The Selector of Souls (9 page)

Kiran had taken Loveleen from Damini’s arms, and set the child down before the TV.

And here the girl now sits as though she’d never moved, just grown in these nine years. She gets two whole months of holy-days each year at this time. She could memorize the
Ramayan
, she could learn to cook, she could jump rope with Khansama’s children. Instead this little girl needs videos, maybe the ones Suresh copies, to tell her stories of pale women and clean-shaven pink men. If she doesn’t have her videos she gets Bore, a saab’s disease like Dipreyshun.

Loveleen does not rise as Mem-saab enters her own drawing-room.

“Darling,” says Mem-saab. “Go tell the driver to bring my car.”

Loveleen turns to face Mem-saab so she can read her lips, and shouts, “Damini-amma, tell Zahir Sheikh to bring the car.”

Mem-saab says gently, “No, Lovey, darling. You go and tell Zahir Sheikh to bring my car. The video can wait.”

The girl turns her head, but does not move. “You can’t order me around,” she says.

Offspring of a snake! Damini stands silent with shock.

Mem-saab is looking at Damini, “What … what did she say?”

Damini turns to her and mouths the words slowly.

Mem-saab comes around to face Loveleen. Her small hand grips the child’s arm above the elbow. “I said, go and tell the driver to bring my car. Damini-amma has to get ready to go with me.”

The child shakes off her hand, but goes. Damini fetches Mem-saab’s handbag and glasses.

The sun whirls like the brass disc behind dancing Lord Shiv. The car’s back seat burns Damini’s fingertips and thighs. The fan blows hot air as soon as Zahir Sheikh starts the car. In a few minutes, her bra is a wet cord beneath her breasts.

Outside, tree branches are ridged where leaves have dried and fallen. Park fountains at the centres of roundabouts are dry. Every bright white street, every red sandstone monument seems to pulse with yearning for the monsoon.

Mem-saab says, “Damini-amma, we are going to meet a lady-lawyer.”

Arriving at the lady-lawyer’s office, Damini helps Mem-saab from the car, then to a one-car garage attached to a bungalow home. Inside, indistinct cries from the nearby market and rumbles from the dusty street compete with the rattle of a window-box air conditioner.

A starched white tie dangles lopsided on a soiled string above the plunge of the lady-lawyer’s sari-blouse. Her skin would spring to the touch like Leela’s—she seems too young to have read all the maroon books that line the walls.

Damini sits on a cane footstool while they sit in chairs, and she massages Mem-saab’s leg through her salwar as she speaks so Mem-saab will know there is someone who cares.

The lady-lawyer listens to Mem-saab with weary though gentle respect; too many women must have cried before her. Mem-saab speaks in Punjabi, because private matters must be said. She ignores Damini’s hand signals to lower her voice; her outrage assaults them. Damini contents herself with interjecting a word or two in Hindi occasionally for the lady-lawyer.

I am still her ears, but Mem-saab has seen much that I thought she denied
.

At last, Mem-saab has no words left.

The lady-lawyer sees Mem-saab’s embroidered hanky has turned to a useless wet ball, and offers her own. She tells Damini to tell her, “Be strong. I will try to help you.”

Mem-saab’s hand seeks Damini’s and grips it. Her fingers are cold despite the close heat.

Now the lady-lawyer talks directly to Mem-saab. She tries to speak slowly, but Damini has to repeat her words sometimes for Mem-saab to read them from her lips.

“You say your son now owns twenty-five percent of your house?”

Mem-saab looks at her from beneath her black-pencilled arches, expecting reproach. “Yes.”

“Then, legally, he can occupy the premises.”

This is not what she wishes to read, so Damini has to repeat it.

The lady-lawyer continues, “We can charge that he gained his rights by putting you under duress. If you wish to stop him from building, we can ask the court to do that.”

“Nothing more?” says Mem-saab.

Damini wants to tell the lady-lawyer to make Aman and Kiran and Loveleen evaporate like the first monsoon rain on a hot tar road, but she is just a pair of ears for Mem-saab, and this is Mem-saab’s family matter. The triangular exchange soon falters, then stops.

