Damini snatches up her dupatta and drapes it across her chest, slips into her rubber sandals, and rushes downstairs. As she runs down the driveway, she yells again and again that she’s coming, she’s sorry, it was her fault for sleeping so soundly. As soon as she unlocks the double gates and pushes them open, he strides past her, bounds up the driveway, dashes upstairs and begins shouting at his mother.
Mem-saab is standing at the front door of her apartment, fumbling with the zip of her dressing gown. Confronted by her son’s ferocious look, she gazes first at Amanjit’s lips, then over his shoulder at Damini, her eyes huge and questioning.
This turbaned man, who Damini knew when he was still coaxing his beard with coconut oil, towers over his mother and shouts, “You knew I was coming, and you locked me out of my father’s house!”
Aman could be yawning or yelping for all Mem-saab knows. He should speak slowly. He should remember Mem-saab can’t lip-read properly through a moustache and beard—even a tidily rolled, hair-netted beard such as his.
Damini ducks past them through the doorway, and takes her place behind Mem-saab. She lays her hand gently on Mem-saab’s shoulder. “Be more respectful, Aman-ji,” says Damini, her respectful “ji” coming with effort. “No one was trying to lock you out. See, everything is open.” She needs an excuse to come between them—she takes a dupatta from its hook behind the door, and offers it to Mem-saab to cover her head. “She’s old and left without a man to protect her.”
That should shame him. He should remember his duty to protect his mother. But there’s no shame in the look he flashes at Damini. That look says she may have been his mother’s ears since he was twenty-two, but she is only that pair of ears. “Go, Damini-amma.” His thumb jerks past her eye. “Go sit in the kitchen.”
Damini ignores that thumb as she used to ignore his tantrums, and helps Mem-saab to her room instead. Mem-saab’s grip on her arm is tighter than usual.
Aman is now shouting down the stairs for Khansama, the cook who is probably still in his servant quarters. “Bring my suitcase,” he yells. The Embassy-man, his wife and children, who rent the five bedrooms on the ground floor, must be well woken up by now. She hears the cook’s sandals slap-slap on the driveway as he runs to the gate.
Damini fetches Mem-saab’s silver water glass and her pills. Mem-saab says, “Tell Aman I am not signing any more papers. I already gave him twenty-five percent of this house last time he came.” She makes her way to the bathroom and closes the door.
Water purrs into the plastic bucket. Mem-saab’s preparing to bathe, without taking a single cup of tea.
Damini goes to deliver Mem-saab’s message but Aman has pointedly closed the door to his father’s room. She can hear him inside, unpacking. She could shout or write a note to slip under the door, but Mem-saab’s message might make matters worse. Soon he will want breakfast.
Mem-saab has begun reciting the Japji aloud in her tuneless chant—she must have emerged from the bathroom. The prayer takes about twenty minutes. Mem-saab should eat breakfast immediately afterwards, to avoid further argument.
Damini opens the screen door to the kitchen and pops her head in so she doesn’t have to remove her sandals. The rail-thin cook looks up from his cane stool, his face grey-brown as a potato. Why doesn’t he just wear a moustache and beard? Then he won’t look like a parched lawn every morning. Hairy forearms poke from his sleep-rumpled kurta and rest upon pyjama-clad knees. Even his toes look like small potatoes.
“Khansama,” says Damini, severely enough to pull him together, “Serve Mem-saab her breakfast.”
Back in Mem-saab’s room, she squats in front of Mem-saab’s chair and enters the chant with her. When the prayer is over and Mem-saab opens her eyes, Damini mouths soundlessly, “What does he want you to sign?”
“He wants me to give all of this house to him and Timcu.”
“Will they live with us?” Damini mouths. Khansama will need to know—he has four children and a wife in the one-room servants’ quarters behind the house. As for Damini, she has a son; she will never need to go begging. Unless Suresh has somehow learned disrespect, like Aman.
“No, they want to make condos in its place,” Mem-saab’s voice swoops like a bulbul bird ascending. Damini gives a hand signal for her to lower it.
“What is ‘condos’?”
“Tall buildings.”
