Another strained dinner. Vikas talks to his parents, not looking at her even once. He makes no attempt to invite her back to the master bedroom—probably feels that might show weakness.
Afterwards, knees knocking against the centre drawer of Chetna’s white painted desk, Anu tries several beginnings for a letter to her parents. When she succumbs to the allure of the blank page, the letter writes itself; it is difficult to stop.
Early tomorrow, Saturday, before the true heat of the day, Vikas will be mounted on the white-painted wooden horse at the centre of a cement bowl, thocking a bamboo ball around in weekly polo practice, Mrs. Kohli will be in the bridge room with her friends, sipping her first rum and Coke of the day, deciding whether to take the finesse or play for the drop, and Anu can take the cordless into the bathroom and call Purnima-aunty.
“Namaste, Anu Miss-saab!” The cook greets her affectionately as he unlocks the French doors to Sharad Uncle and Purnima-aunty’s whitewashed home in South Delhi. Her eye must be less swollen now and her makeup adequate because he doesn’t give her a second glance before dropping his gaze. He ushers Anu past the divans in the gloomy seldom-used drawing-room to the sun-glare of the central courtyard. She requests a glass of iced nimbu-pani; he leaves. She continues down the courtyard gallery, her large handbag clenched beneath one arm, the free end of her sari in the other.
She and Rano used to play hopscotch here. Her brother used to lean against that pillar, pouting when they told him, “Only girls play hopscotch.” Purnima-aunty used to stand here every morning handing out school lunch packets: paneer parathas for Rano, chutney and Amul cheese sandwiches for Anu, lamb samosas for Bobby. Her piano still stands here, the one her two fathers, Sharad Uncle and Dadu, bought for her. And Bobby’s twelve-string as if he is about to snatch it up and play her Bowie’s “Loving the Alien.”
Between signature campaigns to amend the Dowry Prohibition Act and meetings to prevent the chemical sterilization of Indian women, Aunty drove Rano to sitar, Anu to piano, and Bobby to guitar lessons. She attended Rano’s sangeets, Anu’s concerts and Bobby’s jam sessions. When Rano took swimming and riding classes, so did Anu and Bobby. Yet Rano had always wanted to leave, as her older brothers had. “No one in this house is going anywhere,” she said. Anu had loved feeling that Purnima-aunty, Sharad Uncle and this house wouldn’t leave her.
She stops at a screen door. She discerns a triangular shape—her aunt is sitting cross-legged on her bed, her usual mess of Manushi magazines, cookbooks and papers spread around her.
Anu pushes through the door, slings her handbag onto a chair and surrenders to Purnima’s greetings and embraces.
Her aunt’s cinnamon skin glistens and her kameez is sticking to her back, despite the ceiling fan toiling above. Wisps escape her grey-flecked bun. “My glasses!” warns Purnima. “Don’t sit on them.” She scoops up the forms with a swoop of her arm. “Funding applications. To international aid agencies. Must have filled out fifteen or twenty in the last six months. For my friends’ NGOs, you know. I’m going to start a women’s organization of my own, too.”
Anu perches in a half-lotus beside Purnima, and rests her cheek on her aunt’s shoulder for a moment. Purnima yells for a glass of nimbu-pani. Anu assures her she has already requested one.
“Aren’t you hot in that sari?”
“No, it’s fine,” Anu straightens, adjusts her pleats, smooths the free end over her sore shoulder.
Aunty moves a roll-pillow behind Anu, rummages in her nightstand for Odomos mosquito cream and a hand-fan, and offers them. Anu declines the cream, but welcomes the fan.
“The cooler’s fan belt broke.” Purnima-aunty wipes her brow with a handkerchief. “Maybe we shouldn’t replace it. Get an air conditioner, now that waiting lists are gone. Wondering if we can afford it.”
Purnima and Sharad Talwar can afford an air conditioner, given his bank manager’s salary and the money her three engineer sons send from Canada, but Purnima guards each rupee like a blood relative. In her early sixties, she’s ten years older than Mumma so she was fifteen when her parents fled the formation of Pakistan. She still keeps a few thousand rupees, a water bottle and a tin of biscuits in a kit bag in the cupboard in case a band of marauding Muslims break down her doors.
