The Selector of Souls (64 page)

The announcer is talking about a two-in-one test, using words she’s never heard in Hindi or English—Fishun, Litheeyum Deyoteride, thurmo-nyoo-cleyar.

“Was anyone hurt?” Damini yells at the radio. The chai-wallah obligingly turns the dial, and the announcer sounds as if he’s yelling back in answer. Gandhi-ji’s followers of non-violence are gone, he says. Every prime minister since Nehru, he says, has urged restraint, while secretly urging Indian scientists to help India replace imported weapons with made-in-India ones. But the new prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, decided after only ten days sitting in his new office that he was man enough, strong enough, tough enough, to give the green light to test the big-big bumb.

Damini’s third eye sees the Dancing Policeman at Vijay Chowk change his stance: Go.

And matter became ener-jee, says the newscaster in awed tones.

He’s probably never seen jee form matter during a birth. But which matter became ener-jee? Where? Loharki, Bharariya, and Mava, the desert villages where her sisters live since marriage, surround Khetolai. She has not spoken with her sisters recently.

The chai-wallah helps her call the sister who lives closest to their old village. Everyone is together, yes, all safe—she shouts her questions, her sisters shout back.

They were all together, visiting Khetolai for their cousin-sister’s wedding, they tell her. But soldiers herded them out of the village in the
middle of the bride’s henna ceremony. “It was one p.m.,” says her now-eldest sister. “No, it was noon,” says her middle sister from Bharariya. “It was the hottest time of the day in the desert,” says her sister from Mava, “because the mehndi dried on my hands in moments.”

“There were a thousand of us,” says her sister from Bharariya.

“Fifteen hundred at least, if you count the children,” says her sister from Mava. “They said there would be a big big bumb, but they wouldn’t let us run away! There was no shade—they had not provided tents or water. And here we were, fifteen hundred people in the white desert heat of May. It was forty-seven degrees,” she says.

“A hundred and seventeen degrees,” says Damini’s now-eldest sister from Loharki, who measures by the old system. “We had to stand outside for four hours—old, young, sick, a few women were pregnant—the soldiers looked at us as if we were foreign. I fainted.”

“We looked where the soldiers looked. I felt the earth tremble, as if a child were stirring inside,” says her middle sister from Bharariya. “A plume of dust rose over a clump of rohida trees, then—
phph-phat!
—it felt as if I had been slapped right across my breasts.”

“What breasts?” her sister from Loharki says, in the distance. “Kofta-balls, even after three children.”

Which makes Damini and her sister laugh. Sobering, her middle sister continues, “I saw champa flowers tremble, but they did not fall. You know, the kind our papa-ji used to sell. And then, all of a sudden, the earth seemed to move like a sheet. We threw ourselves to the ground over the children. Some tried to run, but the soldiers stopped them at gunpoint. I really thought they would shoot them. When the soldiers cheered, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai!’ we cheered as loud as we could, too.”

Damini’s sister from Loharki takes the phone. “A few seconds and it was over,” she says. “They let us go back into the village, and you know what your grand-nephew said?”

Damini shakes her head as if her sister can see her. Her sister says, just as if she had seen Damini. “He said, ‘Will there be school
tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Are school children in America taking holidays every time their government drops a bumb?’ ”

Her sister from Mava is back on the line. “And I had left in such a hurry, I found I had not tightened the tap completely—half a bucket of water went to waste. We went to the well—and do you know, water had drained out of it.”

Her eldest sister has taken the phone. “I say, How did they know if it’s safe to be there? And there was a big crack in the wall of the wedding hall. I was glad we don’t live in our old home anymore, but we live close enough.”

“We should protest,” says her sister from Mava, in the distance.

Her eldest sister turns away from the mouthpiece, “You—always thinking like-that-like-that. Be grateful it wasn’t like 1974.”

“It
was
like 1974,” says her sister from Mava, taking her turn on the phone. “The soldiers said the PM will be coming to see us—we have to ask for an investigation.”

