The Selector of Souls (6 page)

Sometimes after dinner, Amanjit orders Khansama to bring Mem-saab’s best crystal and he and Kiran put their feet up on Mem-saab’s polished teak tables and her sofas. Sometimes he and Kiran sit in Mem-saab’s drawing-room with their raucous pink friends—he calls them “buyers”—long after decent people go to bed. They spend money on electricity the way rajas and ranis once did, keeping the air conditioner running all day and all night. Once he persuaded a buyer to stay two hours longer just because Kiran gave a bad luck sneeze as the man rose to leave.

“Mem-saab doesn’t use the drawing-room unless they are out. She watches for their arrivals and departures. Whenever Aman-ji is home, they argue.”

“What about?”

Damini sighs. Mem-saab wouldn’t want her to tell anyone but it angered her so …

“Yesterday Aman-ji said she hadn’t done anything useful her whole life. She said she brought him into the world, that she was a wife and mother and gave him love. But he said now that he’s in the world, he needs to live and she should give him the rent money.”

“If he wants it, how can she stop him?”

“I will stop him.”

“You? Ha! So what does Mem-saab do all day?”

“She watches TV and I tell her the story, the lines, and the songs. Today I sang ‘Chal, chal, chal mere haathi, o mere saathi …’ ” She claps, urging him to join.

He sits silent, glowering.

“You always loved this song,” she protests. “You used to play the elephant, remember?”

“It reminds me of the new party for sweepers. The elephant is their symbol. Splitting the Hindu vote so that Muslims can take control of India.”

“Suresh, what are you saying? An elephant is also Lord Ganesh, and Lord Ganesh is Brahma, Vishnu and Shiv together … come sing, sing!” Damini rises, covers her head with her dupatta, half-veiling her face. She steps in and out of an imaginary circle singing, “Chal le chal ghatara kheechke …” The song lifts her spirit and eventually lightens his expression of discontent.

When she gives him her usual gift, he says, “I should be looking after you. If I still had my father’s land, I would be giving you money.”

“Don’t worry, beta. More will come.” It’s a line from the movie of another woman’s life—Damini once heard a saab-woman say it on TV. But no god is manufacturing any more land for people in India. Besides, if Suresh still farmed Piara Singh’s land, it would be mortgaged for Leela’s dowry.

It’s better this way
.

When Suresh is gone, Damini returns upstairs to find Mem-saab sitting before martyr’s pictures: of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the guru executed by that mad Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for defending the right of all Hindus to worship, and of Baba Deep Singh, who carries his severed head aloft in defiance as his tortured bleeding body straddles a white steed. Her lips move, soundless, before the martyrs’ images, repeating her one god’s name: “Vaheguru, Vaheguru …”

Images and idols may be forbidden to Sikhs, but even they sometimes need a photo to witness their tears
.

“You have Dipreyshun,” says Damini.

“No, my chest is hurting.”

“We should have gone to Gurkot for the summer.”

“Maybe next year.”

“Every year you say, ‘next year.’ It’s been five years since we were in the cool mountain air.”

“I said next year! Don’t you think I too yearn to be home in the Big House? But Aman doesn’t want me to go.”

Damini drops her gaze to the marble floor to show respect. After a minute, she says, “Shall I bring oil for your massage?” It’s all she has to offer.

“Not today, Amma.”

And not the next day or the next.

When Kiran breaks a glass bangle, Amanjit buys her a new gold one, saying, “Don’t bring me bad luck by breaking bangles.”

A carved ivory tusk disappears and a leopard skin is removed for reasons of ‘Feng Shooey.’ Fine vases find their way to ‘their’ room; a china rose Sardar-saab brought Mem-saab from abroad is no longer in the sideboard. A set of silver candlesticks vanishes. A mirror with a golden frame is replaced by a Rajasthani silk painting smelling of the street-hawker’s bundle.

Around the first week of June, an ivory miniature departs in a gift-wrapped box for a buyer. Mem-saab says it must be Khansama, stealing again. Then she turns her head away so she cannot read Damini’s answer.

“Go away, Damini-amma,” she says. “I am going to write to Timcu.”

A
FEW KILOMETRES AWAY ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF
Kohli House, a three-storey mansion in the Lutyens-designed area of New Delhi, Anupam Kohli is standing in her daughter’s room, fists clenched at her sides, gazing at Chetna’s neatly made bed, Chetna’s little white desk and chair under the window framed with pink polka-dot curtains.

Only fatherhood has saved her husband, Vikas, from being murdered by his wife many times over. Chetna is the sweetest little daughter in the world.

