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THE NANNY WHO SAVED YOU WAS MANIKA. True, she no longer was technically your nanny by the time Geeta dumped us; you were twelve, a woman. Had it been your fate to be born in a village somewhere in India, you would already have been squatting in your mother-in-law’s hovel picking the worms from her dal, wiping her grandson’s behind with your left hand while her son, your husband, followed his bliss building a career poking wires into tourists’ ears to trowel out the wax. But at first, when I brought Manika home from Varanasi as my mother’s legacy, she was your faithful ayah. When you no longer needed an ayah, she simply was grandmothered in as a member of our household, your companion, your duenna. She fed you with her own hands when she came to us as your nanny, you were so ethereal, so slight—Such a bad eater, my mother would have lamented. Manika shadowed you with spicy snack mixes to pique your thirst, relieved by chasers of warm cardamom milk and rich mango lassis. She never left you alone, she was your personal secret service attachment, she moved within your breath cloud. When Cathedral barred her from entering your classroom along with the other privileged little scholars, she staked a position in the schoolyard. When it banned her from the yard after she attempted to scratch out the eyes of a kid she suspected of looking at you funny, she took up her station across the road in the public domain. There she stood every day from drop-off to pick-up, her eyes burning through the stones of the fortress in which you were imprisoned lest anyone dare harm you. It made the children laugh and play to see faithful little black Manika at school—but tell me, Maya, how many of us in this life have been the repositories of such love? I said to myself, Someday you will understand and appreciate, it will become a song, a poem, a ditty, you will no longer be ashamed.

We were dogs with our tongues hanging out, panting from the heat when Geeta left us. The air pressed down upon us, and behind it the weight of the monsoon, but still the rains would not come. The ground was parched, the breasts of beggar women suckling in the street were dried up and shriveled. We pushed our way out against the heat wall in daylight hours to do what was necessary, hunting, gathering, then staggered home and collapsed on our beds, Manika shuttling between us. I was grieving over my loss, entering the second stage. All that futile stage-one denial had gotten me nowhere, I moved on to anger, fury at her for abandoning me, reviewing obsessively all of the humiliations and betrayals and deceptions that now were so obvious, how could I have missed them, I must have been blind. I could not swallow it, I could not swallow anything Manika brought to me, I sucked lemons and spit out bitter seeds.

You at least ate, I was relieved for Manika’s sake. No matter how prostrate you were with the lethargy of the season, you ate. Your bed was gravelly with salt crumbs, slick with oil stains, sticky with sweet drinks. Your nymphet days were well past by then. More than a year earlier, Geeta had summoned me to observe you as you slept, your covers kicked off, thighs pulpy and succulent. When had you morphed into such a morsel? At breakfast next morning, as you were shoveling rose petal jam straight from the jar into your mouth, Geeta asked, Do you really need that, Maya?—and snatched the spoon out of your hand, a highly counterproductive tactic as I happen to know exceedingly well from the experience of having grown up with a fat mother. Nevertheless, I switched loyalties, siding with Geeta against you, I admit it—I chose her over you as we held you there captive at that table counseling you as a team for your own good about the importance of diet, exercise, not wearing horizontal stripes, and other weight-control and fat-concealing tips, especially now that you had been initiated into the sisterhood of blood, sweetening our message by reminding you of what a pretty face you had. More and more you were coming to resemble your grandmother, Manika noted with so much pride—my mother who had gone to such lengths across the planet to remove herself almost without a trace from the system that had insulted her so profoundly, who had trekked so far at such cost to achieve moksha, to unstrap herself from the torturous wheel of life, achieve liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, and here she was nevertheless, reincarnated in you. Rosy plump cheeks for pinching, breasts like cream for licking, hips like a basket for filling, you who had once been such a dark-eyed heartbreaking waif, ethereal with two thick braids down your back that I plaited every morning standing behind you as you picked at your breakfast—you had been recycled into my mother. Manika, how did you do it? And where would we find the rabbi to take you off our hands and marry you?

The windows of the heavens crashed open at last, the rains came slashing violently down, flooding and clogging the vessels of the city, heaving up in great spasms the foundation of sewage and garbage it rested upon, coating its millions with a mossy fuzz. We were extras in a Bollywood horror movie, topiary animations lumbering about ponderously as if risen from underground. For weeks we did not see the sun. We dwelt in dampness, confined by the monsoon within our four walls for hours of gray daylight, battered by darkness.

Manika believed you were sad because Geeta had left us. It is I who am sad because Geeta has left me, I corrected. I’ve lost not only Geeta but my best shot at India, now I belong to nobody, nowhere. Maybe there was a time once when Geeta had paid attention to you, Maya, willingly looking after you when I was forced to travel for business, even bringing you along some nights like her pet lapdog to exclusive clubs and restaurants when there was no school the next day, or taking you on long holidays and adventures to spas and exotic settings where white tigers stalked and peacocks strutted, treating Manika too, buying fancy gifts for both of you, trendy clothing, designer saris, diamond studs, gold bangles, ruby slippers, every high-tech device update, but that was history, all that had ended more than a year ago. For a year at least Geeta had lost all interest in you, she scarcely noticed you. When she left us she was not thinking about you; when she left me she wanted the hand-held luxury ergonomic bidet, she didn’t want you. No, I explained to Manika, the child is not sad because Geeta split, she is sad as in SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, presenting with depression, hopelessness, apathy, carb craving, and so forth due to the leadenness of the monsoon, the absence of sunlight. I went out in the gloom to buy a light-therapy box to reset your circadian rhythm, and ordered Manika to park you in front of it for as many hours as you would tolerate it, supplementing with St. John’s Wort, and Dr. Bach’s Rescue, and mustard flower remedies, reinforced with yoga and meditation.

