1
THE HOLY MAN SAID, “Whosoever dies in Varanasi will achieve liberation, even a cockroach.”
It was the boldface pullout quote in a magazine my mother opened at random during chemotherapy at her local medical center in Brooklyn. Lounging on the salmon-colored leatherette recliner as the toxic infusion dripped into her veins, Ma read every single word of the article. She had been looking forward to death as liberation was how she justified it to me later—so what was this business now of having to schlep all the way to Varanasi, India, nearly eight thousand miles away on the backside of the earth?
But as she continued to reflect on it, she recognized that liberation was actually not in the cards in the Jewish death deal. Where you landed in the next world, heaven or hell, Gan Eden or Gehinnom, depended on your docket in this one, you were never truly liberated from the fallout from this life. And this was also true in the overcrowded Hindu cosmos, with its thirty-six million idols and getchkes. Depending on your performance evaluation on this earth, you were reborn in another form, as a starlet or a slug, to plod all over again. Only if you died in Varanasi were you guaranteed moksha regardless of your record, the holy man declared, only by dying in Varanasi in the lap of Mother Ganga would you achieve true release from the wheel of life, liberation from the grinding cycle of death and rebirth. The afterlife was this life, the one she had been living. This was a truth Ma now grasped. She had suspected it all along, it explained everything. She had been stuck in the punishment of her afterlife all these years. She had no interest in another sequel.
It was not an accident that Ma’s hand had fallen upon that magazine and that it had opened itself up like an exhaled breath to that page. It was her karma, she told me with the wicked grin of an initiate. The holy man was speaking directly to her; he was sending her a message, special delivery. It was then and there, as she spun it to me afterward, in that chemo parlor with its décor the color of viscera that she was swept up by her inspiration. She would stop all her treatments and go to Varanasi to die.
Anyone who had ever laid eyes on my mother or scanned a few bullet points of her résumé (if she ever had a résumé, which certainly she did not) would find it absurdly farfetched to believe she could be capable of gestating such a heretical desire, much less summon up the energy and nerve to actually carry it to term. We’re talking here about an ultra–Orthodox Jewish woman closing in on the finish line of her eighth decade in a lifespan traditionally calculated at three score and ten, hanging on past the statute of limitations, living on borrowed time—the wife of a rabbi, a rebbetzin, mother of nine, grandmother to many. How many? Don’t ask. That’s a question she would have never answered. Jews do not count their own; God does not take kindly to that, it can be fatal. On top of that, she was stricken with stage four breast cancer, an Ashkenazi Jewish specialty like gefilte fish; it had occupied all her territory, though you might never have guessed it by eyeballing her. As a proper religious matron, she had always worn a wig, well before she lost all her hair from the chemo, and she still weighed in at close to 250 pounds. “Finally, a diet that would do the trick,” Ma said, recalling an inappropriate thought that had shot through her brain when she had gotten her diagnosis—a secondary benefit of illness. “But nothing doing.” And she waved a hand in resignation down over the mass of her stubborn flesh.
The other deviant thought that had flashed with the news of her death sentence, Ma admitted to me later, was that now, finally, she had been given permission to make her exit, following, of course, the ritual sadistic formalities for the sake of family, of pretending to fight for her life, pulling out all the stops, pushing to the limit of cutting-edge medical technology no matter how agonizing or pitiful or futile or costly, no matter how much everyone in her orbit secretly wanted to close her file. A longtime fan of obituaries, Ma’s first thought as she pored over those case-closed mug shots every morning was invariably, It’s over, Lucky you, No one will bother you anymore, Don’t worry, you’re not missing a thing. Still, suicide, it goes without saying, was not an option. First of all, it’s a sin. Second, it’s hard, it’s messy, it requires a lot of initiative and motivation; you need to be a self-starter. But above all, it is not considerate, it would inflict too much pain and guilt on your loved ones, not to mention how boiling mad they would be at her for doing this to them, how unforgiving and lacking in understanding or sympathy.
But the truth was, she was tired of forever being pressured to hold out. She had been looking forward to the liberation of death, it would finally make her breathe easier, as it were. And now this woman, my mother, who always did what was expected of her, who had never openly rebelled in her life, whose axis of influence was a lopsided triangle with three fixed retro-shtetl points, Brooklyn, Miami, Jerusalem, suddenly gets the news that it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. A grand finale was still required of her. She still had to rise from her bed and muster whatever remaining shreds of vitality she possessed to drag her 250 diseased pounds to the faraway rotting stage of Varanasi, packed with filthy bit players and reeking scenery to belt out her final full-throated aria if she wanted to achieve true liberation. A casual bystander might find it incredible that such a woman would heed such a casting call, but to my mind, it was inevitable, it made total sense.
Needless to say, I don’t want this story to be about me, but as it happens, the notion of India was not all that alien to my mother despite her super-conventional stereotypical lifestyle (viewed, of course, in the context of the overall bizarreness of rigidly observant Jewish practice). For that, I am obliged to admit, I deserve the credit, or whatever. And so it is necessary for me to make what I hope will be limited to a cameo appearance in what is, let us never forget this for a minute, my mother’s end-of-life story.
The fact is, I’m an old India hand, a Hin-Jew, a Jewbude, however you want to process it. My fascination with India began in my earliest years, thanks to my mother as it happened, who at that time knew nothing at all about the place except that its starving children were feverish to get their hands on the slabs of schnitzel that my twin brother, Shmelke, and I were taking so for granted, dragging them listlessly around our plates, swirling them like finger paint through pools of ketchup instead of eating them. The problem was enormous, insoluble. How could I get the schnitzel to the starving children of India in time to save them? It was beyond my powers, I was flooded with guilt. That was my introduction to India, a faraway land swarming with kids dying for my schnitzel.
