2

THE NEXT DAY the rebbetzin Dassi called. Ma had taken an unmistakable turn for the worse. I should come at once.

I was in Jerusalem when I received the call, putting the final touches on the schedule for a two-week retreat at a meditation center in Dharamsala for some of the veteran members of Women in Black who, for over two decades, had been holding vigil in their black kerchiefs every Friday afternoon before the Sabbath at France Square (which they had renamed Hagar Square), not far from the official residence of the prime minister of Israel, against war and violence in general, and against the occupation of the so-called West Bank in particular. I am ideologically very sympathetic to this noble cause and was working especially hard to reward these obviously extremely well-deserving heroines with an amazing experience. Even so, I immediately dropped everything and handed over the entire dossier of their itinerary to one of my agents on the ground, in our branch office in an old Templar building in German Colony. I took the first flight out of Tel Aviv that I could get—price in this emergency was of course not an issue—and landed in Mumbai in the early hours of the morning. From there I connected via SpiceJet to Varanasi, arriving at my mother’s apartment in the late afternoon.

The rebbetzin Dassi was in the kitchen, cradling an infant in one arm who was nursing at her breast, a toddler dragging down on her skirt. With her free hand she was stirring a pot of rice and lentils on the stove for her other children, who were climbing like monkeys all over the sofa in the living room, the cushions piled up to form the ramparts and turrets, the chambers and hidden recesses of a fort. Dassi nodded a somber greeting and jerked her head toward the closed door of my mother’s bedroom. Ma was in bed, with Manika’s face poking out from under the covers beside her. I kissed my mother’s dry forehead, like old parchment under my lips. “Ma,” I let out. “What took you so long?” she said. “I was waiting. I have to talk to you. I didn’t know if I could hold out much more.” Her voice was feeble, practically inaudible.

Manika rose from the bed and left the room in obedience to a wordless signal from my mother. Ma indicated to me to draw nearer and bring my ear close to her mouth. “If you love me,” Ma spoke, “put your hand under my thigh and do me a favor. Do not bury me in America or Israel, or in the ground anywhere. But when I am dead, carry my body along the ghats, from Assi to Manikarnika. Cremate me there and throw my ashes into the river.”

With my hand under my mother’s thigh I argued fiercely—her last wish, so beyond recall, such an unfair burden to lay on the back of your own child—but she would not listen to reason no matter how intensely I struggled, even when I resorted to an appeal to her lifelong religious convictions and observance, which was truly ironic since personally and publicly I had rejected all that. It’s a sin, a violation of our faith, and so on and so forth, I argued. The Torah says, Dust you are and to dust you return. We Jews bury our dead, that’s why we were given the land of Israel as our eternal estate—our resting place, in other words, our graveyard, our cemetery. Ma shook her head. She had already taken up too much space above ground. She could not bear to be weighed down under the earth with generations stomping on top of her, lying on her back in her grave looking up between their legs, the idea alone gave her a headache, suffocated her. She could not accept being plunged into the darkness, a plague so thick you could touch it. She could not abide the rain falling on her grave, the frost, the snow, the cold, she suffered at the very thought. She could not give herself over to be consumed by worms and beetles, recycled in the food chain, processed and excreted. She’d rather go up in smoke and be removed from the system.

The family will scream bloody murder, they will disown you, I said. Ma’s lips tightened. Let them compare her to scattered dust, then. For scattered dust, you are not required to sit shiva, you are excused from saying Kaddish.

You would have no grave or marker, I said, there would be no place you would be on this planet, I would have no place to come to if I need you.

Ma looked at me as at a stranger. She could no longer be at her post forever, faithfully waiting for me in case I needed her.

When the Messiah comes at the end of days, I cried in desperation, you would have no remains, you would have no body to resurrect, you would be reduced to ashes.

She closed her eyes sanctimoniously. She would be in good company then, with the six million.

Throughout this ordeal, my hand was under my mother’s thigh. I could feel the weight and heat of her body in which she had lived her life, through which she had experienced her reality, I could feel what it was like to be her, the constriction of her fears, the insistence of her desires, my hand was very close to the womb that was the source of my own being. This is a very ancient form of oath taking, the hand under the thigh, biblical. It was what the patriarch Jacob required of his son Joseph when he too was on his deathbed, under the thigh, grazing the testicles, through this most intimate contact transmitting the full urgency of his final wish with regard to his own funeral arrangements, to be conveyed back to the land of Canaan to lie with his fathers in Hebron rather than to be buried in Egypt, a wish Joseph granted with an extravagant royal spectacle of mourning, though first he could not resist embalming the old man in accordance with Egyptian rites albeit in breach of Jewish ritual, probably a good idea after all, to forestall the inevitable rot and stink on the long trek through the scorching wilderness to the final destination. Jacob’s thigh under which Joseph’s hand was pressed had been wounded when he had wrestled with the angel of God until the break of day in Mahana’im. My hand under my mother’s thigh, I could feel how grievously she too had been wounded, how damaged she was.

“I’ll do it, Ma,” I said.

She startled me by opening her eyes. “Promise me.”

I promised.

