THE NEXT DAY I called the temple and spoke to the aged Rabbi Judah, who, in broken English said, “Yes, sometimes, please, Levi attends services.”
Although I told him that I was not religious, had never been religious, and that all I wanted was to meet Furstenblum, the rabbi, in his high-pitched Indian-English accent and enthusiastic voice coyly pleaded with me to come on the following Friday night. Their congregation was so tiny that he needed every man just to get the required ten men for a minyan. I said I would come soon, but maybe not that Friday.
I found the courage a few Fridays later. I arrived a little early and mistakenly opened the blue gate to the Jewish Cemetery adjacent to the temple. I froze. The smell of curry and incense and wood burning over open pits in the back of the cemetery hit me from a small tent-village of Indian squatters with naked toddlers and stray dogs wandering around. A huge color TV perched on a bench, playing a Hindi “beach blanket”–style movie, and a father and son kicked a tattered soccer ball. The adults stared at me with their bony faces. I sensed their apprehension. Was I the Jew cop come to chase them away for sacrilegiously defaming the dead? Although Hindus cremate their dead, and cemeteries are rare in Delhi, they understand the sanctity of honoring the dead. A burst of hot wind swirled dust and garbage into the air and a tin can smashed into the headstone of a Rachel Mulemet, aged ten, daughter of Moishe and Ruth. Before that it was as if I’d blocked out the headstones. I was thrown into a dust storm world of dream memory—so odd what we chose to remember and forget in the midst of pain—of Castor and our arguments after my mother died about his finishing Hebrew school. Sensing my guilt, like any normal pubescent child, he gave me hell. He dabbed the blade with the incisive tones of his deepening voice. “I am only doing this for Mommoms cause she’s watching me and I promised.” He’d look at me sulkily.
“I know,” I would answer, my voice curt, exhausted from hours in the ER. “That’s the best of reasons.”
He would stop and twirl the curls of his hair with his small hands, “I know that you and Ma don’t care because you never go to temple.”
My precocious genius had cornered me. He seemed all too ready to assume my mother’s mantle of chief guiltmonger.
“Toss the football when you’re done?” I would offer as he trudged to his room. He ignored me, but later he would come out of his room carrying the mini–rubber football and we would go to the long, narrow hallway and throw the ball for hours. He struggled mightily. Unlike physics, which came so effortlessly to him while most of us stared at equations in perplexity, making a nimble catch or swiping an errant throw remained elusively mystifying to him. His hand–eye coordination, as he so frankly put it, “stunk.” Still, he tried and tried. I played down his inability. And Sarah, who had nothing but disgust for the overdeveloped muscles of steroid mooks and their inflated salaries and self-important status in a society that worshiped them, became pissed off at me for his feeling of inadequacy. I lamely blamed his friends, society, anybody but me. She scoffed with a simple “Bullshit!” and urged me to stop watching and listening to “the drones” who broadcast the games. But I couldn’t resist the pull of receding time, becoming friends with my son, tracking his mood swings as we watched TV, becoming upset as the Knicks got creamed. Or as he jumped in the air giddily (and clumsily) and slapped high five as the Yankees paraded off to another World Championship. Sarah couldn’t wait to get me alone. “Castor is only ten, but you, Mr. Big Shot Doctor,” her cadences rising and falling as had my mother’s when uttering that almost condemning phrase, “you acted like such a child. I thought you were different.” Her father, who had left her and her mother early on, and her three stepfathers had been hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble football fanatics. I never drank much, I was certainly not rough and tumble, but I was a good ol’ American sports’ sublimator.
The Indian father miskicked the soccer ball, it rolled toward me, and I picked it up and tossed it back. The boy hopped over the headstone of Rachel buried in the polluted graveyard soil. Was Rachel as sweet as my son? Was she so tired and innocent and worldly at ten? Had her disease made her wise? Did she melt her father’s heart when she whispered, “Daddy, let’s play”? Did she look so forlorn, feeling time so precious, when her parents argued in front of her? Did she crick her neck and arch her eyes like her mom when she was disappointed in her father? Did Rachel’s parents stay awake when she fell ill with the simplest cold because she always seemed frail? Did she, like Castor, move too fast through life? And did her father, sick to his stomach, look insane as I know I looked when friends—yes, friends—explained her death, “It is destiny, god’s will.” I’d rant to myself, trying to remain polite and in control, “Fuck destiny. Any god that could do this to my child, fuck him too.” Yet, still they gave Rachel a Jewish burial, as we had buried Castor, blessed by a rabbi, in the ground now, beside his grandmother. I shut the gate with my dry eyes closed, for I had shed all of my tears.
My mind shut down. I stared out the window, almost unaware of where I was as Vishnu drove me home. Home to find a telegram from Sarah:
Neil, I have emailed you, called the embassy. Finally they gave me your home address. Please, please contact me if only to say you are alive. I’ve said it a thousand times and will keep saying it until you answer me. I’m sorry. I will have to live with this until I die. I love you, I always loved you. Sarah.
Sorry. Yes, sorry that on the afternoon when Castor lay dying, she lay beneath Jeremy Riegle, while she still “loved” me.
Yes, I was sorry, too, that with all my dignity stripped, I still had not told her that our son had died asking not for me, but pleading for the loving touch of his mother. To hear his mother’s voice—one last time.