The Selector of Souls (27 page)

“You do look strong, mata-ji, younger than fifty.”

“I have maybe five-six years left to live, not more.” Less, if she has to sell her body to survive.

“What work can you do here?”

“More than you can, I think,” Leela says to her husband.

The Chunilal Damini knew would have had retorted with raised voice to so cheeky a comment. But this one appears to be carrying an oversized load of troubles. He watches TV reporter Barkha Dutt for a while. “I send Mohan to the chai-stall every week,” he says. “To buy me a Himachal State lottery ticket. But I haven’t won a single rupee yet.”

“I hear you haven’t been driving for months,” Damini says gently. She gestures at the TV. “Which farmer lies in bed all day watching TV people’s stories?”

“It is not months, just a few weeks. I will be all right tomorrow
—you wait and see. And if I can’t go, I’ll send Mohan.” With that, he doubles over coughing.

Could it be TB? And how can he dream of sending twelve-year-old Mohan to drive a truck? Mohan, who can only mimic and repeat without understanding?

Leela peels back Chunilal’s blanket to show Damini the red splotches on his leg, “These haven’t healed for—I can’t remember how long.”

Damini would know which antibiotic cream to try from Mem-saab’s blue sweet tin with its picture of Durga, the eight-armed, many-weaponed goddess astride a tiger. But there is no tin full of English-people’s medicines here. “Have you applied turmeric?”

“Of course, but it still didn’t heal. What else is good?”

“Honey or Kharda moss should draw out the poison,” says Damini, remembering her mother-in-law’s remedies. “I can show you the right kind.”

The frown lines on Leela’s forehead are relaxing. Her step springs, despite the weight of the baby, as she leaves Damini with Chunilal and goes downstairs to the cookroom to make chai.

Damini asks Chunilal about the health of his parents, his two older brothers and their wives, growers of apricots and plums a few villages away. She names each member of his family in turn, hoping she does not miss anyone. All are well—except him. “Have you been to a doctor?” she asks, half-knowing the answer.

“No—who can take me to Shimla?”

“Have you seen a vaid?”

“The vaid moved to Shimla to give lectures at one of the new hotels.”

“What about the government nurse?”

“She came from Jalawaaz a few days ago—some busybody must have told her Leela was pregnant. She took Leela’s blood, gave her a tetanus injection, left her some iron pills, filled her own quota.”

“Did she see you?”

“Me? No. But the ojha came yesterday and gave me this tonic.” He pulls a brown glass vial from beneath his pillow, opens it and takes a gulp. “Made from cow
and
elephant dung; very powerful.”

A scuffing sound outside says Leela is removing her sandals. She pushes through the double doors with a tray bearing three glasses of unsweetened tea, and a small bowl of jaggery. Damini takes a lump of brown sugar and holds it between her teeth. She hasn’t sipped tea through jaggery in five years. The texture is pleasurable. It would be perfect if she could taste sweetness.

“Have you asked your mother to come for the birth?” says Damini to Chunilal.

“No. I thought by now we would be finished with that problem.”

“I can help Leela when the time comes, but … last time, the dai came when Leela was born, and she was here along with your mother and sisters when Kamna and Mohan were born. All of us were here, but only Vijayanthi knew how to save both Leela and Mohan when the cord was wrapped around his neck. We have to ask her to attend.” Both Leela and Chunilal are looking at her, saying nothing. “No?” she says. “Is there another healer in Gurkot?”

Still they say nothing.

Damini puts her tea glass down carefully. “Oh no, no, no,” she says. “I have had two children. I can do massage. I have seen a child delivered in a hospital—but cutting the cord or taking away the Lotus? That’s unclean. Vijayanthi always did it for us—for families of her own caste.”

“Should we pay Vijayanthi, if you are here?” says Chunilal.

Damini purses her lips, but cannot hold back her retort. “Next you’ll ask me to clean the latrine? I could do that, and just wash afterwards, but cutting a cord is like cutting a power line. I don’t know where to bury the Lotus so that the spirits of women who died in childbirth cannot covet it. I can’t do someone else’s dharma!

“If Vijayanthi can’t cut it for us, send Mohan down the hill to the Christians and tell the sweeper-woman to come. Goldina—she
worked in Sardar-saab’s home every summer. She used to clean the ash from the fireplaces, empty the thunderboxes, and carry the manure from the stables. Women like her are used to waste and decay—they’ve been cleaning it away all their lives. And they are fearless enough to separate a dead Lotus from my Leela.”