Satisfied, Ma signaled to me to leave the room. She needed a few minutes of privacy, to gather herself. I am myself a great believer in respecting other people’s right to privacy as I would hope they would respect mine. After what I had just been through, and the great burden of the promise to my mother that I had just taken upon myself, I practically lurched out of Ma’s bedroom in search of my own space. The only place to go for some solitude in that apartment raucous with children was the bathroom. I staggered in, locked the door, sat down on the toilet slumped with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, like Rodin’s Thinker. What I was thinking was, Why is my mother doing this to me? How had I failed her that she was demanding this last extreme act of devotion from me? Was she creating this scenario so that I would leap into the flames of her funeral pyre? Was that why she had sent me all those pictures of the inscribed sati stones? I believe I must have drifted off into another dimension, lost touch with my reality for a brief spell on that toilet, depleted by my travels, emptied by the devastating scene I had just enacted with my mother, voided by the promise I had committed myself to that would, so to speak, put the final nail in the coffin of my alienation from my origins. I woke up shivering, agitated by a memory from my childhood—Ma always cold, piling on sweaters and shawls and scarves, blankets and quilts. She hated the cold—the cold, cold ground. It clamped her with terror. She held with those who favored fire. She must have tasted of desire, as the poet says, and I never gave her credit.

When I opened my eyes, the last mysterious light of the waning day was filtering in. It was only then that I noticed I was not alone. Manika was at the other end of the bathroom, bent over, pushing a broom, its bundle of straw wrapped in wet rags. The walls and ceiling and floor of the bathroom I now saw were covered with undulating gray insects, strange feathery otherworldly bugs, like waves of silver gossamer, like a gauzy veil, like ash. Soundlessly, with her muted broom, Manika was pushing these ghostly creatures down the drain in the center of the cement floor. Our eyes met. I rose at once, flushed the toilet, and left.

Dying is a very private human act, like going to the toilet, like sex. One of the more embarrassing aspects of the punishment of those who are condemned to be executed is to die in public. They wet and soil their trousers, their sexual members are aroused. Even animals that are mortally wounded are given the grace to be allowed to slouch off into a secluded corner to die with dignity. Ma was no longer there when I reentered her room, she had been eliminated and effaced. A stranger had taken her place in the bed, waxen, bloated, rigid, swollen blue hands and feet, a figure that in no way resembled my mother. I would not have been able to identify this suspect in a police lineup. I do not believe in the soul or the anima or the ch’i or the vital spirit, not even in the neshama, literally, the breath of life, the Jewish soul train, or any of that mystical junk, but that creature in that bed was not my mother. It was a husk, a hollow shell, a carapace, such as a locust casts off. My real mother had taken advantage of the privacy I had granted her to escape through the window.

What followed then was like the worst kind of dream—the dream that paralyzes you with horror and won’t let you go so that you can never wake yourself out of it into the relief that it was only a dream. From the moment I returned to that room until we disposed of the remains, I did not leave the side of Ma’s impersonator for a minute. I had already paid a terrible price for my brief absence, which my mother had exploited so cruelly by snatching her death when no one was looking and running with it, stealing away forever. Now I resolved to remain fixed in my place, partly, yes, in homage to the Jewish exhortation to guard the dead until properly settled, which I count among the more humane and enlightened mandates of my lost faith, but above all in my determination to show my mother that I was capable of honoring the promise I had made to her.

I could feel Ma’s unquiet presence vibrating there in the room, watching me as I watched over her, challenging me, testing me, loitering there to see if I possessed the spirit and life to follow through and keep my word. Already there were forces converging to obstruct me. Within the hour after Ma split, the pale gray flies that Manika had been sweeping down the drain in the bathroom started migrating into the room, forming a frothy canopy of filaments and streamers over the corpse, which had begun to emit the stench of decay, sending it forth in putrid shafts that seemed almost to glow. The rebbetzin Dassi opened the door slightly, pressing her bundled infant up against her nose. She glanced into the room, took in the situation, automatically muttered the obligatory phrase of acceptance and fatalism, Blessed is the True Judge, shoved the door closed with her shoulder, collected her brood, and rushed out of the apartment with Manika following swiftly after, as if on assignment.

Within minutes, Rabbi Assi himself showed up, striding into my mother’s bedroom without knocking or announcing himself in any way, with the entitlement of a doctor on rounds in a hospital. I was at that instant still focusing inward on how to carry out the incredibly complex and loaded task before me in strict compliance with the highly transgressive promise my mother had extracted, so I did not fully apprehend his approaching heavy tread. There was no question in my mind that I would do everything in my power to realize Ma’s last wish. She had already broken so many taboos and taken so many risks and sacrificed so much in her quest for liberation, she had rid herself of all desire in her surrender to death other than that single final request, I could not fail her now at the finish line. I was immersed in the immediate problem of how to deal with my father and siblings on the issue of cremation, which without doubt they would find irredeemably abhorrent and repugnant, when the rabbi burst into the room. I had just come to the decision to proceed with the rite as soon as possible exactly as Ma had requested and to hit the family with the news of her passing and the manner in which the remains had been disposed of after the fact—after nothing was left but some clumps of fibrous black ashes in the dark womb of Mother Ganga. There would be nothing they could have done to prevent it thanks to the gift of ignorance I will have bestowed upon them, so they would in no way be liable. I alone, already dead in their eyes, a branded defiled spirit, would be guilty.

