The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Back in the birthing chamber, milk is beginning in Leela’s breasts. Damini massages to rid Leela of it, then binds Leela’s breasts temporarily because her mother-in-law, Ramkali Bai, always cautioned first milk is impure.

  “Go Kamna,” says Damini. “Tell your father he has another daughter.”

  Leela turns her face away and sobs and wails.

  DAMINI

  “STUPID WOMEN,” CHUNILAL YELLS. “Can’t do anything right.”

  I should have faced him myself, but I was tired. Poor Kamna.

  “Even if I win the lottery, where will I find money for two dowries? Even if I find enough for one wedding, even if I find enough for one dowry—these days a son-in-law’s family keeps asking and asking for more every year. I don’t need the ojha to come and foretell our future—I see moneylenders gathering like vultures. I’ll have to sell my truck. Soon Mohan will have nothing left to his name—my name. What use are girls?”

  Damini parts the wooden doors between the two rooms and yells, “Chot lagi pahard se, torde ghar ki sil!” Your hurt was caused by the mountain, don’t take it out on the grindstone!

  “I’m only telling the truth,” he says. And coughs and coughs—he’s going to cough out his lungs.

  Kamna is standing there, a look of shock on her face.

  Kamna must learn what women learn.

  Kamna strokes her father’s back as he spasms. “Don’t worry, baba,” she says. “I won’t get married.”

  “What? You want to stay a girl forever?” her father spits out.

  “I’ll just look after you,” says Kamna.

  “You will get married and go to your real home,” says Damini.

  “This is not my real home?”

  “It is, it is,” says Damini, unable to face the hurt in Kamna’s eyes, “till you get married.”

  “Why do I have to get married?”

  “Dharma.”

  “Whose dharma?”

  “Your father’s.” That’s Chunilal’s role in the movie of his life.

  “I will have to find you a lesser family. We will have to sell the farm. Or Mohan will have to look after you.” Chunilal is almost weeping, as if all these calamities are arriving tomorrow.

  “I will look after Mohan,” says Kamna, setting her chin as Leela used to.

  Damini hides a smile. Truly, Leela has taught her daughter little. Even if she does look after her brother, Kamna should know by now to pretend her brother looks after her.

  “I can be a dancer and drive your truck.”

  “You? Drive my truck? Ha! The first time you break a bangle you’ll come running home, crying.”

  Kamna is undaunted. “And I can look after the farm as well.”

  She shouldn’t tell any man she can do so many things—he’ll only sit back and let her do all of them. The girl looks as if she’s going to challenge her father again.

  “Chal!” Damini takes Kamna by the shoulders and shoos her toward the door.

  With her back to Chunilal, she hears him say, “Who ever heard of a woman farming?”

  “Leela is,” Damini objects before she can stop herself. “When you are playing filum songs in your truck, who do you think farms these three terraces? Leela hacks and carries loads of wood from the forest every day on her head. Leela cooks the cows’ feed, Leela milks them. Leela stacks the bricks to repair each terrace retaining wall. Till two days ago she was bending in the field, giving each onion shoot a handful of water at a time.”

  From just outside the doorway, Kamna says, “Ma-ji cooks for us—two meals a day.” Her indignation is tinted with mischief. “She wields the hoe, she weeds, she knits, she sews our clothes and washes them.”

  “You women,” Chunilal shouts. “Always complaining, complaining … never finish complaining. See if any of you can stand the heat of the plains, do battle with death hour after hour on the road, go sleepless, alone-alone, day after day, breathing kerosene and diesel. See if you can judge where to pay a fee and where to pay a fine, where there’s a speedbump and where there’s a cow, which fuel is diesel and which is kerosene … all of you just sitting here, eating and waiting till I come back.”

  Damini should not say more. Anything more will only set a bad example and encourage wrong tendencies and rebelliousness in Kamna. She sinks to her haunches and rests her head on her knees for a moment. Guests should be like rice grains that take on the flavour of a curry. Chunilal may be sick, but he is still a man and master of the house. She is a guest. But she is also Leela’s mother.

