little girl,” Sister Anu says, as if making an effort to be kind, but in Hindi, thereby including Damini and Goldina, “Everlasting Hope has orphanages, and we find parents who want girls. Some baby girls go to America and Canada, some to other countries. Some are even adopted in India.” “Some” sounds more optimistic than “very few,” but Damini was an amma long enough to know adopted girls can become unpaid maidservants. Sister Anu continues, “But adoption is usually necessary only if a girl-child is abandoned. And mothers who abandon children are usually terribly poor.”

A sudden quiet comes over them. Damini gives Goldina her son.

After all his talk about purity and defilement, Damini wonders, could Suresh lie with a Christian sweeper-woman, even one as beautiful as Goldina?

G
OLDINA IS CROONING AND ROCKING HER INFANT SON
in her arms. Sister Anu accompanies her back to the women’s ward, and checks her bleeding. After checking her pulse, temperature and blood pressure, she brings Goldina tea and rotis to replenish her calories and fluids. She stokes up the coals in the bukhari, and helps Goldina begin feeding Moses. Within half an hour, Goldina’s uterus is already responding to the feeding by contracting—praise the Lord! What complexity and planning it took to create a woman’s body and endow it with hormones that activate exactly when required.

When she returns to the men’s ward, she finds Kiran holding the swaddled baby girl and wearing the kind of martyred look Mumma wears when thwarted in any way.

“You’ll get used to her,” Sister Anu says to Kiran. “I was a mother who never wanted her baby, but I got used to her. And now I miss her so much.”

Kiran shakes her head. “No one understands. I’m ruined.” She looks down at her little girl. A tear glitters on her dark lashes. Is that tear for this daughter or in regret for children she might have had with Vikas?

“You know a Vikas Kohli?” There, the question is out.

Kiran looks up, wariness stirring in her eyes. “There are many men of that name.”

“Yes, but only one who came all the way here from New Delhi a few months ago, driving a saffron-orange Mercedes. Do you know him?”

Kiran gives a wry smile. “I thought I knew him. But I didn’t.”

“When?”

“A long time ago, in college.”

“Did he have a Cord Roadster?”

“Yes,” Kiran smiles as if watching a fond memory. “He’d take me for a ride, with the top down. How do you know him? I don’t think he was ever interested in nuns.”

Sister Anu’s scar twitches involuntarily. “You were to be married?”

“I thought so.”

“If you loved him, why did you agree to marry Amanjit-ji?”

Kiran purses her lips, as if biting back words. After a long silence, she says, “Remember 1984? A Muslim neighbour came to my father’s home and warned him to leave. My father thought of taking a train out of New Delhi, but the government radio and TV stations kept repeating that “two Sikhs” had killed Madam G. They didn’t say whether they meant Sikh men or women, but the news incited violence in Kanpur, Lucknow, Patna and onward. Sikh men were pulled off a train at Lucknow and massacred. He couldn’t decide which place would be safe, so we fled to our local gurdwara, mustered up any weapons we could, and barricaded ourselves within. All the time
that Madam G.’s body lay in state, mobs yelling ‘Khoon ka badla khoon!’ besieged us. They were calling for our blood though none of us killed Madam G. I used a crate of empty Coke bottles to make Molotov cocktails. For three days, Sikh men, women and even children fought side by side, holding the Hindu mobs off with kirpans and swords. Then my father cut his hair. That’s how they missed him when other Sikh men were hacked to pieces. When we returned, we found our home had been looted, our cars and Sikh servants set on fire.

“But you don’t know about this, right? Because it didn’t affect you Hindus. Because the killings weren’t mentioned on radio or TV or in print. For my parents, all Hindus had blood on their hands.”

“I—I’m sorry, Kiran-ji, but what does this have to do with—”

Kiran says, “My father said if I married Vikas, I should never return. And if I didn’t cooperate—by which they meant marry a Sikh man, so I would have Sikh children—they would take me to a psychiatrist. My mother said I would be locked away. They wanted to do their dharma regardless of the effect of their actions on me. I was not Kiran to them, I was their daughter, their duty.