The light-therapy lamp could also be beneficial for your acne, you decided, like those aluminum foil reflectors offering up to the healing rays of the sun gods the mottled fruit faces of your grandmothers, or the tanning beds upon which your mothers were stretched and tortured, and since in any case you were already lying around inert, paralyzed, there would be no extra exertion required in letting it shine upon you. One Friday in June with the weekend looming, in the bleak afternoon teatime hours of the day, too early for dinner or bed, you were soaking up the beams of simulated sunlight to impregnate you with joy when suddenly the permanent battleship gray of the monsoon season engulfing us deepened to pitch black, and there was an explosive boom. The power grid of the entire subcontinent had collapsed. Light was drained from all of India, everything came to a halt throughout the land—traffic, railways, airports, waterworks, the complete slapped-together inadequate improvised substandard electrical infrastructure gave up with a groan, including your light-therapy lamp. It crackled in an otherworldly golden red zigzag as if God were calling you from the burning bush—Maya, Maya, put your shoes on your feet—and then it went out.

You bolted up from your bed as if recharged. Cloaked in darkness you groped your way to the table where Manika, so spiritually tuned in at that time, had already set out the two brass candlesticks that her beloved mistress, your grandmother, would light every Friday when the sun went down in Varanasi even as she was plotting to set herself on fire like a pagan in this polytheistic land and incinerate herself to ash. With gestures as if programmed, you blessed the candles and brought back the light. You opened both arms in a welcoming circle to greet the Sabbath queen and drew them back toward yourself three times like a swimmer treading water to save her life, as if to say, come in, come in. You covered your eyes with the flattened palms of your hands and recited the blessing over the candles, taking on with this ritual the burden of the daughters of Eve down through the generations to restore light to the world, in perpetual atonement for the first woman’s original sin of falling for the seductions of the snake and plunging her descendants into darkness.

By the light of the Sabbath candles, Manika showed us a printout of the email she had received. It was from the replacement Chabad rabbi, Mendy, and his rebbetzin, Mindy. They were inviting all of Mumbai’s nannies and their guests to a special Friday night dinner that very evening in honor of the heroic nanny Sandra who had saved baby Moshe from the hands of the murderers who rise up against us in every generation, may their names and memory be blotted out. Manika had already RSVP’d for three.

We clothed ourselves in our Sabbath best, and over that we draped our rain ponchos. We pulled up our green rubber Wellington galoshes over plastic grocery bags to slosh through the streets streaming with putrid brown rainwater. Manika packed our dress shoes in my company’s tote, a personalized gift bag stuffed with a stash of goodies and essentials that I presented at orientation to each embarking spiritual seeker. This one had been intended for my dear friend and repeat client, the staggeringly rich Washington, DC, heiress and hostess, Charlotte Harlow, but fortunately just in the nick of time I noticed the typo imprinted on it; some joker had replaced the w of her surname with a t, so I decided to keep it—why waste a perfectly good bag?—and put in a rush order for a replacement. Manika was the only non-Jew among the three of us, which meant that by strict religious law she was permitted to carry objects beyond the home boundaries on the Sabbath. It was not that I wanted to give to the new Chabad emissaries a false impression with regard to the level of my observance or piety. It was simply an irresistible need to send the message that they were dealing with a seasoned insider, albeit lapsed, a former member of the club, an initiate who knew the ropes and saw through their agenda, a warning to them in effect not to try any funny business, especially with you.

With you our precious jewel bezeled between us, Manika in front gripping one of your hands leading the way, I the rearguard clutching your other hand, we set out single file into the perilous darkness illuminated here and there by yellow lights powered by emergency generators. In our hooded rain ponchos, we were silhouetted like medieval pilgrims fleeing the apocalyptic devastation of water and plague through the deserted streets of Colaba and the Fort District, trusting our survival to Manika our guide. Not far from the porpoise atop Flora Fountain, in front of a massive edifice, weighty and indestructible in the mighty Victorian Gothic style bequeathed to Bombay by the British occupiers, a tank with a rotating gun was stationed in the brilliant glare of the headlights of a cordon of army jeeps.

This was where Manika halted. A sizable military battalion, uniformed and fully equipped, was encamped there, the troops smoking and checking their cell phones, carrying out official duties. Manika immediately drew out the invitation and handed it to the officer in command. She opened the sack and dumped our shoes into a designated bin, took off her boots and plastic bags and poncho and indicated to us to do the same. Two pitiless attack dogs on leashes were brought forward to sniff us. A female officer approached and without a word began the pat-down, frisking us one after the other right out there in the public space since this was India where nothing is private, her hands exploring the entire topography of our bodies, over and up and in between, nothing was sacred, nothing was new or unique or special, we were all endowed with the same stuff, simply variations on a theme. Ah, to be touched by a woman again, it was good, how I missed it, though I did not appreciate at all being forced to witness the same treatment administered by this low-level type to my child. Watch it kiddo, I was tempted to blurt out, that’s my innocent daughter you’re violating, but Manika telegraphed a cautionary glance and I restrained myself. Clearly, she had been here before, she knew the drill.

We were subjected to full-body radiation exposure in an X-ray booth, then waved through to what looked like a bank vault but was in fact a private elevator manned by two guards armed with submachine guns, which whisked us up to a floor that had no number and let us out in front of a retractable steel grille. Four more officers were stationed here, and the entire security procedure was replayed in quick time—documents, body check, metal detection, interrogation, and so on. At last the steel grille was drawn back to reveal a thick door padded in black leather and studded with brass nails, which was opened, and beyond that another door, mahogany, elegantly wrought and richly lacquered such as befitted this luxury apartment building. Nailed to the doorpost was a large ornate silver mezuzah, which out of perversity I kissed as Rabbi Mendy himself opened the door.

Standing over six feet tall with bulging biceps taut under the sleeves of his black suit jacket and a scar that snaked down the side of his face, starting somewhere under the brim of his black fedora hat and ending somewhere in the thickets of his black beard, he resembled a bouncer at the entrance of an exclusive private Jewish club. The outline of a holster was traceable at his belt, not to be mistaken for a cell phone pouch, for only a weapon would trump the Sabbath in a situation where there is potential danger to life. He had been a decorated hero of the most elite combat unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, hailed throughout the land as the number-one Krav Maga champion wrestler, a celebrity raptly spotlighted for his beautiful women, hard partying, underworld pals. A terrorist would think twice before messing with this guy. With a broad pugilist smile that showcased a wide gap, the space of a missing tooth top center, he welcomed us into a grand salon brightly lit by a private generator and flickering Sabbath candles on a long banquet table covered with a white linen cloth, weighed down by gleaming silver and china and crystal goblets and golden braided challah loaves yet unblessed.

