The Selector of Souls

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  For once, Damini cannot hear. She is too small.

  ANU

  DAMINI SPEAKS IN A HUGE DEEP VOICE. SISTER ANU recognizes a few words in Hindi, but most are in Pahari. Her eyes are half-closed, but this is not a state of consciousness or unconsciousness that Sister Anu has observed in any patient.

  “Anamika Devi has arrived,” Leela translates helpfully, joyfully in Sister Anu’s ear.

  It is possible that everyone’s presence tonight—Aman’s, Kiran’s, her own—has changed Damini’s consciousness as the observer affects an experiment. Perhaps the audience has caused a shift of consciousness from one plane to the next, much as Anu senses her own state changing in prayer. That mental energy can cause physical events and states can be proven just by lifting an arm, but this …

  Damini rolls on the floor, shouting in Pahari. Leela lunges forward and picks at her mother’s sari. She covers Damini’s head, her bare midriff, trying to maintain her modesty. She rocks back on her ankles to translate for Sister Anu.

  Now a high scolding voice—not-Damini’s, not-Damini’s—says Anamika Devi is angry.

  “Why, why? Tell us, tell us, Anamika Devi,” sing the musicians.

  The drums are beating in Sister Anu’s heart.

  And all the men sing out yes, tell us, tell us what has angered you.

  DAMINI

  “MEN OF GURKOT! LISTEN TO ANAMIKA DEVI.” DAMINI’S voice is huge, deep. Sensations flow through her, to the ground. “Lord Golunath has a full idol and a temple, and all I have is a cave. You think it’s enough to worship my form as an earthen pot? Ha! You don’t honour me.”

  “We do honour you,” shouts a man wrapped in a blue Kullu-shawl.

  “If you honoured me, you would honour my shakti everywhere. In your daughters, mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law—even women from other families, other castes, other villages.”

  “Even women belonging to other villages?” says a man puffing a beedi. “Why?”

  “Because every woman is someone’s daughter,” says Damini, in the goddess’s voice.

  “This is true,” the man laughs. “Some poor behen-chod was made poorer by her birth.” He looks around, acknowledging snickers at the poor sister-fucker.

  “A strange woman is also someone’s sister, someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother—every girl and woman is sacred, not only me.”

  “Why are you complaining, Anamika-ji? You are anointed, you are worshipped. Why should we go worshipping every woman? When will we earn a living?”

  “Don’t listen to him, Anamika-ji,” shouts the man in the blue shawl. “We are not all like him.”

  “Then why do you stop girls from coming, why do you only want sons?”

  “What should we do?”

  “See what I see,” says the voice of Anamika Devi. She who names is describing, sending echoes far into the future to form pictures, speaking a world into being, the world that is here, and a world that will be only twenty years from now. She who describes is explaining a world in which men need to pay bride prices, where men will feel they must abduct women, because violence and competition will reign supreme, where sweetness, giving, sacrifice, nurturing and cooperation will have no place, where men will find themselves sharing a wife as in the days of the Mahabharat, sharing with their brothers and sons. She who explains is predicting, showing them a world twenty years from now, when men will trade ever younger girls to other families, just as cows and goats are traded.

  “Our sons would never do such things, Anamika-ji,” says Tubelight, setting aside her knitting. “Other men might do such things, not ours.”

  “I too said our men would never do such things,” remarks the Toothless One, “but that was before Partition.”

  “I too said my brother would never do such things,” says Leela. “But that was before he and a few others in this room burned down the Christians’ church.”

  Some men try to look innocent, some pretend deafness and look away.

  “I too said our Hindu brothers would never do such things,” a low growl comes from Amanjit Singh, “but that was before 1984.”

  “Do you ever tell your sons no?” says the Anamika Devi voice. “Do you explain to them that women can feel? If you keep stopping girls from coming, you only hurt your sons.” And she foretells war and more war, bloodshed and anger. “Because men,” says the goddess, “pick fights like elephants in musth when they have no sweetness in their lives.”