A Punjabi bride doll Vikas bought for his daughter sits on the windowsill. A red silk salwar covers the doll’s legs, her kameez cascades over bulbous breasts. A transparent red gold-fringed dupatta covers her long black hair. Anu looked like that doll, even to the shade of her lipsticked smile, the day she was married off to a man wearing a diamond tie pin and a Gucci charcoal pinstripe suit to whom she had spoken ten words at most.

Now Anu lives in this Taj Mahal of a home with her husband and in-laws. With a cook to help her, with servants to clean, to wash her clothes and tidy her cupboards. She’s wearing a muslin salwar-kameez and has many saris bordered in gold. She can get a facial and have her makeup done at the Taj Palace Hotel whenever she
needs to cover up a swollen or purpling eye. She has pants and matching shirts, embroidered kurtas, pashmina shawls, embellished slippers, and many pairs of high-heeled sandals. She has 24-karat gold and diamond bangles, an array of earrings and necklaces that cost Vikas a fortune. If no one else needs them, she can use the family cars and drivers. She is a Hindu-Christian who has accepted Lord Jesus as her saviour and propitiated god, and all the gods and goddesses as well.

But right now, breathing hurts.

Anu sits on the bed. She has been awake all night, afraid to move in case she woke Vikas.

Nancy Drew … Malory Towers … the
Mahabharat …
the
Iliad
 … the
Ramayan
say the rainbow of titles on the bookshelves. A cricket bat stands in the corner.

Anu stands, grabs the bat, raises it overhead.
Thwack!
She smacks it on the bed.

That’s the sound it would make coming down on Vikas’s head.

She’s trembling, and has to sit down, holding her ribs.

Sitting hurts. She holds her ribs, takes a deep breath, stands.

A bulldozer seems to have crushed her inner space, thrust each organ into the next. Maybe a rib is broken but getting an x-ray will notify the world—beyond your beautician, nothing is confidential in the capital city.

This pain is nothing—the pain of childbirth is still sovereign. No—maybe the pain after her car accident.

Chetna’s scent is still here, as if Chetna had just risen from the white painted desk. Anu sits at the desk. Here’s sketch paper, a tin box. Inside the box, coloured pencils point at her sharply, a quiverful of arrows.

Arrow number one is red. Colour of twenty-year-old Anu’s virgin blood. Colour of her fault for agreeing to marry Vikas and his family. Not that Mumma presented her with many choices that season—eligible bachelors were already selecting younger women.

Anu’s pencil digs a vertical line in red on the page, then another. A few branches, fibrous roots. She realizes she’s drawing the day of her “Showing.” Here’s the table under the banyan tree at the Gymkhana Club, laden with all the Indian, Chinese and Continental dishes Dadu ordered. Here’s Vikas’s father, Mr. Lalit Kohli, leaning forward as he talks to Anu’s father, Deepak Lal. Here’s auburn-haired, sleek Mrs. Pammy Kohli, with her perm, her permanent smile and her permanently startled look. Mrs. Kohli, who produced Vikas, is revered and indulged for that achievement, and needs no other evermore. Mrs. Pammy Kohli clasps her elbows beneath her shahtoosh shawl, smiles, and evaluates Anu.

Here’s glamorous fine-boned Mumma, her hands darting and waving like intelligent animals in rhythm with her non-stop patter. An anxious look on her sparrow face because her daughter was nearing twenty-one and had been rejected twice. One family said Anu was “not homely enough” for their son. Meaning she wasn’t domestic enough. The other said she was “too-much-educated.”

Anu draws herself sitting under the banyan, too. Freezing, she recalls, in a chiffon sari borrowed from her cousin-sister Rano. And white platform sandals that were so in style in 1985. Yearning to imitate her friends, most of whom were engaged or married. Wanting so badly to please her parents that she only took a few sidelong glances at Vikas to verify he would be taller than her in high heels. She assumed she could love him. Marriage, she had thought, would free her from the need for chaperones, and worrying about who might see her looking at or talking to an unrelated man. And Mumma, Purnima-aunty and Rano all assured her that marriage would fix her. That afterwards, she’d want—need—children.

Here’s Vikas. In those days he had a curly lock of black mane that would fall across his forehead, not the slick-gelled cut he has today. Then as now he had a bow-shaped moustache and a square close-shaven chin. Right arm strengthened from swinging a polo mallet, and the left from neck-reining. Thighs accustomed to gripping the
flanks of his ponies. He smelled of leather, horses, and power. Anu gazed shyly at his knee, for most of the Showing.

