The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Damini is all praise for her erstwhile family, and doesn’t tell them how Mem-saab’s educated son behaved. But she can’t help the little sarcastic note that creeps into her voice when she refers to them.

  In each home, she hears again that Amanjit is planning to build twenty-five cottages on the forested hill below the Golunath temple. He has a permit to cut down several hundred trees, and money from the government, they say. In return, Aman has promised to build a school and a clinic for the people of Gurkot.

  Damini hugs herself in secret glee: the government is requiring Amanjit to carry out Mem-saab’s wishes. Karma always catches up. That’s its beauty, that’s its terror.

  At the home of one of her husband’s relatives, who can recite his lineage back to a Hill Raja, Damini holds a cup of head-clearing ginger tea with the corner of her sari. His wife Chimta—so grasping of gossipy details, she’s nicknamed for a pair of tongs—crochets a shoulder bag. “Amanjit-saab said there will be many jobs.”

  “When?” says Damini.

  “Now, as he redesigns his father’s home. My husband says the sawmill manager is increasing production, the trucking company manager is calling in more trucks. And later, there will be even more jobs when Vee-Eye-Pees from Delhi and En-Are-Eyes from abroad buy his cottages.”

  Damini doesn’t think people like Timcu, the only non-resident Indian she knows, would buy cottages so far from Shimla airport. But they all drive imported cars now, like rajas and ranis, and those cars are smoother over potholes than Mem-saab’s old Ambassador … “What kind of jobs?” she says.

  “Construction,” says Chimta. Her needle dips and flashes; the net widens.

  “Those won’t last,” says Damini. “Then there will only be sweeper jobs.”

  “Our family doesn’t do sweeper jobs,” says Chimta, not missing a stitch. “If that’s what he has, let him offer them to low-castes. Get some Sikhs, Christians and Muslims, or bring in workmen from Nepal and Bihar.”

  Damini takes her leave and goes on to the next home.

  To those who ask, and many do, Damini says she is only visiting to help Leela through her delivery, and doesn’t mention she only learned Leela was pregnant when she arrived.

  “But you should tell her to go to her in-laws for the delivery,” says Matki. Her older children used to play with Suresh and Leela and she earned her nickname—earthen pot—because she looks just like one when pregnant. “She’s lost two children because she lives separate-separate from her husband’s family.” Loyalty restrains Damini from saying that Chunilal is estranged from his father and brothers. And everyone knows it—I shouldn’t remind them.

  Halfway down the hill, sipping tea in an inner room with a relative nicknamed Tubelight, Damini can feel the woman’s assumption that she will leave soon after Leela’s delivery.

  “Is your son all right?” Tubelight asks in snide tones. From the shadows, Tubelight’s mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law watch Damini intently.

  “Oh, yes,” says Damini and delivers her prepared speech: “Suresh is looking for a better job and a flat where he will have room for me and a daughter-in-law who will look after me—but it’s very difficult to find a girl from a good family.” Meanwhile, she stresses, she will look after Chunilal so Leela can work.

  “Leela doesn’t have enough children to help her,” Tubelight says. “But that’s why she still looks so young. You too look young, because only two.” Why does Tubelight have to emphasize Damini’s widowhood, and resulting inability to bear more children?

  She was nicknamed Tubelight because she was never very bright.

  Kamna’s name comes up; Tubelight arches an eyebrow.

  Damini says, “Kamna is too young,” and does not say Chunilal cannot pay for a wedding at present.

  But Tubelight, who also has a fourteen-year-old daughter says, “You’ll keep young girls safe, making two families responsible if you go by reeti.” She doesn’t have to say, Forget custom and follow law, and she’ll be with you longer. One more mouth to feed and clothe. She doesn’t have to say, And don’t forget, later marriage means higher dowry.

  “She must be eighteen,” says Damini.

  “Ha!” says Tubelight. “Maybe in Delhi. Our police don’t notice the bride’s age as long as you invite them to the wedding.”