Rabbi Assi muttered the requisite verse of consolation and resignation, Barukh Dayan haEmet. With his fingers stroking his nose up and down in what he fancied was a discreet gesture in no way connected to the rank smell suffusing the space, and pinching his nostrils together so that his words were partially muffled, he instructed me with full pastoral authority that Jewish law requires that the funeral take place immediately, optimally on the very same day if feasible. That was fine with me, I replied; as night was already descending, I was in any event planning it for the first thing next morning. His eyes opened wide in bafflement. But where was I going to bury my holy mother, peace be upon her, in this idolatrous place? He went on to advise me that he had the infrastructure at hand for the purification and preparation of the body by a holy society of righteous women in strict observance of Jewish tradition, and for its shipment to Israel or America, or whatever hallowed ground I chose, for a proper burial; he was offering me a full deluxe funeral and interment package free of charge purely out of his love and respect for my holy mother, a true seeker, may her memory be for a blessing. It then fell to me to let him know that my holy mother the seeker of blessed memory had requested to be cremated. “I promised her, Assi,” I said. With my right hand under her thigh, like Joseph at the deathbed of Father Jacob in that famous scene from the Torah. If I forget my promise, may my right hand forget its cunning.

Calmly at first, Rabbi Assi instructed me that my promise was null and void. My holy mother, may her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life, was now in another place, a place of wisdom and enlightenment, where she now sees her error and recognizes the truth. She now prefers a proper Jewish burial, he assured me. Therefore, my under-the-thigh oath to my mother, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, is canceled, void, invalid, without force or standing or power, completely vaporized as if with the full clout of the Kol Nidre prayer intoned on the eve of Yom Kippur, annulling all the year’s oaths. I was not only permitted to break my vow, I was obligated to do so as it had been superseded by what my holy mother, peace be upon her, actually wants now at this very moment as she stands at the gate of heaven. What she wants now, Rabbi Assi advised me with complete certainty, is to return to the earth from which she had come. I merely shook my head. Nice try, Assi, good khop, but no cigar. It was Ma’s living will to be cremated. Unless she shows up now to tell me right here in person that she has changed her mind and signs a release waiver, I’m moving ahead as scheduled, all systems go.

I continued to shake my head like a pendulum back and forth as Assi poured out a string of objections mostly pertaining to the reasons for the prohibitions against the mutilation of the body, dead or alive, from tattoos to autopsies to cremation—sacred vessel, God’s image, on loan from God, the whole predictable banal drill. When finally it sank in that I was battening down the hatches and not budging, he drew out his last and best card. “Very soon now, very quickly in our time, the holy Rebbe Himself, our Master, our Teacher, our Rabbi, will rise up from concealment in His true form as the Messiah the King to rescue the living and to raise the dead. If you go ahead with this atrocity, your holy mother, peace be upon her, will have no body to resurrect. On that great day she will be forced to come back to life in a different body and no one will recognize her and no one will greet her.” “That’s okay, Assi,” I said, for some reason oddly serene maybe in reaction to his foaming agitation, “Ma never liked her own body very much anyhow. Next time around, I think she’d prefer thin.” “Vantz!” the rabbi spat out. He turned furiously, sparing himself the indignity of a total public meltdown, and darted out of the room. Frankly, I was stunned that Assi knew some Yiddish, even if it was limited to a few common curse words. He was dark skinned, I had taken him for an Oriental Jew stemming from the Levant or North Africa, Sephardi, though of course some Yiddish must have been part of his purebred Ashkenazi Chabad curriculum. And I wasn’t sure if by vantz, which translates as bedbug and is not exactly meant as a compliment, he was referring to me or with his pidgin Yiddish to the swarm of insects hovering over my mother’s double in that bed, like the gray cloud over the Israelites in the wilderness. Tomorrow, it would be replaced by the pillar of fire. Now I was even more unshakable.

It was not the last I would see of the rabbi, of that I was sure the second he stomped out in such a rage. I needed to remain exceedingly vigilant and alert. And just as I had predicted, he was back within the hour, this time accompanied by four of his toughest Hasidim, elite ex-paratroopers by the looks of them, lugging a heavy-duty stretcher. It was obvious that they intended to seize the body by force, to kidnap it in order to save it from the abomination of being consigned to the cremation pit. From the rabbi’s perspective, there are times when it is permissible, in the name of heaven, to commit even an act explicitly forbidden in the written law, such as kidnapping, an act, moreover, for which the death penalty is mandated (though some might argue that this same severity does not apply if the kidnapping involves a corpse, especially one slated for the fires). It was entirely correct in this emergency, according to the rabbi, during the small window of opportunity still open to them, to use any means necessary to rescue the dead from an impending sacrilege, including brute force and violence. Clearly my mother had been in a deluded state when she had made her final request. Assi was acting in her interest, for the sake of her salvation in the world to come.

Shortly before the rabbi and his gang of four showed up, however, Manika had returned with our quartet of eunuchs. They were hanging out with me at the bedside keeping the corpse company, the ends of their saris drawn in a discreet ladylike flip across the lower portion of their faces due to the intensifying stink of decomposition, when the rabbi and his forces charged into the room, pushing the door open so savagely with the metal corner of the stretcher. Our four mighty eunuchs rose at once, positioned themselves silently in a phalanx formation along the bedside facing the invaders, the first line of resistance, their lipstick-stained teeth bared, their arms raised with clawed hands like tigers set to pounce, displaying the long red-lacquered daggers of their fingernails.

The unanticipated presence of the eunuchs along with their menacing maneuver brought the rabbi and his troops to a sudden halt, plunging them into a heated argument, to which, on our side, I alone was privy as it was conducted in Hebrew. The rabbi’s boys were indeed all Israelis, hardened veterans of the Israel Defense Forces morphed into stoned and sexed-out seekers in India, and now, seized by the influence and inspiration of Rabbi Assi himself, newly minted penitents, returnees to the faith. The crux of their debate was whether or not it was permissible for them to engage in battle with an enemy of questionable gender. Were their opponents women or men? If the former, were the laws of negiah applicable, prohibiting the physical contact that would inevitably ensue from hand-to-hand combat? If the latter, would not one be rendered impure simply by touching the perversion of the garb of a woman on the body of a man? And what if parts of their bodies had been altered by surgery or implants or hormones or some other repulsive engineering to resemble the female form? And whether they were male or female, what about the danger of inadvertently being brought to a state of physical arousal by wrestling with these freaks?