“Eh, just in time,” he greeted us in heavy Israeli guttural, seasoned by Brooklynese, acquired during his return-to-faith apprenticeship years in the Chabad universe of Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights, following his sensational penance voraciously detailed in all the Israeli media. “A guten Shabbes to the ladies from the family of the heiligen Rabbi Tabor, may he live on for many good and long years.”

So he had been briefed on our personal data. “Are you referring to Rabbi Tabor senior or junior?” I inquired coyly.

“Eh, you mean Shmelke, your brother. The Holy One Blessed Be He never makes a mistake. There is also a reason for Jews like Shmelke Tabor, though we might not be blessed with the divine wisdom to understand it.”

Just as I was about to correct his reference to my brother by pointedly adding the title Rabbi, the rebbetzin Mindy came forward to take over host duties, as all three of us new arrivals were female and therefore her responsibility in the division of labor department. Her bitumen-black Sabbath wig streamed down her back in thick straight tresses, certified kosher imported from China due to the rabbinical ban on locally grown Indian hair from the heads of idolaters. “Sorry about all the security hassles, ladies,” she immediately said, “but you know the situation. The Indians don’t want another embarrassment like at Nariman House—need I say more? Anyways, you can never be too careful.” Her accent I could GPS exactly—the heart of Crown Heights, specifically President Street between Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues, there was more than a fifty-fifty chance that she was Chabad royalty, matched up in heaven with this rising star from the Holy Land. “Good Shabbes, Manika darling,” she exclaimed, as if just noticing the presence of the background support staff. “Thank God for our little nannies—am I right or am I right?” Leaning over as we stood there observing her, she gave Manika a warm hug. “Go and sit down by your girlfriends, Manika darling, fress to your heart’s content.” She indicated the section of the table where the nannies were clustered, already dipping their fingers into the serving bowls of hummus and potato salad even before the chanting of the blessing over the wine.

Malkie, the eldest daughter, now approached, carrying a baby brother not yet three with his long golden ringlets and bib stained orange from mashed carrots or squash. You remember Malkie, of course. She was the second of the rebbetzin’s eleven children, seventeen years old at the time, flashing a large emerald-cut diamond ring, three carats minimum. She had just been engaged to a Crown Heights boy of excellent pedigree, first-class yikhus, but was obliged to wait to be married until a suitable bride could be found for her brother Shmuly, older by one year, who was much too fussy for his own good, according to reliable sources. A good daughter who still listened to her mother, Malkie took you in hand, escorted you to the corner of the table where the teenage girls were quarantined for everyone’s sake, introduced you, brought you in, performing the mitzvah of Jewish outreach by drawing you closer, which bottom line was the family business—Jewish missionaries snagging the souls of wandering Jews who had wandered too far.

I tried to pick up your frequencies at the table, to check on you to make sure you were at ease, but you were too distant on the women’s side, and with the din of platters coming and going, choreographed by the squad of Indian servants, men in livery all of them armed, and the clatter of cutlery and the buzz of conversation soaring into the singing by the men at the top of their lungs of the Sabbath zmirot, pounding their fists rhythmically on the tabletop, you were lost to me on the airwaves. I had been directed by the rebbetzin Mindy to a place close to the head of the table for some reason, perhaps my perceived distinguished paternal lineage I figured at first, where Rabbi Mendy sat in state. To his right on the women’s side, beside me on my left, was a wizened old woman from what I could see of her. Her head bound up in a tight babushka that defined the slope and cavities of her skull was lowered over the open prayer book on her plate as an indication that no food should be placed there, as if sanctified words alone would be her portion, like those proper ladies in novels who placed their handkerchiefs in their wineglass in a genteel refusal of wine and all gross spirits; someone’s mother, I presumed. On my other side sat an Israeli woman from the consulate, sunk in turgid Hebrew chatter with the woman to her right. It was such an awkward position for me to be in—to be so prominently situated yet so publicly ignored and excluded, I hoped you at your end were faring better socially. Maybe that was why Shmuly, the rabbi’s son and heir apparent seated with the men almost directly across from me to his father’s left took pity and leaned forward to draw me into conversation by asking me if it was true that my brother, Shmelke, believed that a woman who submits to the desires of a holy man can prevent another Holocaust. The old lady to my left lifted her face, black as if charred in a furnace. “Ah, you don’t remember me,” she whispered.

Tall and dark like his father, but wiry, not yet muscle bound, with a thick fringe of black eyelashes that almost brushed the lenses of his glasses and a flushed complexion still only lightly matted with pale down, Shmuly resembled his sister, Malkie, consigned to the other end of the table with you and the other girls, almost as disturbingly as I resembled my twin brother, Shmelke. In compliance with the admonition of the sages that partaking in a meal without talking Torah is like making offerings to the dead, and in his role as the promising son of a leading Chabad emissary being groomed to take over in his turn one of the most influential posts, a critical hotspot, Shmuly now rose to offer a few words of Torah. First, though, he took a moment to welcome the guests at his family’s table, singling us out for a special distinction award, you and me, Maya, “Close friends of the Mumbai martyrs, peace be unto them,” he proclaimed, zooming in on you especially. “Little baby Moshe’le best playmate,” he called you. “Maya here had the z’khus, the high privilege, of playing with Moshe’le every day, she knew little Moshe’le, my friends, she knew him, she was like the best big sister to him.”

So that was the explanation for my seat of honor, I reflected—mother of Maya. Manika had talked us up, laid out the main selling points, Manika was our public relations advance team. Then he plunged into his Torah talk, focusing on the death of Miriam in the Wilderness of Zin, read in that week’s Bible portion, hailing Miriam as one of the first great recorded nannies. She saved the life of her little brother Moshe by babysitting from a distance when he was set afloat on the Nile in a reed basket to escape Pharaoh’s death sentence against all the Hebrew male newborns—just like our beloved nanny Sandra saved the life of our own little Moshe here in Mumbai from the hands of the wicked Pharaohs and their henchmen who rise up to destroy us in every generation, and in our time too, Shmuly declared.