“The PM will just detour around the village,” says the eldest. “Mark my words, he’s coming to congratulate the scientists. My father-in-law asked for an investigation after the 1974 test. He was given a radio instead. Since then, we have shown health workers the cancers in people’s mouths and their throats. We’ve showed them bone tumours, skin lumps, breast lumps. Today a soldier told me, ‘This is a perfect test; nobody will get two-in-ones.’ I said, ‘We’re not asking for radios. We’re asking you, because you made us stand in blistering heat for four hours, you set off a blast—your science men must know what more will happen to us this time.’ ”

“They were just following orders. Doing their dharma. They didn’t care about the effects on us,” says her sister from Bharariya.

The horizon is a jagged rip between a fiery earth and a platinum sky as Damini hangs up, guiltily relieved her sisters are safe. And relieved Anamika Devi didn’t come today not because of any diminish-ment in Damini but because she was busy tending to more important things. Important things are done slowly and mostly happen unseen.

Behind Damini, the radio begins to play “Vande Mataram.” The sons of the motherland are called by the song to worship the slayer-goddess Durga Devi. And what of the daughters?

What do goras like the Embassy-man and his wife think of India now? What does Timcu’s gora wife think, what do Mem-saab’s Canadian grandchildren think of India now? Now will they think India is important enough to visit?

A few seconds and it was over, said her sister. But anything so big, so important must have taken time.

The government has been spending money on the miltry all these years since 1974 and Madam G.’s Emergency. In that time, we ordinary people have been living from one real emergency to the next. Rats clawing in our bellies, diseases like Chunilal’s. Ignorance that makes us trust astrologers and men like Swami Rudransh, and turns our poverty to misery, crime and imprisonment. No miltry has been fighting for women’s wishes. Why didn’t they use that money for electricity connections, drinking water filters, latrines, clinics and schools in Khetolai and Gurkot?

A
T
6
A.M., THE FULL FURNACE OF SUMMER SUN HAS YET
to focus upon Delhi, but the air still seems to waver and warp as Vikas enters Lodi Gardens. Mr. Kohli is waiting on the lawns beside the Glass House, windmilling his arms, touching his toes. “Buck up, beta, oy! I’ve already done one round.”

Vikas smothers a yawn and falls into step beside his father. They set off down the narrow paved pathway girding the ninety-acre garden. Past the palm tree with “Vikas” carved around its grey trunk—he had been trying to impress Kiran.

Which brings to mind her husband and his bloody lawsuit. Game over, Amanjit Singh. India’s Hindu bomb turns law meaningless, criticism treasonous and simple crimes—like financing a church-burning or a gurdwara-burning—unimportant. Justice has been saf-fronized. Let Amanjit Singh pit his Sikh Chieftain money against a leader in one of India’s RSS Hindu organizations for a few more years. The nuclear playing field will make everyday violence petty and permissible.

“Saw BBC yesterday?” Mr. Kohli breaks into his thoughts. “Five underground nuclear devices.”

Vikas nods. “New Delhi TV showed their PM Nawaz Sharif saying it was ‘inevitable’ and then the uproar in our Parliament yesterday.”

“There they were in Islamabad, lighting sparklers, dancing in the streets as if they’d all had one big Sufi mystical experience.”

“Just because we got ourselves a bomb, Pakistan had to set off a Muslim bomb.” Vikas turns toward the tomb of Muhammad Shah Sayyid. “Like ours, mated to a missile so they no longer need to shove it out of an aircraft. But these are mini-nukes, ji. Just thirty-five kilotons. American seismologists will minimize that and say twelve, just like they said ours was much less than forty-five.

“But even if it was only twelve each, Pakistan’s now in the nuclear club with us,” says Mr. Kohli. “And we can’t even blackball those fellows.” He marches into the shadows, as the path winds between thickets of bamboo.

“We and Pakistan are entangled in a quantum connection,” says Vikas.

They fold their hands to greet an acquaintance as they walk past a fifteenth-century mosque.

“How come they were ready just days later? For everything else, it’s ‘inshallah.’ Huh!”

Laughter floats across sun-scalded lawns, from yoga-laughers, standing before the towering sandstone domes of the Burra Gumbad, aspiring for longevity. Past the yoga-laughers, father and son slow to stare at two women in salwar-kameez kicking a football between them. Another woman is doing push-ups a few feet away. Mr. Kohli shakes his head in disapproval and Vikas follows suit.