“So? What’s all this you’re talking on the phone this morning?” she says. “Not enough that you want a divorce? Now you want to become Mother Teresa? Your uncle will not like this. You’ve been talking to that hospital padri.”
“Yes, I met Father Pashan again,” says Anu. “Remember when you and I went to the Canadian High Commission to apply for Chetna’s visa, and they told us we had to wait a few hours?”
“Hmm,” says Purnima. “Sat on the grass. Finished a whole Danielle Steel.”
“Yes, and I went for a walk …”
Embassies flanked the broad boulevard. Soon she was passing the gleaming blue dome of the Pakistani High Commission and the towers of embassies. Walking, thinking. Walking, thinking. That it was her birthday, and Vikas and his father were away for four days at a packaging convention in Singapore, to find a source of abrasion-resistant gloss. That the house would be wonderfully quiet without their constant checking and correcting, and she’d have only Pammy’s drunken vagueness to deal with. That Chetna would be so happy if she came home from school today and learned she was going to spend the summer with her Rano-aunty in Canada, Rano-aunty who won’t be reminded of violence and anger every time she looks at the little girl.
On her way back, Anu took a parallel street, so as not to return the way she came. Through gaps in compound walls and gates, she saw larger embassies. She walked briskly, her salwar scuffing pavement, and encountered a crowd gathered before a huge wrought-iron gate.
Rich, poor, dark-skinned, light-skinned. A few men carried briefcases, as if they were on their way to work. Some women were wearing skirts and dresses—probably Christians. A few carried babies, so they couldn’t be working inside. It was too early in the morning for so many to be embassy employees.
A coiffed nun in a brown and white habit joined the crowd. People turned, greeted her with deep namastes. The gate opened, the crowd filed in. Surprisingly, no one was pressing too close or trying to jump the queue. Greetings in English, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam filled the air.
Drawing closer, Anu read the brass plaque affixed to the gate-pillar: Vatican Embassy in India.
“Anupam!” One blue eye, one black, like David Bowie. Both set deeply above an aquiline nose. That quick boat-shaped flash of a smile against clay-toned skin. No moustache, just a triangular beard that matched the India-shaped lock of hair coming to a point at the middle of his high forehead. Father Pashan. Wearing a stiffer collar and whiter cassock than he had the last time she saw him, at Holy Family Hospital.
He opened the gates, “We’re about to celebrate mass—come!”
She had an hour or two. Yeshu, that half-man son of god, had helped her so many times, even brought her back from the void. And so she entered, genuflected, kneeled in a pew as she used to in school.
“The gods don’t mind what we call them or how we worship,” Dadu used to say. “They only feel the love with which we do it.”
Kneeling, standing, sitting in the cream and gold opulence, Anu sang and prayed and listened to Father Pashan’s sermon.
“Every day,” the priest said, “I meet men and women who question if it would have been better if they had not been born. But know one thing: every child who comes into this world was meant to be here.
“When the person who gave us life cannot or will not give us approval, or when the person we should be closest to spurns us, we can despair. We can descend into a deep depression. But think of what St. Paul said, ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ That means god believes everyone is worthy of being loved. High caste or low, rich or poor, deserving or undeserving—even you.”
; Practical Purnima nods at Anu’s account. “Unconditional love. Maybe only god can give it.”
“He said a lot more, but those words broke me apart. They reminded me of the light I saw when I was almost dead. That same connection, attraction. He was saying I was intended to be here. That I was worthy of anyone’s love. I sat in that pew long after the service was over, just sniffling. It felt as if something had shifted inside me.”
Purnima puts her arm around Anu and rocks her gently.
“And I remembered something you said when you came to see me in the hospital. You said, “A face is irrelevant, Anu. The shape of your eyes, the length of your nose, the curve of your lips, these tell me nothing about you. Or you about me. Only deeds truly speak, and leave traces on the planet.”
“I don’t remember saying that,” says Purnima, squeezing her shoulders. “But yes, I believe in being a karm-yogi. Deeds are all we have to go by. In your next life, you’ll live with the result.”