He beamed an irresistible smile of gratitude at the little flock of nannies fluttering at the table and gestured with both hands for them to stand up and take a bow. All the assembled then rose in ovation and began clapping and singing and dancing in a circle, the men with the men around the table, stomping with their hands on each other’s shoulders, the women more sprightly in a modest corner apart with the nannies seated in the center, whom some of the bigger girls raised up in their chairs, they were all so small, so slight, two lifters per nanny were more than enough to bear the weight securely.

Aloft on her chair, Manika flashed a joyous grin, black gummed from a lifetime chewing paan. She drew off from around her neck the rose silk dupatta that Geeta had given her and grasping it at one end she fluttered it toward you, Maya, and you caught the other end of the scarf in your hand, and there you were dancing like Miriam the prophetess after the splitting of the sea, that night I saw you dancing, I will not forget it, and all the women and girls coming out after you with song and dance.

Miriam is all about water, Shmuly went on once the dancing subsided and all the guests staggered back to their seats and slumped down again, submitting to their fate of sitting through the speech. Her name means bitter sea, maryam—a mixed message, like our monsoon, flood and darkness, but also cleansing, cooling, growth. In Miriam’s merit the Israelites were provided with water in the desert, our sages tell us. She dies and is buried, and the next thing you know the water system shuts down, just like our electricity shut down tonight. Right away the Israelites start complaining to Moshe. Where’s our water, Moshe? So what else is new? From time immemorial we Yid’n have always been big complainers. And God says to Moshe, Take your staff and go talk to the rock before the eyes of the people and water will come out. You have to wonder—why does Moshe need a stick to talk to the rock? Is this the first case of, Speak softly and carry a big stick? And why does Moshe hit the rock when God says to him loud and clear, Talk? He was a prophet, he could see the future; he knew what would happen if he didn’t listen. Oh yes my friends, he was a prophet—but even a prophet is human. Moshe was mad, boiling mad. Moshe had a temper, a holy temper, he exploded only in God’s name. Like when he came down from the mountain and saw the people worshipping the golden calf, and he threw down those two stone tablets in such a rage and smashed them to pieces. He had knocked himself out for these people for so many years, and now here they are bellyaching about the water. How could they hassle him at such a time like this, when he had just lost his beloved sister, his faithful nanny? Didn’t they have any consideration? He was in mourning, it shouldn’t happen to us. He would have liked to whack them, he would have liked to give them such a good zetz, but instead he takes his stick and whacks the rock—two times yet! I think there’s a word for that in mental health lingo. You can check it out with Rabbi Dr. Freud. Transference? Displacement? Channeling? Whatever. So Moshe, he gives it to the rock, two good clops. And what is his punishment for disobeying God? Shut out of the land. Sorry Moshe, you’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here in the desert. No Promised Land for you.

My friends, the Holy One Blessed Be He who knows all, past, present, and future, ordered Moshe to take the staff because he knew he would hit instead of talk. He knew Moshe needed to act out, to vent. He knew Moshe had to get it out of his system. And the Holy One Blessed Be He who is merciful above all also knew and understood that at that moment Moshe in his heart of hearts no longer wanted to enter the Promised Land. Why? Because his beloved sister and nanny would not be coming too. The One Above understood that Moshe’s greatest desire at that moment was to stay in the desert, in exile, in the diaspora, close to his beloved sister-nanny, Miriam, until the arrival of our Master, our Teacher, our Rebbe, the Messiah the King, may it be quickly in our time.

“My friends”—Shmuly was wrapping up—“the Talmud talks about yisurim, pain and suffering. It talks about the yisurim of love. I won’t go into what the rabbis mean by love here, but in my opinion Moshe was suffering from love, from the agony of lost love when his sister, his Miriam, was taken away from him. It also talks about the yisurim necessary to acquire the land of Israel. Nothing worthwhile in this life is gained without yisurim. That also applies to a delicious meal such as we are all enjoying here tonight. To earn it you have to suffer a little, say a few prayers before and after, sit in your place now after eating your fill when maybe you’d rather go home already and loosen your belt but instead you’re stuck here and forced to listen to me yakking and blabbering on and on.” He flicked me a reproachful glance, then cast his eye to the far end of the table where you were sitting, and remained sternly riveted on you. “So my friends, here’s the deal. Come back tomorrow for a delicious lunch, you’re all invited to come and continue our celebration in honor of our awesome nanny heroines. But please—before you give yourself the reward of eating, you should also be ready to undergo some yisurim, it’s only right. First go to shul and pray, do a little necessary suffering, it’s not too much to ask. Tomorrow morning before treating yourself to another delicious meal, go to shul. Spend a few hours sitting in shul talking to the Rock.”

Next morning, following orders at your insistence, the three of us were the first females to show up at the blue Sassoon synagogue, Knesset Eliyahoo, and make our way up to the ladies’ balcony. It was so early that below us, in the main sanctuary, a full quorum of ten adult males had not yet arrived to launch the significant prayers. “No minyan yet,” Rabbi Mendy sang out. “Only eight people.” Okay, I thought, maybe Manika doesn’t count in the category of people because she’s not Jewish, I’ll even grant that for argument’s sake, but by my calculation, when you’re talking people, with you and me up in the peanut gallery sharing the oxygen supply, the sum total is ten—so let’s get the show on the road, Rabbi.

Very soon after, though, three glistening well-fed Baghdadi males appeared and took their places with showy entitlement at their personal pews affixed with their names engraved onto polished brass plates. The service proceeded with Rabbi Mendy at the helm, his prayer shawl drawn over his head, tucked behind each ear to keep it in place, reciting the liturgy expertly and with dispatch, but in a voice so creatively out of tune, it was a revelation, offering new insight into the text. A klatch of Baghdadi wives came chattering up to the balcony, steeping it with the scent of their toiletries and perfumes. Just before Shmuly rose to chant the week’s Torah portion, the rebbetzin Mindy processed in with her entourage headed by Malkie, the bride-to-be, and her pride of younger daughters all in their Sabbath finery, accompanied also by the skeletal dowager beside whom I had been seated the evening before at the Sabbath table. They took their reserved places on the balcony bench almost directly across from us, nodding to us in greeting over the chasm of the male sanctuary below that we Jewish princesses could penetrate only by diving down headfirst and breaking our crowns.