Of course they were men, Rabbi Assi contended with exasperation, urging his warriors on, no different from an enemy who confronts you in camouflage or in the disguise of a burqa or chador. It is your duty to fight them, just as it is your duty to rescue a drowning woman regardless of your male status, the prohibition against touching the female does not pertain in such a case involving a threat to life, which trumps even the holy Sabbath. The drowning woman here is the dead body on the bed about to be sunk to the depths of the river in the form of ashes, and the life that is threatened is her afterlife.

In any other circumstance, all of this pilpul and Talmudic disputation displayed by his students, not to mention the laudatory manifestation of the desire to adhere to the law to the strictest hairsplitting letter, would have been a source of extreme pride to Rabbi Assi, confirmation that all of his teachings had penetrated and taken root in the minds and hearts of his flock. But now he was growing increasingly impatient, their momentum was slipping away. And then their situation turned utterly hopeless. A pack of gray monkeys led by Fetter Feivish leaped into the bedroom, invading the premises through the door that the rabbi and his men had carelessly left open. The monkeys seemed to know who the enemy was, I believe by a sign from Manika who understood how to communicate with them, and began to harass them mercilessly, swatting them with their tails, climbing up their legs and onto their shoulders, nipping at their fingers, tugging their side-curls, pulling off their black flying saucer hats and putting them on their own heads, like in the children’s story about the caps for sale once so beloved by my daughter Maya, so that in the end the rabbi had no choice but to turn and abandon the battlefield, shouting at me as he and his raiders made their exit that he washed his hands of all of it, it was now all on my head, I would pay a very heavy price for it if not in this life then in the next, I might be the daughter but in this situation I was tantamount to the son, the rebellious and wayward son, condemned to death by stoning.

At this juncture I feel it is necessary and appropriate to pause for a moment in my narrative of these traumatic events to acknowledge my debt to Manika. There is no doubt in my mind that without Manika, I would not have been able to honor my mother by carrying out her last wishes exactly as she had mandated them to me, I would not have been able to pull it off on my own. It was during the period between Ma’s disappearance and the immolation of the shell she had left behind that Manika’s extraordinary administrative and managerial powers and her fierce loyalty came to the fore—attributes that continued to enrich my life, for she remained at my side for many years after. After it was all over, I presented her with a thank-you gift of a perfect new set of teeth made to order, brought her to Mumbai with me where she served as my daughter Maya’s ayah, and, as an extra bonus, engaged a private tutor to teach her how to read. But during those terrible dark hours, when I was confined like a captive to the bedside on guard duty, it was Manika who took care of everything and made all the arrangements, operating on her own initiative, without requiring instructions or even a list, which she would not at that time have been able to read in any event. She knew exactly what had to be done, she did not have to be told, she stored it all in her head and made everything happen. Truly, she is my gem, to quote the rebbetzin, the jewel in my crown.

Manika not only had the foresight to summon the eunuchs and mobilize the monkeys, anticipating the looming threat from the rabbi and his cohorts, but after that incident she made sure I was never again alone. There was not a moment subsequently when I was not surrounded by defenders and comforters—our four eunuchs and many of their fellow travelers just being there for me, spending quality time, spraying fine mists of patchouli into the air with atomizers they pulled out of their purses, Fetter Feivish and the mischievous members of his simian tribe tearing open bags of Bamba and Bissli meant for the rabbi’s kids, Bulbul and the delegation of bicycle rickshaw wallahs coming and going, and other assorted visitors. We sat around with our dupattas or the ends of our saris stretched demurely across the lower half of our faces because despite all the perfumes and joss sticks in the world, we could not deny the percolating smell of rot diffused by the microbes and bacteria released at last to gorge inside the carcass. With exemplary reverence and refinement, Manika knotted a kerchief like a pulley tightly around the still-uncovered face of the deceased as if it had a toothache, in order to close its mouth, which had been hanging down slack, wide open, revealing gray gums, an obscene dangling uvula, a swollen tongue, and all the secrets of my childhood.

It was Manika who made all the advance arrangements at the cremation ghat—paying double the fee in anticipation of what would be the extraordinary nature of our cortege, which would include the essential participation of the eunuchs in full regalia, hiring the services of a willing priest at double the price, purchasing double the amount, due to the unusual size of the body, of the best sandalwood for the pyre, the best ghee for fuel, the best incense for fragrance, and so on, price was not an object. Manika was the one who went out with two of our eunuchs as her fashion consultants on an errand to buy the shroud, as well as the lustrous saffron-colored and gold-ribboned coverings, garlands of flowers in abundance, an extra-sturdy reinforced bamboo bier on which to carry the corpse in the processional along the ghats, cords to tie it down securely, and all the other supplies. With a wall of eunuchs screening the bed for privacy, Manika washed the body and swaddled it in the thin sheet of the shroud, shooing away the flies and moths as she labored, this tiny woman performing all the heavy lifting on her own without an audible sigh or groan. And shortly before we all set out, because of the prohibition against the participation of women in the cremation rites due to the well-documented female tendency toward hysteria and the possibility that a lady overcome with grief might lunge headlong into the flames, which is now illegal, it was Manika who transformed me into the eldest son, into my male twin, into Shmelke, by draping me within the concealing folds of a pure white robe, and she shaved my head entirely, leaving only a small tuft in back, a little below the crown.

