The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  You have to get on the net, Anu. It’s like the first time we watched TV in colour in the eighties. The circumference of my mind has expanded. I’m alone, yet connected to a huge network. And that there is no pinnacle, no single point of reference.

  On the net you see the world isn’t only binary in that phallic on/off way, but connected. That’s why they need women to make technology work in the real world.

  I bridge the technical and non-technical worlds, come between human and machine, the seen and the unseen. Like a pandit, I tend the new gods and explain to users how to pray to them, how to propitiate them, how to make them offer their power for our use. We demand the high salaries and consulting fees, like brahmins demanded donations throughout the centuries, and when systems break down, we charge the high prices to fix them. We set up the credentials, we exclude to ensure our system’s security, we operate in silos that protect information, we have the secret mantras and expertise to control the power of these gods. And where once there were only a few mainframe gods, now the gods have multiplied onto each desk.

  When a client reports a problem, my boss says “RTFM”(Read the Fucking Manual). He’s like my fertility doc, who believes that if fertilization doesn’t occur it’s my fault, whereas I begin by assuming it’s the fault of the designer, the machine or the system. Today he called me negative because I pointed out his pro forma profit-and-loss statements were as fictional as Surfacing, the Atwood novel I’m reading right now.

  I can’t progress based on seniority here as Pop did at the bank. I need to find a guru, enter his fiefdom and learn. Just like our old gurukul system. All that’s missing is the Code of Manu spelling out that women have to do the shitwork.

  My engineer brothers all say their new technologies are changing the world. Lord Shiv is always at work, destroying to create. We in technology sell the illusion of coolness, “You must have this new gadget to stay alive!” Chetna already wants a beta (test) version of PlayStation that isn’t even out yet. But we can’t refuse her anything. Still I need to teach her how to choose. Because as long as she’s here, she will always have choices …

  It takes Sister Anu a few days of agonizing before she makes her choice. Then a postcard with a photo of Christ Church, Shimla’s Anglican landmark on the Mall, goes overseas to Chetna.

  Hello my sweetie,

  I love you always.

  Your Anu Mama.

  Gurkot village

  October 1994

  DAMINI

  LEELA IS MOVING LIKE A GIANT SNAIL, SLOWLY DOUBLING into an extra body that with first breath could light an extra atman. She says she can feel the child twitching, punching, even turning as she gathers firewood, milks the cows or pulls weeds.

  “You are mistaken,” says Damini. “The child is still.”

  “I could fall or hit myself,” Leela suggests.

  “If you get sick, you will only make everything worse,” says Damini.

  She must prepare herself to leave after the birth or face hurtful remarks. But where can she go?

  A few days after she arrived, she returned to the booth with the black and yellow sign adjoining the chai-stall. She used the battered telephone resting on a wobbly table to call the factory number for Suresh. “Tell him to phone his mother,” she said, and gave the woman with the air-conditioned voice the number, six digits Suresh would recognize immediately. She waited two hours till Suresh called.

  “It’s my bad bhagya,” he said, “that you cannot live with me. But tell Chunilal it is not for long. These days, sweepers are getting all the good opportunities, but I’m still looking for a better job.” He didn’t say that better jobs are difficult to find in the capital when you can only speak one language, and it isn’t English. Most sweepers have that problem, too. “And as soon as I do,” he said, “I’ll marry a girl from a good family to look after you. Can you send me any money at all?” Damini promised to send him a little as soon as she could predict her own future beyond a month or two. “Forget marriage right now,” she told him. “Only a very poor family would give you a bride.”

  My son—always trying to do his dharma.

  Chunilal too has been trying to do his dharma. Every day, he says he will walk down to Jalawaaz and climb in the cabin of his truck. He rises, washes, brushes his teeth with a datun-twig, puts on his kurta, pyjama and weskit. He drags himself outside and squats on the terrace. Whenever he attempts to climb the staircase to the road, he begins gasping, then coughing. On a good day, the tunk-tunk-tunk of his hammer echoes periodically off the flanks of the mountains. Between coughing jags, he’s stacking and trimming slate, building a half-metre-high square feeding trough outside the cow’s room. And when Leela passes him, he shakes his head and says, “She still has a passenger.”