  Further downhill, old women tell her who has married whom, how many children they have, how old they are, whose son has left for which city, whose land is in dispute, and most important of all: which girls and boys are eligible for marriage. Good breeding, as every woman here knows, requires the best information about bloodlines and caste genealogies. They are required to breed out dark skin, cross-eyes; near-sightedness, tendencies toward deafness, weak digestion; tendencies toward laziness, hairiness, susceptibility to manipulation, mental instability, gambling, poor business sense, low ambition, over-ambition; too much influence of Mangal in the stars, selfishness, obstinacy and the like.

  “Selection,” says Supari, nicknamed for the betel nut that always stains her tongue and lips, “is our work. I too have a daughter who’s almost Kamna’s age. I must plan her seeding. And we must arrange marriages for the boys in the family. But if there is one problem, ji, just one—will I ever hear the end of it from my husband or his family?”

  By the time Damini arrives at Vijayanthi’s home, it is mid-afternoon and monsoon thunder is rolling across the sky. The old midwife squats beneath a thatched awning, her purple sari matching the shutters of her home. Her marriage collar has but two studs of gold, instead of the usual six. The terraces of her home are edged with pipe-railings instead of latticed cement walls, but she is respected for achieving more years than seventy. A little girl of about eighteen months rolls bare-bottomed on a mat beside her.

  Damini folds her hands in greeting and identifies herself, beginning with her in-laws, then Piara Singh. She mentions Suresh with some trepidation, remembering Vijayanthi once twisted his ears for disrespecting a boy only a few months his senior.

  Vijayanthi calls to a granddaughter to bring tea. She takes a turquoise and rose-pink fertilizer sack from a pile, and spreads it before her. She shakes out the urea-smelling plastic sack and separates the warp from the weft, raising a thread to close view, then laying it either to left or right. The toddler wanders perilously close to the edge of the cement terrace; Damini grabs her, saving the girl from plunging through the pipe railings and over the precipice. Vijayanthi doesn’t notice.

  Placing the little girl safely back on the mat, Damini squats beside Vijayanthi and begins to help.

  “I can still tell if the threads are blue or pink,” Vijayanthi says, smoothing a sheaf of blue threads. “There’ll be one pink rope, and three blue ones.”

  Vijayanthi says her seven sons now have nineteen grandsons among them, and only a few granddaughters. This one, she says of the little girl beside her, is her first great-grandchild. “Came instead of your brother, hein, Madhu?” she says, chucking the smiley little girl beneath the chin. “So, you have come all the way downhill to an old blind woman. Someone must be having a baby.”

  “My daughter, Leela.”

  “Naughty one, han! I remember. Married the trucker and he came to live here. Ttt-ttt.”

  “Yes.”

  “She already has a boy. Chalo!—maybe she will have a smarter one this time.”

  Vijayanthi’s granddaughter brings Damini what must be her fifteenth steel tumbler of tea that day, and softly pads away.

  “And you, have you attended a birthing before? I hear that son of yours is still looking for a girl to marry, so probably not.”

  “I helped a cow once,” says Damini, taking a sip. “And once I saw a dog give birth. And I went to a hospital with Mem-saab’s daughter in law—”

  “Hospitals—ha! Then you have seen what can happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Never, ever let a woman go to the hospital,” says Vijayanthi. “We don’t believe in cutting.”

  “Which cutting?”


  “They cut the woman to let the baby out.”

  “Oh, that cutting—yes.”

  “They take more money for that. Then they put stitches. Then they take money to remove the stitches. And the woman is useless for many weeks. Now I—I do massage.”

  “Massage is better,” Damini says agreeably, confident that she knows how to massage. And she knows the proper way to use Dettol, and about the ghosts called germs. Which is more than many women in Gurkot know, but it might seem like boasting to say so.

  Madhu reaches up and tugs at Damini’s dangling dupatta. Damini sets her tumbler down and helps the child stand and fall, stand and fall again.