Shmuly’s voice, in contrast to his father’s, was high pitched and extraterrestrially sweet, as if the hormonal shakedown had not quite taken. You leaned forward with your elbows planted on the balcony railing, your palms joined together as in a namaste, your brow resting against the steeple of your fingers pointed heavenward as he melodically cantillated the tropes he had so perceptively deconstructed the night before—I’m quoting from your wildly enthusiastic recap of his little talk that you articulated with such polish, thanks to your high-priced college-prep education, during our walk home in the night. Death and drought, rebellion and retribution, archetypal motifs. From the front row bench on the balcony where we were sitting you looked down over the railing upon the top of his head in his black velvet yarmulke bent over the open scroll, you did not take your eyes off of him for one minute. Your mouth hung open so soft, your temple vein pulsed blue, your breathing was visible.

Listen to me, you dreamer, I wanted to cry out, Do you think you can squeeze even one drop out of this stone? Do not believe it, my daughter. It will not happen. Neither by rod nor by word.

Once again now you were stopping off at the Chabad center every afternoon on your way home from school. I should have put the kibosh on it. It was on every level a danger zone, however fortified and security-padded a cell it might appear to be to the undiscerning eye. I of all people should have known it could only lead to disaster.

But Manika was with you every minute, I told myself, your chaperone, she would save you. She stationed herself a step behind you, self-erasing like a page-turner for a pianist on the concert stage; you would never lose your place, you would never get lost. Manika was a fixture in the room with you the entire time, present in the moment, unlike Varda when you used to visit baby Moshe’le in Colaba, demonstrably setting herself apart, depositing herself outside to schmooze with the terrorist disguised as the guard. O, protect us from our protectors, I say.

But as for Manika, even if in her heart of hearts it had been her desire to loiter with the security contingent stationed at the entrance leaning against the tank chewing her paan, it was not an option. There was no room in that huddle under the tent, she would have been drenched. The windows of the heavens had been cast wide open, the rains burst down in furious sheets, soaking the earth and heaving up all the filth only just below the surface. You and Manika sloshed through pools of brown sludge, kicking up excrement of all varieties and rot every step of the way on the road to your life-altering vision at Chabad, and soon the guards posted there under their sagging tarps no longer troubled themselves to poke their necks out into the deluge to stop and frisk. They waved you through without even raising their heads from their snakes and ladders. You were defanged, profiled, certified members of the inner circle, family.

So what did you do today at the Chabadniks? I would ask at the dinner table, attempting conversation. Your answer was always the same: Nothing. That was also the answer you gave to my regular daily interrogations: What did you do in school today? Nothing. Whom did you hang out with? Nobody. Manika squatting on the floor would bring her face down even lower into the bowl from which she was feeding with her fingers. I could not induce her to sit at the table after serving us no matter how much I cajoled. It was truly embarrassing, I prayed no one would walk in to witness this abject scene and make unwarranted assumptions about me. On the wall behind her against which she was propped a great water stain had bloomed, mildew rimmed and blistered at its heart, even in Geeta’s luxury flat on Malabar Hill where we were still holding out, even that proud princess was not insulated from the seepage, the monsoon’s revelations of what lies beneath, just below the paint job.

Later, after the light no longer leaked out from under your sealed door, Manika would slip into my room to tell me everything. Her English had evolved thanks above all to the call center videos she watched obsessively on the internet (her two favorite phrases were, I can definitely help you get that sorted, and, I do apologize for any inconvenience). Her ambition now was to enter the outsourcing stage of her life after the completion of the nanny stage the moment you flew the nest, on her path to stage four, the fatal stage, total final renunciation, sannyasa.

The rebbetzin Mindy with her brood was equipped to provide a matching personal playmate for children of all ages, but you chose to spend your face time at Chabad with Malkie, Manika informed me, who accepted you even though she was five years your senior, in her bridal season. Malkie possessed an enviable collection of paper dolls, which she stored in labeled shoeboxes on the top shelves of her wardrobe, with a specialization in weddings, Jewish weddings. She seized the opportunity of your eager presence, a younger girl with whom she could play with these dolls for hours in an orgy of delicious uninhibited regression. She altered the dolls’ costumes—raising necklines, lowering hemlines, lengthening sleeves, rendering the transparent opaque, the form-fitting draped—and she also designed fashions of her own private label for the bride and groom and the entire wedding party along with the ritual accessories, emphasizing modesty, what she called zni’us. As you sat with Malkie on her girlhood bed, Manika reported, dressing and undressing the dolls, she instructed you as your elder and mentor on the importance of zni’us. Bottom line: no part of the body may be uncovered in the presence of men and boys other than your two essential woman-of-valor hands below the wrist to plunge into the suds and crud. Your absorption of these strictures was a new fact on the ground I was beginning to glom on to after you began your playdates at Chabad, when the Cathedral office called to inform me that you were refusing to put on shorts for physical education class. I do apologize, Maya, but I thought at first it had something to do with body image issues related to your thighs.

Manika went on to report how the two of you would sit there on that bed enacting with the paper dolls the series of events leading up to a wedding as Malkie ticked them off, from the first matchmaker-arranged meeting of the couple possibly destined for one another in a public space such as a hotel lobby, to the engagement, the formal introduction of the parents in order to hammer out financial and other essential arrangements, and the betrothal party just a few weeks later. “For verification purposes,” Manika intoned, this was as far as Malkie herself had personally experienced. Nevertheless, Malkie strode boldly into the future using the paper dolls in the outfits she had created for them as visual aids to walk you through frame after frame of the fantasy wedding itself, an event every young Jewish maiden could look forward to as the high point of her life, one Malkie knew intimately from having danced at so many, including even a hazy description of the bride’s prenuptial immersion in the ritual bath for which the two of you stripped a paper doll down to her bra and panties, as far as you could decently go, dunking her until she was limp and useless in a cyst of stagnant rainwater speckled with dead flies that had collected on the windowsill. But beyond the wedding itself Malkie never went, she just didn’t go there, that was where the story always ended, in the mist of happily ever after. She had been put on hold while her brother Shmuly checked with his supervisor, Manika said, in search of perfect wife material.