Parrots and pigeons take wing from a ruined turret, and soar into a blue sky. Over the park boundary wall, Vikas can just see the buildings of the India International Centre. Tongues of academics and diplomats must be wagging in its dining room. Turning northward to the gateway, another mosque comes in his way—is there any place in Delhi where he can avoid them? Muslim architecture, Muslim monuments, Muslim history, the Urdu language. Older and more pervasive than anything left by the Brits.

Father and son walk in silence till Mr. Kohli says, “One commentator started talking about China’s test at Lop Nor three years ago, and he kept bringing up that we fought the Chinese in 1962. Eyewash. Why didn’t he mention the US test in Nevada last year—underground, mind you, underground. Their President Clinton unilaterally broke a five-year moratorium. Why should they do it, but not India?”

Or Pakistan, but it wouldn’t be patriotic to say that
.

“Wait while I get us the
Hindustan Times
.” Mr. Kohli detours off the Athpula Bridge to the free newspapers stacked by the entrance gate. Vikas amuses himself by flicking stones at ducks and geese swimming in the lake beneath the bridge, and then takes the path that runs along the ruined walls of a fourteenth-century fort. He’s almost to the corner turret when his father catches up.

“Listen! ‘Even after the fall of the Soviet Union there are still thirty-six thousand nuclear weapons in the world, most in arsenals of the USA.’ ” Mr. Kohli is reading from his folded paper in rhythm with his stride, “ ‘About five thousand of them are still on alert.’ Don’t you think any one of them could be misdirected by some Pakistani hand to land in India at any time?” He doesn’t say how a Pakistani hand will find its way to an American missile to misdirect it, but there’s always a question mark.

Mr. Kohli leafs through a few more pages, then tosses the paper into the bushes by the boundary wall. Passing dog-walkers hush the barking and whining that breaks out.

Women sitting cross-legged on blankets in a shoulder-to-shoulder huddle are listening to advice from a saffron-clad sadhu. The sadhu dangles spindly bare legs from a metal bench before them. From the few words Vikas can hear, they seem riveted to his lecture on ego-annihilation.

Two young women, deep in conversation, pass him without a sidelong glance. Vikas stares after them. “The problem,” he says, “is women and gays. Every international agency is full of them now.
They’ve been pumping money into Pakistan for development, and Pakistan has been spending it on atom bombs.” He leads his father in the direction of the Sikander Lodi’s tomb.

“And the Americans! Einstein said when America got the bomb that it was like putting a razorblade in the hands of a three-year-old. But do CNN experts bring that up? No.”

“Americans want a ‘level playing field’—well, India and Pakistan have now given them the battlefield of Kurukshetra,” says Vikas.

“They don’t know Kurukshetra. All Americans know of the
Mahabharat
is the line Oppenheimer quoted, ‘Now am I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ ”

“He was right, Dad—a single person can do a lot of damage.”

“But my point is: these are not the most important lines Krishna ever said to Arjun in the
Gita
. If I were producing their show, I would quote the most glorious lines.”

Mr. Kohli climbs the steps of the tomb and declaims as if to wake Sikandar Lodi:

Vikas looks around, embarrassed. When Mr. Kohli has finished, he climbs down the steps and they walk on.

“Did you broadcast Swami Rudransh’s reaction to our bomb last week?” says his father.

“Yes, he said Indian scientists must do their dharma, regardless of consequences. And that science is the weapon of spirituality.”

“Will he give a statement about this Muslim bomb?”

“Oh yes, he’ll say Christians and Muslims have only one life to live, while we Hindus will reincarnate and inherit what’s left. And if the world blows up, then what? Every thing is everything. We will all be returned to brahman.”

“And if any Americans are left, they can still be furious.”

Vikas stops by a row of palms. The dome of the Sheesh Gumbad blocks the whole sky. “Americans have been playing baseball in the Imperial Gymkhana Clubs for so long, they don’t realize the game is now kabaddi. And the arena has shifted to the Indo-Pak Line of Control. Now we too can deal death from afar, as Europeans did for centuries.”