  She lifts her head. “Leela does puja every day to the gods for your health. She sows seed potatoes, harvests them. And the brinjal, cabbage, peas and cauliflower … And she has children. While you’re watching TV, she never sits down from morning to night.”

  Leela calls weakly, from the next room. “See what lies in store for this girl too.”

  A protracted silence follows, waxes, and approaches the threshold of discomfort.

  “See?” Chunilal sticks his feet out from his blanket and wiggles his toes. “She agrees.”

  “If you didn’t want more children, you should have left her alone,” says Damini. “Even children know about wearing the topi … Or you should have allowed her to go to Shimla several months ago.”

  “Did I apply the brakes? I said she should go. She’s the one who kept saying, Then who will look after you? And I didn’t want her to go alone—I said, I should be with her so the doctor-saabs can’t ignore her.”

  Damini stops herself from saying more. The impact of her bitter words should be softened by sweet, even if she isn’t feeling sweet. “Chalo!” she says. “We’re all tired, we don’t know what we’re saying. It’s five in the morning and we haven’t slept in two days. Kamna, you sleep beside your mother. I’ll take the girl in a minute, and feed her some sugar water.” She raises her voice to be heard in the next room. “Leela, rest now, and I’ll give you the baby in a few hours. Chunilal, don’t worry. You make preparations for this child’s gauntrila ceremony. Think, what will you name her?”

  “Let the gods find her a name,” Chunilal turns to the snow peaks. “I refuse her mine.”

  Three days later, Damini crosses the upper terrace to the latticed parapet. She stands beneath the unpitying stars. She gazes at the dark glimmer of the snow peaks. She has placed a sickle beneath Leela’s pillow to ward off the evil eye and prevent nightmares, but Leela has cried out a few times tonight and Damini cannot sleep.

  She strikes a match and lights a beedi from the cone Vijayanthi gave her. She inhales; tobacco hits her lungs.

  A live child. Clearly a girl was in this family’s bhagya and Leela should say: “Brahman, the power beyond all power, sent her.” And persuade Chunilal to give thanks. Sometimes a moment of great joy contains great sorrow.

  She was not in Gurkot while Leela was growing up. Other women might have felt banished, other women might have felt more pain than she in leaving her children behind, but Damini was only twenty and full of the excitement of seeing New Delhi, navel of the world, where Jawaharlal Nehru ruled as first prime minister. The place where Mahatma Gandhi was shot by a Hindu, Nathuram Godse, for being too friendly to Muslims and Pakistan. At twenty, she took in with matchless delight the cries of vendors, the Mughal monuments centred in roundabouts, the Republic Day parade, India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, the sounds of constant construction and the whizz of tubby Ambassador cars. And the shame of her widowhood faded as she tried to help Mem-saab overcome the shame of deafness.

  But her shame is always there, waiting for a harsh word to wake it.

  Could she raise the girl-baby as her own—feeding and loving her until Leela and Chunilal recover from the shock of her birth?

  “What if people thought this child is not Leela’s, but yours, mata-ji?” Chunilal said today. So casually, as if asking her opinion. “What do you think would happen?”

  If a widow were accused of bearing a child, she could be stoned, she could be banished. The child could be killed
. Other women would do it—Chunilal wouldn’t have to raise a finger. All he’d have to do is pretend. How loudly could Leela defend Damini and the baby without endangering herself?

  “Understand me,” Chunilal said. “I never intended to make this child. She happened. A terrible mistake. Look how ugly she is. That too is my doing—I’m an ugly man. Kamna is ugly too, that’s why I named her so. Desire. Cause of my troubles, from the time I was a boy.”

  Two of Leela’s babies died before birth—perhaps the spirits took them. In a city, Leela could have walked into a government clinic in her first three months and said, “I can’t afford another child,” and any doctor could have performed a cleaning out—legally, easily. But events conspired to deny Leela’s wishes at every point. Not being able to leave the family to go to Shimla, not being able to cleanse the child from her body. All wrong timing, as if not one god or goddess has been listening to Leela’s wishes.