We set out while it was still dark, our four noble eunuchs honored with the first round of bearing aloft the bamboo stretcher on which the shrouded body had been laid out, blanketed with vivid cloths for warmth, heaped with garlands of flowers for beauty, firmly anchored with strong bands to prevent shifting or slippage or any unseemly accident along the way, God forbid. As the eldest son and mourner in chief, renamed Mani for the occasion, I walked directly behind. At my side was the hijra guru himself, the eunuch chief in all his splendor, conferring upon Ma the distinction of his presence and the blessings of good luck in his power to grant it as she embarked on her journey toward liberation. Then followed an escort composed of additional initiates in the exclusive society of eunuchs as well as members of the fraternity of bicycle rickshaw wallahs led by Bulbul, all of them eager for the honor of taking their turn carrying the effigy of my holy mother. Making up the rear, at a respectful distance, came the woman and the animal, Manika and Fetter Feivish, accompanied by several of his colleagues. This was the core group, the nucleus around which many other spiritually attuned seekers would amass as we made our way from Ma’s apartment chanting, Rama nama satya hai, the familiar verse intoned over and over again every day by funeral processions wending through the lanes and alleys of Varanasi—the refrain that reverberated in your ears day and night and could never be fully unplugged, Rama nama satya hai, God’s name is truth.

In faithful compliance with Ma’s extraordinary request to be transported to her final destination not by the traditional route through the constricted streets of the city itself but rather along the wide promenade at the top of the broad concrete steps of the ghats, we progressed from the apartment through some twisting roads and alleys, then down the clay slope to our first station, the great Shiva linga under the pipal tree at Assi Ghat. The darkness was still intense, an hour at least remained until the sun would begin to rise over the eastern shore of Mother Ganga, there were no electric lamps or other lights to guide our way as the power had failed as usual, yet already there were bathers and pilgrims at Assi Ghat performing their daily salutations, rising wet from the holy river as if reborn, their clothing clinging to their bodies and rendered translucent, climbing up the slippery incline. By the light of candles affixed with their own melting wax around the base of the linga, I instantly recognized among the Shiva devotees Ma’s girlfriend Zehava, despite the helmet she had on to protect her hairdo. I did not hesitate to approach and introduce myself. Addressing her in Hebrew, I informed her whose remains we were now carrying, and invited her to show her respect to the dear departed by joining our cortege.

She declined on two grounds. First, she was at that very moment engaged in an emergency political action to counteract a string of outrages perpetrated by a radical group that provocatively called itself SS, which stood for Safe Sex, and, to add insult to injury, used the Indian Aryan backward swastika as its symbol. As a Jew she simply could not countenance such Nazi references however much she might be in agreement with this organization’s program to stem the population explosion that dumped more poor people in India than in any other country on the face of the earth, and however deeply she was in accord with its agenda to stop the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases and especially AIDS by truck drivers on gouged-out Indian roads whose throbbing vehicles so agitated their groins and sex organs that they had no choice but to seek release with infected prostitutes at rest stops and then bring the disease back home as a present to their own wives in their villages. Moreover, she absolutely could not tolerate the repellent tactics of this group, including its most recent particularly offensive campaign to promote the virtue of protected sex in a startling act of desecration that would make everyone sit up and pay attention—swathing every Shiva linga they could get their hands on, no matter how small or large, with a condom. Just before our arrival, as it happened, she along with a few other Shivaniks, had peeled off an extra-jumbo plus-sized rubberlike condom from this very impressive linga under this pipal tree right here at Assi Ghat. Clearly, it was more vital that she devote her energies to this immediate crisis. A threat to the living always took precedence over attending to the final rites for the departed, who were anyway already no longer players and past caring.

That was the first reason Zehava gave for not being available on such short notice to join our procession. Her second reason, which she stated succinctly since it required no explanation, was that as a matter of principle she boycotted Hindu funerals since they excluded women for sexist reasons. Hysterics, all of us—and she telegraphed a sisterly smile, taking it for granted I was on her wavelength. That was her inner Golda talking, and I told her so. No, it was her outer Zehava, she corrected, the highest articulation of feminism, the most powerful manifestation of liberation—women’s liberation in the full expression of the lived reality of her femaleness. “Your wise mother, may she rest in peace, she understood this. She told me you’d never get it—and she was right.”

So, Ma had talked about me to this vulgar stranger, and in such a negative light. It required all my self-control to keep from bursting into tears at this betrayal, sobbing wretchedly like a little girl again until I was panting and could no longer catch my breath, falling down crying right there at the foot of the Shiva linga at Assi Ghat, and beating the ground with my fists in a tantrum like your stereotypical female hysteric—but it was necessary to maintain the decorum of the occasion. Lips pumping fishlike, throat constricted as if an umbilical cord had again been twisted around my neck by Shmelke my twin, I nevertheless had to carry myself with adult male dignity and move on. Already our forces were advancing, the bamboo litter at the head with the cadaver like a beached whale dredged up from the sea strapped down to it carted by the next shift of four eunuchs. I took my rightful place directly behind, followed by the founding core escort, our ranks swelling with bystanders and gawkers as we processed along the way—sadhus and holy men, yogis and ascetics, beggars, boatmen, launderers, pushers, touts, dreadlocked kids stoned on hashish, strumming their sitars, banging their tablas, seekers, tourists, the jet-lagged and the insomniac and the homeless, dogs, goats, monkeys, cows. The mood was celebratory and festive, and not discordantly so. Death held no terror here even in the darkness of night. This was Kashi, the city of light where death was bound up in the fabric of life, accepted like any other bodily function, taken in, passed through, and eliminated.

