The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Vikas waves, and soon his father is seated beside him, ordering tea and pineapple pastries.

  “Not to worry, beta.” Mr. Lalit Kohli pats his son’s hand. “Not your fault.”

  “Yes,” says Vikas. “You chose her—ji.”

  “Well, we thought she would be better than that …” His father trails off.

  “Just as you thought it would be better for me to run Kohlisons Media than get a Masters.”

  “Then what? You were going to be another Homi Bhabha, hmm? Arrey! The nuclear programme has already been founded.”

  “I topped the class in physics, even though I got a second div overall.”

  “You’ve always topped every class. You used to catch the teachers’ errors. But remember how many M.Sc. seats were left for us Forward castes after the quotas for Backward caste people were set? Five—just five. I would have needed lakhs and lakhs of rupees as ‘donation’ for your admission. I told you you could apply to study in England or the US. Less competitive.”

  Vikas shakes his head. “Cook, wash dishes and clean my own toilet in some student apartment? Not my style, Dad.”

  “Ah, here are the pastries. Vickoo—have one.”

  Vikas cuts through foamy cream and crushed pineapple to the layer of plain cake, and takes a bite. “Not as good as at the Taj Hotel.”

  The tea steeps in silence.

  Eventually Mr. Kohli pours, adds milk to his own cup, then Vikas’s. “I say Vikas, what’s that around your neck?”

  “Photo of Swami Rudransh. His society ordered ten thousand medallions for his All India campaign. Devotees will buy them along with his bottles of energized water and vials of herbal medicines—we’re designing and printing the labels.”

  “Very good, very good.” Mr. Kohli leans forward to peer at the swami’s bindi. “Did he tell what his problem was with the last advertising chap?”

  “The fellow didn’t like his calling Partition ‘the truncation of India.’ Wanted him to call the murder of Gandhi an ‘assassination.’ Didn’t like him talking about minority appeasement.”

  “That chap will remain a two-bit operator forever. One day he’ll wish he could ruddy influence things. Sugar?”

  “No, ji. Playing a match tomorrow morning. Better not eat too much, too.” He pushes away his half-eaten pastry with more force than necessary. He looks around.

  Couples all over the place. Gora men take their blasted wives everywhere they go.

  “Come, come,” his father is saying. “Not the end of the world. Hurried too much, last time. Should have checked the femily history.”

  “Not femily, dad, fam-ily.”

  “Bloody English language specialist, you’ve become? Vikas, this is good in the long run—pay her off, marry again. You’re worth at least fifty lakhs—this time we won’t be shy to ask.”

  Vikas’s fist crashes to the envelope. A couple of tourists look around in consternation. He lowers his voice to a hiss. “Don’t you marry me off again right away, even for a nice dowry. I’m going to contest this.”

  “Look here my boy, if you don’t settle we’ll be in court for years, and you can’t marry until and unless you’re divorced. No good family in Delhi is going to give you a girl before that. Why waste money on lawyers?”

  “I can’t let her think she’s beaten me.”

  Mr. Kohli dabs whipped cream from his moustache. “True. I’m not saying you can’t have a floozy or two in the years you’re in court, but these days you have to worry about AIDS and herpes and syphilis—remember: no foreign floozies!”

  “I’ve time for floozies?” says Vikas. “Have to run the company, remember? So that my six cousin-brothers can be paid both over and under the table?”

  “Cousin-brothers, brothers—same thing, Vikas. They also have to live.”

  “Their club bills tell me they live very well.”

  Mr. Lal and Anupam’s tall stooped uncle Mr. Talwar have arrived at the table. They have a sheepish, apologetic air—as they should, as they should. Vikas rises to greet them, then more tea is ordered, more pineapple pastries.

  All they want, Mr. Lal begins, is an amicable settlement. His middle finger jabs his black glasses up the slick slope of his nose. “Best for both families,” he says. The three older men nod at Vikas.

  Vikas adopts a tone halfway between businesslike and deferential. “Your daughter,” he tells his father-in-law, “thinks she can do whatever she likes. No concept of family—no concept at all. Never satisfied. Did you know I told your daughter to quit her silly job but she wouldn’t?”

  “I always told her to be independent and strong.”