“We don’t need to talk about delivering,” Leela says quickly. “Mata-ji, this is my third child—fifth, if you include the two I could not heat to birth. I would try for another son for our old age, but with him—” she lifts her chin in Chunilal’s direction—“in this condition …” She swallows, carries on. “I already have one daughter for whom we must provide a dowry and one son who needs—and will need—care all his life.”

She dashes at her eyes with the corner of her sari. “Every day I’ve been telling myself I’ll go to Shimla and get it cleaned out. I thought I could be back in a week. But every day, there was wood to be fetched, rows to be hoed, seeds to be sown, clothes to be washed, vegetables to be curried, and cows to be milked and watered. Every day I thought, who will look after him and the children while I am gone? Kamna will be off in her own world, dancing, and Mohan will sit at the chai-stall eating mint parathas all day.”

“Very good mint parathas,” says Chunilal, in his son’s defence. “It makes me ill to think of them right now, but they are the best.”

“Why didn’t you go to Vijayanthi?” says Damini.

“He said not to,” says Leela, with a nod in Chunilal’s direction. “He said Vijayanthi is too old and blind. He was afraid for me.”

“She could have told you what to do.”

“He was afraid of that as well. Every day he said, ‘Wait. Tomorrow I will feel better, and I’ll take you myself.’ ” She adjusts her marriage collar, then her sari pallu and turns to her husband, “Anamika Devi herself has sent my mother. Now I will get it done.”

“Get what done?” says a high perky voice at the door.

It’s Damini’s granddaughter Kamna, with Mohan close behind.

“Nothing, nothing. Come and see who is here.”

“Nani!” The little girl Damini remembers has grown into a jaunty fourteen-year-old with two long sleek braids and sun-whipped cheeks. She’s graduated from a frock and thong sandals to a daisy-print salwar-kameez and canvas sneakers. In Kamna’s embrace, Damini gazes into brown eyes flecked with green.

Too disturbingly direct—at her age, thinks Damini, Kamna should behave a little more shyly, even around family.

The young girl smells of coriander from the fluffy bunch clasped in one bangled fist. “From the roadside,” she says, dropping it in her mother’s lap. Leela begins separating the coriander from the wild cannabis that grows with it in the ditch.

Kamna has too much purush ener-jee. Cooling foods, that’s what she needs
.

Mohan comes forward, with his usual round-eyed open-mouthed look of surprise, unpretentious as uncarved wood. Leela reminds him to touch Damini’s feet in greeting. He stoops to receive Damini’s hand on his head in blessing, then steps back and stares at his dusty feet splayed in a pair of rubber thongs. A soft down is beginning on his chin. His Fanta-orange kurta further brightens his bronzed cheeks. It flaps about his thin frame, and so do his pants. His black hair ripples almost to his shoulders; he must still be frightened by barbers.

Poor boy—such bad bhagya from his past lives.

Mohan perches at the end of Chunilal’s rope-bed. Kamna places a cushion on the floor for Damini, and flounces into a crouch beside her. “I’ll show you all the bangles I have collected since you came last time.” She jingles the rainbows on her wrists. “Papa buys me a dozen from every city.”

“So now you’re in secondary school,” says Damini. “You take the new road—it’s far?”

“Only twelve kilometres. A jeep stopped for us this morning so we didn’t have to walk.”

If Chunilal were still driving his truck, the children wouldn’t be walking to school—they could pay to take the new minibus.

Kamna probably throws rotten apples at trucks just as her mother did. She’s lost the baby softness Damini remembers, and looks lithe and willowy even when seated, holding herself tall.

Damini fetches her gifts. The bangles tinkle and spark. “They look nicer on your wrists than in the shop,” she says.

Mohan blows into his new flute; everyone applauds his honking. Chunilal says proudly, “He whistles all the time.”

“Especially at girls,” says Kamna. “Papa wants him to be a policeman—then he’ll whistle more!”

“Not a policeman,” says Damini. “Everyone would just hate and fear him.”

“You know how often I drive from here to Shimla, to Amritsar, past the Border Security Force at the Wagha Border,” says Chunilal. “Every time, my truck is stopped, but they never tell me to unload and reload all my goods. They never search my cab. You know why?”

Mohan honks through the flute. Kamna moves neck and eyes in sundari movements, left and right like a dancer.

