The Selector of Souls (18 page)

There is silence. Inert silence—a constant silence she thought only Mem-saab had ever known.

Damini stops massaging. Mem-saab’s arm droops, heavy over the curve of the bed. She puts her hands to her ears. She shakes her head. She hears no sound. There is no sound.

No breath, no sound.

Peels of Mem-saab’s pills scatter from Damini’s lap as she rises.

She is weeping. She must not weep.
Krishna, Ganesh, Durga Devi, Vaheguru, Guru Tegh Bahadur … someone … a poor woman begs you, give me strength
. How could she have let her spirit wander in dream? How could she have let Mem-saab be alone as she went to her next life?

Damini brings Mem-saab’s kajal pencils and draws her eyebrows, dark above her closed eyes. She brings colour for her cheeks and lipstick to make her lips hibiscus-red. She takes Mem-saab’s hair in her hands, hair the colour of spent fire-coals, and she braids it for her though she is a widow.

When she is beautiful, Damini covers her face.

“Begin your journey, Mem-saab,” she says aloud, in case Mem-saab’s spirit, waiting for cremation in the plane of prêt-lok with all the other spirits, has gained the power to hear.

But even if Damini had been awake, even if Aman were the best son in the world and at his mother’s side, you are alone when Yama the green-skinned god comes for you.

Damini washes her hands, using water sparingly from Mem-saab’s bathroom, till she remembers Mem-saab doesn’t need water anymore. And Mem-saab no longer needs a pair of ears.

S
IX DAYS AFTER
M
EM-SAAB’S PASSING, MORNING IS
ripening from a mango-blush sky. Across the market, the narrow caverns of shop stalls are still closed, their rippling silver garage doors padlocked to the ground. Only a flower-seller plies his cart, offering marigold and rose garlands for Lord Ganesh. But Damini doesn’t even glance at the temple as she alights from Mem-saab’s car.

Lord Ganesh is deafer than Mem-saab ever was, and today she refuses to spend a single rupee on a god like him—or Shiv, or Krishna, or Vishnu. Sky gods have forgotten ordinary people like Damini, these days. They don’t deserve bowing or praises or invoking them with mantras. But what can you expect? It’s many centuries since they were human.

Still—first they took her kind, hardworking Piara Singh when she was only twenty and left her a widow, and now they have taken away her almost-sister, her mistress for the past thirty years. And how can Damini know if Amanjit and Kiran drove Mem-saab to take those pills, or if she made a mistake and took too many, or if she wanted to take them?

Zahir Sheikh lifts her canvas bedroll and khaki shoulder bag from the trunk and carries them to a row of scooter-rickshaws parked beneath a mango tree.

Like Khansama, Mem-saab’s driver is staying to serve Aman, as if he were an inherited chair or table—how can either do any different? They have children to support and Aman needs their skills.

“Khuda Hafiz,” he says, in his courtly Muslim way.

Damini makes a quick namaste and they exchange polite wishes to meet again if it be written in their bhagyas. A promise to phone if ever she is in need. And someone she has known almost ten years vanishes.

Damini sits down on her bedroll for a moment, the mango tree at her back. Deep breaths will keep her tears within. Sometimes a woman needs to be accompanied just a little further.

She would have liked to accompany Mem-saab a little farther, at least to the cremation ground. All Damini could do was wash Mem-saab one last time, and massage her with sandalwood paste and turmeric.

Mothers, daughters, sisters, daughters-in-law, friends—all these are useless at the hour of cremation. Only sons can light a funeral pyre, and lead a parent’s soul to the path of the sun, that path of the gods on the way to brahman.

The
Bhagvad Gita
says, “For death is certain to one who is born; to one who is dead, birth is certain; therefore, thou shalt not grieve for what is unavoidable.” But how can she not grieve?

Damini visited Lakshmi Devi, serene in her temple, and tried to send her wishes with Mem-saab. But those wishes didn’t know where they were going. When Damini tried to see Mem-saab’s cremation chamber with her soul’s eye, all she saw was a place like abroad, where shadow people exist in darkness while she moves in sunlight, and where even the names of the gods are forgotten.

