The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  “Your home is mine, Mrs. Kohli. Why should I have to make my own tea? Besides, there’s no power—your kettle doesn’t work.” He flops into the cane reading chair, and puts his feet up on her footstool. He looks up at her expectantly.

  Anu mutters, “Ever heard of a saucepan?”

  “Already with your burd-burd!” he shouts. And after a second’s pause he says so gently, “Aren’t you going to offer me some tea? I’ve driven hours from Shimla to see you.”

  “I’ll make you tea, and then please leave.” Was it her convent-school manners or the imperative of hospitality or playing for time that made her say that? She must placate him—or kill him.

  “What? Not even a night in the sack for old time’s sake … ?”

  “No,” she says evenly.

  A grin slides across his face. “Why? Is someone else sharing your bed these days?”

  “My companion sister will be here very soon.”

  “She shares your bed?” His lip curls in disgust.

  “As you see we have two beds.”

  “Is she the prettier one?”

  Distract him. She walks into the kitchen and fills a saucepan with water. Keep him talking. Please, god, make Bethany return. She turns on the gas burner.

  “I can’t believe you left me and Chetna, and life in Delhi, for this hole in the wall.”

  “My definition of family is larger than yours.” She pulls opens a drawer as if reaching for a spoon.

  “What’re you talking about?” A dragon-breath roar blasts into the kitchen, “My family is much larger than yours. Much! You hardly have a family. Why would you say your family is larger, when you know mine is?” She hears him pacing the drawing-room.

  Sister Anu covers her ears with trembling palms. Another shout and she’ll be right back where she started …

  She hears him take a huge breath. “But do I leave my duties? I don’t run away to hick towns in the Himalayas.”

  “No, you just beat up anyone you can,” she mutters.

  Shut up! Don’t remind him. Don’t plant the seed in his mind.

  “Burd-burd, again. Don’t think I can’t hear, Anupam.”

  Anu lowers her palms, she makes no response.

  Vikas sits down on the divan and stretches, arching his back. His left arm thumps across the roll pillows. He drops his head, presses the forefinger and thumb of his right hand to his forehead. “Oh, Anu. I don’t know what made me say that. I get angry when I’m tired and hungry, you know that. I let off steam! But don’t worry—it’s past. I have forgotten it.”

  He seems to think she has erased it from her memory, too. Now he’ll mimic vulnerability.

  “I really apologize if I have been insufferable—that’s just how I am.”

  Sister Anu takes a spoon from a drawer, and leaves the drawer open. She opens the tea tin and puts a teabag in a small teapot. She waits for the water to boil, willing the crunch of footsteps on the driveway, but all she hears is the tinkle of wind chimes and the hiss of the wind. Please god, be with me now.

  The pan rocks a little. Pick it up, throw boiling water over him.

  Don’t anger him. You could have an “accident” off the cantilevered terrace, like Bobby. You could end up in the rain-harvest tank.

  Should she add milk? If she does, it will either be too much or too little. She takes the lid from a steel pan of milk, pours it into a milk jug. He doesn’t take sugar. But if she doesn’t serve it, he’ll want some. She finds a tray. Her hands tremble only slightly as she arranges the milk jug beside a teapot.

  Vikas leans against the door jamb, blocking her exit. “You’ve put on weight.” In fact, Anu has lost four kilos from walking up and downhill. “I haven’t.” He boxes himself manfully in the solar plexus. “Polo on Sundays. Handicap still plus two.”

  Sister Anu clenches her fingers around a knife handle. “Good for you,” she says.

  “Come, I don’t hold a grudge, unlike you. You hoard every incident and bring it up months later.”

  “You would too if you had been hurt and shouted at.”

  “You get hurt too easily.”

  “Yes, I do.” She turns slightly to block his view of the drawer, and reaches for the sugar bowl at the same time.

  “What’s the matter with you? You know I don’t take sugar. My tastes haven’t changed in just a year or two.”

  Sister Anu gives a shrug, “People do change. People do learn.”

  “I don’t. I don’t need to. You’re the one who changes.” He spits out the word like an epithet. “You’ve been serving tea and god-knows-what to unrelated men all this time, haven’t you?”