We made our way chanting along the promenade rising above the holy river Ganges, past Tulsi Ghat, and the Jain Ghat, and onward, with the hope of reaching Harishchandra Ghat as our next station, to switch bearers, change horses as it were, when an unforeseen event occurred at the ghat named for the great god himself, destroyer and transformer, Shivala Ghat. This is the ghat favored by cows and water buffalos, herded here from the cramped teeming interior of the city and marched down the steps into the waters of the river to bathe and cool off, leaving in their wake great wet mounds of waste matter, sloppy heaps of dung. On the bright side, when our bearers stumbled and slipped on the muck, they managed to stop their slide after rolling down only about four or five steps and were spared crashing down the entire flight. Most importantly, the body on the stretcher thank God remained securely in place and did not suffer the humiliation of plummeting with a horrifying thud. Still, it did not emerge unscathed. It was smeared with shit as if it had been rolled like dough in sugar, the eunuchs were shrieking, their saris and makeup were ruined, we were obliged to stop and wait while they descended into the water with the stretcher and submerged entirely to clean off as best they could. When they came up out of Mother Ganga there was no time for drying, no warmth from the sun, which had not yet risen, our schedule had been disrupted, it was imperative to move on. Ten fresh eunuchs, four on each side in file, plus one at the head and one at the feet, were now required to ferry the waterlogged body, weighed down even more by the coverings soaked through and through. Alluding to the excrement that had in such a ghastly spectacle toppled the guest of honor and her bearers, the hijra guru said, “It is the filth of Shiva and therefore pure, all opposites are illusion.” We took whatever comfort we could from this wisdom as we continued on our way.

Because of this unexpected pit stop at Shivala, we now moved ahead at a purposeful clip in our legions, chanting our Rama nama satya hai, hoping to pass Harishchandra Ghat without stopping there to pay our respects as we had originally intended. This, however, was not to be, and perhaps in hindsight it was correct that we pause for some moments of silence at this holy site, since it is the more ancient of the two cremation ghats and regarded by many of the Kashi old-timers as the more sacred and therefore the preferred access route to moksha. What prevented us from pushing ahead directly was the small mob of children who slept in Harishchandra in the shadow of the electric crematorium, and in the pavilion, and on the benches, and along the retaining wall, and in any sheltered nook they could curl up in the fetal position to stick their thumbs into their mouths even among the open-air pyres, burning continuously. The boisterous parade of our throng passing in the night jolted them into wakefulness. Illuminated by the fresh and smoldering flames of burning bodies, the urchins descended on us like tiny demons, the whites of their eyes and teeth gleaming in the darkness of that underworld as they penetrated our ranks, circling our legs, squeezing in very close, groping, clawing, grasping, begging, stealing.

Still, even as they clung to us and hung from our necks and arms, we barely slowed our pace, plowing ahead, shooing them off like mosquitos, the eunuchs letting out terrifying cries and howls from the monster abyss of prebirth dreams, startling the imps into flight. We thought we had succeeded in shaking them off entirely, but a small hardcore contingent had regrouped ahead of us. In a straight row barring our way, they were squatting bare-bottomed and defecating, staking out their territory like dogs, looking up at us defiantly, sniffing and grinning triumphantly. It stopped us in our tracks, their pathetic barricade. We stood there gazing far too long, overcome by the realization that this was their only line of defense, there was nothing we could do to save them. So we simply circled around and went on. I wanted to call out to my mother, Ma, wherever you are (certainly not in that obscene blob we were hauling), these are the poor starving children of India you were always reminding me about when I refused to finish all the food on my plate—take a look, Ma. Ma, why did you have to fixate on Manikarnika for your cremation? You’re too heavy, Ma. You love little children, Ma, you could have chosen Harishchandra. Then we would already have arrived.

We advanced past Kedar Ghat, churning onward, lugging our load through ghat after ghat, past the launderers slapping saris against the stone and stretching them out to dry as the sky began to lighten and we came to Dashashwamedha, the busiest of all the ghats. To the east, at our right, Mother Ganga was already crowded with bathers and pilgrims performing their daily puja. The silvery dark water was strewn with flower petals and flickering with candles floating in banana leaf baskets, gifts to the gods. Boats packed with tourists and guides plied up and down, stopping to bob on the water to allow the passengers to gape at the quaint rites. Along the ghat itself in front of us and to our left, streams of devotees were descending to the river to carry out their ablutions, washing their bodies with the murky water, brushing their teeth with neem twigs, gargling and spitting. Hawkers peddling snacks and souvenirs, boatmen and masseurs, drug dealers and flower sellers and silk merchants and guides already were hustling for clients—it was business as usual at dawn on the main ghat, the only remarkable intrusion was our procession of dropouts transporting physical remains of extraordinary proportions through this sacred territory rather than through the streets of the city, chanting in one voice our praises to the truth of Rama. Now our ranks already swollen by the mixed mob collected along the way grew even greater in number, increased by the curious and the sensation seekers pressing in for a good vantage point as we stopped at one of the pandit stations shaded by a bamboo umbrella, and I climbed onto the wooden platform to say a few words in memory of my mother.

