The Selector of Souls (26 page)

A flock of chattering cranes rises on a column of warm air and arrows toward her, then over. They have skimmed through the high passes into India, like so many migrants, traders and raiders. Eagles will claim a few of their exhausted young, but most will survive and multiply.

It was for this northward view that an Englishman built the Big House, the Bara Ghar. It had an English name too, but no one remembers it. How durable are those peaks compared to that builder’s short spark of life. For these mountains, even a greedy eon of Kaliyug is but the blink of an eye.

The porter says, “With this road, trucks go back and forth from the sawmill to Jalawaaz. And supplies can come all the way from Shimla to build new cottages.”

“Where?”

“There.” He points to the next forested peak, where the conical dome of Lord Golunath’s temple shines white against verdant green. It too has a tall curved fence, but that’s to keep out monkeys. Beyond
the temple fence lies jungle so thick only tribals and sweepers would be desperate enough to crawl through the tangles of branches and thorns.

“People from the plains will travel many miles to enjoy our cool summers and this view of the hills. And they’ll be like Sardar-saab’s family, going back to the plains in winter.”

“One-two more homes don’t matter.”

“He’s building twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five! That will disturb the ener-jee of Gurkot.”

Before Damini saw Delhi, she compared all things to Gurkot, the centre of her world. Now …

What you see depends on what you expect to see, and what you’ve seen before
.

Below Sardar-saab’s Big House, houses and terraced fields dot the hill—some no bigger than Mem-saab’s drawing-room. All depend on the mountain stream that begins near Anamika Devi’s cave.

Jade and tan terraces follow the contour lines of the hill, each curving swath representing hours of carving and shoring that belies their permanent look. There must be thirty or forty farms if she counts the hand-built white houses that stud the two hills from peak to valley, kilometres apart. Resembling railway carriages at this distance, each has one or two cantilevered levels of rooms, with bright blue or green shutters. Doors from each room open onto cement terraces with filigreed balconies, where you can hang washing to dry.

Leela’s home is a short walk down the north-facing slope. The porter lopes away before Damini.

Damini’s sandals tug between her toes as the road dips. She passes the overgrown British cemetery, and the run-down chapel with its white bell tower. An outdoor display box still stands by its wrought-iron gate. In British times, the priest used to keep a large Bible in the glass case, for all who could read in Hindi. The road levels for several meters, now, and Damini trudges past the weedy grounds of a school for Britishers’ children, then a compound with an adjacent row of
administrative buildings. All built on land confiscated by the British from Gurkha kings, hill rajas, or tribals, and assigned to Sardar-saab after Independence as compensation for the lands he lost in Pakistan. The only areas that have seen use since British days are the stables and cowsheds, and the unpainted tin-roofed cement block where Amanjit Singh’s manager lives.

The porter falls behind, wheezing a little, letting her show the way. She approaches two roadside storage sheds around the next bend, then leaves the road to descend a stone stairway.

Two tiers of rippling red corrugated tin form the roof of Chunilal’s home on the mountainside. She and Piara Singh built only the first, upper tier.

Damini breathes in the fragrance of oakwood fires. Women are bending and straightening on terrace fields. Damini’s sandals stir up dirt, flame-coloured hair strands flick her cheeks. Leela must be in the lower tier of rooms, in the cookroom, or the cow’s room. “Leela!”

Hens peck and scratch between the bricks of the lower level, and two night-black cows turn their heads to low softly as she clambers down the steep stairs. A breeze teases the leaves of peach trees clustered at the far end of the cement terrace. From here she can see terrace fields, fields Piara Singh cleared so many years ago, glowing green with vegetables.

“Leela!
Arey-o
, Leela!”

There’s her baby daughter—a woman now. Joy surges like a wave within.

Yes, Leela is the tall, very pregnant woman in a mustard-yellow sari who’s standing in the half-open door.

A
WHIRL OF EXCLAMATIONS AND LAUGHTER MIXES
with the smell of woodsmoke and dung. Leela directs the porter to unload Damini’s bedroll and shoulder bag in the upper level sitting room, the one with benches and chairs for visitors.

Damini attempts to pay the porter as he leaves, but Leela has already done so. A moment later, his spindly legs are climbing up, then disappearing over the slate embankment to the road.