You did not notice him right away the first time he came into his sister’s bedroom. You were swaying on your toes on top of a wobbly folding chair, arched precariously forward, your face thrust into the blackness of the open wardrobe, reaching for a shoebox of paper doll accessories labeled, Head Coverings: Snoods, etc. “I hope I’m not interrupting your girl talk,” Shmuly said—and it was only then that you realized he was there, gazing at you from behind freely and unobstructed, and so you fell from on top of your camel, my child, like Mother Rebecca when she first laid eyes on Father Isaac, you came crashing down on the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” you were whimpering in mortification on the carpet as Manika scurried to check you for any visible damage, and then to gather up the contents of the box that had scattered everywhere murmuring, “I’m here to assist you in any way I can”—and Malkie stepped forward to discreetly draw down the hem of the skirt of your school uniform which had ridden up immodestly over your knees as Shmuly stood there with his hand over his mouth to cover up a spasm of wicked laughter—other people falling is always so funny, the stuff of slapstick. His blank gaze was fixed doggedly on the night window against which the rain thrummed, as it is forbidden to look upon a female in disarray, much less touch one not related to you, even a girl of twelve like you, still so pure and innocent—untouchable, like Manika.

You came home earlier than usual that day, but only after first sitting there on that bed sticking it out a little longer for a respectable time span out of pride, your head lowered, your eyes cast down as he recapped for his sister the shiddukh setup date he had just returned from in the lobby of the Taj. In response to one of the questions he routinely asked a prospective bridal candidate—what is the thing about yourself that you would most like to improve?—instead of answering my soul (four points), or my heart (three) or even my mind (two) or my brain (one), she replied, My legs (minus four). “Can you believe it?” Shmuly asked, addressing Malkie. “A grown girl, sixteen and a half, on the marriage market already? Maybe from a twelve year old still with the chubby ankles and baby fat pulkes you would expect such a brilliant answer,” he said, turning at last from Malkie to acknowledge you with a warm smile. “Especially when she goes to the fanciest goyische school money can buy and has such nice pretty eyes.”

That happened on a Thursday. The next night, Friday, Sabbath eve, you fell again. We were in the Sassoon synagogue where we had gone to earn our meal ticket for the Sabbath table at the Chabad house, which was the correct protocol as Shmuly the young rabbi in training had so diplomatically clarified. It was just the two of us that night. I had agreed that Manika should remain at home working on her online outsourcing course, though it was in my opinion an utter waste of time, her English accent was hopeless, the lilt of her speech screamed Indian, she was way too old, no way would she ever be hired. But I appreciated having some alone time with you, quality time, and so we headed out into the downpour, you and I, mother and daughter.

Shmuly was standing with a few of his brothers and his father, Rabbi Mendy, after the closing of the Friday night services to welcome the Sabbath queen at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the women’s balcony, the steps slick with the rain and mud that had been dragged in. “Good Shabbes, Masha,” he greeted you as you descended the staircase fully clothed, including your rain slicker with the hood already drawn up. “My name is Maya,” you snapped back, and went tumbling down the rest of the flight, thank God only five or six steps I counted more or less as I scrambled in desperate maternal angst after you. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” you couldn’t stop chanting to the small klatch of women in attendance that evening who had clustered around you wringing their hands and quieting their hearts as the men stood back paralyzed, trying not to gape. Why were you apologizing like that? What had you done wrong? I would have given anything to scoop you up in my arms at that moment and carry you away to a safe zone childproof against falling and other life hazards, but it was impossible, you were already such a big girl, my darling.

“Don’t touch me!” you hissed the minute the door to the ladies room sucked shut behind us. Your tights were in shreds at the knees, but thanks to the long skirts you had taken to wearing, not much was really noticeable. There were bruises here and there which would spread into black-and-blue pools under the skin over the next few days I knew—we Tabor women bruised so easily, my mother, you, I—but otherwise there was no discernible serious damage at least to the outer shell. We had been spared, it was a miracle, a bit of cosmetic touch-up and you would be presentable again. You insisted on carrying on with our plans, making our appearance at the Shabbat dinner as if nothing had happened. You were a trouper, my brave little warrior daughter, I was overcome with such admiration and respect.

The next day, at Sabbath lunch I watched in horror as you fell again. You and Malkie and a few other proper young ladies were strutting your domestic creds by helping with the serving, you were carrying out from the kitchen a tray piled high with small appetizer plates of chopped liver and gefilte fish, each mound-shaped dropping topped with a decorative swag of raw carrot. “Don’t fall, Masha,” Shmuly sang out to you. Instantly, as if he had just injected you with a brilliant idea, as if he had pressed a button to a hidden trapdoor, down you went. “I’m sorry I called you Masha,” he said, standing over you sprawled in the middle of that mess of first course on the floor that looked now before it had been consumed suspiciously like how one might imagine it would look after it had made its way through the system and come out the other end. “It’s just that when I see you, I also see Moshe, little baby Moshe’le, because you knew him personally—such a privilege! People are saying he is a miracle boy, that he is destined to come back to Mumbai on a white donkey one day to take over the Chabad house again and avenge the murder of his holy mother and father. Moshe, Masha—you can do worse than to be mixed up with that holy child, I didn’t mean to push you down the stairs, God forbid.”

On Sunday you rested, at least from falling, as far as I knew. School was closed; there would be no Chabad pit stop on your homeward route. I had given Manika the day off to visit a friend from her village who had just arrived to the Dharavi slum to work in the construction business clearing rocks, so there was no chaperone on call that day to escort you. Manika had offered to take you along to watch the slum potters squeezing their clay, she even invited me to join for “quality assurance,” but there was no way I would allow you to be exposed to such filth and pollution, and especially now while you were going through this bizarre pubescent hormonal falling stage, I didn’t even want to begin to imagine what you might sink into should you happen to take it into your head to fall in that slum with its open lakes of raw sewage and waste where the children played. We would have a nice quiet Sunday, you and I, it would be a treat. During the wet season my tour business typically slowed down almost to a standstill, and though in the past I had used the time to visit my branch offices in Jerusalem and New York for networking purposes and to catch up with administrative details, this monsoon I was obliged to stay put in Mumbai because as you know I had no responsible adult to leave you with, Geeta had abandoned us. Now I realized it was a blessing in disguise. Our Sundays would unfold slow and easy, an unforeseen gift of time to work on our relationship, focus on some mother-daughter bonding.