Damini can tell Mem-saab doesn’t quite understand the word either, though she has two more years of schooling than Damini, having studied up to Class 10. At sixteen, the chauthi-lav of the Sikh marriage ceremony ringing in her jewelled ears, Mem-saab came from Pari Darvaza, her village in the part of Punjab that was cut away to make Pakistan. Came wrapped in red silk to ornament Sardar-saab’s home in Rawalpindi as his second wife, to birth the sons his first wife couldn’t. There was one daughter who died early. Then Devinder, pet named Timcu, then Amanjit.
So respectful was Mem-saab, she never used her husband’s real name or called him the familiar tu, even after his first wife died. Always, she called him Sardar-ji. After their home in Rawalpindi was abandoned to the Muslims of Pakistan in August 1947, they fled to Delhi and built their lives along with the city.
Until Sardar-saab’s demise, Mem-saab needed only to know to pray, decorate the house, shop and give orders to servants.
It’s about thirty rains since Damini came from Gurkot in the hills to live here—perhaps more, perhaps less, for sometimes the rains desert the land, sometimes they are ceaseless. And the saab-log have the abroad calendar, ordinary people have the harvest and temple calendar. But for about thirty years, Damini has only needed to know the art of massage and the timing that turns flattery to praise.
But now …
“Where will we live?” she asks Mem-saab.
“Aman is concerned about me here … such a big house … alone … with my poor health.”
Aman’s concern is like a farmer’s for a crop of jute—how much can be harvested and how much will it bring? And Mem-saab is not alone. Damini is here. And Khansama, the driver, two gardeners, two sweepers, a daytime security guard, the washerman, the Embassy-man’s servants—each looks after her as if she were his mother.
But we are nothing, no one for the saab-log.
“He says a smaller house in Delhi would be better, or that I should go to the hills and live in the Big House in Gurkot.” Mem-saab means the estate Sardar-saab received as compensation from the Government of India for the loss of his home and villages in Pakistan.
“The snow there gets this high,” Damini says, bringing her palm level with her midriff. “Too cold for you. And me. Though the first year I came to Delhi, I thought I’d die of the heat.”
That year began auspiciously enough with her success in giving birth to Suresh, after only one daughter, Leela. But then Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru died, and the whole country mourned. Then her Piara Singh was electrocuted while working and Damini consigned her marriage collar to his funeral pyre after less than five years as a wife. In Gurkot, in those days, everyone did khuss-puss, khuss-puss whispering Damini must have done something terrible in a past life to give her widowhood in this one. That Piara Singh’s death was foretold, that Damini’s bhagya in this life was to be a living ghost. And far away in New Delhi, young Mem-saab’s ears stopped speaking to her. So at the end of peach season, Sardar-saab hired Damini to replace those ears, and Damini left Suresh and Leela with her in-laws and became an amma in Delhi.
Mem-saab sighs, “Money—the expectation of Sardar-ji’s money—is changing my sons.”
Changing? Damini remembers the first time she saw Aman: home from university hostel for the winter holidays, whipping a tonga horse who could go no faster. And his elder brother Timcu, not restraining Aman, just letting him do it! She remembers Aman a few years later, laughing when a barefoot beggar dived into a ditchful of slime to escape the swerve of his car. And Timcu in the front seat with him, estimating the amount they’d need for a police bribe to forget the poor man’s li
fe, should it come to that. A good amma needs to forget much more than she remembers.
“How true, how true,” she replies, hanging up Mem-saab’s dressing gown.
If Amanjit and Timcu still had a sister, maybe they would be kinder. And if Aman and Timcu had been younger when Damini came, maybe she could have taught them more gentleness. But like Mem-saab, she gave these little maharajas too much love, too much forgiveness. She passed down their clothes to Suresh and gave them all the blessings and hopes she should have given to her own children.
Leela understands. She knows that but for their fear of Sardar-saab, Piara Singh’s brothers would have thrown Damini out. But here, an amma gets chai in the morning and two meals a day.
Damini chooses three salwar-kameezes from the cupboard and shows them to Mem-saab, along with chiffon dupattas. If the salwar, kameez or dupatta is a slightly different shade, Mem-saab will look bad.
