The Selector of Souls (10 page)

“So if he contests, I’m expected to live on five hundred rupees a month and support my child for ten or twelve years? That’s impossible.”

“The way you’re talking!” says Mrs. Nadkarni. “Maybe the father will support her. Some men do, na? And this is not New York or London—we can rely on family. Actually, who else can we rely on? Your father is alive—that is lucky. Do you have brothers?”

“No—I mean, yes—I had one. Younger. But he is no more.”

“Oh. Very very sad.”

“Yes, and I don’t want my parents to have to look after me—they have been through enough.”

“Of course. Extended family, i.e. brothers-in-law, uncles, cousin-brothers?”

Anu shakes her head. Dadu lost his immediate family in the violence of Partition, and was raised by a cousin-uncle. Mumma’s older brother is estranged, thanks to his disapproval of Mumma’s marrying down-caste. He and his wife have never called, sent sweets for a birthday or festival, or dropped in. Mumma didn’t invite them to Anu’s wedding.

Her extended family members are her Purnima-aunty and Sharad Uncle. She and her little brother, Bobby, lived with them so they could attend English-medium schools in Delhi while Dadu was transferred across India on government postings.

“Can you rely on them?” says Mrs. Nadkarni.

“How do you mean, ‘rely’?”

“I mean financially.”

“Well—only on my father and my Sharad Uncle. And I don’t know how long I can impose on them. Especially if Chetna could be fifteen or older by the time my divorce is final.”

“Could your father or uncle persuade your husband to sign an amicable agreement of separation, guaranteeing payment for his daughter’s education and wedding?”

Anu’s bruised clavicle throbs. “I’ll ask them, but …”

“No? Okay,” says Mrs. Nadkarni. “Then we should hope that by the time your divorce comes through, your daughter will be grown up and your husband will have paid for her wedding.”

So the molasses-flow of divorce cases through the courts can benefit Chetna, so long as Anu remains technically married. And keeps herself from killing Vikas.

“What if Chetna doesn’t get married?”

Mrs. Nadkarni laughs. “No, no!” she says, as if the very possibility is just a mother’s silly nightmare.

She asks more questions about Anu’s salary, Vikas’s wealth and income, company names, organizations to which he donates. “Has he applied for one of those new cards the banks are offering? Credit cards, yes?”

“No. He only uses cash.”

“Black money, yes? Difficult to trace.”

Cars—makes, models? Several, but the one that comes to Anu’s mind is the cream and maroon Cord Roadster, gone for two years. Her hand rises involuntarily to her scar.

And she’s back in the tobacco-brown passenger seat of that ’37 convertible, holding her dupatta across her mouth to filter dust. The car he had in college, refurbished with the money his parents gave him to spend on a puja ceremony for the birth of his son, after he learned Anu had produced a daughter.

Wheels squealed as the Cord careened around the pedestal where Queen Victoria’s statue once gazed down its stoney nose upon New Delhi. The parade lawns flashed past as Vikas shot off toward the massive archway of India Gate racing a biker on a motorcycle—black as the lampless night. Up Raisina Hill, the floodlit pillared domes and ramparts of the Presidential Palace silhouetted themselves against the night sky. Up the sand-bordered pathway of kings and viceroys they zoomed, as if all of Delhi was still and only the car flew in the breath of a lion.

Vikas drew closer and closer to the motorbike as if he were riding a horse off on a polo field, trying to scare him. One swerve too close and the motorcyclist peeled away to the sandy shoulder. The wheels of the motorbike jumped the low chain secured between cement posts to cordon off the lawns and sped on, but the Cord rammed straight into the post.

 … A web of stellar streams above … a blade of white pain in her skull … Hot hot hot screaming hot screaming … blood-red veil before her eyes, as on the day of her wedding …

She can’t remember scrambling out, just staggering away, and looking back at the shattered windshield. Blood on each palm. Hot hot hot. The screaming in her ears was her own.

The Cord ignited in a halo of saffron. Vikas was a black silhouette against the crackling flames and petrol smell. Feinting like a fencer, getting as close to the car as he dared. Then he doubled over, weeping.

For his car.

The lawyer is still talking. She’s telling Anu that since Vikas would be assumed to be the primary member at the Gymkhana Club, the Delhi Golf Club, the Habitat Centre and the India International Centre, it could take from fifteen to forty years on each waiting list for Anu to become a lady-member.

“Vikas’s father is the full member, not Vikas,” says Anu. “Vikas is a full member only of the golf club. He’s so proud of that. I always felt out of place there.”

“I will draft the divorce petition and file it in the court. Notice will be served by registered letter, then by dasti. By hand.” She translates the Mughal-era term. “And if that is not possible, a copy will be affixed to the door of his home. My assistant will let you know the date of your first hearing. You should pack a bag with your clothes and all your papers and valuables.” Mrs. Nadkarni nods at Anu’s bruised face.

Most of her pants and shirts are still in her old home at Purnima-aunty’s, along with several saris and salwar-kameezes, her books, and
piano—Vikas’s Ralph Laurens, Burberrys and Calvin Kleins occupy the closet space in her marital home. If Anu had produced a son she might have earned a little closet space.

“Find a safe place to stay. Friends?”

Names pour through a sieve in Anu’s mind. Who will value her when she has lost so much worth in her own eyes? Close friends from college have changed last names, moved away to their husband’s hometowns. Several are in Bangalore, married to software engineers who are coding away to save the legacy systems of North America from the meltdown expected on January 1, 2000. Some, like Rano, married into families that moved overseas during the brain drain era.

You go to school with other girls, share meals, ideas, books, games, jokes, struggles, and then you get married off, and your name is changed. They change their names too, and you never see most of them again
.