  “Independent? Day after day she’s sitting at Adventure Travel, enticing goras and Muslims to pollute India with their presence. After all the trouble we Hindus went through to get Independence.”

  “Then what should she do?”

  “I told her, ‘Come and work at Kohlisons Media,’ and she asked how much I would pay?”

  Actually, Vikas only read the question on Anupam’s face. She hadn’t said it, but meant to, he could tell.

  Mr. Lal looks confused. “Anu volunteers whenever and wherever people need her. But even if she did say it, what’s wrong with paying family workers in a family business?” His middle finger rises into view, jabs at his black-rimmed glasses and subsides. “Family businesses don’t all rely on slave labour.”

  “Slave labour! Huh.” Mr. Kohli’s index finger taps the table. “Your daughter should be grateful she wasn’t married to a Muslim, Lal-saab. They have exported legions of Hindu slaves to the Middle East.”

  His father sounds as if the Mughal slave trading of the sixteenth century were still in progress, but Vikas isn’t going to object.

  “No, sir,” Mr. Kohli continues. “Instead the slave is my son, working and working all the time.”

  Dad’s right about that. Time to go on the offensive.

  “And I ask you, does a man pay his wife?” says Vikas. “You might as well ask him to pay his son. If it was for tax reasons, certainly—but to demand it?”

  “I hear you hit her when she wouldn’t quit her job.”

  “All I said was: out of one pocket and into another.” His tone says if he hit Anu, he was justified. “She just wouldn’t understand simple arithmetic.”

  “Accounting is always at femily level, Mr. Lal,” Mr. Kohli intones. “You never taught her that?”

  “Even if he never taught her, I did,” says Vikas. “Told her many times. But she doesn’t have much of a brain that she can learn.”

  “I hope,” says Mr. Lal, his middle finger slowly rising again, “for Chetna’s sake, that one day you won’t find yourself trying to be polite to a man who hits your daughter and thinks you’ll agree that she deserved it.” The finger jabs again at his spectacles.

  “I have consulted my lawyer,” Vikas says. “I will countersue. I have complaints. Frigidity, for instance.”

  “Women need persuasion, Vikas,” Mr. Lal’s hand hovers as if he’s about to reach for Vikas’s cuff.

  Vikas recoils. “I have been very patient, ji,” he says. “But your daughter has a kink in the brain. Don’t think I’m joking. You should have her checked by a psychiatrist. Maybe she’s bipolar.”

  “Shhhh,” Mr. Lal’s gaze caroms around the room. “She’s almost twenty-nine, ji, I can’t ‘have her checked’ by anyone.”

  “All she ever said was No. That’s not a normal woman. You should have named her Anuchit—abnormal.”

  “Her name is Anupam, meaning special.”

  “Your so-special so-educated Hindu daughter got the idea she should refuse to have even one,” Mr. Kohli says, leaning closer to Vikas. “We Hindus are a dying breed, Mr. Lal. Because we do just what the government slogan says: ‘We are two, we have two.’ But Muslims and Christians say, ‘We are five, and we have twenty-five.’ ”

  “Who is using such a slogan, ji?” says Mr. Lal. “It’s all in your mind.”

  “In my mind? At the Muslim and
Christian rate of multiplication, we Hindus will be outnumbered and outvoted in just a few years time. Chunks of the country will become majority Muslim, or majority Christian.”

  “Then what will happen, ji?” Mr. Lal has the temerity to look amused.

  Mr. Kohli continues, “Then they will secede as in ’47, and we’ll lose more chunks of the motherland.”

  “Why should anyone secede nowadays—unless we treat them badly?” says Mr. Lal, looking mystified.

  “Because both the Kaaba and Rome do not lie in India,” Mr. Kohli slurps his tea. “Only Hindus consider India both fatherland and holy land.”

  “So said Savarkar, yes, but I wouldn’t quote that warmonger,” says Mr. Lal. “I consider India my motherland and the whole world as holy.”

  “The whole world does not consider India holy—all the whole world has ever done is colonize us. First the Muslims, then the British chaps, now the American guys. But it’s all enslavement. Your kind of thinking,” says Mr. Kohli, tapping his temple, “has allowed this to happen. And your kind of thinking is your daughter’s.”