This eulogy was the only feature of the familiar Western ceremony that I retained. My mother never mentioned it, so she never explicitly forbade it. I wanted to have an opportunity to say something and I knew it would not be possible to betray my woman’s naked voice when we arrived at the cremation ghat, Manikarnika. With the ancient priest sitting cross-legged on the platform under his bamboo umbrella looking up at me tolerantly through steel-framed glasses, oddly familiar like Bapu on all those rupee notes, I spoke my requiem in English, hoping it would be incomprehensible to the more fanatic members of the audience so that no one would take offense at the irregular nature of our congregation and observance, and deem it all some kind of mockery.

The truth is, in recalling the words of my eulogy, I’m not sure if what I am now reporting is what I actually said or what I wish I had said or even if I dared to speak at all, I was so wiped out physically and so emotionally drained by all the events of the past days. But assuming I did speak, I believe this, more or less, was the content. I believe I went on for a bit, addressing Ma directly, assuring her that I was carrying out her wishes to the letter, exactly as she had communicated them to me when she had trapped my hand under the weight of her thigh so near to the opening of the birth canal through which I, followed by my twin brother, Shmelke, had made our entry into this world of woe, hoping, I guess, that she would find some way to express her approval and gratitude from the other side in the presence of these onlookers, a simple thank-you, some small token of appreciation and recognition, it was the least she could do. The rest of my eulogy, as best I can remember, was focused on speculation as to why Ma had wanted to be processed in this particular way, so alien to someone of her background and lifestyle. If she was thinking along environmentally friendly, ecological recycling lines (which I doubted), I might have speculated that it would have been more sustainable for her to have requested to be laid out on a mountain-top like carrion in the Parsee way and devoured by vultures; I would have done whatever she asked, she could have counted on me. In any event, in choosing between burial and cremation, clearly she preferred to leave a greater carbon footprint than to take up extra space on this already overcrowded planet. Finally, in conclusion, I played with the idea that Ma had chosen to avoid a traditional rite because at all costs she did not want to be called a Woman of Valor, an Aishet Hayil, which is how every respectable dead religious Jewish woman is summed up and characterized in the eulogy at her funeral and on her gravestone regardless of how she may or may not have conducted her life. Charm is false, beauty is vanity, a God-fearing woman, she will be praised, and so on—this is the Aishet Hayil, the grunt in the army of husband and sons, laughing all the way to the end of time. Ma wanted no part of that—that was my hypothesis. She’d rather go up in smoke. I turned to the great corpse at my feet, supported by the eunuchs as it was partially propped up against the platform on which I was standing, and addressed it directly. “So Ma, I just want you to know that you have made your point. Rest assured, you are no Aishet fucking Hayil.”

The priest attending cross-legged uncoiled like a cobra and levitated unexpectedly. “Ah, it is Mama-ji,” he said. “I knew I recognized her. So the end of life has arrived for her. Yes, she is gone, but she has not yet come. She is poised now in a very dangerous place. It is a very delicate moment.” He raised his index finger significantly and placed a red tikka on my forehead. “Go at once, the gate to moksha is soon closing.”

We sped northward in a blur through the remaining ghats—Man Mandir, Meer, and so on. The sun rose on the eastern flank of Mother Ganga, and we arrived at Manikarnika.

There’s something about ritual, especially death ritual that sucks you in like a sealed train and carries you along to the end of the line, you need to accept that you’re in it for the ride. Not that I went like a sheep to the slaughter, not that I didn’t in some measure resist. It took so long for that great mass, allegedly my mother, to burn completely, that at a certain point, well beyond the three hours allotted for the incineration of an average body, the Doms began to hassle me to conclude the ceremony and vacate the cremation grounds. No way I was going to just follow orders, and not out of any personal elitism either—certainly not because the Doms are untouchables, predestined to sink their hands into the pollution of death—I trust that by now you know me well enough to give me more credit than that. No, it was because I knew they intended to wrap up Ma’s case the minute I turned my back and left—sweep up the ashes along with the big chunks of meat and body parts that had not yet been deconstructed, and toss the whole lot into the river to be ravaged by the dogs, ogled by tourists in their boats, pounded by oars like a schnitzel, devoured by snapping turtles and strange sea monsters. The assembly line had to be kept rolling, and Ma was clogging up the works. The Doms may belong to a defiled caste but they are also reputed to have prospered garishly. Death is big business, Varanasi, the mother lode.

So it was an exceedingly long day—from dawn when we arrived at Manikarnika chanting, Rama nama satya hai and marched purposefully down the bank of the ghat directly to the ritual bath mikvah of the Ganges to give Ma her final dunk, until dark when Ma combusted to the last crisp, and I performed the ultimate filial rite required of me, following which I was free at last to go my way. And yet, though I know the day streamed into the night until it blurred into a day that was neither day nor night, and though my memory when I revisit it takes the form of frames unfolding in slow motion, like video replays of a sports event that bestow an aura of gravity and consequence on the smallest details—despite all that, while I lived through it, it seemed to race by, like a fleeting dream.

Throughout, I felt Ma’s hovering presence, as if she were checking out the scene from wherever she was, doubtless horrified at the attention garnered by the remains attributed to her, especially at the terminus of Manikarnika. The sequined and spangled spectacle of her eunuch bearers had been enough to turn all heads during the processional, but at the cremation ghat itself, the sacred space where nothing is sacred, where all pretension and artifice are stripped away, and everything is transparent and on view, the action truly stopped at the sight of the massive husk itself that my mother had shed. The Dom Sonderkommandos standing knee-deep in the sooty water sifting with sieves of mesh and screening for gold teeth and jewels that might have been deposited with the ashes, froze in their labors to stare at the body as it was lowered for its last dip. The emaciated haulers in ragged lungis and shredded T-shirts unloading the boats, trudging up the hill to add to the great woodpiles stacked behind the ghat, paused with the burden of logs pressing down on their heads at the landing platform where Ma’s double had been laid out to dry, gaping with dropped jaws and blackened toothless gums. The regulars and hangers-on and loafers and prowlers speculated and bantered at the novelty of this imposing specimen. It couldn’t be an elephant as it was forbidden to cremate a beast on this holy ground, so it could only be a man of enormous wealth, a maharajah or a prince, an eminent personage who, though he could doubtless afford the purest ghee to fuel his own cremation, might even derive some perverse postmortem satisfaction from saving a few rupees by recycling all that built-in fat.