“I cried for Vikas. I called, begging him to elope. He wouldn’t.” She gives a great sigh. “I don’t blame him now. His father told him he would throw him out without a dime if he married a Sikh girl. His father said, ‘The Sikhs killed our prime minister,’ as if every Sikh was guilty of the assassination of Madam G. Vikas never said his father was wrong. Either he agreed with him, or he loved his creature comforts too much to sacrifice them for love.”

“But—aren’t Hindus and Sikhs very similar? More similar than Hindus and Christians, certainly. I have a cousin who married a Sikh man …”

“Did she marry him after 1984?” says Kiran.

“Before.”

“Since the massacre, Sikh men are wearing baseball caps instead of turbans. Many have cut their hair to blend in. Vikas may use Sikh
men in government travel ads so Indians look different from Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, but the Sikh men I know try to go unnoticed. Many of us have emigrated. Those who cannot are educating Sikh children to speak Hindi and English—and almost no Punjabi. Sikh families now try to marry their sons to Hindu women to make alliances with Hindu families.

“But when I was a little girl, we Sikhs took pride in never worshipping pictures or calendars or idols—not even idols of our ten gurus. We believed our gurus were teachers, not gods and used to be proud of believing in one god—Vaheguru. But who would dream that Congress Party politicians and the police would lead Hindu mobs to our homes?”

She stops. “Wait—how do you know Vikas drove a Cord? You know him?”

“I was married to him,” says Sister Anu. “For almost nine years.”

A well-tweezed eyebrow rises. “Oh, truly this is a night of revelations,” says Kiran. “First we find out you, a nun, were raped, now that you were married, and to my old boyfriend. A Bollywood scriptwriter could do no better.”

“My rapist and your old boyfriend are one and the same.”

Genuine confusion and surprise cloud her face. “Vikas? He was such a gentleman.”

“He has drawing-room manners when the world is watching.” Sister Anu doesn’t succeed at keeping bitterness from her tone.

“Well, you left him, obviously. You’re a lesbian?”

“No,” says Sister Anu. “Nuns are celibate, not lesbians.”

Kiran’s mouth twists in disbelief.

“I wanted to rule myself.”

A short sharp laugh. “As if a woman is a country! Is there a woman in the world who rules herself?”

“You can try raising one,” says Sister Anu. “You can begin with believing your daughter is precious, even if everyone around you says she isn’t.”

Kiran rolls her eyes.

Sister Anu returns to her desk and a night-chilled cup of tea.

Was it because Kiran’s parents showed contempt for Kiran’s wishes and decisions? No, that’s too harsh. All fathers are not as liberal as Dadu, and many parents ignore a daughter’s wishes. Yet every woman doesn’t try to switch her baby daughter for a son.

Rejecting your baby is like rejecting a limb. How could she?

Mothers can reject daughters in many ways, not only by starving, selling, abandoning or exchanging them for sons. Just look at Mumma.

And what about you and Chetna? Have you rejected her or saved her by sending her to Rano? Did you feel her to be gift or burden? Every time you look at her, don’t you feel Vikas’s violence again?

With all her anxiety for the baby girl, Sister Anu understands what it will cost Amanjit Singh and Kiran to raise and marry off not one but two girls. She wouldn’t wish that on any father, not even Vikas. In hindsight, the solution Anu proposed, adoption of a girl baby just because she is a girl, is as unjust as Kiran’s trying to exchange the girl. So Anu too has contributed to the happening of all that is happening.

Lord, give us courage
.

How much courage? And why should a woman always have to be brave? Where are fathers like Dadu who are gladly responsible, caring and protective of the girls they create?

Would she be asking such questions if she lived in Canada like Rano? Her neural connections are really not up to thinking this through at this hour of the morning.

It is not only Kiran and Damini and Goldina who need healing. Every man, woman and child in this village needs healing. But if there’s one thing Sister Anu has learned while nursing, it is that healing must happen from within.