  “All she has to do is pass it,” Damini tells him.

  Damini shoos the hens out of the upstairs storeroom and drags in a rickety old rope-bed. During the day, sunlight will slant between the window bars. At night—if it goes on that long—there is the swinging cord and bulb Piara Singh installed years ago.

  A day later, Leela falls on the straw beside the milk bucket—her water has broken. Kamna helps her mother upstairs.

  Damini spreads an old quilt on the packed-earth floor. If Leela dies this brisk October night as women do—but please Lord Ram, please not Leela—her body must be touching ground, or she will haunt the world forever. And whether Leela lives or dies, her mother must be guardian and witness in one.

  Damini tells Mohan, “Call Goldina to cut the cord.” The boy hears it once and can repeat it like an actor’s line.

  Just like his grandmother.

  Except that Mohan repeats it and repeats it and repeats it as he runs downhill to the sweeper-colony.

  Kamna helps Damini boil and carry a large pan of water from the smoky cookroom to the storeroom. Damini examines her fingernails—all short, all clean. Vijayanthi and Mem-saab would approve. She pours two capfuls of Dettol from a bottle she purchased in Jalawaaz into the pan. Then she plunges her hands in the water. O Anamika Devi, O flowing one. Keep away all unclean things, keep away ghosts, keep away germs. She lifts her hands, wipes them with a towel.

  Damini settles Leela cross-legged on the old rope-bed and encourages her to groan and growl like a tiger, to moan as she must have in lovemaking, to push down and grunt as if passing stool. She opens the windows and doors. She gives Kamna keys to open every lock in the house. She unbinds Leela’s hair to suggest to Leela’s body that the baby should come.

  “Curse and scream,” she tells Leela. “This is your time to sob to the wilderness. I will pretend to be deaf. All you have to do is be brave.”

  Leela squats, then crawls on all fours. She pulls on a rope Damini has attached to the window. She grabs Damini’s hands and screams. Her head lolls back till the whites of her eyes are all Damini can see. Damini massages her, kisses her, strokes her to release all Leela’s fears.

  “The right time will come, my beti,” Damini soothes Leela. “Your body will know.”

  Far from being as flighty and careless as Leela predicted, Kamna fills buckets of water from the pipe and carries them upstairs to the birthing room, one arm outstretched for balance.

  Since Damini is doing unclean work, Kamna must do the cooking. Kamna brings sweet halwa and roti for her mother, and crouches beneath the smoke layer in the cookroom making Chunilal’s favourite Kachalu vegetables and Mohan’s potato and pea curry. For Damini, she double-boils a continuous stream of chai. Damini watches for signs of daydreaming, but Kamna milks the cows early the next morning without even being asked, so that Mohan is able to deliver milk to the co-op on his way to school.

  When she sends Kamna to gather firewood, the girl doesn’t complain and takes the ghost-trail down the south face all by herself.

  “Be respectful of the spirits,” says Damini.

  “I don’t fear them,” says Kamna.

  She will learn, she must learn. In time she will learn to fear.

 
; Leela has been in labour for eighteen hours. Holding Leela to her chest, the pulse of Damini’s breath and heart merge with Leela’s. She feels the flow of her daughter’s blood and intestines. “Leela,” she whispers, “anything important happens slowly.” Leaving Leela under Kamna’s watchful eye, she sweeps a heavy shawl about her shoulders and emerges from the armpit-smell of the birth chamber.

  Beyond the terrace railing, wavy lines of hills separate the realms of earth and sky. Sheaves of maize, brinjal, carrots, red beans and gourds lie on gunny sacks in a corner of the terrace, drying in preparation for winter. The peach tree on the lower terrace has lost almost all its leaves. Fireflies glow and fade, glow and fade, on the cascading terrace fields.

  The sweeper-woman Goldina squats by the door, looking up at the cold burn of the distant moon. Her honey-brown face is a perfect oval, with deep-set fierce eyes. Her forearms rest on salwar-clad knees, as if she’s ready to rise at any moment and get to work. She seems to be listening to the TV sounds coming from the men’s quarters.