Then, when Shmelke and I were maybe five years old, before we were torn apart yet again and sentenced to separate bedrooms, I happened to find in a garbage pail set out for pickup on the curb of our Brooklyn street a picture book sodden with coffee grinds and potato peels, about Hindu gods and goddesses, an object I instinctively assumed to have been confiscated from some kid in our neighborhood who had gone off the rails, God alone knows at what station she ended up. Shmelke and I read this contraband every night, not including the Sabbath, under the covers with a flashlight, we knew all the stories by heart—by heart! I was particularly blown away by the tale of the twin brother and sister, Yama and Yami, the first mortals on earth. Like Yami, I begged my Yama, my twin brother, Shmelke, to marry me. Why not? Why should this not be possible? How could there be closeness tighter than that of twins, so spiritually conjoined? Only an arrogant fool would presume to insert himself between two so bound up together even from the womb and attempt to split them apart. Hadn’t Cain and Abel, according to legend, married their twin sisters—for how else other than through the implicit existence of twin sisters could all that begetting have gotten its kick start, since no mention needless to say is made of female births in the first family? Yet Shmelke turned me down, a rejection that still throbs in memory to this day, like a savagely amputated limb. It was against the laws of the Torah, he pronounced sagely: The nakedness of your sister you may not uncover, Leviticus chapter eighteen verse nine. Already he was a prodigy, an ilui, a category applied only to boys, with a royal career mapped out before him by our father and his hand-picked team of tutors and groomers.
I don’t want to dwell on this, but the gist is, with regard to India, having suffered rejection by the one whom naked I had embraced for nine months in the womb and all that preceded this and followed from the moment we emerged from between our mother’s legs into the night, I basically went native. My former wife, Geeta, is Indian, a stunning blue-eyed, mocha-skinned Kashmiri of the Brahmin caste, which makes her also, in a sense, for what it’s worth, a rabbi’s daughter. Together we ran a travel business in Mumbai, known in those days as M&G (Meena—that’s me, formerly Mina—and Geeta) Sati Trips. In Sanskrit sati means good wife, but it’s also the word for the outlawed (like dueling, yet also not without its legendary satisfactions) Hindu practice of the widow immolating herself in the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. For our primarily female clientele, however, we repackaged this intrinsically sexist concept in an intriguing new light with the prompt of our slogan: India Is Hot. Jump In. The message resonated phenomenally with our women seekers, predominantly from North America and Israel, who flocked to my call to ashrams and meditation sites, yoga retreats and Ayurveda healing centers in India—in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south, or, depending on the season, the good old reliables, Dharamsala and Rishikesh in the north—for periods of about two weeks.
It was a travel-intensive enterprise. Too often, I admit, I was flying madly here and there, stroking clients, dealing with our far-flung agents, fine-tuning tour schedules, handling emergencies physical and spiritual from Delhi belly to Dharma syndrome, managing drug flip-outs, the whole deal, forced by all of these pressures to delegate my daily responsibilities as a single mom for my daughter, Maya. Thank God I’d mostly been able to find decent childcare (with some painful exceptions), especially since Geeta, Maya’s adoptive mother no less and a lady with an enviably flexible schedule to say the least, proved maddeningly unreliable even in her finest hour, and Maya’s semen donor, my stab at a husband, Shmiel the schlemiel Shapiro, was out of commission, a willing exile in Jerusalem where he was known as the Holy Beggar, self-appointed caretaker of the gravesite of the celebrated Hasidic minstrel Reb Shlomo Carlebach.
Strumming out of tune the only three chords in a minor key that he managed to halfway master, Shmiel could be found every day except the Sabbath up at the Har haMenukhot cemetery, parked under a marquee emblazoned with the epitaph, “Mamesh a Gevalt the Sweetest of the Sweet,” his cardboard guitar case open at his feet filling up with coins and bills deposited by the stream of pilgrims and lost souls and borderline cases trudging up the mountain to join the sing-along, to weep and spill out their hearts like water at the holy grave. The good news was, for the first time in his life my loser ex was making a halfway decent living. Far be it for me to have begrudged him, yet it might be worth noting the obvious here, of which I am perfectly aware, if only to justify why against my nature I ever hooked up with a man in the first place other than to fulfill the predestined birth of Maya. His name is one of the diminutives for Shmuel, Samuel, like the name of my brother, Shmelke. All my life I have been searching for my lost inner Sam, the holy man might have said.
With regard to my mother, though, the main point is, that thanks to me, not only India, but also the possibility of rebellion was not so foreign to her, not in the heavens but on the near horizon, close at hand. Ma had me as a model, my lifelong career as a free radical, its early onset in my adolescent acting out—black hair wild to the waist, diamond stud in the cleft of my nostril, lotus tattoo like a locket at the base of my throat, the full original presentation of my identity politics—and these were just some of the external manifestations that she and my father the rabbi and the entire neighborhood and the whole congregation of Israel could actually witness and testify to.
He pretended as much as possible to be oblivious to all of it, my father the rabbi—that was his defensive stance; he wouldn’t see it so it wasn’t there. (Like God who is also invisible? I challenged him.) He also dismissed my fixation with India, refusing to take seriously any religion reputed to be nonviolent (however mistakenly), such as Hinduism or Buddhism: not major players, harmless, pareve, neither meat nor dairy. My worship was benign, nothing that required emergency excision, certainly not in the same league as a religion with muscle, a hard-core apostasy like converting to Christianity, God forbid. So when I brought Geeta to them as my true intended, my destined one, my bashert’e, he at first made a big provincial joke out of it, claiming Geeta as one of ours, insisting that she was really just another nice Jewish girl, a Marrano, a member of the lost tribe of Menashe, she looked like such a proper balabatische Yiddish’e maidel, and wasn’t her name Geeta after all, such a respectable Yiddish name, Gitel, it means good, he had an aunt named Gitel, Tante Gitel’e, murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazi killers, may their name and memory be blotted out from the face of the earth.