  Damini fists the cinder of the beedi, containing its heat in her palm.

  Lila’s breasts are now swollen and painful, but she will not feed her baby. Today all persuasion failed again, so Damini sent Kamna to Vijayanthi’s house to ask if there is another woman in the village who can feed it.

  One sweeper-woman, came the answer.

  Damini threatened to bring that sweeper-woman to feed Leela’s child if Leela wouldn’t. But all Leela said was, “Let the sweeper-woman feed the child and keep her—we won’t take her back.”

  What use is it to feed this girl for a few days if Chunilal and Leela refuse her love and caring thereafter? All girls need is a little love and caring, but … so many die of falling down hillsides or into wells, so many catch fevers or starve. Petal-like eyelids beneath her fingertips—closing, closing.

  Damini inhales as if the smoke will fumigate fear. She holds it, exhales; smoke curls and dissolves in the crisp air.

  Chunilal is coughing so hard, he could have TB. But TB is not as common as when she was young. And his sores … the white coating on his tongue …

  Her gaze falls to a smear of hardened white paste and a broken pink plastic shell on the ground.

  Ten rupees. The price of one of Chunilal’s lottery tickets. That’s all Kamna spent two days ago. Ten rupees for a sample bottle of Fair & Lovely. Chunilal snatched the skin-lightening cream, and smashed it on the parapet because she bought it without his permission. Until his anger is spent, Kamna must sleep on the lower level with the cows each night.

  Chunilal’s voice is in her inner ear … If it’s a girl, I don’t want to see her … “Let the gods find her a name, I refuse to name her.” Vijayanthi’s voice … “Sometimes we have to do what is necessary for the good of a family.”

  Damini was the one who said to apply the fire plant. Damini should have known how to help her daughter. But even when teachers teach girls up to class eight, they don’t tell you what you really need to know in life. Maybe they tell boys.

  An answer may present itself if she gives it her whole undivided attention, if she really listens. Damini, who was a pair of ears for thirty years, often hears things people do not intend to be heard. “Tell me your wish,” she said to Leela a few hours ago. “And remember you will have to live with your decision forever.”

  Leela wept. “You know what I wish. I wish the girl had never been born.”

  Threads of pink, threads of blue shuttle across the pale gold loom of the morning sky.

  In whitewashed houses scattered across the wavy lines of the hills, women are stirring, lighting fires in cookrooms or walking into the forest with their scythes, to gather firewood for the day. Their life is the only life this girl will know. Not as bad as the life of a sweeper, but so difficult.

  A red strand of hair falls across Damini’s face. She turns to face the cool breeze. Mist and rain clouds obscure the far snow peaks. Birdsong sounds all around her, but the gods are silent.

  Damini returns to the birth chamber. She lifts the newborn from Leela’s side and takes the baby to her bed. She lies down, nuzzling close to the sleeping child, a taut ache in her chest.

  Four days later, Damini sits cross-legged on her rope-bed, her granddaughter wailing in her lap. A bukhari glows in the corner; the shallow basin of orange-grey coals warms the room. Chunilal and Mohan are asleep in the men’s quarters next door. Kamna sleeps on the floor below in the cow’s room. Hé Ram! How can any of them sleep through this child’s crying?

  Damini shelters the infant beneath her sari-pallu and opens the child’s swaddling.

  She is so beautiful.

  November 1994

  ANU

  Dearest Rano,

  Sitting in a cane armchair on the grey stone terrace of what will be the nuns’ residence in Gurkot, looking out on a panoramic view of the snow peaks. Father Pashan, Sister Bethany and I arrived yesterday to check on the renovation of the Anglican chapel, the red-roofed schoolroom and cement buildings that will become our clinic.

  Anu chews the end of her pen. Past Father Pashan’s cassocked figure seated beside her, sunlight flavours the early morning air, washing the treetops, reaching fingers of shadow down the mountains—lighting but not warming. A bird calls kewkew. A slight breeze stirs clusters of pine cones.

  “Did you notice the rainwater harvesting tank?”