  Goldina wears a kerchief knotted behind her head, instead of a dupatta over head and shoulders. In the parting that burrows beneath that kerchief, she wears no vermilion powder—yet Damini remembers a daughter or two helping Goldina in the Big House; Goldina is married. Her salwar and kameez are worn thin, but look clean enough. A large flower-shaped jewel sparkles on her nose. Several silver toe rings and silver anklets adorn her bare feet—probably the sum total of her husband’s savings.

  Goldina has cleaned the latrine and washed the bedclothes. She says she has cut many a cord. Her patient watchfulness has been reassuring over the past day and a half. Damini has not told Goldina a stillbirth is possible—cord cutters don’t get paid unless a live child is born.

  Yesterday, Goldina brought her own rotis and daal in a tiffin carrier, assuming Damini wouldn’t want to defile a platter from Chunilal’s cookroom. But Damini is also a Sikh and has eaten from the same daal bucket as others whose castes she never knew, and Chunilal is a trucker and has eaten in chai-stalls, so today Damini told Goldina, “This family doesn’t believe in differences. Everyone is equal-equal.” And gave Goldina four or five rotis in a bundle.

  Which doesn’t mean Damini would touch an afterbirth, or allow Goldina into the family’s cookroom without her son-in-law’s permission. Only that she has nothing against giving food to sweepers.

  Or a shawl—she fetches an old one for Goldina. Goldina wraps herself in it. Damini notices the cloth bundle beside her—she must be taking the rotis home to share.

  Damini leans against the outer wall and gazes at the sequined indigo sky. Unbidden, an image of her mother comes—her mother’s body, black and burned. Just a bundle on a rooftop terrace. Tiny embroidered sprigs on the remnants of an indigo sari.

  And she’s very small again, walking behind her four big sisters, all following the sway of that indigo sari. Two miles each way to the pond, in the days when distance was still measured in miles. Two miles to fetch water once the well in Khetolai ran dry. Twice a day, sometimes three. The six of them, walking, walking.

  “Something happened?” Goldina sounds warmer.

  “No, just—I remembered my mother,” says Damini.

  Damini pulls a low wicker stool beneath her bottom before sinking to a squat, to keep herself a few inches above Goldina. She keeps her misted gaze on the blurry spines of the hills, till her vision sharpens again.

  “Birthing is the time to remember mothers,” says Goldina. “I was remembering my own.”

  “Is yours alive?”

  “Yes,” says Goldina. “And I’m a Christian and married in Gurkot because of her.”

  Goldina’s mother was from Punjab, like Damini’s. When Multan became part of Pakistan in 1947, Goldina’s mother slung her youngest on her back, took Goldina’s three eldest sisters and walked hundreds of miles to what remained of India.

  “I too had four older sisters,” says Damini, letting the solidness of the wall draw the tension from her back. “Three are alive, living in their husbands’ villages, near Khetolai. Only I was sent so far away. I used to call them often from Mem-saab’s home, but now a phone is so far … And your father?”

  “My first father’s ancestors were like my husband’s, from the firstborn tribes of India. But during the Partition … we don’t know if he was killed by a Muslim or a Hindu, just that he was knifed.”

  “Hai, your poor mother!”

  “Yes. She was hungry and weak like everyone else who fled when Muslims rose up against their Hindu landlords. She followed the landlord, because he was her only hope for a job—in those days Hindus began to call outcastes like us Hindu, you know, because they needed our votes. But when they reached Delhi, the landlord had no land for his servants to till. My mother said, ‘My children will die if I remain in a tent city and wait for the British-saabs or the new brown-saabs to help.’ And she went to the nearest church and promised to be a Christian if they would feed her family.”

  “I would have done the same,” says Damini, remembering how she became a Sikh to accommodate living with Mem-saab.

  “But she said my sisters should always remember to be Hindu as well, in case the Hindu landlord ever wanted us to return to work.”