But I would not back down, I refused to allow him to patronize my reality or the reality of my bride. Sorry Pop, no way Geeta is Jewish, Geeta is purebred Indian, 100 percent, top caste. It was then that my father spat into our shared air space the word “Indyk!” which means not only Indian in Yiddish but also turkey. Good, at least he’s mad now, I thought, at least it has registered finally that I’m not kidding around. Halleluah! I cried. And digging even deeper into the praise-God book of Psalms for further ammunition, I added jubilantly, Hodu laShem Ki Tov—Give Thanks to God for He is Good—because Hodu means not only thanksgiving, it is also Hebrew for India. Therefore, as I pointed out to my father the rabbi and scholar but no gentleman (what for a gentleman?), it can also be interpreted as “India is to God for it is good”—and within the godly goodness of India, I embraced my divine Geeta, my wife. The old man barked out a sharp little laugh, rejecting the seriousness of this new development as well. Such relations between women were meaningless. The Torah does not even condescend to mention them for the sake of forbidding them because they produce nothing, they’re ridiculous, the mechanics were beyond his imagination.
Still, I would not let him dismiss me. I insisted on due deference to my choice, a full-scale wedding, never mind that I was already an independent operator at an advanced age. It was a father’s responsibility to give his daughter a proper wedding, not like the slapped-together, under-the-radar shotgun affair that had made it official between me and Shmiel. This time I was going to collect all the celebratory shards of broken plates and glasses I deserved—the dancing chairs, the complete smorgasbord including the ice sculpture in the shape of a swan, every last crumb of daughterly entitlement. “So you want a Jewish wedding?” Ma remarked after a prolonged thoughtful pause when I was done with my pitch. “Nu, so okay. But just in case you don’t happen to know this, the custom is, the bride’s family pays for everything except FLOPS—flowers, liquor, orchestra, photography, and sheitel (that’s the matron’s wig). So since it’s a question of money, what I need to know right now is—are we the parents of the bride or the groom?”
Privately, not long afterward, Ma recapped for me something she had read, also in a magazine—that it had been scientifically proven that certain women prefer women because they find men too powerful and threatening. And then she confided an odd bit of personal trivia—that she herself, ever since she had been a young girl, would play this little trick in her mind, turn a man into a woman whenever she experienced him as too uncontrollable and dominant, a practice she occasionally indulged in even to that day. “How?” I inquired. “By imagining him in a dress, of course, silly. Even your father sometimes. It’s very becoming.” My mother—she was such a bandit, or, as she would have pronounced it, bandit. God, I miss her and her rapier wit.
Well, enough already about me. Bottom line—India was heavily punctuated on my mother’s radar screen. When it became clear that Ma was not budging, that she was firm in her determination to finish up in Varanasi in order to achieve liberation as the holy man had guaranteed, she let my father know her intention, framing it as her last wish. What could he do? How could he deny her? Would anyone with a heart turn down a dying child’s final request for a trip to Disneyland? The same principle applied in Ma’s case. I proceeded, not only as a good daughter but also as a travel specialist, to make all the arrangements and booked Ma’s passage to India. Toward the end of December, around Christmastime by the calendar of the goyim, we flew Turkish Air business class to New Delhi, with a brief stopover in Istanbul, and then Kingfisher from Delhi to Varanasi. Hodu laShem Ki Tov.
The apartment I had leased in advance for my mother was located on the ground floor of the building in which the Chabad mission was housed, not far from Assi Ghat, the southernmost of the eighty-plus ghats stretching along the sacred bank of the Ganges River in Varanasi. My strategy was to settle Ma in a place where there would at least be some familiar markers, even if it were nothing more than the smell of chicken soup simmering on Friday afternoons wafting on the wings of malaria flies. The emissaries who ran this outpost, the shlukhim Rabbi Assi (yes, of Assi Ghat, an auspicious coincidence—short for Assaf) and his rebbetzin Dassi (Hadas), had in fact been very helpful to me in nailing down and setting up the apartment, and though we never came to a formal agreement, it was understood that they would not only be aware of Ma’s presence, they would also check on her regularly to make sure she was still breathing and had everything she needed, they would be my point team on the ground and serve as my contacts in case of an emergency. This was a mitzvah, the chance to perform a hessed, an act of loving-kindness for another human being; it was an opportunity that had fallen into their laps, as if from the heavens, they considered themselves fortunate and blessed.
I feel obliged to note here, with no intention whatsoever of diminishing the generosity of Assi and Dassi but for the purpose of complete transparency, that they also were acutely aware that this old lady they would be babysitting was none other than the mother of Reb Breslov Tabor, as my twin brother, Shmelke, was known by then—notorious, hunted, the fiercely controversial leader of a rival sect, but still, indisputably, one of the gedolim, one of the greats of the generation before whom all must rise when he enters your airspace. It was bottom-line nothing less than an honor, and so they conceived of it, to be of some service in her final hours to the holy mother who bore this genius. And after all, Ma was a seeker, too, not so very different from all the other Jewish seekers who passed through this polluted idolatrous city whom they were charged with rescuing, mostly young Israeli post-army kids crashing after all the stress of their mandatory stint in wretched holes like Gaza and Jenin, ravenously into drugs, sex, and music—only my mother was into death at the other end of the age spectrum.