  “Where, Father? My city eyes are missing half the landscape.”

  Father Pashan points to one end of the terrace. He’s quite old—at least fifty-five—but has been untiring since the moment the expedition left the Shimla convent, taking turns driving the jeep on the looping roads, lighting the coals of a bukhari to warm the small house, arranging that the driver will replenish their petrol jerry cans in Jalawaaz and bring them to Gurkot, spreading sheets and quilts in the bedroom, and opening his own bedding roll in the main room, making chapatis on the gas hotplate in the little kitchen, right along with Sister Anu and Sister Bethany. Then he sat cross-legged with them on a dhurrie, eating daal bhaat, and only stopped talking about plans for the ministry when All India Radio said Bishop Tutu and the newly appointed government of South Africa were holding seminars and workshops to help people understand a draft National Unity and Reconciliation Bill. “I wish we could have such trials in India too,” Pashan said, “to face the results of caste.”

  “What made you choose this area for our mission?” Anu asks.

  “The good Lord led me here,” the priest says. “I needed a flock, and Mr. Amanjit Singh wants the cemetery maintained by a Christian.” His eyes glow as if there is nowhere he would rather be.

  Anu says, “Do you feel there’s something special about Gurkot? I do.”

  “Jesus first spoke,” Father Pashan says, his blue eye reflecting the sky, “to the outcastes. They heard his message, they responded first. It will be so here as well. Our Catholic congregation as far as I have been able to count is about two hundred families. Two hundred dalit and tribal families thirsty for the Word. About the same number are Sikhs—some have caste, some converted from outcastes. And it may be necessary to feed the belly before we feed the soul.”

  His concern for social justice is contagious. And his warmth. The way he talks to her! As if he thinks she’s intelligent. Anu has never before had a friendship with an unrelated man. Growing up, she learned to flirt, admire a man’s achievements, exclaim over him, but a friendship? Men in her life were either gods, bosses, husbands or servants. In school and college if she so much as spoke to a “boy” older than herself, Sharad Uncle or Mumma would have made sure she was married off to him to preserve her reputation. When friendships with men were becoming commonplace for other women in New Delhi, Anu’d been afraid Vikas would find out if she said more than a few words to an unrelated man, or met a man as she was now—alone and unchaperoned.

  Maybe it takes a vow of celibacy to be friends with a man.

  Pashan takes a final gulp of tea and gives the dregs to a flower bed. He goes indoors to dress. Sister Bethany has gone to meet the village headmaster, and see how the mission can suppl
ement his efforts. She’ll return with list upon list of tasks and equipment.

  Anu savours the vista for a moment, flexes cold-numbed fingers and writes:

  We’re converting the chapel to Catholic—all that is needed is a crucifix and holy water for consecration. I thought holy water came from some fount in the Holy See, but it comes from a tap. Still, once blessed, it has the healing powers of Ganges-water.

  It’s strange to be out of the convent routine—prayers at five became prayers at six this morning. I don’t think we will be stopping for noon prayers …

  Oh, scratch that! Prayer focuses her, allows her to peer into herself. Through it, she attempts to link herself to the bright warm light once more. She’s never succeeded even for an instant, but each attempt leaves her feeling effortlessly attentive, boundless and spacious. Rano probably wouldn’t understand.

  Remember I told you Father Pashan was the priest at the Vatican Embassy in New Delhi? Well, this morning my companion Sister Bethany told me his Provincial actually banished him to the hills for giving a sermon in which he said the story of the loaves and fishes in the Bible shouldn’t be interpreted literally. He said Christ may or may not have fed five thousand people. Instead, he said Jesus was rebelling against the dietary laws of his day about unclean food. He was demonstrating sharing and justice.

  The clinic he has founded here is called The Bread of Healing. From Ecclesiastes—you remember it too, from school, I’m sure.

  She won’t. Rano went to Moral Science classes while Anu volunteered for Catechism.

  “Cast your bread upon the waters … Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land.”

  The lines I always liked come next—

  “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of god, the Maker of all things. Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.”