The Selector of Souls (67 page)

“And I say you cannot ask and take from Anamika Devi without giving something back.” Leela says. She moves around the little group, distributing tumblers of tea and jaggery. “If you do, you will not value her words. That would be stealing without learning or understanding.”

“And this is why Anamika Devi asks for an oath-deposit. If a girl is born and dies unnamed, the money will be forfeited to the Women’s Survival Society of Gurkot.”

“Huh! Do men pay, now?” says Kamna. “I remember when you first said this, they would complain and complain.”

“Oh, we tell them an oath-deposit costs less than an ultrasound and cleaning, so they pay. But it’s not only men who have to swear.”

“
Women
have to swear?”

“Because,” Leela says, “a mother or a grandmother should swear that if her husband doesn’t allow her to give the child his family name, the woman will give the child her family name.” She sits suddenly, knees apart. The empty tray slides from her lap. She pulls her dupatta forward to cover her face a little.

Everyone is silent. Damini pats her daughter’s arm.

“I’ve started using the money,” Leela says, recovering her voice, “to make interest-free loans for a few months to people who don’t want any favours from Amanjit-ji.”

Kamna gives a low whistle. Which makes Mohan whistle. He whistles and whistles till Leela shoos him upstairs. “But don’t the
men say, ‘Give the money to us’?” Kamna asks as the whistling fades.

“Yes,” says Damini. “But I say, ‘You’ll only spend it on rum and lottery tickets.’ And I tell them they can ask the women to employ them.”

Leela says, “Fathers often offer to bring Anamika Devi a she-goat, but your nani says Anamika could be angered by a sacrificed body or blood. One offered to bury an earthen vessel of money beneath her statue, but we say Anamika Devi only wants flowers and sweetness.”

The gift of moving between worlds is emboldening. And a responsibility. In the echoland of altered consciousness to which her gift gives her entry, she sees many futures for Kamna, and also that her own future, now that she is in it, doesn’t resemble the one she expected. “Once Anamika Devi has answered the questions of supplicants,” she says, “I speak in my own voice. I say, ‘See how shameless I am, living with my daughter in my old age! Still the goddess comes through me.’ ”

“And they say … ?” Anu prompts.

“All say,
‘Hein
?
Hein
?’ in surprise. And I have to say, ‘Yeh bhi hota hai!’ I say it over and over. I even repeat it in English: ‘This also happens!’ Then only they begin to see that a parent
can
take from a daughter. I say, ‘This also happens that your son may not be there to help in your old age. Then if you have not treated your daughter as well as you treated your son, if you abandoned her, starved or beat her, or simply used her strength like a wordless animal—with what face can you turn to her for help?’

“I say, ‘My daughter is looking after me in my old age instead of my son. Shouldn’t I be proud of her? But no, people say I should feel ashamed to be living with her. But look, I am no longer ashamed of things I should be proud of, and proud of things of which I should be ashamed.’ ”

Mohan is playing the TV very loud now.

“He must be hungry,” says Kamna.

Leela rises to make some potato curry for her son. But then she stops, looks at Kamna. “And you, what do you want to eat?”

Kamna smiles shyly. “For me? I like the peas with cauliflower. I’ll help you.”

“No, today you sit with your nani and the sister-ji.”

Damini, Kamna and Anu look out at ranges upon ranges for a while in comfortable silence. Then Kamna says, “When someone finishes the questioning, Nani, do they go away satisfied?”

“Anamika Devi never gives a complete answer,” says Damini. “Nor is there any. We just go to the next life and learn more. But she does say one question can have many answers, and women can find those answers too.”

To Damini’s ears, at times, Anamika Devi sounds like her mother, at times a friendly mistress like Mem-saab, at times the small girl who walked behind her mother in the desert. At other times Anamika is an unrecognizable mystery. The goddess seems to like the soft glow of oil lamps and lanterns lit at night—at those times, she speaks in Mem-saab’s voice.

And one night Anamika spoke in the high thin voice of a ghost-child. Leela laughed and reached out her arms and Damini woke from trance to hold her very close, till both cried. Leela thought she knew whose voice came that day, but only Damini truly remembered the voice of her sister Yashodara, the little girl from Khetolai who fasted to death in the Rajasthan desert, after the water ran out.