  “I’m a nurse. I look after ordinary people.” The knife has made it from the drawer and now lurks on the countertop beneath the short legs of the hotplate.

  “And for that you had to convert to Christianity and become a nun as well?”

  “No, I could have converted to any religion that says you should help the poor.”

  “So you rejected Hinduism because we have no requirement to pay the poor?”

  “I don’t reject it. I’m still a Hindu.”

  He cocks his dark gelled head. Knitted eyebrows rise. “Strange Hindu. Not a Ganesh at the door, not even a Lakshmi calendar in this house. I should have brought you our latest on coated paper.” He gestures at the crucifix over the fireplace. “Jesus, Jesus everywhere.”

  “Most Hindus find everything is god and god is in everything whether Ganesh or Lakshmi or Christ. But you’re right, that’s beyond your understanding.” She spreads a table mat on a tray, and arranges the tea pot, milk jug and sugar pot on top. She walks toward him as if utterly confident he will let her pass, as if she hadn’t just slipped the knife beneath the table mat.

  He steps aside with exaggerated chivalry. “What can you do that will last here? There isn’t even enough power to run a bloody kettle.”

  Sister Anu places the tray on the dining table. “I am a nurse, now. I know a bit about the human body.” She knows all the points where a knife should enter his flesh to do the most harm. She can see the artery pulsing in his neck, knows the soft area below his ribs where she could thrust it upwards.

  “I know your body better than you know it, Mrs. Kohli. I’ve seen areas of it you’ve never seen. You don’t know anything about your body—let alone the bodies of others.” Chair legs screech on cement as he sits down. He takes a sip; his face scrunches. “This is tea-dust, not tea. And this mug—why are you giving me a servant’s dishes?”

  “I told you we have no servants. Bethany and I have one mug each. Both are alike.”

  “What a way to live. Okay, do you have jam-toast? Pakoras? Jalebis? I’m so hungry. I drove four hours to get here.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He grimaces again, but sips the tea. “Why not do something more necessary?”

  “What’s more necessary?”

  “I don’t know. Charity fashion shows in New Delhi—all my friends’ wives are organizing them. But you’re so selfish, Anu. You abandoned your child and think you’re going to help strangers?”

  Lead me not into temptation, Lord. Deliver me from evil …

  Aloud, she says, “You seem to have abandoned Chetna too.”

  He shrugs. “I was invited to five Holi parties this year and at each one, people were asking, ‘Where is Anu?’ Told them you were away in Canada. Couldn’t say I was single! Lord Ram has Sita Mata, Lord Vishnu has Lakshmi Devi, Lord Shiv has Parvati Devi, Krishna has Radha, salt has pepper—didn’t you miss the Holi parties?”

  “No. The hosts were your friends, not mine.”

  “You’ve always been so judgmental, so critical and harsh. Man, your superiority is so insulting.” He pauses for breath. “Most of us just want to get the most out of life for ourselves and be cool, and the hell with the rest.”

  “I believe in Christ’s ideas, Gandhian ideas.” The fog seems to have crept indoors and she’s shivering. She should have made a second mug of tea, but it di
dn’t occur to her. Vikas doesn’t notice that he is drinking while she is not.

  “Gandhi! Ah, that little brahmin—the Congress Party’s mascot. No one tells me what to do with my money.”

  “No one can. But I don’t have to contribute my labour to your lifestyle, either.”

  He laughs as if he will fall off his chair. “As if you did any.”

  “I worked!”

  “Hardly! If you quit or were fired, you could just say, ‘Oh it was my hobby,’ and no one would call you a bloody failure, as they would a man.” He takes a gulp of tea. “And what’s so terrible about my lifestyle? Every man in my Old Boys Association strives for it. All the comforts of Europe—plus servants. India is no longer backward.” He stops. “Except here. What can anyone sell to these people? Hmm, let’s see—family planning? But you’re a nun.” He slaps his knee as he laughs.

  When he stops, she says, “I don’t have to sell them anything. They just need health, education and clean water. Which could be supplied by the government, but isn’t.”

