The Selector of Souls (5 page)

It’s 10 p.m., long past Mem-saab’s usual dinnertime. Khansama’s sweet white rasgullahs still wait in the kitchen. Not for Mem-saab, who ordered the dessert, but for Amanjit. Listening to him now, Damini thinks she should have made him eat them before the meal to sweeten his words.

“You are getting so old, you cannot make up your mind about anything.” Aman has switched to Punjabi and remembers to speak
slowly, but it is still difficult for Mem-saab to read his lips through his beard.

Damini leaves out the part about being old when she repeats his words for Mem-saab.

Mem-saab gestures for Damini to offer Aman more curry.

“Your father told me never to sell or move from this house,” she says in Punjabi. “You know, we built it together, selling the jewellery we escaped with during Partition. I still see him walking with me through these rooms—there were only wood beams then, to mark where the walls would rise. This house and the estate in Gurkot, he said, would replace all he’d lost.”

“Certainly not all,” says Aman. “The government didn’t give Sardar-ji any compensation for so many of his villages. They were lost to Pakistan.”

“We escaped with our lives—so many didn’t.”

“Yes, I know. Haven’t I heard it, and heard it, and heard it from Sardar-ji and you? He looked backward to Rawalpindi the rest of his life. But Mama, we must look forward. It’s a new world now—why don’t you decide to live in it?”

Even with the air conditioner going and Khansama’s curry steaming, Damini can smell Aman’s exotic cologne.

“I do live in it, Aman—maybe you haven’t noticed. Perhaps you are right that I cannot decide anything, but …” she smiles apologetically, “your father always decided everything for me.”

Aman scrapes the serving spoon around the bowl, retrieving the last morsels. He is too old for Damini to tell him not to be greedy.

“If your businesses are not doing well, Aman, I can help. How much more do you need?” As always, she is too mild with her youngest.

Amanjit rocks back in his father’s chair, taking her measure through half-closed eyes. “My businesses are doing well, Mama—not that you and my father ever had confidence in any of my projects when I really needed the investment. But one must grow—no limits.”

Mem-saab holds up her hand to stop Damini from repeating—he has enunciated clearly enough.

“You’re competing with something, someone?”

“There’s no one I want to compete with in India. No, it’s time to scale up, think bigger, aim higher. All I want is more.”

He lets the chair legs thump to the carpet, and shifts.

A mongrel, kicked away once, will attack afresh. And from behind
.

He mouths without sound, so that Damini too must lip-read his words. “Today I made arrangements with a construction company. Tomorrow they will begin building bedrooms on the terrace. Kiran and Loveleen and I will move from Bombay and live here with you.”

Mem-saab looks at Damini; Damini shakes her head as if she has not understood, so Aman has a chance to change his words. Building on the terrace would make his share far more than a quarter of the house. But Aman mouths it clearly again, just as before, so Mem-saab cannot mistake him.

She gestures for Damini to offer him a chapati.

“Why do you need to move?” she asks, a little too loud.

Aman’s strong dark hands close around the softness of the chapati. He tears a small piece from its slack circle. Then another and another. Intent as a counterfeit yogi, he tears every piece smaller and smaller.

“I will look after you in your old age, Mama,” he says.

She reads the words from his lips. Reads what she wants to read, but she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise. Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”

She doesn’t mention Timcu’s rights; Timcu’s not the son sitting before her, taking far more than he was given. White shreds of chapati grow to a pile before Aman. The handles of a silver salver Damini holds out to him feel as if they will burn through her serving cloth. She comes level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lychees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.

Damini returns the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. She will just forget to serve Aman the rasgullahs. She will give them to Khansama’s children instead.

The next morning, Timcu calls from Canada and asks in halting Hindi about Mem-saab. Damini tells him Mem-saab is well and not to worry, though Mem-saab breathed heavily through the night.

That evening, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh come to the gates and find them locked, though Damini has made Mem-saab beautiful and she is waiting upstairs. Damini hears Khansama tell them that Mem-saab went to tea at the Delhi Golf Club with Aman. She starts down the stairs to correct him.

“Looking after his mother. Such a fine son.” Sardar Gulab Singh’s voice travels down the driveway. Damini opens her mouth to yell, but already his scooter is putt-putting away, with Sardarni Gulab Singh seated erect and sidesaddle behind.

Khansama wears a half-smile as he turns from the gate. He glances at a new watch on his wrist. Aman does not like poor relations.

“What a misunderstanding,” Mem-saab says, when Damini tells her what happened. “I’ll tell Aman he must phone them and apologize for Khansama’s mistake.” And when Damini tells her about Khansama’s new watch she says, “Aman has always been a generous boy.” She turns her eyes away. “Put on the TV, Amma—tell me what other mothers and their sons are doing.”

On TV you can see past, present, future, upper, middle and lower worlds at once, as Lord Arjun could, but you can’t smell or feel them. Damini places the marigold blossoms from the Ganesh temple at its base. She presses the right buttons. An actor’s deep voice booms as the
Ramayan
begins, guiding her back to the time of Lord Ram and Sita Mata, and Lord Hanuman. When Lord Ram and Sita Mata were married, two great energies collided. Purush the masculine,
shakti the feminine, the same that create the world. The Aryans of the day make sacrifices and get attacked by dark demons …

Today on TV, Lord Ram and Sita Mata have been banished for fourteen years to save Ram’s father’s honour, and have arrived at Chitrakoot. There is Lord Ram, placing a clod of earth wrapped in saffron cloth on a mantelpiece very much like the one in Mem-saab’s drawing-room. And he prays to that clod of earth, to the earth of his birthplace, saying its presence has purified his camp.