  Vijayanthi crosses the terrace to the railing, counting her steps under her breath. A bottlebrush plant arches over her head. “You won’t be much help to your daughter during childbirth,” she says, after some thought. “I try to teach my grandson’s wife, but she says she can’t learn, even though her children are no longer at her breast. She just doesn’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night to deliver a baby. Says she works hard enough already. When I first came here as a bride, no one heard me complain, but young women these days—no dumm in them at all. They’re like this,” She reaches up, snaps a twig to demonstrate. “Still young women like your Leela—they need help. Babies—they need help.” She opens her arms wide as if taking in the immense bowl of tarnished silver sky. “Who else can help here? Doctors and nurses? Dais, ojhas, vaids, compounders—we are the only ones who help. I can tell you what to do, but I can’t do it anymore. Learn from me before I go to my next life. If Leela has any problems, you just pray to Anamika Devi.”

  Standing beside Vijayanthi, Damini gazes down. The hill, verdant with monsoon splendour, slopes from the last ploughed terrace below the house to the river. Waterfalls and feeder streams glint in the folds of the ranges, as if following the bones of a giant fish skeleton.

  Her eyes trace the river path as it enters a patch of trees and leads to a thin line of beach. Damini and Piara Singh used to meet there, out of sight of his parents. It was where they made Leela just the way Lord Brahma created the world—for no reason, just for play, just for delight. Hai, she must help Leela find delight again.

  In this season, the river, fed by monsoon water will be flowing wide and fast, drawing its clay colour from its bed. The silver flicker of the river below dances with the flicker in her stomach. She has to broach the subject.

  “Vijayanthi-ji,” says Damini. “You know my son-in-law Chunilal? He is unwell.”

  Vijayanthi is looking past her, but Damini can feel her listening.

  “He has been unwell for months. Leela is doing all the work. She has one daughter already, one son. Now is not the right time for Leela to have a third child. Yet she is already at seven months.”

  “She should have come to me or gone to Shimla before now.”

  “Yes, she should have. But she kept thinking Chunilal would get well. And then she thought maybe she would have it because she wants another son. But now … what if it’s a girl?”

  Madhu crawls over. Vijayanthi lifts her great-granddaughter and settles her on her hip.

  “If it’s a girl, Chunilal can’t send Leela away and marry another wife,” says Vijayanthi. “Leela is the mother of his son. It’s true, that son will be cheated by every buyer in the bazaar, but she gave him a son. What kind of son is Chunilal’s bhagya. Besides,” Vijayanthi gives a hearty cackle, “where would he send Leela—this is her village, she’s already home. So you’re thinking—what are you thinking?”

  Damini pulls her cloth bag forward and takes a pink flower from its depths. She takes Vijayanthi’s calloused hand and places the flower in her palm.

  Vijayanthi lets the little girl slip to the quilt and turns her face to Damini. She’s listening.

  Damini says, “After Suresh was born, I told my mother, I have two children and one is a son. I don’t want more. She said if I became pregnant again, I should scrape and grind the root of a lal chita, apply it deep in my yoni, then wait for the bleeding to come. I did, and the bleeding came. Later that year my husband died, and there were no more children. Now I don’t know if I had no more children because I had no husband to plant them, or because the fire plant stopped them forever. I thought: Vijayanthi will know.”

  Vijayanthi rubs the pink flower between thumb and forefinger and breathes in its scent.

  “Lal chita. So long since I’ve seen one. I can’t climb to where they grow now. I used to make a liniment from it with a bit of mustard oil for stiffness in the joints. And I used it one time when we had a plague, and another time when a scorpion stung a child. Your mother told you to dry and grind the root?”

  “Yes. But she never said how much to use.”

  “No one knows how much is too much, or how much is too little. Are you certain Leela wants to drop this child? And in her seventh month …”

  “Yes. She would have come to you herself, but she had to water the large terrace today.”

  “Apply very very little, then. Not more than the thumbnail of your right hand. And feed her carrot seeds ground with jaggery—that heats the womb. Then prepare to birth a lifeless child very soon.”

