The Selector of Souls Read Free Page A

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 Sikhmarriage 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