Free The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin Page B

sandstone monument seems to pulse with yearning for the monsoon.
    Mem-saab says, “Damini-amma, we are going to meet a lady-lawyer.”

    Arriving at the lady-lawyer’s office, Damini helps Mem-saab from the car, then to a one-car garage attached to a bungalow home. Inside, indistinct cries from the nearby market and rumbles from the dusty street compete with the rattle of a window-box air conditioner.
    A starched white tie dangles lopsided on a soiled string above the plunge of the lady-lawyer’s sari-blouse. Her skin would spring to the touch like Leela’s—she seems too young to have read all the maroon books that line the walls.
    Damini sits on a cane footstool while they sit in chairs, and she massages Mem-saab’s leg through her salwar as she speaks so Mem-saab will know there is someone who cares.
    The lady-lawyer listens to Mem-saab with weary though gentle respect; too many women must have cried before her. Mem-saab speaks in Punjabi, because private matters must be said. She ignores Damini’s hand signals to lower her voice; her outrage assaults them. Damini contents herself with interjecting a word or two in Hindi occasionally for the lady-lawyer.
    I am still her ears, but Mem-saab has seen much that I thought she denied
.
    At last, Mem-saab has no words left.
    The lady-lawyer sees Mem-saab’s embroidered hanky has turned to a useless wet ball, and offers her own. She tells Damini to tell her, “Be strong. I will try to help you.”
    Mem-saab’s hand seeks Damini’s and grips it. Her fingers are cold despite the close heat.
    Now the lady-lawyer talks directly to Mem-saab. She tries to speak slowly, but Damini has to repeat her words sometimes for Mem-saab to read them from her lips.
    “You say your son now owns twenty-five percent of your house?”
    Mem-saab looks at her from beneath her black-pencilled arches, expecting reproach. “Yes.”
    “Then, legally, he can occupy the premises.”
    This is not what she wishes to read, so Damini has to repeat it.
    The lady-lawyer continues, “We can charge that he gained his rights by putting you under duress. If you wish to stop him from building, we can ask the court to do that.”
    “Nothing more?” says Mem-saab.
    Damini wants to tell the lady-lawyer to make Aman and Kiran and Loveleen evaporate like the first monsoon rain on a hot tar road, but she is just a pair of ears for Mem-saab, and this is Mem-saab’s family matter. The triangular exchange soon falters, then stops.
    Nothing more.
    Mem-saab writes a cheque and signs a vakalatnama appointing the lady-lawyer to begin her court case.
    As Damini leads Mem-saab out into the white flood of sunshine, she leans heavily on her arm.
    A tall slender woman in a rose pink sari is sitting on a cane chair in the single car-length driveway, waiting for the lady-lawyer. In profile, her eye is as almond-shaped as an awakened goddess. Her loosely braided black hair is waist-length, thick and shiny as Rekha’s in the movies. Very dark sunglasses swing from one hand. As they approach, she turns and hurriedly puts them on, but not before Damini notices the other eye, swollen large, and another swelling above the ridge of one cheekbone. A leaf-shaped scar droops down across the woman’s cheek. In this searing heat, the woman wears a long-sleeved sari blouse. There’s a bruise at her clavicle.
    Hai, what bad bhagya she has.

ANU
    S ITTING BEFORE SLIGHT, INTELLIGENT-FACED M RS . Shruti Nadkarni in her garage office, Anu feels strangely light after hearing herself say “divorce.” She practised the word on the bus, and walking from the stop.
    All the way here, people averted their gazes from her bruised face, her swollen eye, her throbbing temples. Everyone but the two old women she had seen leaving the lawyer’s office, whose problems were probably worse than her own.
    Lord Jesus, help them
.
    Anu keeps her gaze on the leather-bound books behind Mrs. Nadkarni’s head. She feels for her sunglasses, folds them, opens