If only Timcu hadn’t told her Mem-saab’s cremation was nothing like the ones in movies, or her husband Piara Singh’s so many years ago. Nowadays in Delhi and other cities, he explained, it’s done with electricity. A father is put in a box and his eldest son presses a button and the flowers of his ashes come out in a few hours. A mother is put
in a box and her youngest son presses a button and the flowers of her ashes come out in a few hours. And the person who has no sons—he or she must find a brother, an uncle, a nephew, some man to help or their souls will always wander without rest. So, he said, Mem-saab was lucky Aman had moved to Delhi to look after her.

Timcu had arrived the day after the cremation, without his gora wife or Mem-saab’s Canadian grandchildren. India is too hot, crowded and dirty for them, he said. He was staying a week, but brought enough baggage for months and moved into the Embassy-man’s vacated residence. All he did was loud talk-talk in English with Aman. “Sell the house … pay me my share … sell it … pay me my share.” How could Damini interrupt their haggling to ask whether the goddess of fire received your soul more kindly if your son pressed a button or if he applied a flaming torch to your pyre?

Surprisingly, Kiran raised no objection when a few hours before the body was taken away for cremation, Damini lit cotton wicks in shell-shaped clay diyas and placed them all around Mem-saab, as if she were celebrating Diwali. Maybe Kiran also remembered how much Mem-saab loved light.

Maybe Kiran was celebrating because Mem-saab’s lawsuit died alongside Mem-saab.

And on the fifth day, after the final prayers were said and all the mourners were gone, it was Kiran who gave Damini her last pay and a bonus for her years of service—far more than Damini expected. And she also gave her the smooth steel kara Mem-saab always wore on her right wrist, a beige everyday shawl, a thick brown shawl, a grey cotton salwar-kameez and a white one that Mem-saab had worn to bed a few times. Kiran ordered Khansama to help Damini pack her bedroll and shoulder bag, and asked the driver to take Damini as far as the market.

The question of her staying on did not arise—it was the Dettol, it was the broken brassieres. It was the brown triangle Damini burned on the front of Kiran’s best silk kameez the night Mem-saab’s atman
began its journey again. It could be her age; Kiran didn’t want to be responsible if she got sick.

Or maybe it was that Damini had noticed the black and grey photo of an unfamiliar man tucked in Kirin’s dresser drawer and asked Kiran who in her family had cut his hair and did not wear a turban?

Or it was that Damini can only understand English, not speak it. Or that Kiran doesn’t want a maidservant who can understand any English. Or maybe it was that Kiran does whatever Amanjit wants done, that’s all.

Sardar-saab would never have let Damini leave without asking where she was going, or how she would live, or whether she had a man to escort her while travelling. He would have provided her with a pension or a gift of saleable jewellery for her years of service. He would have told her to bring Suresh before him and formally entrusted Damini into the care of her son. He would know it was his duty to look after all women from his village, and found her another job.

Damini should have asked Aman if she could stay on. Maybe Damini could have asked Kiran to find her another position with a saab-type family like this one. But why should she have to ask for what Kiran should have offered?

Always too proud. Too much ego, her father always said. Even at this age, she could end up selling her body in a brothel somewhere.

Never!

But everything in the last few days is happening so suddenly, Damini keeps having to stop and breathe. She must stop turning to Mem-saab and repeating what everyone says. Mem-saab isn’t here.

Of course, she has with great confidence told Kiran that Suresh will look after her, but a scream of panic is rising inside her as if she were a child just arrived in the world. She called the factory number twice, and left messages, but maybe the woman with the air-conditioned voice never told Suresh.

A rain-soaked branch brushes her shoulder, a black insect dangles and wriggles a few inches from her cheek. A caterpillar is sprouting
from its armoured cocoon, splitting its skin. It too has no choice but to change.

Damini should be thinking of her future, not the past. Her bhagya is good—she survived when no one wanted her, and has never had to sell this body. She isn’t like Mem-saab. She isn’t like her own mother. Both had Dipreyshun. Damini doesn’t get Dipreyshun. She is accustomed to work, has a sound heart, and is still young. When she was younger, she was never so afraid of change.

But what is my role now, and in the movie of whose life?

If Mem-saab were here, Damini would tell her that neither Timcu nor Amanjit embraced her when she took her leave. If they had, Damini would have given them her blessing in memory of their original goodness, and because Mem-saab was no longer there to do so. But they know exactly what she thinks of them. And what she thinks doesn’t matter. Their forefathers well-nigh owned her husband’s family. They are saab-log, she is not.