“I feel Lord Jesus and the gods saved me for a reason after my accident, but I haven’t done anything in return. Nothing for others, I mean. I went back to work once my scars were healed enough not to scare away tourists—but does travel help anyone, change anything?”
“Did you pray to Shiv-ji?”
“Of course. I said, O Lord Shiv-ji, you who have the power to destroy me. Let me live and I will be a better mother, a better woman. You who tread upon Apasmara, that demon of fear and ignorance—tread on my fear, tread on my ignorance. But I haven’t done much to be that better woman.”
“So then?”
“I began attending mass at the Vatican Embassy chapel whenever I could slip away. I left as soon as Vikas left for work, got there an hour before I had to take my seat behind my terminal at Adventure Travels, and sometimes in the evening on my way home. And after mass, I spoke to nuns who worked in hospitals, old age homes, clinics, libraries, schools, and centres for the disabled.”
“Oh, they do good work no doubt, but what do you know of their lives?”
“One said, ‘We serve god by helping those who really need it.’ A cloistered nun from a contemplative order said, ‘We touch every person in the world through constant prayer.’ A very noble selfless nun from an active order said, ‘We touch a very small number of people in the world by our deeds.’ I talked to Paulines, Sacred Heart, Maryknolls, Dominicans, Order of Jesus and Mary, Order of Loreto, but familiarity and nostalgia brought me back to St. Anne’s and the Order of Everlasting Hope. I think joining them is the perfect solution.”
Purnima-aunty doesn’t look convinced.
“Better than suicide, better than murdering Vikas and being sent to prison,” says Anu. “Better than begging Mumma or you to take me in.”
Purnima waves this away as hyperbole. “You can always stay with me—us—we’re your second parents.”
“Yes you are. But you’ve done so much.”
“Why not volunteer in a women’s organization. Non-governmental, if you don’t like government ones—every new NGO in Delhi needs English-speaking volunteers to write project reports, apply for funding or translate interviews into English. I can find you one—I can find you ten.”
“No, I promised … well, let’s just say something is calling me to do this. It doesn’t matter if I am pulled to do this or have been pushed—I’m going to do this. I need to do this.”
“Have you watched The Sound of Music?”
“Not recently.”
“Rent it. Julie Andrews is too thin, but she has a voice like The Nightingale.” She means Lata Mangeshkar to whom all singers are compared. “Does Vikas know?”
“Not yet.” The thought makes her breathing come shallow and quick. “I’ll be untraceable before the divorce notification is served. And the rest is none of his business.”
Anu dips into a quilted cloth bag in her handbag and removes three kundan necklaces, several gold bangles, a nine-jewel necklace, a pair of ornate gold anklets, a pair of gold jhumka earrings. They glitter at her fingertips. “Dadu and Mumma gave me these at my wedding,” she says.
“That’s all?” says Purnima.
“Mumma married for love. Your parents didn’t give her these—Dadu did. And Mumma didn’t buy more for me, because Vikas’s father didn’t ask for dowry.’ ”
“Huh! You’re not supposed to believe the boy’s side when they say such things. But to me, it seemed Vikas was really in love with you.”
“He was probably like me,” Anu said, “wanting to fall in love to please our parents.” She could add what Vikas told Anu the first week they were married, that an alliance with a government servant’s family would assure Kohlisons Media a limitless future, but she doesn’t. Anu’s father failed to bring Kohlisons Media the expected government contracts, or nudge a single multinational towards them. Vikas mentioned this often, as if Dadu was the only honest government servant he had ever met.
“Please, take these to the jeweller, sell them and send the money to Rano for my Chetna.”
“Nothing doing!” Purnima’s hands are up, palms outward. “That’s family jewellery, not yours. I’ll keep it for Chetna’s dowry and we’ll have to buy her more. Can’t let the same thing happen to her, na?”
The silhouette of a tall stooped man in a white pyjama-kurta appears at the screen door—it’s Sharad Uncle, clearing his throat and removing his sandals in the courtyard outside.
“Come in, come in,” says Purnima.
