The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page A

inner space, thrust each organ into the next. Maybe a rib is broken but getting an x-ray will notify the world—beyond your beautician, nothing is confidential in the capital city.
    This pain is nothing—the pain of childbirth is still sovereign. No—maybe the pain after her car accident.
    Chetna’s scent is still here, as if Chetna had just risen from the white painted desk. Anu sits at the desk. Here’s sketch paper, a tin box. Inside the box, coloured pencils point at her sharply, a quiverful of arrows.
    Arrow number one is red. Colour of twenty-year-old Anu’s virgin blood. Colour of her fault for agreeing to marry Vikas and his family. Not that Mumma presented her with many choices that season—eligible bachelors were already selecting younger women.
    Anu’s pencil digs a vertical line in red on the page, then another. A few branches, fibrous roots. She realizes she’s drawing the day of her “Showing.” Here’s the table under the banyan tree at the Gymkhana Club, laden with all the Indian, Chinese and Continental dishes Dadu ordered. Here’s Vikas’s father, Mr. Lalit Kohli, leaning forward as he talks to Anu’s father, Deepak Lal. Here’s auburn-haired, sleek Mrs. Pammy Kohli, with her perm, her permanent smile and her permanently startled look. Mrs. Kohli, who produced Vikas, is revered and indulged for that achievement, and needs no other evermore. Mrs. Pammy Kohli clasps her elbows beneath her shahtoosh shawl, smiles, and evaluates Anu.
    Here’s glamorous fine-boned Mumma, her hands darting and waving like intelligent animals in rhythm with her non-stop patter. An anxious look on her sparrow face because her daughter was nearing twenty-one and had been rejected twice. One family said Anu was “not homely enough” for their son. Meaning she wasn’t domestic enough. The other said she was “too-much-educated.”
    Anu draws herself sitting under the banyan, too. Freezing, she recalls, in a chiffon sari borrowed from her cousin-sister Rano. And white platform sandals that were so in style in 1985. Yearning to imitate her friends, most of whom were engaged or married. Wanting so badly to please her parents that she only took a few sidelong glances at Vikas to verify he would be taller than her in high heels. She assumed she could love him. Marriage, she had thought, would free her from the need for chaperones, and worrying about who might see her looking at or talking to an unrelated man. And Mumma, Purnima-aunty and Rano all assured her that marriage would fix her. That afterwards, she’d want—need—children.
    Here’s Vikas. In those days he had a curly lock of black mane that would fall across his forehead, not the slick-gelled cut he has today. Then as now he had a bow-shaped moustache and a square close-shaven chin. Right arm strengthened from swinging a polo mallet, and the left from neck-reining. Thighs accustomed to gripping theflanks of his ponies. He smelled of leather, horses, and power. Anu gazed shyly at his knee, for most of the Showing.
    Ambitious, well-mannered, well-educated, he’d flashed her his movie-star smile. Only son and heir to an entrepreneur much-demonized under Nehruvian socialism, but well-protected from foreign competition. Vikas entered his father’s printing business, Kohlisons Media, at twenty-five, the year Madam G.’s son Rajiv became prime minister. When India liberalized and multinationals and private companies began wooing the government for entry into India, the Kohlis were right there to help them advertise to the masses.
    The advertising and packaging boom cushions mistakes. All Vikas’s decisions are right. Even those to come. He is corrective and combative with waiters in five-star hotel restaurants, ushers at movie theatres, his personal barber. He admonishes his gardener, his security guard, his drivers—whom he now calls chauffeurs. No one challenges him, no one protests, so he brings his public imperiousness home.
    Lord, give him a heart attack.