Free The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin

it amuses her to distract Loveleen.
    Nine years ago, Mem-saab sent Damini to Bombay to help Kiran when she was expecting this girl. Damini made khichri and fresh yogurt in Kiran and Aman’s apartment kitchen, filled a large tiffin and took a bus, as directed, to the hospital. There she sat on a cane chair, waiting till Aman brought his pregnant wife in a taxi.
    As soon as Kiran arrived, doctors and nurses began doing things to her, making decisions for her. And normally assertive Kiran just lay there as she was told—flat on her back with her heels in cups. They didn’t give her more than an hour or two without their medicines. Kiran didn’t know the meaning of the words they used anymore than Damini did, though these words could affect her life, and the life of her baby. Peeto-shin, fee-thal montor, see-sex-shun. After those medicines, Kiran’s contractions looked as if a demon was attacking her from within.
    She expected to massage Kiran to help the baby come, but the nurse, who spoke strange Hindi, acted as if Kiran was sick instead of pregnant. Soon she called a doctor-saab who made Kiran lie curled up on her side and gave her an injection with a long needle. After that, it was impossible for Kiran to move or position herself and the baby at all.
    Kiran lay like a pale candle and refused to allow any doctor to bring a razor near her. Not to shave the mound of her belly, or the hair on her yoni, because of being a Sikh. She ordered Damini to guard her to be sure no one shaved her if she lost consciousness.
    A nurse asked Kiran if she felt any pain.
    Kiran said, “I feel nothing.”
    Two nurses came in: a fat, short, smiley one in a white dress, stockings ruched up in her sandals, and a sweet-faced South Indian one in a white sari and starched white cap. Kiran let them tie leather straps across her wrists. They attached a tube to the back of her hand with a needle, and hung a clear plastic bag from a pole beside her. Damini asked the South-Indian nurse if the bag was filled with Ganges-water. The nurse said no, and pointing at Damini’s tiffin carrier, admonished her—kindly—not to feed Kiran.
    Damini had given birth twice but felt so ignorant. She, a kshatriya, a warrior-woman, was told to hunker down in the corridor beside a mop and bucket of phenyl, and wait. Obviously the nurses thought her as dirty and unclean as any sweeper-woman.
    Another doctor-saab appeared, dressed head to toe in green, hands gloved in plastic, wearing a white mask that made him look as monkeyish as Lord Hanuman.
    The ammonia smell from the bucket was sharp in her nostrils. Looking upwards, she could see everything the doctor was doing reflected in the glass upper section of the door opposite Kiran’s bed.She watched helplessly as Doctor-saab cut into Kiran’s abdomen, as metal clamps spread her wound, and then sutures tied off bleeding blood vessels.
    So this girl Loveleen came out covered in a chalky fur, instead of blood and stickiness, simply lifted between the clamps through the gaping hole in Kiran’s stomach. Born without struggle. Maybe this is why the child has so little sympathy for those who do struggle.
    After the baby came a plum-coloured thing taken from Kiran’s stomach. It must have been the Lotus. Damini watched carefully in case the force left in the Lotus rose up to strangle Kiran, because the doctors didn’t seem at all concerned—the Hanuman-faced one even turned his back to it!
    The child was scrubbed and washed quite roughly, and not given to her mother for hours, though Kiran ordered Damini to ask the nurses every few minutes.
    Kiran looked so unhappy. It was two days before she could walk and she didn’t remember the birth at all. Most of the time, she just wept because she had made a daughter. Damini hushed her, saying, “Don’t let anyone see tears. Some might say your husband can’t afford this girl’s dowry. And don’t worry, next time you’ll have a boy.”
    She gave Kiran sponge baths and fed