They were not ageists, Rabbi Assi and his rebbetzin Dassi, they were inclusive, they didn’t discriminate when it came to saving Jews. They too had come to Varanasi from Israel, from secular families, he from the development town of Dimona in the South, home to the Black Hebrews who are not Hebrew and the nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist, she from the grim city of Afula in the north, otherwise known as the anus of the world, famous throughout the Middle East for the balls of falafel it excreted. They made their way to Varanasi in search of enlightenment directly after their rite-of-passage military service, and, like all the other deluded Israelis, sank to the lowest depths in this idol-worshipping underworld, they would spare me all the ugly details, until the true path revealed itself to them, as if a veil had lifted to illuminate what had always been there, their birthright, their legacy, right there in front of their eyes—It was like a vision, the rebbetzin recalled, We were as if dreaming. They would look after Ma, they assured me. The holy Rebbe Himself had sent them to this heathen place precisely to reach out to such wandering Jews, even to such endangered species as my mother no matter how little life remained in them yet. And soon, soon, God willing, the holy Rebbe Himself, our Master, our Teacher, our Rabbi, will rise from concealment in His true form as the Messiah the King to rescue the living and to raise the dead.
Well, he’d better hurry up, I was about to say but held my tongue. The other day Ma dropped a reference to cremation. Does the Messiah do ashes?
What I need to report here, though, is how irrationally, regressively thrilled I felt when my mother approved of nearly every detail of my arrangements. Not only that, but for the first time in God alone knows how many years she even gave me a compliment on my appearance—she admired my long black braid. “So shiny, like a shampoo ad in a magazine.” She pressed her finger tenderly on the red tikka on my forehead as if she were suctioning up the last moist cake crumb from the table—my third eye, the sign that I am a married woman.
As for the apartment, she was unambivalently enraptured by it—it was perfect. She had never had even a room of her own, much less an entire dwelling place. She appreciated the mezuzot that Rabbi Assi had affixed to the doorposts. She was pleased with the simple but adequate furniture, the clean bed, the soft couch, the sturdy kitchen table and two solid chairs, the dishes and cutlery and pots and pans all clearly marked in big, bright letters for clouded eyes—blue for milk, red for meat. She acknowledged my thoughtful considerateness in choosing an apartment on the ground floor with no steps for her to negotiate. She was grateful for the uniformed guard at the door of the building in the wake of the bloody slaughter by terrorists at Nariman House, the Chabad headquarters in my own city of Mumbai. She especially enjoyed the drop-in visits of the two oldest of Rabbi Assi and Dassi’s seven children, the fraternal twins (precious evocations of Shmelke and me no doubt), Menachem Mendel and Chaya Mushka, age six. There was always a supply of unhealthy treats stocked for them, such as bags of Bissli and Bamba imported from Israel, in a special drawer they flew to directly.
But above all she was delighted with the small terrace situated off the living room with its white molded plastic porch furniture. During her first weeks in Varanasi, her period of adjustment, she would sit there almost every day for as long as there was light with a can of diet soda on the table beside her or an unglazed clay cup of lemon tea, which she sipped to its dregs through a sugar cube wedged between her dentures, then thrillingly threw on the stone-tiled floor smashing it to pieces, ecologically recycling it back to the dust whence it had come. With her edematous feet propped up on a stool, she took in the uproar, the perpetual frenzy of the swarming street as if on stage before her, streaked with color, pulsing with sound—ox carts, bicycle rickshaws, autorickshaws rumbling by, horns bleating in desperation nonstop, children running wild, weaving through the throngs, picking pockets, squatting to defecate on the ground with one arm extended for alms, naked sadhus smeared in white ash with matted hair, beggars with missing limbs, women pounding on car windows, opening and closing their mouths like marionettes to mimic hunger, deformed children harnessed to mutilated babies, goats, cows, water buffalos, stray dogs, monkeys, now and then a boar, once an elephant, several times a day a dead body covered in saffron-colored cloth, bedecked with garlands of orange and yellow marigolds, borne through the streets on a bamboo stretcher followed by chanting mourners on the way to the cremation ghats of Harishchandra or Manikarnika along the banks of the Ganges.
When things quieted down, toward evening, she would continue to sit there leafing through magazines, talking on the cell phone I had given her, feeding pieces of challah and matzah to the silver-gray monkey that had befriended her whom she called Fetter Feivish, since he reminded her both in expression and the habit of casually manipulating his privates of her long-dead Uncle Feivel, or simply leaning back with her head resting against a cushion and her eyes closed, her face turned up to receive the last rays of the sun.
The weather was still warm and comfortable when I settled my mother into her Varanasi apartment. The crushing heat had not yet arrived to stupefy the brain and bring on the annual epidemic of sluggishness and madness. The monsoon season was still months away with its drenching rains that would flood holy Mother Ganga and send her waters choked with the ashes and bones and unburned body parts of the dead and the rotting carcasses of lepers and pregnant women, children and cattle rising up the steps of the ghats and lapping like a prehistoric monster through the streets of the city.
The apartment also came equipped with a servant who was sitting on her haunches in a corner of the kitchen in a kind of copse composed of the squeegee, the stunted straw broom, the mop, the dustpan, and other assorted forlorn cleaning implements as Dassi was showing us around, so that we did not at first notice her during the tour. Only when the rebbetzin announced that she was also throwing in her helper as part of Ma’s package, and called out, “Manika?” did she come into focus, a tiny creature, black and shriveled like a prune. She flashed a bashful toothless smile, and automatically twitched the loose end of her green-and-orange print cotton sari forward over her head like a monk’s cowl. The rebbetzin said, “Manika means jewel in their language, and I’m telling you, she is like her name. She’s my gem.”
Ma objected ardently, it was the only feature she disliked in the entire setup. She had been looking forward to living on her own, she valued her privacy, she didn’t want or need a maid, but the rebbetzin insisted. “She’s a present, you can’t refuse a present, a very good girl, from the sweeper and toilet cleaner caste, we don’t hold by that but it’s the lowest of the low, she’ll lick the cow caca off your feet for two paisa, that’s their mentality, she’ll do anything you ask, you won’t even know she’s there, like a fly.”