Damini pats a seat beside her on the low wall surrounding the terrace. Leela sits down, half-facing the peaks draped in their shawls of snow. Damini strokes her daughter’s arm, her cheek, her hand.

Those eyelashes fringing Leela’s large black eyes. That small mouth, puckered as if she has never outgrown babyhood at Damini’s breast. That shiny black tangle of hair, now oiled with coconut and rolled into a dung-cake-shape behind her daughter’s head.

“Hai,”
Damini places her palms on Leela’s belly. “Let it be another boy.”

Leela’s eyes brim suddenly. “Voh …” she uses the respectful pronoun instead of her husband’s name. She looks away, swallows. “He used to put his hands on my stomach like that when Kamna and Mohan were coming, but for this one—no.”

“No? But you are making a child—that is good. Your mother-in-law is happy with you, na?”

“He hasn’t told his mother,” Leela says.

“Then who does he think will come to help you?”

“It’s for him to send word, if he wants his mother or sister to come. The gods heard my prayers and sent you instead.”

Damini opens her cloth-wrapped bundle to postpone any discussion of why she is here and how long she is staying. “From Delhi,” she says, displaying the stack of parathas and the tiffin-box of mutton curry. Then the presents for Kamna and Mohan.

Both are in school. Leela says Kamna lives in her own world, hearing tunes no one else can hear, seeing dances no one else can see. “I tell her, ‘Get married and if your bhagya is good, your in-laws might allow you to dance.’ What else to say? I don’t remember being so immature at her age.”

“You used to sing and dance.”

“Too many cares—I don’t feel like singing now.”

“Does she dance well?”

“Oh, we all enjoy it, but I don’t want unrelated men to see her dancing. You know, now she’s fourteen.”

“And Mohan?”

“Mohan!” Leela’s face glows. “He can’t write the
ah—aa—i—ee
in Devanagari, but he has learned to write his name in English! He seems to understand everything at the cinema. We recognize the film songs he tries to sing, though others can’t. He can carry things and remembers messages word for word. He can change a truck tire and make easy repairs. And he splits logs for me.” She points to a woodpile in the corner.

“Does he eat anything but allu-mattar, now?”

“He likes mint parathas from the chai-stall. But otherwise, yes, just my potato-and-pea curry.”

“Name-writing is good. Remembering messages is very good. And changing tires is very very good.” She returns to Chunilal. “But Leela, tell me, how is he?”

Leela’s eyes cloud. “He says he’s so tired he can’t get up—for five
months! Typhoid would be over by now. His eyeballs are white—it’s not the yellow sickness.”

“Did he have an accident?”

“He says he doesn’t remember. Would you forget an accident? When I was only Kamna’s age and he was driving along and I threw a rotten apple at his truck and ran away, and he saw me for the first time and nearly plunged down the hillside. To this day, he laughs about that.

“And the time he was driving fast with a load of apples and one sack fell off and down the hill on to our roof, and he found me again—he doesn’t forget that. That’s how he learned my father had died and you were working in Delhi and my grandmother told him this farm was my dowry … He says that was the best accident.

“He tells Mohan about accidents in which his friends died—which truck plunged down which precipice. He can tell you what the truck was carrying, and whether it was night or day, and whether its driver was drunk or sober. He remembers the loads they were carrying, whether they were trucking or smuggling.”

Damini nods.

“But,” says Leela, “he can’t say this sickness is from an accident. Maybe he cursed someone important—he does that sometimes, when he’s driving.”

Damini pats Leela’s arm. “Maybe evil eye?”

Leela shakes her head. “Always he flies a black flag from his truck, against the evil eye.” She pulls her ankles into cross-legged position on the parapet. “But he eats in chai-stalls every day on his routes, and maybe one or two have sweeper-caste cooks, who knows?”

“Everyone eats there, not only him,” says Damini.

“I said he should do a special puja at the temple, but he says Lord Golunath is for justice, not health. And he said it’s too expensive to have the kind of ceremony a bigger god might appreciate.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “I asked, ‘Have you been sleeping with prostitutes?’ and he said, ‘No, of course not.’ But if he hasn’t been
using those-those types of dirty women, he wouldn’t be sick. But what can I say, now? To a sick man?”

