The Selector of Souls

  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.

  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.”

  ANU

  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 wa
ving 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.