Piara Singh’s brothers were a shade different from him—just enough to make the whole family look bad. But their karma caught up. They had many misfortunes, while Damini has survived when so many said she would end up selling her body for money. She has her ears, she has strong hands and bhagya.
Mem-saab points to a rose and grey silk. Damini lays it on the bed.
Aman has a business that exports fine silks like these. And women’s clothing that would barely cover a child. Another business sells plywood, furniture, crates, cricket bats, hockey sticks, cedar oil and varnish. And Timcu—instead of becoming a doctor so he could cure the pains that strike his mother every time she climbs the stairs—Timcu is an astrologer in Canada, divining if prices will go up or down and will there be too much of one thing and not of another. Even his Damini-amma knows prices go up and there is never too much of anything in this eon of greed called Kalyug. So much money spent on Timcu’s education, and the man cannot even tell Damini if Suresh will love her when she can no longer give him money.
Foolish mothers like me make astrologers rich.
A knock at the door—Khansama’s standing outside, steam rising from the tray in his hands. He has changed his kurta.
Damini takes the tray and elbows the door shut. She places it on a small table in the sitting area and helps Mem-saab to her sofa-chair. Damini adjusts the table before her, pours milk into the bowl of oatmeal, adds raisins and honey.
Mem-saab’s spoon stops halfway to her lips. “Where’s he now?”
Damini can hear Aman opening and closing drawers, then a creak as Sardar-saab’s mirror tilts for the first time in seven years. He’s trying on a dead man’s silk ties and turbans. “Unpacking,” she says.
“Stand here while I eat.” The order is a plea. There are things Aman cannot say to his mother in the presence of a servant.
When she has finished, Damini helps her to dress and then calls, “Khansama, tell Zahir Sheikh to bring Mem-saab’s car.” Her driver will take Mem-saab shopping before the May sun beats down at full strength.
Damini takes her towel upstairs to the terrace. She uses the squat-toilet in her wash area behind the half-wall, and then sits before the tap. She pulls a basin of soiled clothing across the floor, and waits for a thin stream of water.
Aromas of scrambled egg-bhurji, toast and butter rise up the stairwell as she kneads Mem-saab’s heavy silk salwar-kameezes, then Mem-saab’s transparent dupattas. Rising, she moves past the half-wall to hang the clothes on the line.
Returning to the wash area, Damini half-fills a plastic bucket, pulls her kameez over her head and steps from the legs of her salwar. The water, sun-warmed from the tank at the other end of the terrace, wakes the skin of her forehead and shoulders.
Piara Singh never lived with these rounded shoulders, this slight pot-belly, these grey strands between her legs. But those legs are as lean and strong as when her husband was alive, her breasts still heavy, sagging only a little.
Somewhere below the canopy of gulmohar trees that screens her view of the driveway, Aman is shouting for Khansama to stop a taxi on the main road. Damini towels dry.
The taxi-man honks as Damini steps into a clean salwar and ties its cord at her waist.
Aman clatters down the stairs, shouting at Khansama. Why hasn’t the cook placed his ice water Thermos and his briefcase in the taxi yet? How many times does Khansama need to be reminded?
She pulls a clean kameez over her head and smooths it till it falls below her knees.
She can’t see Khansama or Aman. “Answer me, don’t just stand there—are you or are you not a moron?”
Some English words require no translation.
Khansama, have a thick skin.
Aman leaves. The house crouches in waiting silence.
“That suitcase was heavy.” Khansama takes a stool beside Damini, and leans back against the red gas cylinder of the two-burner hotplate.
Damini chews slowly on her morning roti, then takes a sip of chai. “How much did he pay you this time?”
“Full five hundred rupees.” He fans himself with the notes.
Just for carrying a suitcase? Payment to forget Aman called him a moron.
“You’ve forgotten your cap. Mem-saab will find your hair in the curry tonight,” says Damini.
Khansama rises and rummages in a cupboard as if he hasn’t heard her. He forgets sometimes that he is just a servant. He forgets even more often that there can be honour only from serving those who have honour.