  “Anamika-ji.” The man with the beedi looks a little shaken. “I tell my daughters, You are the same as boys. I say this is the new age of barabari.”

  “Yes, you men have learned the talk,” says the voice of Anamika Devi. “Girls are same as boys, women are the same as men. But I know you,” she says, sighting down the line of her forefinger. The man gulps smoke into his lungs. “Your daughter’s name is not painted alongside your son’s at the door to your home. You tell people you have a son and a mistake, you tell her she is your burden and your duty, but that your son is a gift. When you die, will your daughter send you to the next life or will your son?”

  “My s-son.”

  “And when your daughter-in-law Supari came to your home, you renamed her, though I, Anamika Devi, had already given her a name.”

  “It made her feel part of her new family, ji.”

  Supari grinds her teeth over her betel nuts.

  “And is she?” says Anamika Devi. “Then why do her parents feel obliged to send you gifts all her life? If she is so much a part of your family, do your grandsons carry her name or only yours?”

  The men begin to shout. “Show us men who do what you’re asking!” yells one. “There are no fathers in the world who can be just between daughters and sons. Daughters are not sons, sons are not daughters. My daughter-in-law is better than a daughter, but no son-in-law can help me like a son.”

  Another shouts, “Is there any father or mother in the world who does not need sons? I can’t take from a daughter. A daughter can’t leave her real family and tend to me in my old age. Will the government support me when I am old? Will you look after me when I am old? Ha!”

  ANU

  SISTER ANU CAN’T STAND SHOUTING MEN, SHE JUST can’t … she has a flashing sensation of being somewhere else though her body is still functioning. She used to tune out Vikas that way.

  Damini is writhing, thrashing, flailing, bending backwards into an extreme arch. She’s transformed, unrecognizable. Is the goddess really speaking? Which voice is human, which voice is divine? How is Damini’s experience different from Elijah’s or Isaiah’s or Ezekiel’s? Or the Sufi Mansoor Al-Hallaj uttering “Anna al-haq” while in trance? How different can it be from Jesus’s vision of the Holy Spirit descending like a dove? What if the heavenly voice, bath qol, the “daughter of sound” truly belongs to nameless Anamika?

  In her possessed state, Damini is claiming the authority Jesus, the Buddha, godmen and gurus all claimed to effect changes in traditions. Well, why not?

  Damini straightens and crosses to the men’s side of the room. She moves along with jerking limbs till she arrives before Amanjit Singh. She circles his little island.

  The drumming rises, as if echoing the heartbeat of the universe. Damini leans over and holds Aman, one hand at his heart, one at his back. She holds him this way and says, “Respect everyone.” This is a new voice, a voice that bounces up and downhill as if Damini does not hear it. “Protect both daughters,” says this voice, as if Damini is accustomed to giving orders, though gently. “And ask your wife why she needed to snatch from her lowly sister when the gods have given her so much.”

  She moves away, more graceful, swaying strangely at first, then dancing.

  Kamna rises and joins her grandmother in her dance, as if the music is within, and each movement rises from some wellspring of shakti. Both seem to be dancing on another plane, linked by trance to a larger world, seeing another dimension. Kamna bends back as if opening her heart, swaying as if echoing the dances of leaves. Can any
one even call this dancing?

  When she was near death, Sister Anu had the feeling her consciousness was seeking and linking to an unearthly power. If the bright warm light she had seen could be named god or Jesus—why not Anamika Devi? During her training when she tended patients in coma—Ganga-water couldn’t release them from the trance state. Maybe when Pentecostals speak in tongues, they’re speaking Hindi or Pahari, and English-speaking listeners just don’t know? Physics and physicalism offer no further explanation of what is happening in this room.

  But what if Damini’s trance-state is mere self-hypnosis? Is Sister Anu’s prayer and meditation self-delusion too?

