The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin

armies pointed missiles at one another. You’re procreating too often, they said, even as the Pill bifurcated procreation from pleasure. Control your breeding, they said, and there’ll be more water, food, land and brotherly love for each man, woman and child in India. Back in the early seventies the slogan went, “India was Indira and Indira was India,” and Madam G. loomed on billboards at traffic intersections, berating Indians for having more than two children. The year India managed to sterilize six and a half million men, a younger Anu told Rano that having children was a selfish act of self-perpetuation, an imposition on India’s resources, and a sacrifice of a woman’s independence. She would have self-control.
    But Rano just laughed and said Anu would feel differently as soon as she was married, that love would come and hormones would kick in and that having a child would make a woman of her. And to believe anything else was abnormal.
    Chetna will never understand how naive her mother was. How could Anu have expected her parents to find her a man who would love her for being herself, not because she was equipped to produce babies? How utterly stupid, how clueless she was to believe she could remain childless in the face of her husband’s expectations, and her in-laws’ expectations. And Vikas’s prodding to produce the son he needed to carry on his family name, and the family businesses. Otherwise, he had demanded to know, what was he working for?
    “If you didn’t want me, why did you have me?” wept Chetna.
    “Because …” Anu couldn’t tell Chetna the whole truth. Never, ever.
    The act that conceived Chetna was rape—even if the policewoman with the black leather chestband said, “Such things don’t happen in India. Only abroad.” She cocked her cap over her sleek coconut-oiled hair and said, “If somehow it happened in India, it is not a crime,” and refused to register Anu’s complaint. It was rape, even if Pammy Kohli denied it happened, and then said Anu had brought it on herself by saying No, and now doesn’t remember any such incident.
    Chetna was born of Vikas’s disbelief that any woman would not want a child. She was born of violence, and Anu’s lack of contraception. She’d fully intended to use the rhythm method.
    Raping your wife is not a crime. Killing your husband is a crime
.
    And premeditated murder is an even larger crime, which would lead to years in prison.
    Now a green cord grows from the receiver on the page. Anu curls it up into white space.
    A partial truth came out that night, as she attempted to reassure her crying daughter: “Because once you were coming, I couldn’t … I mean … I began to want you.” A child Anu once saw as theoretical moved into her body, its very real hunger causing her nausea, its will to survive competing with her body’s early desire to expel it. But once Anu felt Chetna’s first fiery movements in her belly, she could not bring herself to extinguish a life-spark, and allowed the baby touse her body as incubator. Rano had counselled that a woman is incomplete without the experience of children. That if she had one, she would see.
    “Then you were born,” Anu said, taking the phone from Chetna and choosing her words for an eight-year-old as she hung it up, “And I fell in love with you. That’s why I called you Chetna—it means self-knowing—do you know that?”
    Anu could not refuse that tiny hand groping for her breast, laying claim to her body. You will love me, said that gesture, and incredibly, mother-love came like a life-jolt from heaven. The moment she named Chetna, Anu connected with a force much stronger than herself. She was responsible for a life, this one life, and time could never again be linear. She wanted to strain the world through her fingers for Chetna. She found herself petitioning god and all the gods and Lord Jesus to hold her daughter safe.
    Vikas’s first words when he saw Chetna two days after