The Selector of Souls Read Online Free PDF

looks.
    Mem-saab’s hair, resting in Damini’s palms as she braids it, is the colour of spent fire-coals. Damini’s hair, which went white upon widowhood, looks flame-red in the mirror. For hair dye, she buys an egg each month and mixes its yolk with dark henna powder and water that has known the comfort of tea leaves.
    Mem-saab goes to the door of her husband’s room and sees the padlock. She weighs it in her hands, then tugs it. She looks over her shoulder at Damini.
    “Did he say when he would be back?”
    “No, Mem-saab.”
    “Tell me as soon as you hear him arrive.”
    “Will you have dinner together?” Damini mouths. Mem-saab can pretend she knows the answer; Khansama will need to know how much food to make.
    “Serve enough for two,” Mem-saab says.
    Around five in the evening, when the fiery heat has tempered to sweat-crawling haze, Damini leads Mem-saab to her Ambassador car for a ride to the market.
    “Hilloh,” she says to the Embassy-man downstairs, trying to sound like Timcu calling from Canada on the phone. He takes the word as Mem-saab’s greeting, but Damini enjoys that in Hindi it orders him to move.
    The gora man—beardless, moustacheless, pink as Himalayan salt—folds his hands strangely, lower than his heart. Today he forgets to speak to Mem-saab in Hindi and Damini cannot help much, though she understands most of his English words. Mem-saab and he stand for long minutes, smiling, with Zahir Sheikh holding the car door open.
    At the market, Damini guides Mem-saab out of the way of tooting three-wheeled scooter-rickshaws, and tells her the prices the fruit-sellers ask. When she turns her face away so that she cannot read Damini’s lips anymore, it is Damini’s signal to say: that is Mem-saab’s rock-bottom price. Mem-saab has very little money with her—just a few notes tied in the corner of her dupatta. Always thrifty, so Aman and Timcu will inherit more of their father’s wealth. Even so, she always gives Damini a fifty-rupee note to buy a marigold garland at the Hindu temple. And she waits outside with Zahir Sheikh, in the hot oven of the car, while Damini rings the bell before Lord Ganesh’s raised trunk, offers him the garland, and asks his blessing upon her children. The liquid sound of a voice intoning Sanskrit verses circles the inner sanctum with Damini. For a few minutes, she leans against the welcome cool of a marble pillar and listens to a pandit, sitting cross-legged in his corner telling the
Bhagvad Gita
. She takes a few marigolds with her as blessing and braves the dull burn of the air outside.
    Mem-saab offers her usual gentle admonition as Damini takes her seat in front, beside Zahir Sheikh, “Amma, remember Vaheguru also answers women’s prayers.”
    “We prayed to Vaheguru this morning,” she reminds Mem-saab.
    Returning home, she helps Mem-saab put colour on her cheeks and paint her lips hibiscus-red, making her ready to receive relatives.Ever since Mem-saab lost her hearing, she has been too ashamed to go visiting relatives herself. Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh, Sardar and Sardarni Sewa Singh—people her husband helped when their Partition-refugees’ application was all that lay between them and the begging bowl—are the only ones who still come to pay her respect.
    They touch Mem-saab’s feet in greeting; she represents her husband for them. It’s been a long time since either Aman or Timcu touched Mem-saab’s feet—or Damini’s, who also was considered their mother.
    “Damini-amma,” they call her, with respect because nowadays only higher-caste families have servants who live with them.
    Today Khansama’s white uniform jacket is crumpled and he wears its Nehru collar insolently unhooked, but Mem-saab does not order him to change it before he wheels in the brass trolley-cart crowned with a wobbling tea cozy. She talks to her relatives in English about his “stealing”—threatening with a laugh to send him and his family back to his