For my part, although I found the rebbetzin’s patronizing, even racist language deeply offensive, I pleaded with Ma to accept, if only for my sake, for my peace of mind, so that I could feel reassured that she would not be alone after I left. What if you slip in the tub? What if your food goes down the wrong pipe? What if something happens? My mother shook her head—she didn’t want this alter cocker around, it made her feel like an old lady. “She’s probably younger than I am, Ma,” I said, but still my mother wouldn’t yield. It was only after I reminded Ma of the courageous loyalty of the Indian nanny who had rescued the baby Moshe’le during the Mumbai massacre, an event as Ma well knew that had seriously impacted my life also, and of how this blessed Sandra ayah had gone on to become a heroine of the State of Israel and deservedly so, that my mother softened and finally relented, in patriotic solidarity, to hold out an incentive to other budding righteous gentiles no matter what caste, no matter where situated on the great chain of being, to do the right thing and save a Jew.
And in the end, she was happy for the company, even though, or maybe in part because they had no common language between them to communicate with. Nevertheless, they understood each other in their bones, like mother and daughter. She especially loved the long head and foot massages Manika administered, and her unfailing cheerfulness, which given her circumstances was a mystery Ma sought to unravel in the hope of gaining some spiritual insight, she told me. This was during a telephone conversation after I had already left Varanasi and returned home to Geeta and Maya, and to my office in Mumbai. Ma then went on to inform me with the superior air of an old India hand that the name Manika fit her even better than the rebbetzin could imagine—not only because she’s the rebbebtzin’s so-called gem, but also because of the way she would creep into Ma’s bedroom at night to steal a piece of jewelry. (Ma believed in jewelry, especially gold, you could never have too much; in this as in so many other ways, I might point out, Indians and Jews are more alike than you would ever have dreamed of in your philosophy.) “She thinks I’m sleeping while she’s poking around in my jewelry box, but the whole time I’m awake and I’m thinking—C’mon, hurry up, take what you want from in there and get out. Just finish your business already and let me sleep. Same like I used to think in the old days, with your father, when he used to bother me.”
There was also an unforeseen advantage in setting Ma up with a servant, which I regard as priceless and treasure to this day. It emerged very soon after my departure, when I began to receive photos taken by Manika on the cell phone I had left with my mother, a reasonably high-tech mobile toy that gleamed like an onyx gemstone, which this illiterate little woman from a village without running water or sewage system or electricity promptly mastered thoroughly. These pictures form a kind of visual archive of Ma’s time in Varanasi, charting her sojourn there. At first, they tended to be taken against the background of her apartment, generally on the terrace where the light must have been best. It seems my mother did not object despite the traditional strictures she had abided by all her life against allowing herself to be photographed for reasons of modesty (and also, to be completely frank, because she always thought she looked too fat). Here in Varanasi she was mellow, laid back, zen, going with the graven-image flow, easing into liberation.
The pictures that stand out from that period focused on her evolving look. In one, Ma is wearing the long tunic and ballooning pants of a salwar kameez, to my eyes, on my mother a costume utterly shocking, completely mind-blowing. When I mentioned it during our daily telephone conversation (yes, I called my mother every day, religiously, I’m such a good girl) adding that all of us—not only I but also her daughter-in-law Geeta and her granddaughter Maya—thought she looked absolutely gorgeous, that it suited her perfectly, Ma reflected that she had never worn pants in her life, not counting her underpants, she had never thought she would live to see the day when she would be wearing pants publicly on the outside, she should say a She’hekhiyanu that she had been kept alive and sustained to reach this season. The only pants she had ever expected to wear other than her personal oversized pink bloomers, her long turn-off granny gatkes, she went on to make a point of informing me, were the breeches that would form a part of her white linen gender-neutral burial shroud, which of course she would not be alive to see, no one would see them other than the pious ladies of the holy society who washed and purified and dressed her body for the grave, and the worms and maggots who devoured her.
In another photo from this period, Ma’s head is tightly bound in a glossy magenta kerchief streaked with gold tinsel. She’s sitting on her porch with Fetter Feivish, her fancy Sabbath wig plopped askew on his head. With tweezered fingers, the monkey seems to be picking nits out of her everyday wig, which is perched atop the egg-shaped Styrofoam wig stand propped on the table. “Yes, darling,” Ma said, automatically slipping into her role as reinforcer of my self-esteem by complimenting me on my keen powers of observation, “that’s what he’s doing, Fetter. He loves lice, they’re for him a delicacy, like for us chopped liver.”
This was my mother, the same woman who had passed on to me her fear of animals, which still resides in me on a subliminal level but which on the surface I manage to give the appearance of having overcome, a Jewish mother who true to the boilerplate would do anything for her children, turn herself into a doormat and beg them to tread upon her, but at best could only bring herself to satisfy our entreaties for a pet by offering a doomed goldfish swimming in deep depression in a plastic bag, which she had won in a synagogue raffle—and now her best friend was a beast, a monkey, this son of Hanuman. As for her wig, I never saw it on her again. She kept her head covered with a succession of brilliant silk scarves wrapped like a turban over the downy white fuzz of her hair, which was beginning to sprout back like a tender lawn. And I never again saw her dressed in the long skirt and loose long-sleeved blouse or sweater or jacket that is the Orthodox ladies’ official uniform for public appearances or the housecoat for at-home leisure wear, but always either in a salwar kameez or on special occasions, a Benares silk sari, and of course, topping it all, a shawl. Even with her mass of natural built-in padding and insulation, even before she had been consumed by malignancy, Ma was always cold. Our task as children had always been to run and fetch her a sweater or a blanket. When we would reach up for her hand, we always found a tissue there, crumpled for warmth, as if enclosing an ember rescued from the flames.