When Sardar-saab was still in this life, Khansama made rogan josh and chicken jalfrezi swimming in layers of pure butter-ghee. His curries, Sardar-saab used to say, were better than those in five-star hotels. And sweet rice, and phirni fragrant with rosewater. He should have been told, “Hmm, these are good but you can do better.” But Mem-saab gave him so many compliments, now everyone has to suffer his swelled head. He sits idle most of the day now, and describes flavours and dishes he dreams of cooking—since she became a widow, Mem-saab doesn’t order meat or sweets unless she has guests.
Khansama places a small steel bowl before Damini—sugar for her second cup of tea. Damini swirls the square granules with her forefinger.
She lost her sweet tooth a year and a half ago on a December day when she saw Suresh on TV. There was her son—or someone just like him—at the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, clambering up the half-demolished sides of a masjid. The masjid was built by Muslims recently, only seven centuries ago. Who but his mother could have recognised that beloved face twisted with anger, those hands wielding a metal truncheon? Certainly no one in Ayodhya.
Suresh had been transported from Delhi along with 200,000 others by leaders in Nehru caps and sadhus in saffron robes. He looked fearless and brave on TV, shouting slogans as he and his fellow pilgrims leapt into the fray and tore down the Babri Masjid. As if fighting the whole Mughal Empire, more than three hundred years after its collapse.
But later, shame churned in Damini’s stomach like the milky ocean that birthed the world. Such disrespect for a sacred place. Had she taught him that? Had she forgiven him too many small paaps along the way?
She should, she could, she will, one day, ask Suresh if he was there. Can a mother mistake another woman’s son for her own? Impossible. But if he was there, Suresh had committed destruction that is only the right of Lord Shiv.
At that moment her taste for sweetness vanished.
Khansama raises his rupees to a shaft of sunlight that knifes through the chic-bamboo blinds. The notes are worn in the centre, but acceptable.
“Only a fool accepts dirty money,” says Damini—then regrets speaking so sharply to a man who has already been called a moron today. He may not be a moron, just a witless donkey.
“He says he will bring his wife and daughter and they will move in here too,” says Khansama.
“Here?”
“Where else? You too are becoming deaf.”
“Get a few years and some wisdom and your ears will ignore echoes from empty vessels: there are only two bedrooms on this floor. The second is not large enough
for three people. If Aman moves in downstairs, Mem-saab will lose her income.”
“Aman-ji says he will build more rooms upstairs.”
On the third storey? Then where will Damini relieve herself? Where will she bathe? She’ll have to share the wash area with Khansama’s family. Or will Mem-saab allow Damini to share her bathroom if the sweeper cleans it afterwards? After all, Mem-saab’s Japji prayer says there’s no high-up, no low-down, all equal-equal. Damini may not be saab-log like Mem-saab, but she is a kshatriya. A warrior descended from rajas, not a sweeper. So maybe she can share Mem-saab’s bathroom. That is difficult to imagine.
Much has changed in thirty years—people in towns and cities eat from chai-stalls and in restaurants and who knows if a brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya, sudra or outcaste cooked their food or ate from the same plates, or drank from the same glass? Respected people use public bathrooms that might have been used by lower castes. Newer buildings don’t have two doors into the bathrooms, and outcastes enter from the same door as Hindus with caste.
But even in this Sikh household, where caste is banished by decree of ten gurus, when Timcu cut his hair and stopped wearing a turban to marry a no-caste gora woman in Canada, Sardar-saab would not write to him for several years.
Mem-saab, a generation younger than her husband, is a better Sikh. She wouldn’t treat Damini like a sweeper. Damini has accepted the ten gurus as her gods and become a Sikh for Mem-saab’s sake. Damini’s husband’s name, which she writes as her second name to get his pension, was Singh—just like a Sikh. And a few times, when Mem-saab had no appetite, Damini persuaded her to eat a little from her own plate, as sisters do.
Hai! Sometimes Damini needs more gods than one, and more than ten gurus for inspiration; maybe she should become a Hindu again.
“Are you finished?” Khansama says, pointing to the steel bowl with the sugar.
Sardar-saab used to say never trust a clean-shaven man. Potato-face looks happy; to those who follow him, Aman can be the smile of Lords Ram, Krishna and Ganesh in one.
The Selector of Souls Page 2
