Mirroring disparate lives ~ Book Review - 'The Selector of Souls'

Women! Women’s issues; women’s bodies; women’s emotions; women bonding together; women at war; women’s babies, sexual inequalities and the pressures on women to not give birth to their own gender. In her book, Shauna Singh Baldwin tells of women’s lives and stories that are strangely intertwined.

It is a book about two women from diametrically different spheres of society. Repressed by society, money (or the lack of it), expectations and men, they can break free and make independent decisions and autonomous judgments, no matter how flawed they may be.

Stumbling through existence, pushed in various directions, they battle life and challenge deep-rooted, pre-conceived notions about paths that women’s lives should take. The road is often rocky, but they trudge on, carving their paths in the mountain of life. Shauna Singh Baldwin takes up the much-talked and written about issue of gender selection and female foeticide in The Selector of Souls. She weaves it in the story of Damini, a loyal maid in a household, who is turned out by the family when her mistress dies. She lives in her daughter’s home in Gurkot; and Anu, the daughter-in-law of a rich Hindu family, a battered wife, must live a life abhorrent to her, till she decides to change it. The novel starts with a chilling note of murder of a baby at the cave, the ‘temple’ of an elemental pagan female deity, Anamika Devi. Damini’s daughter was to have her third child and she delivered a girl. Unaccepted by both the parents, there seems no other way but to put an end to her life. Damini must do the brutal act.

Murder is also on the mind of Anu — the murder of her husband. So overwhelming is her desire to kill the vicious man that she decides to convert to Christianity, become a nun and trains to be a nurse. She also files for divorce and takes the heart-wrenching decision to send her young daughter to her cousin in Canada.

The two women come together in Gurkot, in a government hospital. Both are working to alleviate the misery of women, but in different ways. Whereas Damini is the selector of souls — the one who helps women decide whether or not to give birth to a girl child, Anu wants to improve the health and lot of women, to educate them to be able to take the decision to have girl children. Baldwin is the author of the Commonwealth Prize winning novel What the Body Remembers and the Giller Prize-nominated novel, Tiger Claw. After chequered lives and trying times in the lives of the women in the book, there is resolution, though not in a traditional way. There is some independence for women, a voice, not loud, but allowed to be heard, some breathing space that they win for themselves and their sisterhood.