  He gestures around the cottage. “So you call this living? I mean, great view, but you can’t eat it. Can’t fuck it either. And live here? It would drive me crazy.”

  “We’re closer to god, here,” says Sister Anu. “I pray for you to be so, too.”

  And I pray I don’t have to use the knife.

  “Oh, how she cares—she prays for me! What happens to you women? There’s my mother, stuck on Swami Rudransh and here’s you, a Jesus-lover.” He drums his fingers on the table and looks at his watch.

  If she kills Vikas, it will undo all the prayer and healing she has accomplished over the last year and a half. “Isn’t that a photo of Swami Rudransh that you’re wearing around your neck?”

  “You like it? We’ve sold thousands, lakhs—maybe crores by now! And not only to our friends in RSS but every saffron organization. Swami Rudransh doesn’t have to name Muslims, Christians or Sikhs, you just know who he means is the enemy of all Hindus. He gives the same discourse in every city but you feel as if you’re hearing him for the first time … This is the Übermensch, Anu! A ruddy marketing phenomenon, yar—a godman brand like Shirdi or Sai Baba. We’ll use his photo on incense boxes and khat-meeth bags. He’ll have his own brand of tea, Rudransh-Tips, his own airline, Rudransh Viman, his own product line of Ayurvedic diet foods. With his account, I no longer have to sell print ads or make commercials for government and international agencies. Anu, we’re no longer overpainting movie billboards by hand, we’re doing desktop publishing! Now all I need is a few artists to rejig ads from abroad, hacks to write worshipful ad copy, and translators to translate it into eighteen or twenty languages. Give the swami credit for a few Jesus-type miracles, like producing ashes as his blessings—although I don’t know why these godmen can’t conjure up something more useful …”

  If she kills Vikas, Jesus will return from his past lives on Judgement Day and judge her to be just like her ex-husband. And then she’ll burn in hell with Vikas. Then what use will be all her prayers or this Work? Any hope of linking to the warm bright light ever again will be gone.

  He is cradling his teacup in both hands, leaning back, legs apart, as if he owns the place. He’s talking about working very hard, too. “The only mystical force I acknowledge is the market. So if it leaves the world littered with unsuccessful chumps, is it my fault? I didn’t cause other people’s poverty or the castes they were born into. I’m sorry for them, but they have their karma to begin with and their bhagya to continue.”

  “Vikas, do you even know what you feel?”

  “Who cares how I feel? Image, yar, image is everything. Look like you’re having fun, and everyone will think you are. Act like a media mogul’s wife and … but you know. That role is your dharma, and dharma the role. I never wanted to run Dad’s business, but I do. And you are no help to me here, no help at all.”

  Can Anu be beginning to feel sorry for Vikas?

  Everyone has his suffering.

  He straightens in his chair, and she braces for a mood shift.

  “Look, you people in the religion business are all alike.” His tone has turned fatherly, explaining. “Zero investment required, zero risk taken, zero experience required, zero inventory to carry, no taxes to pay. And if the client isn’t satisfied, it’s not your problem, but the client’s own fault. You can make any claim you want—all are unverifiable. All of you believe your own ad copy.”

  Sister Anu glances out of the window, but Bethany does not take shape from the fog. “Everything in the world is not ad copy and money, Vikas.”

  “Ah, there you’re wrong. Ads are a universal language, darling, un-i-ver-sal! All about fear and desire. Without desire, nothing fucking happens—don’t you see? We create maya. Illusion for any brand. Hinduism, Christianity and Coke are strong brands, and we make them stronger. You religious types can try to stamp out desire, but people like me make new ones every day.”

  He stands, strolls over to The 5 Minute Clinical Consult and opens it. “And money is also a universal language—most women understand money for sex. Why don’t you?”

  She smooths the table mat, feeling the long hard shape beneath it. She keeps her voice calm. “I wasn’t your mistress, Vikas, I was your wife.”

  “Same thing.” He rifles through the pages of the tome. “Room and board and a secure old age in exchange for exclusive access.”

  “That is not the same thing!”