Still all the gods and goddesses seem conflicted and undecided about the direction the world will take. Another war with Pakistan happened and both sides could not use nuclear bombs because the destruction of Pakistan would mean the destruction of India. Everyone, including the spirits, including Anamika Devi, agrees there will be yet another war. Expectations of death are fading, annihilation is becoming familiar to a new generation. Many possibilities exist. Few exclude each other and each moment contains the seed of the rest.

Maybe the knot in Damini’s heart will always remain, as will the ache and the horrors of dreams.

“Kamna,” she says, “No little girl should lose a sister as you did. Never again will I need to become a stone to know what a stone feels like. Never again will I need to become a mountain to know what a mountain feels like. Because I am a person, my heart has melted, like the ice on those ridges that recedes a little farther each year. And because a person can feel, and a person who is a woman can create, can nurture, I have made it known in Gurkot that I will take in baby girls if anyone finds them abandoned.”

“And boys, too?” says Kamna. “Boys like Mohan?”

“Yes, and boys. I never told you, but Moses was the first child placed with the Anamika-Yeshu Adoption Centre at the Shimla convent.”

“This way, Goldina knows he is safe and near his relatives,” says Anu. “We can visit him on our way.”

Kamna sits very still at this news of her cousin-brother. Maybe Damini should have told her before, but she couldn’t. Damini turns to Anu.

“And you, Anu-ji? Are you still healing others?”

“Yes. I work at Deluxe Hospital in Delhi.”

“Mem-saab used to go there. It’s a saab-hospital.”

“Yes, it’s private. But I am also helping Sister Bethany by trying to find couples who want to be parents, not couples who want a child. We have so many children there now, that I said I would return in summer and help her at the adoption centre.”

“She’ll pay?” says Damini.

“No, I’m volunteering.”

“You’ll be a bridge between the saab-log and us,” says Kamna. “Nani, how is Suresh Uncle?”

“Still an Under Trial in Kasauli jail. Whenever I visit him, I learn again that a pure moment of joy or sorrow is impossible,” Damini says. “Every day I ask Anamika Devi to bail him out, because the jail officers are like gods and want more cash offerings than we can
muster. But even Anamika-ji must believe he deserves more punishment. I tell her he is one of us. I say no healing can happen without his doing his dharma, being a father for Moses. I tell her he cannot pay for the damage he did, but he can teach people at the temple to be better Hindus. I may not like what your Suresh Uncle has done, but I love him as his mother.”

Leela descends to the terrace, with Mohan carrying her sari pallu like a train. He sits down beside Damini, and the pallu becomes his reins. Leela holds out a small bottle, “For you,” she says to Kamna.

Kamna smiles as she takes it, then opens the bottle of Fair & Lovely and smooths it over her cheeks. She turns to Anu and holds out a tiny dab for her and Anu rubs it over her cheeks, too. Then Kamna puts a dab on Damini. Wrinkles smoothen beneath her fingertips as she rubs the cream on. Then Mohan wants a dab—and another and another.

Damini takes Kamna’s arm on one side, Mohan’s on the other. “Come, your story is only beginning. Remember, you two, take joy in sweetness. Sweetness survives—sweetness will exist, somewhere beyond the end of the end.”

I
T’S THREE NIGHTS BEFORE
D
IWALI
. I
N
G
URKOT
, D
AMINI
will be lighting shell-shaped clay diyas to welcome Lord Ram back from Sri Lanka. But there are no clay lamps in the intensive care unit at Deluxe Hospital, where Nurse Anu is on duty.

She lit lamps the year she brought Chetna home. They flickered from the windowsills of the rooms she rented from Sharad Uncle and Purnima after they moved to Canada. And Chetna wept all night despite them. Her tears began after Anu called Rano’s family with Diwali wishes and Chetna took the opportunity to tell Rano she didn’t care if Lord Ram ever came home. She said she wanted to celebrate the Sikh festival Bandhi Chhord Divas, and Anu-mama didn’t know anything about Guru Har Gobind Singh-ji and wasn’t letting her. Then she asked Rano if she could please come home.