Nothing more.

Mem-saab writes a cheque and signs a vakalatnama appointing the lady-lawyer to begin her court case.

As Damini leads Mem-saab out into the white flood of sunshine, she leans heavily on her arm.

A tall slender woman in a rose pink sari is sitting on a cane chair in the single car-length driveway, waiting for the lady-lawyer. In profile, her eye is as almond-shaped as an awakened goddess. Her loosely braided black hair is waist-length, thick and shiny as Rekha’s in the movies. Very dark sunglasses swing from one hand. As they approach, she turns and hurriedly puts them on, but not before Damini notices the other eye, swollen large, and another swelling above the ridge of one cheekbone. A leaf-shaped scar droops down across the woman’s cheek. In this searing heat, the woman wears a long-sleeved sari blouse. There’s a bruise at her clavicle.

Hai, what bad bhagya she has.

S
ITTING BEFORE SLIGHT, INTELLIGENT-FACED
M
RS
. Shruti Nadkarni in her garage office, Anu feels strangely light after hearing herself say “divorce.” She practised the word on the bus, and walking from the stop.

All the way here, people averted their gazes from her bruised face, her swollen eye, her throbbing temples. Everyone but the two old women she had seen leaving the lawyer’s office, whose problems were probably worse than her own.

Lord Jesus, help them
.

Anu keeps her gaze on the leather-bound books behind Mrs. Nadkarni’s head. She feels for her sunglasses, folds them, opens them. Mrs. Nadkarni extends a large printed handkerchief. She seems a couple of years older than Anu, perhaps in her early thirties.

Anu dabs at her scar. Tears on that cheek still feel different from those on the other.

“Did you call the police, Mrs. Kohli?” Unfamiliar with Anu’s comfort level in English, she repeats the question in Hindi, without a trace of impatience or condescension.

“Vikas might have beaten me again if I had,” Anu replies in English. “And which police officer would believe me? He went to school with the local superintendent of police. The local officers know him. His usual tip is higher than a constable’s monthly salary.” Besides, Anu doesn’t say, her visit to the police after Vikas raped her led nowhere. And if she had gone to the police for slaps, kicks or beatings since, she would have shamed Chetna along with the Kohlis. Shaming the family, she has been brought up to believe, is well-nigh a crime. Even now, before Mrs. Nadkarni, she is compelled to mention that Vikas never wanted to marry her.

“How do you know?”

“My mother-in-law told me. He wanted to marry a girl from a Sikh chieftain family whose land grants date back to Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire.”

“Early 1800s?”

Anu nods. “And that girl’s parents said they wouldn’t even discuss a marriage proposal from a Hindu family. They had been forced into hiding in a gurdwara during the anti-Sikh riots in 1984.”

“Yes, colonial logic—two or three thousand must die for the murder of one of ‘ours.’ ”

“And when they lost their home, they blamed all Hindus.”

“Collective responsibility—the same-same thinking that had just been used against them.”

“I suppose so. When they heard Vikas’s roadster had been seen
outside the girl’s college, they made her confess: yes, she had gone to a movie with him. She had walked among the monuments in Lodi Gardens with him. Yes, he had held her hand. The very next month, that girl was married off to a much older Sikh man. And Vikas’s parents found him a substitute—me.”

Hearing this in the first few days of her marriage, Anu wondered what That-Girl was like and how can she try to be like her? But then she heard Vikas shout at his mother, “No one can replace her!”

But was he talking of That-Girl? She wasn’t sure, because he’s never mentioned That-Girl’s name to her. No one has. His mother told her he’d carved their names into a palm tree in Lodi Gardens, but Anu never found it. Maybe That-Girl doesn’t exist, never existed. That’s why she’s nameless. She’s too perfect to exist.

“But even so, Mrs. Kohli,” says Mrs. Nadkarni, “most men marry the girls chosen for them, even if they liked other girls. Marriage is by caste. All those men don’t beat their wives.”

