“No,” she says, pouring her share of sugar into her tea, though she cannot taste it. She will not share anything to sweeten his life. And no more of Mem-saab’s salt than she can help, till she knows the price of Khansama’s heart.
Mem-saab returns from her shopping without parcels or bags, eyes red and swollen. She stops several times to rest as she climbs the staircase.
Damini calls for Khansama to serve lunch. She stands by Mem-saab as she eats and then prepares her bed for her afternoon nap.
Damini had a sleeping mat on the floor in a corner of Mem-saab’s room until the anti-Sikh riots ten years ago. That night, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by a Sikh bodyguard and Congress Party officials used voter lists to lead mobs of angry young Hindu men to Sikh dwellings. Mem-saab’s Sikh driver was going to risk his life to inform the well-informed police, but Mem-saab ordered him not to go—if she hadn’t, he might have been arrested and shot with the rest. As it was the police seized licensed weapons from Sikh men, even veterans, then stood by as mobs burned homes and smoked out Sikh men, women and children. For three days and nights, Mem-saab kept her Sikh driver safe behind her gates, as Sikh women and children fought alongside their turbaned menfolk. On the third day, he begged to come out of hiding. He said he had to protect his family. Mem-saab told him to take her car so he’d look like a saab. But a Hindu mob tore him from the driver’s seat, hacked him to pieces, and set her car alight.
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 c
urly 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.
It’s 10 p.m., long past Mem-saab’s usual dinnertime. Khansama’s sweet white rasgullahs still wait in the kitchen. Not for Mem-saab, who ordered the dessert, but for Amanjit. Listening to him now, Damini thinks she should have made him eat them before the meal to sweeten his words.
“You are getting so old, you cannot make up your mind about anything.” Aman has switched to Punjabi and remembers to speak slowly, but it is still difficult for Mem-saab to read his lips through his beard.
Damini leaves out the part about being old when she repeats his words for Mem-saab.
Mem-saab gestures for Damini to offer Aman more curry.
“Your father told me never to sell or move from this house,” she says in Punjabi. “You know, we built it together, selling the jewellery we escaped with during Partition. I still see him walking with me through these rooms—there were only wood beams then, to mark where the walls would rise. This house and the estate in Gurkot, he said, would replace all he’d lost.”
“Certainly not all,” says Aman. “The government didn’t give Sardar-ji any compensation for so many of his villages. They were lost to Pakistan.”
“We escaped with our lives—so many didn’t.”
“Yes, I know. Haven’t I heard it, and heard it, and heard it from Sardar-ji and you? He looked backward to Rawalpindi the rest of his life. But Mama, we must look forward. It’s a new world now—why don’t you decide to live in it?”
Even with the air conditioner going and Khansama’s curry steaming, Damini can smell Aman’s exotic cologne.
“I do live in it, Aman—maybe you haven’t noticed. Perhaps you are right that I cannot decide anything, but …” she smiles apologetically, “your father always decided everything for me.”
Aman scrapes the serving spoon around the bowl, retrieving the last morsels. He is too old for Damini to tell him not to be greedy.
“If your businesses are not doing well, Aman, I can help. How much more do you need?” As always, she is too mild with her youngest.
Amanjit rocks back in his father’s chair, taking her measure through half-closed eyes. “My businesses are doing well, Mama—not that you and my father ever had confidence in any of my projects when I really needed the investment. But one must grow—no limits.”
Mem-saab holds up her hand to stop Damini from repeating—he has enunciated clearly enough.
“You’re competing with something, someone?”
“There’s no one I want to compete with in India. No, it’s time to scale up, think bigger, aim higher. All I want is more.”
He lets the chair legs thump to the carpet, and
shifts.
A mongrel, kicked away once, will attack afresh. And from behind.
He mouths without sound, so that Damini too must lip-read his words. “Today I made arrangements with a construction company. Tomorrow they will begin building bedrooms on the terrace. Kiran and Loveleen and I will move from Bombay and live here with you.”
Mem-saab looks at Damini; Damini shakes her head as if she has not understood, so Aman has a chance to change his words. Building on the terrace would make his share far more than a quarter of the house. But Aman mouths it clearly again, just as before, so Mem-saab cannot mistake him.
She gestures for Damini to offer him a chapati.
“Why do you need to move?” she asks, a little too loud.
Aman’s strong dark hands close around the softness of the chapati. He tears a small piece from its slack circle. Then another and another. Intent as a counterfeit yogi, he tears every piece smaller and smaller.
“I will look after you in your old age, Mama,” he says.
She reads the words from his lips. Reads what she wants to read, but she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise. Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”
She doesn’t mention Timcu’s rights; Timcu’s not the son sitting before her, taking far more than he was given. White shreds of chapati grow to a pile before Aman. The handles of a silver salver Damini holds out to him feel as if they will burn through her serving cloth. She comes level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lychees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.
Damini returns the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. She will just forget to serve Aman the rasgullahs. She will give them to Khansama’s children instead.
The next morning, Timcu calls from Canada and asks in halting Hindi about Mem-saab. Damini tells him Mem-saab is well and not to worry, though Mem-saab breathed heavily through the night.
The Selector of Souls Page 3