  “Well, it’s close.” He flips the cover, the book thuds shut. “I’d often like to run away to the Himalayas, too. So why don’t I? Because I’m like a horse in the traces, just doing my dharma. I’ve never even taken a vacation. As for the fuckwits here—they’re not my blood! I don’t owe them a goddamn rupee. I have enough relatives and employees and employees’ families to look after.”

  “Vikas, it’s not right to give people in the villages leftovers after the needs of people in the cities are satisfied … we each need to give, and soon.”

  He returns to the dining table, places his chair next to hers and leans toward her. She won’t let herself back away. He whispers in her ear, “Next you’ll start talking about their rights, like the pinkos on CNN.”

  “Well, yes. We all have fundamental rights, not only you. Check the constitution. All you want is for people to have duties, preferably to you.”

  “That’s because democracy isn’t half as much fun as feudalism, darling. Feudalism works for me. The British left us our institutions, all set up to rape the common man. Don’t you see? All we have to do is use them.” She goes stiff as he puts his arm around her shoulders. “Come with me, and I’ll make it all work for you. Don’t you feel my need? My parents and your daughter are suffering, and you’re just heartless.”

  Amusement at last bubbles up in Sister Anu, penetrating her fear. “I doubt you or your parents are suffering, Vikas.” She shifts beneath the weight of his arm. “And our daughter Chetna is better off with Rano than with either of us.” She rises, as if it’s the most natural act in the world to leave the circle of his mallet arm. “Let me show you the wonderful things we’ve done here. You’ll feel how these hick town people are connected to you, to the larger world.”

  “Still a tour guide, aren’t you? No thanks.”

  She faces him. He’s sitting. This is better. “Then why did you come?”

  “I came to find out how could you leave me? Why do you hate me so? I gave you so much. I gave you anything you asked for. An air-conditioned house, gold and diamond jewellery, saris, priceless shawls. Without me, would you have met people in the top families in Delhi? We are invited to three events a night, sometimes four …”

  He is wearing a little-boy look, a piteous look that once pulled at her heartstrings.

  Beware.

  “Vikas, tour Gurkot with me. You’ll see that the bigger your roti gets, the less there is for people in these villages. The injustice is ongoing.”

  He looks as pleased as if she had presented him a polo trop
hy. “Ongoing. You’re beginning to get it. That’s how the world is, baby!” He jumps up, crosses the room, steps over the door jamb to stand on the flagstone terrace. He declaims to the snow peaks, “We’re in the top two percent of the world! We own half the world’s wealth.” He bounds back inside and he’s beside her at the table, too close for comfort but not close enough for the knife to do lasting damage. She sits down, preparing to thrust upwards. “We make ourselves rich, but as your Jesus said, ‘You always have the poor with you …’ He’s so comforting, na? That’s just the way it is.”

  “Oh stop your self-justifications, Vikas! You’re just a professional consumer—”

  “People like me make the world go round, baby.” His forefinger makes a circular motion. “Why judge me so harshly when every guy in America consumes twenty-five times as much? Aren’t they professional consumers?” He sits down again.

  Keep him talking.

  “Because you’re here. In India. You proclaim you love India, yet you see the poverty and pain of poor Indians every day. What use is it to love India if you hate Indians?”

  “Hate them? Your heart is bleeding all over me. Without me, hundreds of hacks, artists and musicians would go hungry. But you? You’re making them dependent. Very bad idea.”

  “Since when did other Indians become ‘them,’ Vikas?” Sister Anu says though she shouldn’t, she mustn’t.

  “Oh, my Anupam. You’d want me to give everything I have to the poor. Even Swami Rudransh doesn’t ask that.” He reaches down, grasps his ankle and rests it on his opposite knee.

  “Yes, I know. He tells you you deserve your good fortune, instead of how blessed and lucky you are.”

  “He understands that if I gave away every paisa to the poor, I couldn’t generate more wealth. But,” he scratches his head, in exaggerated perplexity, “I don’t understand why you expect the people you should be serving, your own family members, to stand in line behind strangers.”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it—what you think I ought to be doing, and what I think I ought to do.”

  “So you gave up—me! And you’ve neglected your child to come to this godforsaken little town and eat dirt with the backward castes.”