  “Anu has ideas of her own,” says Mr. Lal.

  Mr. Talwar’s lips purse in agreement with his brother-in-law.

  “Ideas come from somewhere, no?” says Dad. “Nothing in the universe is original.”

  “Do you tell your clients that?” says Anu’s father.

  “No, we say our advertising is completely original. That’s what foreign companies expect us to say, so we say it. But you know what we find, Lal-saab? Genuine Indians want the old traditions and the same old stories, dressed up in technicolour.”

  “Who is this Mr. Genuine Indian?”

  Mr. Kohli reaches around the teapot and helps himself to more sugar. “I made a Himalayan blunder by marrying your daughter to my son. You should reread the vedas. Tell your daughter to do so as well.”

  “We must abandon Manu if we want to progress,” says Mr. Lal.

  “Why latch onto that? Read and understand all the vedas, sir, not only the Code of Manu about women. The vedas are beyond progress.”

  “Only god is beyond progress, Kohli-saab. The vedas are man-made and as flawed as all of us—even you, even your son.”

  His father turns to Vikas. “If this is the kind of argumentation you have had to put up with, it shows how misguided your wife has been.” He rounds on Mr. Lal. “Sir, you encouraged your daughter to believe she could shirk her duties and live a man’s life. If this is what convent education does, then I say your mistake lies in educating her. Tell me, sir, what would happen if every daughter-in-law in every femily said she doesn’t want children?”

  “Chaos,” says Mr. Talwar with a head-tilt of agreement.

  Ah, dissension. Anupam’s father quells his brother-in-law with a glance.

  “This is a matter of two individuals, Anu and Vikas,” says Mr. Lal.

  “No sir.” Mr. Kohli sounds as if his collar is too tight. “People have roles in their families, people have obligations. A man can’t fulfill a woman’s obligations and a woman can’t fulfil those of a man.” He takes another slurp of tea. “So we must follow nature.”

  “We don’t follow nature in all ways, Kohli-saab. We don’t stay illiterate, or run around without clothes. I’m saying each person should follow his or her own nature.”

  “If a woman wishes to belong to a femily,” says Dad, “she will follow the nature of the femily, she will adjust.”

  Mr. Talwar’s head is tilting again, but Vikas’s father-in-law bristles in defence of his daughter. “She did. She had a child, just as you wanted. And we must discuss that child.”

  Mr. Kohli waves this away, “A daughter—very sweet girl, pretty child.” He pauses, studying his gold watch meaningfully. “But I’m talking about sons, Lal-saab, sons.”

  Mr. Lal is going on now about how daughters and sons are the same. And once they are born, you have a duty … etcetera etcetera.

  Chetna—another duty.

  A nauseating feeling of helplessness comes over Vikas.

  He’ll have to be both father and mother to Chetna. He’s not fit for motherhood. He’ll lose his mind. He could hire a few maids, ammas, ayahs, nannies, tutors. And those servants require supervision and become his responsibility even as they grow old and die—along with their families.

  He closes his eyes.

  Be practical. The law gives custody but how can he look after a child, run an advertising empire, and play four to six chukkers twice a week? And golf whenever he must entertain foreign clients.

  Boarding school, like his alma mater? Waste of money. A girl doesn’t have the intellect. She doesn’t need life-long membership in an old boys’ association.

  Dad is saying his wife’s meditation sessions with Swami Rudransh cannot be disturbed by looking after Chetna. But Vikas knows that his mother’s almost continuous state of blissful inebriation makes her unsuitable for looking after Chetna. He loves his mother, of course he does, but she is—always was—so inconsiderate. If she had made a brother for Vikas, he could park the girl with his brother’s family.

  No, let the Lal family look after her. Let pushy Rano and her impotent husband keep her. Canadians now, they can afford it. “The girl should remain where she is,” he says aloud. “I have other priorities.”

  “If you want her back,” says Mr. Lal, “All you have to do is ask.”

  Anger streaks through Vikas’s veins. Why should he have to ask anyone for anything? Aloud, he says, “How do I know?—she may not be mine.”