  What if a divine spirit really is speaking to Damini and through her? Why not to Anu, who has spent so many hours in prayer and yearning? Why not to Anu who so admires god’s creation? Why not to Anu who came here to do the Work? Why can Anu not revisit the bright warm light just one more time? For all her sacrifices and prayers, god or gods or goddesses have all remained obstinately silent. So have Christ, the saints and angels.

  DAMINI

  DAMINI RETURNS WHERE SHE BEGAN, DROPS INTO LOTUS position, eyes half-open, still in trance, as if a tree rooted in her yoni rises to merge with her torso. She rolls her head from side to side and sways. She can feel her veins and arteries fork and net beneath her skin, her breasts, and within her arms. Her arms feel like branches of the tree and her henna-red hair has come loose in a halo of coiled springs.

  She is up on the mountain where the spring begins, down at the river, swaying on the rope-bridge, climbing the ghost-trail, descending it, gazing down at a baby girl who opens her eyes, gazing up to the gods. She is inside the chapel before it burns, outside the chapel as it burned—all places all spaces all times are hers because they are Anamika’s.

  Fear demons claw and screech that Damini will remain forever small, that there will be no going back now that she has been both outside and inside the goddess. What if she has revealed too much of her self? Anamika Devi lives in a place where Damini cannot. She must wrench herself away—separate—cut her cord to Anamika, but keep the stump growing from her solar chakra.

  Fear brings thirst, and she’s clawing upwards, reclaiming her own body, her own voice.

  “Water! Water!”

  Tiny needles seem to prick her face—water. She smells her own flesh, alive as never before.

  “Leave, Anamika Devi!” shouts Matki. “Leave this woman, now!” Cold water splashes over Damini’s face, trickles down, tickles her neck.

  Sister Anu is leaning over her, shaking her. Damini falls forward, hitting her shoulder but feeling only distant pain. She lies there, aware of legs and feet passing, devotees leaving, and the tumult of argument in the next room.

  Gentle arms are lifting her. Direction and balance return slowly. Piara Singh’s voice is in her right ear—did she feel a puff of air on her eyelids, almost as if he were breathing again? His diamond eyes glitter in the half-dark. His male energy complements her own, restoring her. Does his beloved presence mean she has done enough to balance the stain on her karma?

  Tubelight is before her, bearing a tray of laddoos. Sister Anu takes one of the bright golden balls. “Eat,” she says, and a laddoo comes toward Damini.

  Damini bites into the laddoo. Saliva suddenly streams to meet the sweetness. Amazing, returning sweetness. Sweetness, always there, no longer inaccessible. Sweetness that calls to her own remembered sweetness. She turns to Piara Singh, to share the other half with him, but he is gone.

  A turbaned man with a rolled black beard stands in the doorway, a woman in salwar-kameez silhouetted behind him. “Dayan!” he says.

  Damini flinches from the malevolent power of the word. She doesn’t care what Aman thinks of her, but if other men hear he thinks she’s a witch, they could turn against her. It has happened to other women who learned to say what men should hear—some were paraded naked, some expelled from villages. She glances around. Sister Anu, Leela and Kiran have heard him, no one else.

  “What happened, Aman-ji?” says Damini, in the bright tone she used when Aman and Timcu were unmarried. “Tell me, what did Anamika Devi say?”

  “You don’t know?” Amanjit comes close. Damini stares into those lychee-stone eyes. She drops her gaze and pulls the end of her sari over her head.

  He can barely control himself. “Your Anamika Devi told each farmer to build a shrine on his farm.”

  “Then? That is good—like a gurdwara in each home.”

  “No it is not,” Kiran says. “If each farmer builds a temple on his property, we can’t buy their farms and build cottages. We can’t tear down their temples.”

  “Legal—illegal—what does Anamika know of the law, Kiran-ji?” says Damini. Memory stirs—Anamika’s voice saying the farmers of Gurkot shouldn’t be loyal to Amanjit just because they were loyal to his father. There can be honour, said Anamika Devi, only from serving those who have honour. “If you buy their land, I’m sure you won’t feel any pain when you demolish a shrine.”