“I think running the family business is too much for Vikas. Things might have been different if he had been a civil servant, or started his own company, rather than carrying out his father’s ideas. He wanted to be a physicist,” Anu says. “But he ended up in advertising.”

“Many men his age have gone into a family business.” Mrs. Nadkarni is gently insistent. “Many men don’t do the work they wanted to. How come they don’t all beat their wives?”

“Maybe he believes it is all right to take it out on me.”

“He could use a pillow or a punching bag, instead,” says Mrs. Nadkarni. “Still, since you never filed a police report, there is no evidence of violence. What kind of wedding ceremony did you have?”

“A very large one,” Anu replies. What relationship can that day have to this?

“I mean, did you take the saptapadi around the fire?”

“Yes. Seven steps, the usual ceremony.”

“So Hindu Law applies.”

“But I’m also a Christian,” Anu says. “Lord Jesus has given me the courage to come to you today, while my child is safe in Canada with my cousin-sister.”

Mrs. Nadkarni shakes her head and closes her eyes, smiling at Anu’s naiveté. “Law,” she says, opening her eyes, “only allows one religion: Hindu or Christian. You cannot be two-in-one like—like a radio and tape recorder.”

“Women can be two in one,” says Anu. “Sometimes even more.”

“Personal law is not about persons—it’s really … well, it’s actually about families. Tell me—did you convert before or after marriage?”

“My baptism was after marriage, and I never told Vikas.”

Mrs. Nadkarni scribbles on a pad before her. She looks up.

“We will proceed as if you are still a Hindu—i.e. under Hindu Personal Law.” It takes Anu a moment to understand what Mrs. Nadkarni means by “eye-ee.”

“Where was your marriage registered?”

“It wasn’t. Vikas became impatient after hours in line at the registration office.”

“How many hours?”

“Seven.”

“Only seven?”

“Maybe more—I don’t remember. He just stomped off.”

Mrs. Nadkarni’s hand covers her pinked lips for a moment. “This is not good, not good. Only photos of the ceremony will show you’re married if it was not registered.”

Anu takes an envelope from her handbag, opens it, and lays six black-and-white photos on the lawyer’s desk. “Five hundred guests saw Vikas and me circle the fire seven times at the Ashoka Hotel.”

“This is good—if you want to remain married. But you don’t. Maintenance and custody are the issue. Without registration, even if you have photos, a man can say he was never married.”

If the court grants Anu maintenance, she explains, it will only be Rs. 500 per month, but legal costs might be anywhere from Rs. 5,000
to 500,000, and the cost of Chetna’s wedding and dowry could be far greater. Maintenance is an anti-joke.

Anu has grimly hung onto her travel agent job to get out of the Kohli household every day, attend mass, and maintain the illusion of independence. But as Pammy Kohli often reminds her, “It’s almost a volunteer job.”

“How long would I spend in jail if … if I kill him?”

“I hope you are joking, Mrs. Kohli, but seven to ten years. And not in some jail like they show on TV and Bollywood movies, cells with beds and desks and chairs. Women’s jails in real life are stinking holes. A woman of your background would go mad in a matter of months. Activists and the new inspector general of prisons are working to change this, but …”

“I see. And my child?”

The child, Mrs. Nadkarni explains, is the property of her father. “Women’s organizations are working very hard to change this law,” she says, “but it will surely take them till the next century. So even with grounds of mental and physical cruelty, you must expect that Vikas will be granted custody of a child over the age of five. If and only if he wants it.”

Anu folds, smooths and unfolds the handkerchief upon her sari-pleats, reminds herself that Chetna is safe in Toronto. “I don’t think Vikas will ask for custody. How long will it take me to get a divorce?”

“Not you. Your family—if your family persuades your husband to come to a mutual agreement and negotiate a financial settlement, then only a few weeks from the date we draft a divorce petition. If he contests it, minimum seven years.

“Seven years!”

“That’s if I fight your case. If you go to other lawyers who don’t fight as hard, then ten or twelve. The
Guinness Book of Records
says that one case took seven hundred and sixty-one years—oh, not here in the capital. In another town.”