Nurse Anu leans from a window. Occasionally the honk of trucks and the rumble of buses bruise the night, but it is otherwise quiet. So quiet, Anu can hear peacocks calling—
Keyoo, Keyoo!
—from their perches on rubbish heaps. One storey below, frogs burp from a nearby pond. The night watchman’s bamboo walking stick shocks the night as it strikes the pavement.

Like the shock on Chetna’s face when Rano said that no, she couldn’t come back to Canada—Rano couldn’t look after two girls
without servants. After that, Chetna went into what Damini would call Dipreyshun. Until Mumma came to Delhi to meet her. Mumma, who no longer calls widows loose or immoral, made Ovaltine-laced milk for Chetna. She called Chetna “beta” as she used to call Bobby, but wouldn’t stay more than a few days in case it made her look bad, living with her daughter. With Mumma, Chetna has forged the kind of bond Anu tried for, yearned for.

Nurse Anu straightens, and draws the window screen tight against mosquitoes.

Life takes strange turns. But is god involved? Maybe not at a personal level. Still she prayed her thanks by habit when some thugs in the mob who burned the church were sentenced—but they were acquitted on appeal. She prayed for help as plenty of money came from somewhere—presumably from Vikas and his RSS friends in the saffron organizations—but found that the Church could bring no corresponding pressure to bear on the legal system. Only Suresh is still in jail.

Cars are honking on the streets outside. A commotion is coming closer … Loudspeakers in the hospital corridors blare names of doctors. A doctor’s jacket hanging on a hook nearby begins ringing. Down the corridor, another cellphone amplifies as it demands an answer.

“Turn on the radio and the TV!” cries a doctor, shrugging her white coat over her sari as she goes out to meet the ambulances. Anu turns up the volume on All India Radio. Just music. Off the air.

She hurries to the nurses’ lounge, flicks channels till she finds New Delhi TV, which shows footage of bloody bodies on the streets. Men are hugging, women are weeping. The wounded are being carried to taxis. Most will be taken to government hospitals. The rich will be taken to private hospitals, like this one. Crowds surround reporter Barkha Dutt, who is questioning witnesses. A motorcycle lays charred, its wheels melted off. Shop fronts are shattered. Bleeding victims are crowding into the back of a tempo.

She flicks to CNN. “No Americans killed.” Yes, but what about others?

Sirens wail and wail. A few ambulances are flying up the arterial roads of New Delhi. Finally BBC’s Late Night News explains: “Terrorist blasts have torn through Paharganj and Sarojini Nagar—both markets were jammed with holiday shoppers. Another blast went off on a bus.” Later, she will learn sixty people have died and two hundred have been wounded.

She recognizes Vikas the moment he is brought in, though his scratched face has the grey-brown pallor of Delhi smog.

Lord Jesus, give her medical distance! Of the billion and more people in India, here’s the one person she doesn’t want to meet ever again, not even in a next life. Damini would say it was written in her bhagya. Sister Imaculata would say god works in mysterious ways. Professional training says she must deal with him as a patient.

He is dazed and grazed, but must have threatened loudly or bribed the police to get here. Must have shouted, “Don’t you know who I am?”

Right femur cracked in the stampede, left clavicle too. Fracture of right radius and ulna requiring bone setting.

Once a cast is on the leg and it is raised in traction, he is moved to a private room. Doctors dart in and out—Vikas is too drugged to notice.

His parents arrive with whisky and a pack of cards for the vigil at the bedside. Vikas’s uniformed servants bring ice and soda.

Nurse Anu exchanges room assignments with a younger nurse, newly arrived from Gujarat. Mrs. Kohli may not notice her nurse’s cap, white dress and stockings, her slightly grey hair, or her scarred face, just as she never noticed servants, but Anu can’t take the chance.

She doesn’t have to walk past to hear when the Gujarati nurse is helping Vikas to the bathroom or bringing his pills. And she jumps every time she hears him bark buy-and-sell orders into his cellphone. Once in passing she risked a glance into his room to see the nurse listening to his heart. Maybe he has one.

His sycophants arrive, bow and scrape before him. Nurse Anu would like to chop him to pieces before their eyes.