  Vijayanthi’s hand, gripping the railing beside Damini’s, is large and rough. Her thumbnail, well trimmed and filed as if ready for work in a birthing chamber, is double the size of Damini’s. Damini is about to ask whose thumbnail she should use, but the old woman is musing …

  “Lord Golunath knows what an ideal world might be, but one thing is certain: this is not it,” she says. “Until he brings balance, we must find many different kinds of courage to do what is necessary for our families. Sometimes we do what men want done, but don’t have the courage to do.” Vijayanthi’s fingertips graze Damini’s cheek.

  Damini’s eyes have brimmed and spilled.

  Foolish woman, to mourn an unborn grandchild.

  Vijayanthi turns and enters the house. Madhu has crawled back to the ledge. Damini grabs the errant toddler, lifts her to her hip, and follows.

  Vijayanthi leads Damini into a storeroom. She opens a trunk with an air of reverence. “I’m giving away things,” she says. Not to just anyone who needs, but to people within her clan and caste. She rummages beneath a chenille quilt, pulls, then heaves. Out comes a black boot with a bulbous rubber toe and laces, then its mate. Army combat boots.

  “My father’s,” she says. “He was a miltry man: a subedar-major in the British Army, then the Indian Army. If they fit you, you can have them. You’re a kshatriya—you must fight for women’s wishes. Remember, no miltry in this world fights for women’s wishes.”

  Damini sits the child down on the packed earth floor, removes a rubber sandal, folds the leg of her salwar tight and wedges her foot into a boot. It accommodates her broad instep. It clasps her heels, her toes. In Delhi, such boots would make her feet sweat, but here …

  She puts on the second boot and stands. The boots grip the ground, adding an inch to her stature. With these boots, she can march from here to Shimla.

  Vijayanthi cocks her head, listening to the patter and gurgle beginning on the roof. She glances over her shoulder as if sensing the white glow outside. Rain is swirling into the valley.

  She pulls a large blue and white striped umbrella from the trunk. “All of Gurkot knew me by this,” she says, leading Damini back to the terrace. “People looking downhill or up will know you too. Come back every day, and I will teach you.”

  All the way home, with rain dancing tupa-tup-tup on the large blue and white umbrella, and her combat boots repelling mud and water, Damini feels like Narada on the path of the devotee: she is a pair of ears again, listening to women. Helping women do as they want. Beginning with her own dear Leela.

  Shimla

  September 1994

  ANU

  SISTER ANU’S FINGERS FLY OVER BLACK AND IVORY keys, as she accompanies the choir, rendering the minor arpeggios of “Ay Malik Tere Bande Hum.” The hymn does as it says in Hin
di, surrendering her being to god. Today she even experiences a flash of all she’s been reaching for when she plays it. But what truly transports her is the postcard in the packet from Mrs. Nadkarni. The photo is of a long needle tower, bulging at the top. Overleaf, it said:

  Hello Mama.

  Are you okay?

  Love,

  Chetna

  Should she reply? Would it hurt Chetna or help her?

  After choir practice, in the nuns’ recreation room she opens the letter from Rano.

  I told Chetna about your divorce. She was actually relieved to hear it. She’s worried about you without anyone to look after you. I told her Mummy and Pop are looking after you.

  Chetna’s ahead in Math, behind in Science, but that’s all right. I have begun working from home so that I can enjoy more time with her, help her with homework. It’s an adjustment for all of us, but we’re loving it.

  After just a few weeks of working from home, I have been thinking of our nani’s mother. This is how our great-grandmother must have felt. I find myself shopping by catalog now, instead of going to stores, just as she had home-visiting vendors. No one says I have to, but there’s some ancestral memory of seclusion that makes me avoid malls and other public spaces if I can. People may imagine me beautiful as she was behind her veil, but I’m usually sitting in front of the computer in yoga pants and a T-shirt. If it wasn’t for Chetna’s activities and my weekly visit to Loblaws for groceries, I might never leave the house. Maybe you and I are in purdah and have taken the modern veil just like her. And so many Muslim women must experience the same in modern times. I imagine you in similar seclusion and silence in your nunnery.

  Anu looks up at the sunshine pouring through the window of the recreation room. Birds debate loudly in the trees outside. Girls are yelling on the basketball field, and a chorus of children is rote reciting in the distance. Her nunnery isn’t all silence.