Ambitious, well-mannered, well-educated, he’d flashed her his movie-star smile. Only son and heir to an entrepreneur much-demonized under Nehruvian socialism, but well-protected from foreign competition. Vikas entered his father’s printing business, Kohlisons Media, at twenty-five, the year Madam G.’s son Rajiv became prime minister. When India liberalized and multinationals and private companies began wooing the government for entry into India, the Kohlis were right there to help them advertise to the masses.

The advertising and packaging boom cushions mistakes. All Vikas’s decisions are right. Even those to come. He is corrective and combative with waiters in five-star hotel restaurants, ushers at movie theatres, his personal barber. He admonishes his gardener, his security guard, his drivers—whom he now calls chauffeurs. No one challenges him, no one protests, so he brings his public imperiousness home.

Lord, give him a heart attack. Maim him before I sin
.

“What matters is who you know—not what you know,” Vikas often says to Anu. A member of the Old Boys Associations of Sanawar School and Hindu College, the Delhi Golf Club, the Habitat Centre and the India International Centre, he is proud to be even a Dependent Member of the venerable Delhi Gymkhana Club thanks to his father. He works hard to keep up with the party circuit. “We must attend,” is followed by, “I invited about eighty guests for cocktails and dinner, maybe fifty will turn up.” Which launches Anu into a frenzy of purchasing and cooking, and ordering shamiana-tents and caterers, flower arrangements and musicians, leaving no time to read or implement her own ideas, or even help Chetna with homework.

Nightly, Vikas makes shows of plenty to people who undertake fasts and pilgrimages and spend lakhs of rupees—no, crores of rupees—on religious ceremonies, weddings and birthday parties.
Nightly he exchanges gold-embossed invitations, floral arrangements and shiny wrapped gifts with people of high blood and low competence. They drink Dom Pérignon and eat canapés while the poor go unnoticed and unfed. He’s entangled her in a new version of colonialism.

Arrow number two: pale gold—colour of caution, colour of all those could-haves.

Could Anu have written to Vikas and confessed her feelings about children before the wedding, feelings everyone assured her would pass upon marriage? No. Vikas could have jilted her and left her reputation in tatters.

Could she have realized that Vikas was comparing her to someone? Anu writes the numeral one in gurmukhi script, then a three as if beginning an “om.” She extends its tail up, and over to join the beginning. One more arc jumping from there, and it becomes “Ik Onkar,” symbol of the Sikhs. There must have been more to his first fiancée, besides her religion.

And now Arrow number three: Green for Chetna—colour of movement, change, and growth. With the green pencil, Anu draws, then colours in a telephone receiver.

Anu had been on the phone with Rano late at night. Vikas was travelling. Rano was on her lunch hour, as lonely in Toronto as Anu was in Delhi. After the usual discussion of family members, Rano said her period had come again, and she’d cried, and so had her husband, Jatin. Six thousand dollars worth of fertility treatments, all for nothing. Two little blocked fallopian tubes and she just cannot conceive.

Then Rano had asked delicately about Vikas, and Anu began in a falsely bright tone. But she soon faltered, tears came, and she whispered to her cousin, “You know how it was, Rano. I never wanted this child.” And Rano said, “Hai, don’t say that, sis. Listen, Anu. Listen very carefully. If you really don’t want her, send her to me. Jatin will be delighted, I know.”

And the next moment, a click on the line. Had Vikas come home early and heard her? She hung up quickly and walked into the kitchen. There was Chetna, receiver in hand, tears plopping into her Ovaltine-laced milk.

“You never wanted me, Mummy, you don’t want me.”

“Oh, no darling,” she’d said. “It’s just that I’d promised myself I’d never have a child—any child.” How could she explain that at twenty, she walked around looking like a woman, feeling feminine—attractive, caring, kind, able to feel for the aged or sick without reserve, feeling no distaste for children, overflowing with love for parents, relatives, fiancé, country—but failing to need a child of her own?

Maybe one day Chetna will understand Anu’s promise to herself to remain childless. When Anu was growing up the US Agency for International Development, World Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, WHO, Swedish International Development Authority, Population Council, UNFPA, IMF and Indian Government all tutt-tutt-tutted that Indian women were having far too many children. Restrain yourselves! they said. It’s an explosion, said European experts, even as their armies pointed missiles at one another. You’re procreating too often, they said, even as the Pill bifurcated procreation from pleasure. Control your breeding, they said, and there’ll be more water, food, land and brotherly love for each man, woman and child in India. Back in the early seventies the slogan went, “India was Indira and Indira was India,” and Madam G. loomed on billboards at traffic intersections, berating Indians for having more than two children. The year India managed to sterilize six and a half million men, a younger Anu told Rano that having children was a selfish act of self-perpetuation, an imposition on India’s resources, and a sacrifice of a woman’s independence. She would have self-control.