The door to your room remained shut the entire day. If you stepped out to use the toilet, I must have missed it. I knocked to summon you to meals, but you informed me from within you were not hungry. I left a tray on the floor outside your door, although I knew you kept a stash of sweet and salty snacks in the back of your closet, you would not starve. I set that tray down anyway simply to preempt you from concluding that I considered it just as well you were not eating, it wouldn’t kill you to lose a few pounds. From inside your room I could hear the familiar prayers from my childhood. You were listening on your laptop to cantorial videos, sometimes singing softly along, learning the words and tunes.

When you emerged at last I was already in bed for the night. You knocked and came into my room in your nightgown, which had become your sleepwear of choice since you had given up pajamas as well as pants and all articles of clothing that could by any inference be regarded as male apparel and therefore forbidden. “Didn’t you get dressed at all today?” I asked as you stood there just inside the entryway. You shook your head. “My mother, your grandmother, may she rest in peace, used to say, ‘if you don’t get dressed, the day didn’t happen.’”

You were silent for a respectful span to absorb this deep ancient wisdom, then you proceeded to deliver a little speech, as if you had rehearsed it; clearly it was for this purpose that you had come to my room. “I want to apologize for how I behaved today, Mommy. It was a sin. The Torah commands us to honor our mother and father. I should have listened when you called me to come out, to eat or whatever. I’m sorry. I know you’re worried about my falling all the time. If it makes you feel any better, I just want you to know that I’m never happier than when I fall, it’s the most amazing feeling in the world. The whole time I’m thinking—I’m going to fall, I can’t stop myself, here I go, I’m falling, falling—and then I fall, as if my knees, my legs, my limbs, my entire body from head to toe, has melted, it’s like I’m flooded with warmth and light. Malkie says that it’s like what happens to the chosen ones in the Torah, when God calls them and they fall upon their faces, and they answer, Here I am. She’s right, that’s exactly what it’s like—like I’m in God’s presence. I just wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t worry.”

The punishing rains continued to pound down into July, the fountains of the deep split open pushing upward the soggy landfill of our amphibious city only newly emerged from the sea, still conflicted between wet and dry. You took upon yourself to rise earlier to say your morning prayers before heading off to school with Manika sloshing in your wake waving down a cab. You declared yourself 100 percent strictly kosher now, refusing to partake of the hot school lunches I had prepaid in full with no refund forthcoming, packing a bunch of bananas in your rucksack instead to sustain you through the day. At home, since we were confirmed vegans, you agreed to share some of our foodstuffs but only after I bought a new set of personal tin thali bowls and utensils for you at the local bazaar, which you hauled to the Chabad ritual bath and immersed before using, reciting the designated blessing. “I’m twelve years old,” you announced, as if this would be news to me. “I’m a woman now, I’m responsible for my own sins. Until I turned twelve, my sins were on your head, Mommy, sorry about that.”

How had such ideas seeped into your brainpan? This was precisely the kind of mindset, defined by sin, that I had struggled so hard to escape, this was why I had come to India as a seeker of true meaning and spirituality and union with the divine, to shield you from such destructive guilt trips and to purge myself as well from the authoritarianism of the original Abrahamic faith that had messed so negatively with my head. Later, when Manika came into my room for our nightly wrap-up, she corroborated that what I was hearing was yet another example of Malkie’s brainwashing, as I had of course surmised. What sins could such a blameless child like you possibly have committed before you turned twelve that were likely to fall on my head? I demanded to know from Manika, not that I wasn’t ready, willing, and able to take on any and all of your sins at any time of your life. Manika looked down at her feet. I’m sorry this has happened to you, she was mumbling. What can we do to make it right?

One thing we couldn’t do for sure at this point, I knew, was to put a stop to your visits to the Chabad house, or forbid you from consorting with such a bad influence as Malkie. You and Malkie were tighter than ever, inseparable. In the synagogue you circulated holding hands, calling yourselves soul sisters. Only the previous Sabbath as we were walking together toward the Chabad house for lunch, dodging the violent traffic as we sought an opening to cross Mahatma Gandhi Road in the Fort District after morning prayers, Malkie said to me, “I just want you to know that I love Maya with all my heart and soul. She is like a sister to me. I wish she could be my true sister. I wish she could marry Shmuly. Then we’d be real sisters. Too bad she’s only twelve, I just can’t wait that long.” And she held up her hand, the one clasped to yours, the one with the dazzling rock on its fourth finger, she held it up toward the heavens, turning it this way and that in an effort to catch a glint of sunlight as Rabbi Mendy strode briskly past in intense conversation with Shmuly, but the clouds were low and dark, there was not a glimmer of light present to land on the facets of the stone and set them aglow, the toe of your boot as she pulled your arm upward to show off her bling snagged on an irregularity in the pavement and in the slow-motion seconds before I could reach out to save you, your sister wannabe Malkie let go of your hand and down you flew onto the sodden concrete, hitting bottom, crying, Sorry, sorry, sorry.

The all-consuming discussion between Shmuly and his father as they swept past us when you fell in the street raged on in feverish whispers throughout the Sabbath lunch in the pauses between the ritual requirements, so that they scarcely fulfilled their mandate to reach out to their guests, including me in my usual place at the table so near to them, the spectral old woman as always shedding ash from the other world to my left. Following the Grace After the Meal, when everyone had escaped to process the digestive overload, you approached hand in hand with Malkie to ask permission to stay through the afternoon until three stars would be visible in the night sky, not very likely in the monsoon season, and the Sabbath queen would regretfully be ushered out. As I was rising to work out the logistics with Manika in the kitchen where she typically hung out, socializing with her fellow low-caste colleagues, Rabbi Mendy made a downward gesture with his hand indicating that I remain in my seat, Shmuly turned to you and said, “I hope you don’t mind, just a few questions, then we’ll let you go and you can play with the dollies,” and the rebbetzin Mindy slipped into the empty chair to my right—all of them pouncing on us in a single pincer movement in what seemed like a preplanned coordinated three-pronged action.