Ma is wearing a deep-green silk sari embroidered with gold thread and embedded with mirror chips and a pale pashmina dupatta, in one of the first of the series of pictures showing her venturing out of her Varanasi apartment, seated in the carriage of a rickshaw, the driver, malnourished, his brown face cratered by a childhood disease he could not have recovered from too long before, half-straddling his beat-up bicycle, beaming jubilantly. “That’s Bulbul, my personal chauffeur,” Ma explained. “Don’t worry so much, Meena’le. He maybe looks like a ninety-pound weakling, but he’s strong like an ox, he can pedal like nobody’s business. He calls me Mama and tells me I’m light like smoke, the little tukhes licker, even though my own personal tukhes is hanging the whole time over the bench from the rickshaw because it’s a bench not made for zaftig old ladies like me, it’s made for Indians with no meat on their behinds. But I’ll tell you something, Meena’le, I love that boy, I turn my pocketbook upside down and shake it out in his hands, all my rupees I give to that little no-goodnik, my last red cent.” Another image in that series shows Ma enthroned in the rickshaw carriage with Manika tucked in beside her, like a tiny doll from which most of the stuffing had leaked out, a favorite, beloved doll the child refuses to leave home without. Bulbul must have shot that one.
There then follow a series of photographs in which, in addition to her personal staff consisting of Manika and Bulbul, Ma is also shown accompanied by a strikingly glamorous woman young enough to be her daughter, on the wrong side of forty-five by my estimate, though others less experienced in sizing up women would have pegged her as much younger. This newcomer on the scene is always impeccably groomed and made up, dazzling white teeth showcasing dentistry at its most state of the art, nose job, face-lift, silky platinum hair, trendy bling, tight tank top, studded leather jacket, designer jeans, stiletto-heeled boots, the works, a masterpiece of maintenance—Zehava, Ma said, my life coach. She pronounced it koi’akh, like the Yiddish for strength. In her former life, Zehava had been a stratospherically high-placed minister in the Israeli government, with a portfolio in finance or the military, not something soft and womanish such as health or education, a paragon of feminist achievement—a big shot, according to my mother, a very important hoo-ha in the kitchen cabinet of the Knesset. Her name used to be Golda in those days, and she really did in her previous incarnation look uncannily like the legendary Golda Meir. But then she quit everything and changed her life—had an extreme makeover and turned into the Zehava, who, it seemed, had adopted my mother as her pet project.
Zehava’s transformation was breathtaking. Manika sent me links to before-and-after photos of Golda/Zehava from an overpriced internet café meant for mommy-and-daddy-subsidized Lonely Planet travelers in the Assi Ghat area, the proprietor’s threadbare sleeping mat glimpsed on the floor through the half-drawn curtain in the rear. Before her metamorphosis, you truly might have taken her for Golda Meir’s twin sister, Golda’s reincarnation, Golda’s gilgul, Golda’s avatar—chunky build, stocky like a babushka, no-nonsense boxy clothing down to her super-sensible shoes, grizzled graying hair pulled back into a severe low knot to expose a well-scrubbed, coarse-skinned face aggressively stripped of any artifice, small shrewd eyes, bulbous nose laced with a cobweb of red vessels, dark mustache, cigarette plugged between thin dry lips. Now, in her new emanation, she was like the flawless marble statue that had been buried inside the rough stone, liberated by the sculptor, like the scullery maid transformed into the princess by the touch of the godmother’s wand. A YouTube video that Manika also sent to me features Zehava decked out in an iridescent leotard snug as a second skin and shimmering split tulle skirt, gliding smoothly in glass slippers across a polished floor with a devastatingly charming partner at least half her age twirling her to show off her tight satiny panties as the music pounds in a clip from the television show, Dancing with the Stars. Zehava is the star.
Nobody comes to India and is not in some way changed. That is the truism behind Zehava’s radical transformation. She had written a book about it, Transfiguration: The Seeker’s Path to the True You, which was a best seller in Israel, Moldova, the Upper West Side of New York City, and South Korea (where it was translated as True Jew, to tap into the vast Korean market of Talmud readers mining for the secret of alleged Jewish academic genius and financial wizardry). Now, as an exercise, Zehava had taken on my mother as her ultimate challenge. The secret of Zehava’s success was India—more precisely, Hinduism, even more to the point, the linga, the symbol of the great god Shiva, destroyer and transformer. By visiting the temples of Lord Shiva, draping an offering of flowers around the erect linga, sprinkling some holy water, and worshipping there through immersion in a state of profound meditative self-obliteration, the supplicant is in effect destroyed and then transformed. The promise of transformation—of restored youth and health and desirability—is exponentially increased the more Shiva lingas you visit. Varanasi is Shiva’s city, his stomping ground. In Varanasi, there are said to be over one hundred thousand Shiva lingas of every variety. In Varanasi, it is said, there is not a piece of ground the size of a sunflower seed that is not capable of bringing forth its own linga. The pictures that Manika sent to me from this period show Ma and Zehava smiling broadly on either side of flower-draped lingas in an astonishing range of sizes and materials and colors, thick and thin, tall and short, mud and marble, granite and gold, cream and crimson, one in particular I remember standing out for the glowing light bulb at its tip. Of course Ma knew what a linga means to people with dirty minds, she responded when I inquired tentatively. I could feel her blushing at the other end of the phone. She had had nine children after all, although it is true she had preferred not to look. “I’m sitting Shiva,” Ma commented with a dry laugh. “Why not? Why not give it a shot? What can it hurt?”