  “I don’t fear Anamika Devi,” says Aman to his wife, “not at all.” He clears his throat. “I’m not a Hindu—why would I fear her?”

  “But if we demolished a single shrine to a Hindu goddess, the Development Authority would never allow us to construct a cottage or a villa in its place,” Kiran says, “even if we offered crores of rupees. We could end up in jail, like Suresh is for destroying the church on our property. Oh, Damini- amma is very clever. She knows the authorities would never pardon a Sikh man as they have pardoned Hindus for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Sikhs don’t have as many votes.”

  Kiran has a point—Suresh was never caught or questioned by the police for his role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But a glow of satisfaction comes over Damini to think that Aman might be afraid to continue building his summer cottages, at least in Gurkot.

  “Next time,” Kiran almost spits at Damini, “tell people they don’t have to build shrines.”

  “I don’t know if the goddess will ever come through me again, Kiran-ji.” Damini’s tone is elaborately polite. “If she does, I will speak no more and no less than the goddess wants. But now that we know what Anamika Devi asked, I promise you her first shrine will be built on Leela’s farm. Chunilal’s atman is wandering in the prêt-lok, wandering the roads of the Himalayas—may a shrine to Anamika be his final stop.”

  Kiran tosses her black mane and flings her dupatta around her shoulders.

  Amanjit Singh says, “How can we compete with the world when we have superstitious, backward people like you?”

  Damini grins up at him. “English-speaking saabs like you will surely find a way.”

  Aman turns on his heel, almost bumping into Kiran, and they leave.

  Leela approaches, a new respect and also trepidation written on her face, “Come, let’s go, Mata-ji.”

  The night is as dark as if the whole world has been sucked back into Anamika’s cave. But fireflies dance across the terraces, and a single light shines in Chunilal’s old room, guiding Damini uphill as she leads Sister Anu, Leela, Kamna and Mohan home. Sister Anu has accepted Damini’s invitation to share their roti and potato-pea curry without any saab attitude of bestowing a favour.

  But after they have all washed hands and feet beneath the water pipe, Damini says, “You all go into the cookroom. I’ll sit outside.”

  “Why?” says Kamna.

  “I am unclean.”

  “You?” says Leela. She glances at Sister Anu and titters behind her hand.

  “But you just washed,” says Sister Anu.

  “Yes, but tonight blood came again. I have not felt bleeding for years.”

  Sister Anu says, “If the goddess sent you your menses, how can you be unclean? And if you are unclean, then I will sit outside with you.”

  “Oh no, you’re a guest. You go in.”

  “Not without you,” Sister Anu says, a stubborn set to her chin.

  “I’ll stay outside too,” says Kamna. She turns t
o Leela, “Ma-ji, you go in.”

  “Huh, I should cook all alone like a servant and give you all food outside?” says Leela. “No, you all prepare to sleep hungry tonight.”

  “Even Mohan?”

  “No, I have to cook for him.”

  “But we’re all hungry, Ma-ji!” says Kamna.

  And so Damini steps over the threshold, into the kitchen.

  Nothing shrivels, nothing dies. Leela checks the milk—it has not soured. It may later, but for now …

  Sister Anu sits with them in the half-circle around the coal-stove, wiping her eyes in the smoke. “Your body and clothing seemed to glow all the way home,” she says. “And your face is still … radiant. Do you know why you were chosen from all who were present?”

  “You think Anamika Devi should have chosen an English-speaking woman, na? I think Anamika-ji said, ‘Here is Damini, she has a pair of ears to listen, she has a pair of hands to work; I can use her.’ Goddesses are like saab-log. They think like-that-like-that.”

  “I thought goddesses only visit other families, not ours,” Leela says. She slaps a roti onto the hot iron tava.

  “It runs in our family,” says Damini. “But not by blood. I got it from your father’s mother. Some things are passed down by spirit and example, too.” She begins to chop onions to sweeten the daal.