“See,” says Mem-saab, who doesn’t need Damini to explain or tell her this story, “he’s forgetting his mother and thanking a clod of earth for his life. And he’s forgetting Sita Mata, the incarnation of Earth. Ha! He should be praying to her, begging forgiveness for bringing her into the jungle! Where is she?”

You can’t stop a TV story to ask the storyteller such a question; his tale is shaped long before it is shown. Sita Mata must be praying and doing puja somewhere—she’s so good.

The story moves on when it moves on, and then it stops.

Each god and goddess’s face is being shown up close, with a short sharp trumpet blast.

Damini turns to Mem-saab. “Why is Ram’s birthplace more important than any other place?” she mouths, “The whole world is Lord Ram’s to take birth in anywhere he wants, isn’t it?” The question has bothered her since her glimpse of Suresh on TV.

The gods and goddesses are all having similar reactions of shock, as if they weren’t gifted with any foresight. But they never disagree with each other. Or at least, not for long.

“He can come as Ram-ji, he can stay as Vaheguru-ji,” says Mem-saab. “This is just a TV play, Damini. You know this is an actor, not the real Lord Ram.”

But even when you know the actor is just an actor, Lord Ram’s name and crown make him seem larger than the TV. And even when you know Sita Mata will be abducted by the ten-headed Ravan, and that Lord Ram will go to Sri Lanka with the help of Lord Hanuman
and burn Lanka to the ground and rescue her, you have to watch out of respect, though this
Ramayan
is taking weeks and weeks to tell. The Punjabi song-story version Damini’s mother taught her takes four or five hours to recite, and she can recite the Hindi telling she learned from her father in eight hours.

Maybe Leela and Damini’s grandchildren are watching TV right now. Once they’ve seen this show, will they need her song-stories? Mem-saab has not felt well enough to spend summers in Gurkot, and Damini has not seen her daughter or grandchildren for five years now. Who knows when she’ll see them again.

Even if TV is just illusion, it’s what Mem-saab calls a ‘time-pass.’ And Lord Ram, Sita Mata and Lord Hanuman are familiar, serene and soothing. By the end of this week’s episode, Mem-saab seems to have forgotten her son’s slight to their relatives.

“It’s only three weeks since Aman-ji began construction, but I can already see the new walls from down here,” says Suresh. He’s hunkered down beside Damini, both balancing on the low wall of the Embassy-man’s lawn. Gulmohar trees give some shade, but the sun still burns through the back of Damini’s sari blouse. She draws the end of her sari around her, mops her face, then covers her head with it.

“It’s good that Mem-saab can’t hear the construction workers, but she feels the vibrations.”

“Do you still bathe on the terrace?”

“Not anymore. I told the women who carry the bricks and cement upstairs they could use my wash area to keep their babies safe. I have been washing Mem-saab’s clothes in her bathroom, and bathing there after Mem-saab has bathed.”

“Toilet?”

“Khansama’s, in his quarter.”

“Where do you dry the clothes?”

“In the back garden.” She can’t tell her son how much it bothers her to hang Mem-saab’s undergarments where any passing man can leer at them. Or that she’s been watching Aman every day, but he hasn’t called Sardar Gulab Singh to apologize. Sardar Gulab Singh ventured to visit twice more, but Khansama turned him away.

“Cement dust is settling everywhere,” she says. She wants to tell Suresh that she ordered the sweeper to use a wet rag to wipe the painting of Aman’s late father above the mantle twice a day, hoping the old man’s steady gaze from beneath his white turban and bushy grey eyebrows would shame his son, but last night, when Aman was drunk enough to think no one was listening, he raised his glass, and said, “Hey, Sardar-ji”—he still wouldn’t dare call the old gentleman Papa or Dad—“What does your widow need with all this money?”

But if she confides this, Suresh will say, “Sikhs are so greedy.”

“You are serving Amanjit and Kiran at table?” he asks.

“No,” she says. Because not once since Kiran and Loveleen arrived has the family sat at table with Mem-saab. Khansama has orders to serve Aman, Kiran and Loveleen morning tea in “their” bedroom. “They’re often out for lunch, cocktails, or dinner.”

Every morning, Kiran wraps her satin dressing gown over a bosom as buxom as that new actress Madhuri Dixit, sits at her dressing table, and preens before the mirror as she applies a mask of gora-coloured makeup. Her sunglasses balance on her nose ring all day, even indoors. She looks petulant and irritated whether she’s talking to Damini or any other servant, and only smiles when Amanjit holds up a camera.

“What does she do all day?”

“She takes Mem-saab’s car and driver shopping. She likes to shop. I helped her unpack, and even her handbags and high-heeled shoes have saab-sounding names: Kochar, Fear-raga-mo, Hurmeez. Mem-saab gives Zahir Sheikh money for petrol and tells him to treat Kiran with respect, though after so many years of marriage Kiran still has
no sons.” Mem-saab even admonished Damini, though gently, when Kiran squealed that Damini broke the plastic half-circles in her brassieres when she washed them.

“They must be meeting Mem-saab at chai-time?”

“They are too busy to sit with Mem-saab and talk.” Amanjit is not too busy to sit in his room with a newly installed air conditioner and talk on the phone to Bombay. He’s not too busy to pay a Chinese yogi to tell him where to position his bed for maximum energy flow, or a Hindu jyotshi to draw up a horoscope for a new business. And he’s never too busy to entertain, buying whisky by the case on his mother’s account at Malcha Marg market. Bills come, but Mem-saab doesn’t give them to Aman. She takes a taxi to Punjab National Bank for money to pay them.