That to me was the bitterest revelation of all. I had not realized until then how much comfort I had taken from Ma’s insistence that she not only wanted to die, she was looking forward to death and the liberation it would bring with every remaining metastasized cell. It had been on the basis of that assertion that I had supported her in her Varanasi adventure, made all the arrangements, carried out all her wishes. I was giving my mother what she wanted, honoring her living will, I was her enabler, I was helping her to die with dignity. That she had declared with so much conviction that she wanted nothing better than to die made everything so much easier for me, banished any qualms and reservations. And now here she was turning the tables on me, trying to wheedle a reprieve, choosing life, putting herself on life support, placing her trust in this operator, this hustler Zehava, in a last desperate plea bargain for an extension. Had I been in Varanasi at that time, I would have pushed Zehava in all her high-maintenance glory into the foul waters of the Ganges alongside the slimy bathers and the sweating launderers and the idol worshippers doing their puja not only for the sin of raising false hopes, but for the crime of betraying the entire feminist agenda, for choosing her inner Zehava over her Golda, which is completely unforgivable.
How to understand Ma’s weird fixation with Zehava and her preposterous Shiva linga weight loss and transformation program? In the end I concluded that the only reasonable explanation was that she figured it might turn into a boon for India’s tourism, which could translate into more business for me. Ma was always looking out for her kids’ welfare. If she noticed someone talking to himself in the street, for example, she would hand him one of the cards she had had made up to publicize the powers of my twin brother, Shmelke. Go see my son, Reb Breslov Tabor, in Jerusalem, a miracle worker, a healer, he will make you normal, much cheaper than a psychiatrist, even with the airfare. But hey, bottom line, whatever Ma’s good intentions might have been on my behalf, however much she might have had my interests at heart by cultivating this con artist at the expense of her true desire for moksha, Zehava was messing with my mother’s head, it was a nonstarter. And not long after, Zehava was out of the picture—literally, the ones Manika was sending to me. No matter how many Shiva lingas Ma had stroked, she had not lost a single ounce, nothing at all had been transformed or transfigured. In a routine update email, the rebbetzin Dassi speculated that the cancer seemed to have dug its claws into my mother’s spine with a vengeance; it was becoming more and more painful for Ma to get around, though she still had her appetite, and her mood was still positive.
The final set of photographs sent to me by Manika opened ominously, like dead birds strewn in the sand on the way to the sea. The first few pictures in this series did not even include my mother, but rather images of what she saw as she was carted by Bulbul in the bicycle rickshaw around Varanasi, and what for reasons it was left to me to decipher she had instructed Manika to photograph and pass on to me. There was a single theme to all of these pictures. They all showed stones upon which the image of a married couple was carved in relief, posed side by side united in devotion, monuments placed as a shrine near the spot where the good wife had set herself aflame on her husband’s funeral pyre. Ma was drawing nearer to the fires—that was the obvious message. So it did not surprise me at all that when next I saw my mother come into virtual focus it was at the burning ghat, the great cremation ground of Manikarnika.
Manikarnika means jewel earring, Ma explained to me—Same like my girl, Manika. It has to do with some bubbe meise of theirs, one of their gods losing an earring there or some sort of narishkeit like that. Ma, of course, didn’t hold with such nonsense, but she was drawn by the idea of likening death to a lost earring. She had once read, in a magazine geared to ultra-Orthodox women, that a holy Jewish sage and mystic had said that if you find sixty-nine earrings you had lost, you would achieve redemption. One loss after another—that was life in a nutshell—you lose everything until you have nothing.
She was conveyed to Manikarnika Ghat sometime in the morning and sat there all day, often into the night. The fires burned twenty-four hours, never stopping, for my information. She arrived in the bicycle rickshaw with Manika squeezed in beside her in the carriage and Bulbul pedaling furiously. He would pull up as close as possible to the top of the steps. Four eunuchs awaited her; she had won their hearts weeks before when they passed her terrace begging in their hormonally deep belligerent voices, which she softened and soothed by feeding them rugalekhs and strudel while stroking their arms. The eunuchs greeted the arriving rickshaw with bowed heads and palms pressed together in a namaste. They approached, bearing an ancient palanquin with a flaking gilt cabin and shredded upholstery, which they had appropriated from the decaying museum in the crumbling palace and fort of the Maharaja of Benares on the other side of the river where the dead souls go. Each of these eunuchs was a formidable giant, unusually large for an Indian man, thick layers of makeup masking their stubble, false eyelashes, long dangling earrings jingling as they moved sinuously, parodying an idea of woman, lustrous saris in silk and chiffon synthetics. Effortlessly they lifted Ma’s 250 pounds from the carriage of the rickshaw and transferred her to the seat of the litter. With the poles resting on their broad shoulders, they bore her halfway down the steps to a platform in the middle of the cremation ghat, the best seat in the house, the ideal position for viewing. Manika followed closely in their perfumed wake, carrying a folding lounge chair and a pile of cushions, and set it all down on the designated spot. Gently, as if positioning a rare artifact, the eunuchs moved Ma from the palanquin to the chair and parked her there.
This is where my mother sat all day for three weeks, eighteen days in total not including the Sabbath when it is forbidden to drive, and on Fridays she was delivered back to her apartment early, in time to light candles and welcome the Sabbath queen. The weather was still mild. If it grew cool as evening descended, Manika would spread a blanket across my mother’s lap, though the flames rising from the dead burning day and night were like a monstrous furnace perpetually heating this last earthly station.
On each one of those eighteen days I was sent a single picture. The central figure was always my mother in her chair on Manikarnika in a white sari with a blue stripe, like a grotesquely inflated Mother Teresa, the end draped over her head, which is tightly wrapped in a white kerchief threaded with gold, and over her shoulders a wool paisley scarf. Her eyes are blacked out by an oversized pair of sunglasses, a celebrity guarding against being recognized and mobbed by her fans.