The few attempts she’d made to keep up with classmates or make new friends failed—“She’s too dark,” Vikas would say of each one. Or, “She has such a screechy voice.”

“Why doesn’t your friend Shalini wear a sari like a decent married woman?” he once said. “She secretly wants to live in London. She’d move tomorrow, if she could take her servants.”

But even if she had kept up with Shalini and other friends from school, their husbands wouldn’t want a divorced woman staying with them, and for who-knows-how-long.

She may not be able to heal herself, but the world needs healing. She may not be able to heal her family, but her existence should do some good for India, for the world. All ambitions too grandiose to mention—especially with her aching ribs and shoulder.

“I’ll find a place,” Anu says to Mrs. Nadkarni. “I’ll phone and tell you where I am.” She writes a cheque and signs a vakalatnama appointing the lawyer to begin her divorce.

Anu takes a taxi back to Kohli House. She downs two Naprosyn and a Crocin—her second round of painkillers today. Then she fills her largest suitcase, humming a hymn she used to play in church when she was … oh, fourteen.

She takes only the jewellery she received from Dadu and Mumma, a few everyday salwar-kameezes and dupattas, socks, underwear. Five pairs of thin-strapped high heels, her Bible, her copy of the
Bhagvad Gita
, the rosary Sister Imaculata gave her at graduation. All the money she can find, including some change from Vikas’s change-bowl.

Hurry, hurry
.

School records, her science degree, driver’s license. Photos and videos of Chetna, her baby girl—
this is NOT the time to linger over them!
Chetna’s birth certificate, school certificates, Punjabi bride doll.

On second thought, not the Punjabi bride doll. Toss her away.

At noon, she phones for a cab herself, but allows the cook to help her load the suitcase into it. “I’ll be home tonight,” is all she says. She doesn’t volunteer and he doesn’t ask where she is going—Vikas haranguing him for complicity would be far harsher than for ignorance. She hopes he won’t tell Vikas she has taken a suitcase, but it wouldn’t be fair to ask him to keep it secret. Besides, security guards watching from pillboxes in the street could tell Vikas. Any neighbour might tell as well.

Pray
.

She works the second half of the day at the travel agency, suitcase under her desk, starting to her feet every time a customer walks in. Her boss, Mr. Gurinder Singh, recognizes the trauma of domestic terrorism when he sees it—this tubby Sikh man survived the anti-Sikh riots by cutting his waist-length hair and shaving his beard. He has a permanent limp from breaking his leg jumping from a balcony, but managed to escape being doused in kerosene and set on fire by the mobs. Noting her suitcase, he presses his handkerchief and a hundred-rupee note into her hand. “Talk to your family, find a place to stay,” he says, “I’ll send the suitcase wherever you want.” Then he shoos her into the baking streets.

Where to stay? Anu lived with her parents during her three years in college when Dadu was posted in New Delhi. Three years of alternating dread and an almost painful desire to please. At the time, if her mother, Indu Lal, loved cheese soufflé or hated karelas, Anu was loyal enough to do the same. At the time, if Indu Lal felt an instant of sadness, Anu’s eyeliner could run.

Back then, Mumma’s wounds, her hungers, her personal gods were also Anu’s. Mumma could read Anu’s mind and diary, and to disallow her was ungrateful disloyalty. What Mumma valued was the only value that excited; Mumma pities those who don’t see that. Always the teacher, report card in hand. A report card that reads for every area of life, “Could do Better.”

Did she regret marrying down? Anu had been prepared to climb the caste ladder and raise the family’s profile. At Anu’s wedding, Mrs. Lal wore a cyclamen lehnga with a gold border, twice as expensive as her daughter’s salwar-kameez. Several guests mistook her for the bride, Mumma still likes to recall.

The thought conjures up Mumma’s voice, “So? I wanted you to have the respect I lost by marrying your father. Your father acts like a marriage gets arranged by magic, but it doesn’t. I had to arrange it. Did I get any thanks? No. And you liked him immediately, so it is all your fault.”

She had liked Vikas. The first few days, she’d liked everything from his lop-sided grin to his affectionate-sounding insults to—Lord, forgive her—his jokes. Every one of them, she later realized, at someone else’s expense. She had loved his long fingers and the arrogant grace of his movements. Twenty-year-old Anu had wanted never to make Mumma’s mistake, marrying for love. She wanted what arranged marriages promise: the soothing story to be lived, never worrying that your husband will choose someone else, or that you’ll be shunned by either family. Many other lives might have been Anu’s but for Mumma’s choice of husband for her.

Dadu …

Had Dadu been posted to the national level of government in New Delhi instead of state level, maybe Mumma and he would have encountered more families like Vikas’s. Maybe they wouldn’t have been so easily impressed. Love, promises—swept away like ants before a sweeper’s broom.

Living with Mumma again, flattering Mumma, competing with Mumma again in every area of life—that’s unthinkable. Watching Dadu pander to Mumma in incessant guilt for his slightly lower caste and want of patrimony, apologizing for his too-honest use of his position so that Mumma has to give private tuition in English. Mumma couldn’t wait for Anu to be married so that Dadu could centre his attention completely on her. She can’t live with Mumma again, she just can’t.

But for Chetna’s sake?

She cannot subject Chetna to Mumma’s pretentiousness, or her Victorian ideas about young women’s reputations. Chetna shouldn’t make the same mistakes. Chetna needs to grow, to develop separately from Mumma and Anu. If Chetna lives with Mumma, the only language she’ll ever know is English. And if Anu and Chetna were to live with Mumma, Anu’s mothering, cooking, weight, attire and makeup will be constantly critiqued and found wanting.

Anu can return to her aunt and uncle’s home. But how can she
impose again, and this time along with her daughter? She buys a newspaper from a street urchin who looks far worse off than she. The ads for furnished rooms will move her forward.