Converging from all sides, they formed a merry parade behind the main attraction as it was moved on its bamboo stretcher from its drying rack to its next station at the ghat, and set down on the ground beside the capacious altar of sandalwood constructed for it by the Doms. Cows and goats squeezed through the crowd in anticipation of a grand feast as the cords were untied and the appetizers and salads of beribboned cloth and flower garlands cast off; dogs pressed in to sniff out the territory, chewing on bones dredged from the scummy water. With a great communal intake of breath and a deep grunt, the Doms joined hands to heave the body wrapped in the thin sack of its shroud onto the bed of the pyre, which partially sank under its weight, collapsing the lattice-like gaps between the pieces of wood expertly arranged for the flow of oxygen to feed the flames. There it rested on top of the altar, served up, its pathetic mortal shape fully on view for all to see. The staggering mound of its torso rose behind its feet, which were pointed in the general direction of Mother Ganga as if about to soon set out. The Doms went to work piling the sandalwood on the peak of the belly, the logs sliding down its slope one after another, to the jolly amusement of the bystanders, until at last an artful meshing was devised, and the body was entirely encased in kindling, leaving only the knob of the hooded head exposed at the other end of its soaring bell curve.

The little priest, who had stationed himself at my side so close I could hear his neurons synapsing, rummaged deep inside his dhoti, then pulled out a cell phone. There had been no ring, he must have set it on vibrate. With the phone pressed to his ear he was nodding emphatically, but since no sound came out of his mouth, my eyes followed the arc of his gaze, which was focused intensely up the slope of the ghat to the very top, where Manika was positioned talking animatedly into her cell phone, gesturing furiously. Manika was directing the show from above, she was the power behind the throne, pulling all the strings. It was an exquisitely complex and above all sensitive operation to bring together, not least because each of its elements was in violation of the faith, from its leading lady, the Hebrew corpse herself in all her splendor, to its supporting cast of bearers and mourners of ambiguous gender. But this little sweeper and excrement wiper Manika was on top of every detail. She was wielding the clout of money. The priest too was on retainer and was being lavishly rewarded.

Orders received, he shoved the phone back down into the folds of his dhoti, dragged me along to the boss Dom assigned to the job, and pointed severely to a significant stash of untouched ghee. The crooks had been caught in the act, attempting to pirate these blocks of soft gold to sell a second time, figuring Ma could stew in her own juices, but Manika was having none of that. We stood there grimly, alert and unblinking as more and more cakes of ghee were inserted into strategic pockets of the pyre, leaving just enough in reserve to add as needed once the entire bed had been set alight. Fistfuls of incense that had also been hoarded were now generously sprinkled on top and scattered within. The priest handed me a flaming sheaf of twigs, ignited from the eternal fire that the Doms are said to maintain, and instructed me as the eldest son and chief mourner to walk around the altar, like a bride circling her bridegroom under the canopy at a Jewish wedding, only counterclockwise, because in death time unravels and leaks back into chaos and formlessness. When my bridal bouquet of burning twigs became too hot to hold I gave up running in circles like a rat in a maze, shoved it deep into the heart of the sandalwood cage, and set my mother on fire.

The netting of logs spun by the Doms in which the victim was caught collapsed almost instantly, sizzling and frying the great hump of the belly until it simply deflated, liquefied, and then seemed to vaporize. Her right leg flexed suddenly, startling me, as if she were unfolding in an effort to settle into a more comfortable position. A bare foot kicked out, the horned yellow toenails shockingly flecked with chipped polish, cherry red—and I had always thought I knew my own mother. The thin muslin in which she was swaddled clung to her skin, blistered, melted into translucence, outlining precisely each delicate seashell whorl and crevice and cavity of her ears. Dom boys stoked the fire with long wooden poles, throwing in more incense, adding ghee and sandalwood to keep it going.

She burned for more than twelve hours, through the day and into the night. In the darkness stray dogs gathered around and stretched out on the ground to sleep, warming themselves by the hearth. What I would not have given to lie down beside them and rest, just another dog among the dogs. But I never moved from my place, never turned my eyes away, I kept faithful vigil into the night since that was my duty. One by one our entire mixed multitude, including our inner core of eunuchs and Bulbul and Fetter Feivish, crept away. Manika, alone at her post overlooking the inferno, and I, in the ninth circle in the pit down below, were left standing in the dark, my little Virgil priest still joined to me at the hip, paid by the hour.

The body laid out on top of the altar had been reduced to pulverized white bone dust and ash that the Doms would collect and dump into the river. Only the skull remained, resting with unseeing eyes in its place as on a pillow. In accordance with my duty as mourner in chief and eldest son, I accepted the bamboo stick from the hands of the priest in order to perform the last rite. I smashed it down on the skull, cracking it open and liberating the soul.

Ma, Ma, she sobbed.

But I scuttled away and never looked back.