  Damini touches her kara, the steel bangle that still circles her right wrist. “Yes, I’m a Sikh, and I’m also Hindu.”

  “Two-in-one,” Goldina wobbles her head in agreement.

  “And that’s how you became Christian,” says Damini. She rises to go look in on her daughter, who is so fatigued she has managed to fall asleep.

  “Yes, for a while. But when my two older sisters turned fourteen and fifteen my mother wanted to arrange their marriages. The Catholic priest refused. He said they were too young. Imagine, he said girls that age are still children!”

  “I got married at fourteen,” says Damini.

  “Right! My mother got hot as a pataka. She was afraid for my sisters’ reputations, and needed to share the responsibility of looking after them with other families as soon as possible. But that padri just wouldn’t understand. So my mother said, ‘I’ll marry them off to Hindus—Hindus will understand.’ ”

  “So you all became Hindu again?”

  “Oh no. My mother liked being Christian—pretty music—so only my sisters became Hindu and she remained Christian. But then my third sister became pregnant. She was seventeen, and unmarried. The eldest son of the house where she worked saw a pretty girl and suddenly forgot all his own rules about who is clean and unclean.”

  “This is what happens,” Damini says. “This is why early marriage is best. So did your third sister have a cleaning?”

  “My mother wanted her to. It was a child of rape—she wasn’t doing anything against the law. But the padri said my third sister would fry in hell if the baby was cleaned out.”

  “Hell is—what?”

  “It’s where Christians go after death. If we have done bad things.”

  “Cleaning out a child is a bad thing?”

  “Oh yes—if you do it you go to hell.”

  “What happens in hell?”

  “You fry like a pakora in ghee. For-ev-er.” Goldina rocks on her ankles.

  “No coming back? No repairing this world?” Damini glances over her shoulder into the birthing room, to check on Leela. “But we often don’t know if we’re doing good or bad until we die. But no matter. Then what happened?”

  “Then my mother went to a pandit and paid for a penance ceremony. That way he made her a Hindu again. Then she got my third sister cleaned out, and married her off to a Christian to make her a Christian again. After that, my mother returned to the priest and confessed.”

  “Confessed is—what?”

  “Told the padri all what she did—”

  “Why did she tell him about the cleaning out? Why not just let the man think she did what she was told?”

  “Because when you sit in his forgiveness chair, you get shanti by telling when you’ve done wrong things.�
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  “I have sat in many chairs. Never one like that,” says Damini. “Did the padri make her fry in hell?”

  “No, hell is only after death. But since she was still alive, he just told her to say many prayers.”

  “When a man threatens something, he usually does it.”

  “No, the padri said god would do it for him.”

  Damini considers this for a moment. “Very powerful man. I pray, but the big gods don’t listen. Was he praying to Lord Shiv or did he mean karma … ?” Lord Shiv could have burned Goldina’s mother immediately, while karma takes centuries.

  Goldina looks blank.

  “Did he send your mother on a pilgrimage?” asks Damini.

  “No—but he said she would feel her guilt inside. An inner voice would speak.”

  “That happened to my mother-in-law,” says Damini. “A goddess came inside her and made her tremble and tremble. So then you were all Christian again.”

  “Yes, for a while.”

  Goldina’s fourth sister had, by this time, married. She had a nine-month-old boy. The child caught dengue fever and died. Goldina’s mother helped her daughter lay out the tiny corpse, sewed its shroud and waited for the priest and congregation to come and mourn with her, as they had so often done for others. But by nightfall, no one had come and they realized no one would be coming.

  Goldina’s mother went to the priest’s home to find out why. The priest explained he could not bury a baby who had not been baptized.

  “Baptized is—what?”

  “When the padri pours holy water on you and says you accept Christ.”

  “I became a Sikh that way,” recalls Damini. “Mem-saab took me to her gurdwara and the granthi stirred water with a sword, poured some on my forehead and gave me some to drink. It was sweet.”

  “Yes, like that,” says Goldina. “The priest said my nephew was unbaptized. My mother was furious—she said the priest could pour his holy water or Ganga-water or any water he liked on the dead baby if he wanted, but he said no.”