“Because I know how much grease is needed to grease whose palms so my goods find their way into Pakistan. But I’ve often thought, as I was bumping across the Line of Control, that it is better to be receiving rather than giving.” He tousles Mohan’s hair with rough tenderness. Mohan grins as if he understands, and blows another blast. “Who will dare to question the father of a police officer? Who will dare peek at his contraband, whether tea or hashish or heroin? Police officers will finally know who I am, and refrain from even hinting at bribes.”

Chunilal is so sure, it would be cruel to object. Or to mention that if Mohan became a policeman, Chunilal would have to pay a labourer to split wood.

“Stop now, Mohan!” Leela stays the boy from blowing.

Mohan leaves off, and says, “Dance, Kamna!”

Kamna rises. She hums a tune as her arms arc above her head, her hands twirl. Her hips slide left and right, like a Bollywood filmi
dancer. She slaps her bare feet on the floor and gives form to each note, as if an invisible thread stretched between her and the humming. Then her dance changes. Even Mohan watches.

She sways and folds as if all around her have disappeared. Slight and deliberate, she connects with the ground, with the air, claiming space boldly as if it is her birthright. She steps on her shadow, around it, into it, slanting forward and back like a spring coiling and uncoiling, her face to the window, her eyes shining bright.

Damini’s breath catches, then soars. Kamna’s dance is unlike anything she has ever seen, even on TV. It doesn’t imitate Bollywood or the wriggly dancing of saab-log in clubs.

Kamna twirls and lunges, dips and rocks, humming to herself.

Movies don’t capture this kind of joy, the animal glint in Kamna’s eye, the delight of childhood. Her energy shimmers and amplifies itself in the small room. Chunilal is smiling and clapping along with Mohan.

Leela isn’t watching Kamna. She is sitting on a low stool, hands clasping the weight of her belly, gazing at the ground.

At last, the girl collapses, laughing and panting. After a moment, she snuggles close to Damini.

“Who taught you such steps?” says Damini.

“No one.” says Kamna. “I saw them in my head.” She becomes serious, telling her grandmother earnestly, “I want a dance guru. I want to be trained, become a real dancer.”

A dance guru won’t help her shape this dancing to the visions Kamna sees in her mind. He’ll teach Kamna to perform to his bol, his verbal command. Will require obeisance and obedience. Will demand gestures, expressions and poses men wish to watch, will teach Kamna to dance stories that have been danced and choreographed through centuries. But it would be cruel to say so. “That kind of guru. I don’t think you’ll find him here.”

“And Papa says no,” Kamna says, mock-tattling.

“We’re not some low-caste people,” Chunilal says as if speaking for an unseen tribe. “Our girls don’t need to become dancing girls. I’ll get
you married, then you work in the house.” To Damini he says, “Kamna says she can learn enough to teach dancing someday. I said we all have to eat today. If she becomes a dance guru, she’ll only spend any money she gets on clothes, bangles, and nail polish. She shouldn’t be taking a job away from a man and his family. I say, do your dharma in this life, and maybe in your next life …”

Kamna shrugs, but the corners of her mouth tremble. Leela is gazing through the barred window at the ridges of the hills. Kriya—creation—is like dancing. It needs Leela’s whole body, it feeds from her body, it happens through her body. Both times Leela gave birth she was back in the fields without more than two days of rest. But this time …

Leela can make an ordinary bowl of lentils into a fragrant wonder, or fill a simple brinjal with the taste of remembered dreams. Once Leela transformed an old sari border into a quilt, another time, she transformed an old quilt to a bag, a bag to a pillowcase, a pillowcase into a shawl for Lord Golunath. All without much thought. But how can a woman create, transform seed, transform anything without joy?

“Are you a good cook?” Damini asks Kamna.

Kamna wobbles her head and smiles; she is not boastful.

“Can you cook as well as your mother?”

Kamna laughs—“I’ll make dinner tomorrow, and you tell me.” She rises and skips out, mercifully taking Mohan and his honking flute.

“Leela,” says Damini, “how long till the baby is due? Two months?”

“I think so.”

“No government or private doctor in Shimla will do a cleaning now. And if you find a bad doctor who will do it so late, you could die! And you know how much it costs? The later you get, the more expensive. In Delhi they take a thousand rupees per month of pregnancy. Must be less in Shimla but not that much less. Do you have five or six or seven thousand rupees?”