Veins on Sharad Talwar’s forehead stand out. “So here you are. Purnima told me you’re considering … divorce?” He makes the word sound like a synonym for a career in prostitution.
“Not considering, Uncle, I’ve decided.”
“Decided? When did you talk to your parents?”
“Uncle, I’m twenty-nine. I have decided what I need to do.”
“Who are you to decide? Have you ever made choices for yourself before now?”
His normally mild voice has risen.
“No, Uncle, no.” She cannot bear more shouting. Why can’t she just make a decision? Why does she have to defend it? Why does it have to be a family decision?
“And not only divorce. What’s all this other nonsense? You have been tricked by that padri! Can he and his convent look after you in some way your family cannot?”
“I don’t want to be taken care of. I want to contribute.”
“You have a child—you have contributed,” says Sharad Uncle. “Rano can look after Chetna. She’ll be happy to do it. She will be her second mother. But you—you’re still my responsibility. I can’t allow you to enter any convent-shonvent. Your parents will say …”
Anu interjects, “Uncle, you don’t need to allow or disallow, it’s a personal decision.”
She doesn’t want to be rude. Sharad Uncle was always anxious to do his duty and more. He opened bank accounts for Anu and Bobby at his bank, saying, “Remember the power of compound interest.” There he deposited the cheques Dadu sent every few months for their care, though he could have cashed them as Dadu intended. Anu owes him so much, but …
“Hein? I’m your uncle and you’re a Hindu. I know what those Christians do. Brainwash you and feed you beef, first thing!”
“Where are they going to find beef in India?” says Anu, trying to deflect his ire with a laugh.
“From old cows,” says Purnima. “Muslims slaughter them, tan their hides. But I’m not really worried about beef. Rano eats it in Canada, I’m sure, even if she doesn’t tell me. Our three sons probably eat it too. I don’t know how they can eat the flesh of an animal whose milk they drink, or why they don’t think: oh, all three hundred and thirty three million gods are in my stomach at the same time and I might explode from eating so much power. No, my problem is different. Anu, I’m sorry to say this nun-shun business seems like a cult. Maybe two thousand years from now, people will call swamis like Osho, Baba Ramdev and Swami Rudransh ‘son of god’—how do we know? But today they are cult leaders, like Lord Jesus Christ was when he began his
magic show. They’re not for educated people like us. They’re for the gullible.”
“I’m gullible,” says Anu. “I married Vikas, remember?”
“Oh, you had nothing to do with that—we married you to him. We all thought two science graduates would have something in common.” Purnima rolls from one buttock to the other, draws up one knee and clasps her arms around it. “Lord Jesus may be calling you but you are going to answer to the Catholic Church—that’s no different from being in an ashram with one of these swami-types.”
“So should I go to an ashram? I’d have to prove my devotion with years and donations before I could learn anything. Only the deserving are taught by those gurus—that’s the brahmanical way. I need a more egalitarian community.”
“Okay, okay,” says Purnima. “Don’t go to an ashram. But mark my words, I went to convent schools too, and I don’t think you’ll find the Church any less authoritarian than our guru system.”
“I have freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship.” Anu alludes to the words of the Indian constitution. “I can convert three times a day if I want. Aunty, I just want to be with people who have principles.”
Silence. Purnima seems to be considering this. “You said you’ll be untraceable. Will becoming a nun make you untraceable?”
“I hope so,” says Anu.
“Find some work the Kohlis wouldn’t dream you would do. You aren’t dark enough to be a maid. Too bad you can’t go back to school at any age, as Rano did in Canada—my sister always wanted a doctor in the family.”
“Mumma wanted Bobby to be a doctor, not me.”
“Become a nurse then. Some are quite fair.”
“Go home,” Sharad Uncle growls. “Your dharma is to be with your husband.” He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t see. He doesn’t want to see.
Anu rises to her feet and lets her sari slide from her left shoulder.
Sharad Uncle’s eyes widen—he holds up his hand, palm outward. “Arrey! Arrey!” He looks around, either to flee from her immodesty or to verify no other man is looking.
The Selector of Souls Page 9