“Men are like that only,” says Damini. “They don’t think with their heads.”

Leela leads Damini back up the stone staircase to the upper level. The sitting room is now painted turquoise and functions as a puja room when no relatives are visiting, but the ceiling is black with soot from its previous incarnation as a cookroom. A magenta and orange cotton dhurrie covers its earthen floor, and plastic lace doillies cover the tables that flank two straight-backed double-seat chairs. Carved low stools are stacked in a corner for children and lower-ranking guests. Leela flips a switch inside the wall cupboard to show off how the long nose of Lord Ganesh, the slightly flat features of Lord Golunath and the other idols inside light up.

She helps Damini unroll her bedroll on a rope-bed in the corner, then takes her back to the terrace. Damini follows the lucky footprints of Lakshmi Devi stencilled in red, removes her sandals and enters through the double doors of the central room as she did as a bride, right foot first over the threshold. The large room is dark and cool, and the blue-grey flicker of a TV screen in the corner throws shadows like the paintings in Anamika Devi’s cave. When Piara Singh and his father used to sleep here there was no TV, only a radio. Damini would bring their copper platters from the kitchen, and her father-in-law would sometimes gesture to her to squat beside him, allowing her a few moments of rest.

Chunilal is hunched under a blanket on a rope-bed near the window. If he looked between the window-bars, he would see the white-capped peaks, but his gaze is riveted to an ad for Bata shoes.

He turns to Leela, then notices Damini. “Mata-ji! Kaise aey!” He calls her mother as Leela does, perfectly mixing delight and surprise. He brings his palms together in greeting; his right hand and arm are sun-blackened from leaning from his truck window. An intense man of about thirty-five, his brown pate shines above
a jet-black fringe of hair. Chunilal’s eyes glitter. He flashes a gap-toothed grin.

“Arrey!” says Damini, squatting beside his blanket cocoon. “What has happened to you?”

Chunilal says, “Buss aise.” No reason. He tries to rise. His skin is tinged grey, like eucalyptus bark. “A little weakness—something I ate.” His normally vigorous voice sounds as hunched and pallid as his body. He looks away and says, “Did Leela ask you to come?”

“No,” she hastens to say, “Leela would never ask me to visit without your knowledge.”

For the first time Damini has to tell someone her Mem-saab is gone to a new life, and that she herself has been let go. “I couldn’t go to Suresh, na. He doesn’t have any place … and you are also a son to me.”

Chunilal strokes the black line of his moustache where it dips like the handlebars of a Hero bicycle. Damini waits for her statement to sink in—a man who comes to live in his wife’s village is an almost-son. His shortcut around the normal way of inheriting land disallows him the right to criticize.

But—men do things they say women shouldn’t. They can be shameless, even if we can’t
.

And Chunilal wouldn’t disrespect an elder. Unless he’s base as Aman.

“It’s your home,” he says, though both black eyebrows wag like left and right indicators on his truck.

“How long will you stay?” says Leela.

“I don’t know.”

Chunilal is silent a moment, considering. “So that is how it is.”

“Yes.”

“Some say a house full of your wife’s relations is like a field full of birds.”

“Yes,” says Damini, careful to agree before she disagrees. “But the tree cries for its fruit, even if the fruit doesn’t cry for its tree.”

“Life in New Delhi is not like our life in the hills, mata-ji. We cannot provide you with halwa puri as you ate while living with Mem-saab.”

“I have learned many useful things in the city. My pension is two hundred rupees a month—it is yours.”

She doesn’t mention her bonus—she has seen what happens when an old woman gives away too much money too soon.

A wry grin passes across his face. “Mata-ji, you probably spent your pension for the month just taking the train from Delhi. What does two hundred rupees buy?”

Something falls in Damini’s stomach. Receiving her pension is like receiving a letter from Piara Singh every month. She says, “I don’t need much—just a place to sleep, a little food. To this day, I can carry heavy loads and walk up and down mountains.”

She is a guest here, though he may politely call it her home. It’s no different from being a guest in her father’s home, then living with least respect as a bride in her husband’s home, then sleeping beside Mem-saab all these years. Guests should try to be helpful, useful.