Yet Loveleen had surprised her—she came running to Damini, wrapped her arms around her waist, and said a tearful goodbye.

Mem-saab’s spirit came through her grandchild at that moment
.

The scuffed black shoulder bag beside Damini contains three saris and two salwar-kameezes along with those Kiran gave her. And a sequined dupatta Mem-saab gave her in celebration of Timcu’s wedding, the violet-blue phulkari shawl Mem-saab gave her in celebration of Aman’s wedding, her plastic painted gods, a water bottle, a cloth-wrapped bundle with a stack of stuffed parathas, and a tiffin-box of mutton curry cooked by Khansama.

He didn’t want any curses from an old woman
.

Aman and Timcu are not planning a trip to Kartarpur where Mem-saab wanted to be strewn on the fields along with her beloved gurus. No. Both are planning to take her ashes to Hardwar and drop her off in the sacred water with everyone else and all the fish.

It isn’t as if Mem-saab had expected or asked them to use sandalwood for her cremation—so couldn’t her sons have honoured that
last wish? And Mem-saab often spoke of donating to build a new gurdwara in Gurkot. And for a girls’ school, and a clinic, but …

No one listens to women’s wishes
.

Mem-saab might have wanted Aman to give Damini more, for instance, might even have specified her wishes in writing. But even a rich woman can’t keep her promises, should the men in her family decide otherwise.

Mem-saab, may you be a human in your next life
.

Damini reaches under the canvas roof of a scooter-rickshaw to shake its sleeping driver by the shoulder. She climbs in to its gold gondola and settles back in the passenger cabin.

The scooter driver stretches, yawns a “Namaste, ji.”

He clambers out to hoist her bedroll into the seat beside her. He hefts her shoulder bag on top of the bedroll. He pours a soothing libation of oil into the tank, and winds a scarf about his neck with a flourish like that new actor Shahrukh Khan. He steadies the eager bounce of the scooter’s green plastic-tasselled handles. “Where do you go, ji?” he shouts over the engine.

Her destination comes to Damini in a flash. “To Rashtrapati Bhavan,” she says. The Presidential Palace, the Secretariat and its surrounding Houses of Parliament lie at the heart of New Delhi. Parliament is where all big decisions are made. That’s where positive and negative energies resolve into intention.

Suresh is her son. She is his responsibility; this is the way.

But Suresh shares a fly-bitten servant’s quarter with five other men—he has no place for her. No, this is not the time to go to Suresh. Not every son is kind to his mother in her old age—and at this moment, does she have the energy to test her own?

The scooter putt-putts around the arch of India Gate. Damini squints at the eternal flame. It’s for an unknown soldier, Mem-saab once explained, “a warrior who may or may not have been of the kshatriya caste. We don’t know. All we know is that he—or she—was there when his country needed him.”

Suresh doesn’t need her. Leela may need her, her grandchildren may need her. Some other woman like Mem-saab may need her. She must be useful.

Wind whips Damini’s cheeks.

“So, today you’re invited to the president’s home?” the scooter-man shouts over his shoulder, as they vroom down the ceremonial boulevard.

“What’s it to you if I am?” Damini retorts. Every man in this city must volunteer his opinion about where a woman is going, where she should be, where she should live … maybe she
should
go and ask President Shankar Dayal Sharma where can a woman like her live in old age? Maybe he can tell her how to live without an income, without begging, or selling her body.

Leela lives in Damini’s old home. The house she and Piara Singh built stone by stone with their own hands for his parents and themselves. The house Damini no longer owns, that became Leela’s dowry. Damini’s inner ear conjures up Leela’s warm-toned voice, honed on mountain ridges. Her little girl who danced and sang as if blessed by snakes. In all of Gurkot, Leela is one of few women her age who lives alone for long periods. Chunilal plies a truck through the Himalayan passes, rarely going as far south as Delhi. He comes home monthly, for a few days at a time, and leaves Leela his gun to scare away monkeys.

Leela is strong today because I left her in the village with her grandmother. Everyone said she would grow up wild, but I could see no other way
.

If she goes to Leela, there will be scornful comments in the village about a woman who takes from a daughter’s family, just as there were hurtful comments fifteen years ago when Chunilal came to live in his wife’s village. “Not our reeti,” said the villagers of Gurkot. Not our way.