Each photo presented another variation to ponder, like impressionistic studies by an artist in changing lights. What was not visible to me was what Ma herself was seeing, what it was that drew her to this inferno again and again; her dark glasses guarded her thoughts against betrayal, reflected nothing, nor was she forthcoming when we talked at night about what was unfolding before her day after day. In a single phone conversation only, after I had pleaded with her, in pity she opened up slightly, as I remember it, to liken the scene she was witnessing to an end-of-days landscape of altars, human sacrifices laid on top of them, burning, roasting, pluming in smoke, flaking into ash. Your body that matters so much to you in your lifetime, that is such a big deal to you, this body is basically the same like everyone else’s, Ma said, with everything in the same place more or less. You think you’re different but you’re nothing special, you start with the head, you end with the feet, arms, legs, kishkes, bowels, your shriveled and dried-up little unmentionables that give you so much aggravation and tzores in your life—who needs it? You take up so much and so much space on this earth, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but always, give or take, the length and width of an altar, that’s what you see at Marnikarnika. Most of the bodies brought here for cremation are small—very small—Ma observed, Not like my body, but it’s all the same basic model. These are so small though, most of the time you can’t tell if it’s a man or a lady stretched out there on the altar wrapped in a sheet with the face bagged like for an execution. You think they’re all women they’re so small, but they could also be shrunken old men, in death the differences are wiped out. It’s just so relaxing to sit there so warm and toasty and watch, Ma said, it’s just such a relief to finally stop fighting, to just sit back and surrender yourself to the facts of death.
The photograph of the day, on the other hand, communicated far more information. And, I should note, it was a testament to how my mother came to be regarded that these pictures even existed in the first place. As every tourist is forewarned, it is forbidden to take pictures at the cremation ghats, out of respect for this most personal of religious rituals, never mind that it is so transparently enacted in public, and in deference to the mourners, who in any event, seem strangely detached and almost indifferent, like the dead themselves, they do not scream and yell openly, to wail and tear your hair is considered bad form, inauspicious for the dead poised in this delicate space of transition. Self-appointed guardians of the faith prowling the burning ghat on the lookout for any violators of the no-photos rule will pounce on alleged flouters, but not one of them ever dared to mess with my mother or her support staff. She was protected by her eunuchs, their long red lacquered fingernails curled like talons to rip them to pieces, lurid lipstick-smeared mouths quivering in readiness to open and let out a hideous harpy shriek.
In the first of these eighteen pictures, Ma is captured with her eunuchs robed in luminescent saris in shades of red, two eunuchs on each side, all leaning in toward my mother enthroned in her chair shrouded in widow white, flanking her with crimson lips pursed into a Cupid’s bow and heads fetchingly posed in a flirtatious tilt. In another of these earlier pictures Ma is not even making eye contact with the camera. She is engrossed in sharing her lunch with her gray monkey, Fetter Feivish; Ma is eating a banana, Fetter is sipping from a can of diet soda through a straw. There are a few more photos of Ma with other snacking animals in this open-air death processing factory—one surrounded by seven emaciated black cows, dung caked all over their flanks and tails, grazing on the discarded marigold wreaths that had decorated the litters of the dead, another with a goat, the upper portion of its body clad in a torn striped polo shirt, to whom Ma is feeding a piece of saffron-colored cloth laced with silver ribbon that had been used to cover a corpse, another showing Ma with two wild dogs in front of her gnawing on a human foot.
But most of the images by far are of my mother adorned with heaps of flower garlands, gold, red, orange, circling her neck, draped over her head, spilling out of her lap. At her feet are rows of small baskets fashioned out of leaves filled with flower petals, sprouting bouquets of incense sticks. On cloths spread out on either side of her are piles of coins and rupees, and offerings of sweets in vibrant colors and textures. “Oh no, I would never touch that stuff,” Ma said when I inquired. “What are you talking about? It’s not even kosher. It doesn’t have even an OU, not even a K, I’m not even talking glatt. Besides, it’s very fattening. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hutz-klutz, all of a sudden they decide I’m some kind of saint, or nokh besser, it shouldn’t happen to a dog, a god—Mamadevi, the latest goddess. As if they didn’t have enough already—now they have thirty-six million and one. Ma Kali, they call me. At first I thought they were saying Ma Kallah—you know, like a bride? Mother of the bride, ha ha—but no, wrong again. It seems they really have this dolly named Kali, she’s one of their big shot goddesses, mother superior, they tell me, and also she likes to hang around the cremation grounds, like me. I even saw a picture of her, on an old calendar in Bulbul’s rickshaw. Black face, long red tongue sticking out of her mouth like a very bad girl, her hair a mess, bloodshot eyes, cut off heads everywhere spritzing blood, crazy lady breaking all the rules and nobody can stop her, out of control. But thank God, at least she’s skinny. Maybe even too skinny, if such a thing is possible. So, okay, so now I’m Ma Kali—I accept, why not? Every day they come and bring me presents. I try to tell them they’re making a very big mistake—but who ever listens to a crazy old lady?”
Lurking in a corner of almost all of these pictures is the figure of a small, slight man, baldheaded, bare chested, with leather chappals on his feet, a white dhoti around his waist, round wire-rimmed glasses. In the eighteenth picture he takes center stage. “That’s my end-of-life guru,” Ma said when I ventured to ask. “I call him the angel of death. Every day he comes up to me, he points to the burning fires, and he whispers in my ear, ‘It’s the end of life, Mama. How do you feel about that?’”
“How do you feel about it, Ma?”
“I’m not worried, mama’le. Guru-shmuru. What does he know? He knows from nothing.” Silence fell, long enough to trigger the fear that I had lost the connection when, suddenly, Ma’s voice resurfaced. “My mama, may she rest in peace—she would never let anything bad happen to me.”