The Selector of Souls (12 page)

Silence prickles up and down the line.

“Are you serious?” Rano says slowly. “Don’t joke with me on this one, Anu.”

Anu wishes she could see her face.

“I’ll keep her as long as you want—always if you want—you know that.” She realizes that Rano is crying.

Anu is crying. It feels as if they have been headed to this moment all their lives.

“What about Jatin?”

“He’ll be thrilled. Chetna looks enough like us. And she’s not a boy, so we won’t have to wrestle with the question of wearing or not wearing a turban in Canada. I put off having a child for years—though you know how much I wanted one—because I had nightmares that I’d have a boy. And Jatin and I would discuss and discuss—would we keep his hair long, or cut it and break my in-laws’ hearts? If we kept the boy’s hair long, how would Hindu me learn to tie a turban on a little Sikh boy? Which god or goddess do you think would help me? And if we cut one inch of the little boy’s hair, I can tell you my in-laws would forgive Jatin, but never forgive me. So I’ve been terrified even as I’m stimulating my ovaries with a diet of hormones and paying out of our savings for treatments that only give us a seventy-five percent chance of conception! Don’t you worry, Jatin will feel as I do, that we have been offered a gift.”

A metric tonne seems to lift from Anu’s heart—every woman should have a cousin like Rano.

“Don’t let her forget her Hindi or Punjabi.”

“I promise she’ll speak both just as if she lived in India,” says Rano. “But Jatin’ll expect her to become a Sikh and attend the gurdwara with us—that’s not a problem, is it?”

“No, no—light comes from many sources,” says Anu. “It might be a problem for Vikas, though.”

“If so, he can always ask for his daughter—then she’ll have two fathers, and two mothers, like you.”

If I had never had Chetna, I wouldn’t be losing her now. If Chetna had never been born, she wouldn’t be faced with losing her mother. What a selfish mistake I made by not having an abortion
.

And just as quickly as this thought passes through her mind, Anu is ashamed of it.

What a selfish mistake it would have been to have an abortion
.

She hangs up, feeling a strange blend of elation and depression. She is doing the best she can for Chetna—she believes this from the
core of her being. But the rest of the day, she feels like a bag of broken glass, and finds herself weeping at the slightest frustration.

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.”