  Mr. Lal immediately offers to have Chetna’s DNA matched to Vikas’s. The two DNA labs in the country are booked till next year, but after that …

  But Vikas cannot stand entering a hospital. Being vaccinated turns his stomach. Once in bio class, he was reading about mucus and disgust so overcame him, he almost passed out. Another time he gave blood after every classfellow had volunteered, and felt weak for days. When Chetna was born, he didn’t want to see her till all the body fluids were cleaned off. “I don’t have to submit to any such test,” he says.

  Mr. Lal is looking as if Vikas’s refusal resolves the fatherhood question.

  Such a fool. But if he weren’t such a fool, he’d be in business not government.

  “You’re a dutiful father, you must be responsible for Chetna’s wedding.” Mr. Lal is leaning too close. Does his father-in-law think he can’t afford a wedding, today or ten years hence?

  His own father’s restraining hand weighs on his arm but Vikas ignores it. “There’s no must about it,” he says, “but I will.”

  “I will also ask that you not try to see Anu until that wedding. She has suffered a great deal. If not, I will request the court for a restraining order.”

  “Request whatever you like,” says Vikas, baring his teeth in a smile. “I too have suffered. Am suffering.”

  Mr. Talwar’s oily voice says, “Both families are at fault, ji, both families.”

  Vikas purses his lips. Fuckwit. Probably worried Kohlisons Media will move its accounts to Citibank, HSBC or Scotiabank. Serve him right if he did, but how can he think a patriot would move from an Indian bank, even given the circumstances?

  Mr. Lal says, “Your family should also have tried to adjust to Anu, not only our family trying to adjust to you.”

  Vikas snorts. “Why?”

  “Because she is a person.”

  Vikas doesn’t need to respond—his father is wearing a castor-oil face.

  Mr. Kohli pulls a paper from his coat pocket. “A list of jewellery our femily gave yours at the wedding. Almost twenty lakhs worth of gold. Your femily must return them.”

  Anu’s father takes the paper. “Her marriage necklace, of course. But the rest? These were wedding gifts to Anu. She told me she left all the jewellery she received from your side at your home. I said she shouldn’t have and that her personal jewellery is hers by law!”

  The outrage and surprise on his father-in-law’s face sends a jolt of irritation down Vikas’s spine. />
  Pretending he doesn’t know wedding gifts are for show.

  Mr. Kohli says, “What law? Marriage ends: you take back the girl, we take back the jewellery. Tell her she’s lucky. Because this is what would have happened to her in my day …” His forefinger forms a pistol barrel, and arcs over the table aiming at an absent Anu, “Phatttt!”

  Lal and Talwar recoil.

  Does he think anyone gave gifts especially for his daughter, when all they knew of her was her name? Vikas rises to his feet like a coiled spring. Mr. Kohli follows.

  The Lal family can foot the bill.

  DAMINI

  FOR A WEEK AFTER THE COURT HEARING, MEM-SAAB asks every day if there is a letter from Timcu.

  “No,” says Damini, “no letter.” And since that call in May the day after Aman arrived, almost three months ago, when she told Timcu Mem-saab was well, no phone call either. Damini considers writing to him but she cannot form English letters and is not sure he remembers how to read Devanagari script. And how can she write complaints against his brother?

  Today there is a square envelope from the Embassy-man. Mem-saab reads the English note—it asks if he may come to tea with Mem-saab. Mem-saab sends Damini downstairs with a note saying yes.

  Damini tells Khansama to make cake and jalebis, and knows this means Amanjit and Kiran will be notified as well.

  It takes Mem-saab most of the morning to dress and prepare; she rests often to ease the pain in her chest. All afternoon, she sits watching the downpour and waiting for tea as though the Embassy-man were one of the relatives.

  Khansama wheels in the trolley as usual, but he doesn’t leave the room afterwards. He stands by the door, hands clasped before him. He must have to report back to Aman.

  The Embassy-man asks for tea without milk. In English. Damini pretends not to understand.

  He should learn Hindi if he wants me to help him talk to Mem-saab.

  Mem-saab pours milk in the Embassy-man’s teacup.

  “As you know—” the cup is small in his large hand. He gazes at the pale swirling surface, “my lease is till the end of this month.”