The matter at hand that had been preoccupying the rabbi and his heir apparent concerned Moshe, little baby Moshe, a matter of great urgency for their future in Mumbai and beyond in the inner power circle of the Chabad elite. Aside from Moshe’le’s nanny, Sandra, with whom they were banned from communicating by the boy’s family and who would not talk to them in any case, you and I, they advised us, and you especially, are likely to be the only ones still around now who knew baby Moshe intimately during the first two crucially formative years of his life, when everything is determined. Was he a normal child, in both the negative and positive sense? The public had a right to know. Some said he had been irreparably damaged psychologically as a result of witnessing the butchering of his parents. Others said he possessed special powers like Moses our Teacher even as a baby—that he was born circumcised and came out of the womb talking Torah to his mother and father, and that now he continues to communicate with them every day morning and night, earth to heaven.

“Tell us everything you know,” Shmuly said in his most ominous, still soft voice, his eyes fixed on you in a concentrated focus perhaps for the first time, boring into you as if to flush out your lifeblood until your face drained white, you looked as if you might swoon. It struck me that I ought to put a stop to this inquisition at once. Why was I just sitting there paralyzed, letting them torture you like this?

“He was not even two,” you said finally, “and I was only eight.”

“Old enough to remember.”

“He used to stick his hand into the flames of his mother’s Sabbath candles,” you offered at last after a long silence. “Then he would put it in his mouth. He burned his hand and his mouth.” This was a graphic image I didn’t remember ever having myself observed, a disturbing sight you had witnessed more than once apparently but never shared with me. A daughter is supposed to confide in her mother. How had I gone wrong?

“Eh, like Moshe our Teacher when he was a little baby, when the Egyptian wise guys decided he was destined to grab away the throne from Pharaoh the king,” Rabbi Mendy interpreted. “So they put down in front of him a piece of gold the same like the crown and also a burning hot coal. Any normal kid would go for the gold—right? But the angel Gabriel, he takes little Moshe’s little hand and plops it down on the burning coal, and Moshe picks up the coal and puts it into his mouth—kids put everything in their mouths. That’s the reason for why Moshe Rabbenu was ‘heavy of speech and heavy of tongue,’ like the Torah says, why he couldn’t talk so good—because he burned out his mouth. So, did baby Moshe also have a stutter like big Moshe?” the rabbi asked you.

“I don’t know, I don’t remember, he wasn’t even two, he couldn’t really talk yet.”

“Something’s definitely not right here,” the rebbetzin said, pushing hard, baring her fangs like a tigress sensing danger to her cubs. “Why didn’t they stop him from sticking his hand in the fire? It’s criminally irresponsible. What kind of parents would do such a thing? They could have lit the Shabbes candles in a high place where he couldn’t reach. They should have been reported to the child protective services if you ask me.”

“The answer is right in front of our noses,” Shmuly said. “They were grooming him to take over the world for their own gain and profit, trying to clone him into Moshe Rabbenu, turning him into a Moshe Rabbenu celebrity starting with that public relations bit about the hand and mouth burning, like those Indian firewalkers, whatever they’re called—the fakers—excuse me, fakirs.”

Before my inner eye Geeta with the charred soles of her feet rolled off into the sunset in her wheelchair, never to return. The old woman next to me brought her mouth up to my face. Her breath was stale, her lips bubbling with white foam, like fat on the fire. “Pay attention,” she sprayed into my ear, “the child is in danger.”

She was referring of course to her grandson Shmuly, eighteen years old, from her perspective still a child. He had been reared with all the entitlement of Chabad royalty. Now he was being dethroned by an upstart little kid. The brilliant future they had all envisioned for him at the center of the innermost Chabad court, a major player sought out by presidents and prime ministers and kings on anything related to the Jewish question, with all the collateral benefits flowing to them as a family in terms of power, prestige, prosperity—all that was now on the endangered list. According to the rebbetzin, the overreaching, the sheer heresy in the circles surrounding baby Moshe was mindboggling. She sat there spuming as if a valve under pressure had been released. There was talk that baby Moshe was saved from the slaughter by a miracle, an angel from God in the form of the little Nepalese peasant Sandra; that he had been set apart, chosen for a special destiny, there were even some who called him a Holy Child. Excuse me, but the last time I heard Holy Child it was in reference to you-know-who, Yoshke Pandrek, JC, I’m not even allowed to say his name, a very goyisch idea to put it mildly, plain old apikorsus. Then there are the other heretics, the ones who say that baby Moshe is the Rebbe’s gilgul—like the Rebbe’s reincarnation? As far as I’m concerned, this is not one iota different than the fairy-tale garbage they believe right here in this cesspool of idol worshippers—Vishnu-Pishnu, Krishna-Pishna. Please! How can the Rebbe have a gilgul? You can only have a gilgul if you’re dead already. Everyone knows that the Rebbe is not dead. Any day now he will come out from that grave where he’s taking a short rest and rise up again as the Messiah our King.

The talk at that table was intolerable, there was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to extricate myself, go home and take a shower, and with luck, drag you out with me. I could have forced the issue by citing the fifth commandment now that you had become so pious in your observance, which would oblige you to honor your mother, but you wanted so badly to stay on with your “soul sister,” Malkie. I understood the pull of your desire to be close to that other girl. I didn’t have the heart to cause you more pain especially at that moment, after they had put you through such an ordeal. My only consolation was that Manika would remain to look after you and keep you from harm.

As I stood at the door wrapping myself in my rain gear, the rebbetzin came up to administer her mandatory hug that every female guest was required to endure going and coming, and by the way, to also invite us, you and me, for an exclusive VIP preview tour of Nariman House now in the process of being restored into the new Chabad center—The best revenge, let them see that they couldn’t destroy us, the people of Israel live. The renovations were still underway, she advised me, but you could already see the finished product taking shape—a synagogue, a study hall, a kosher restaurant, a hostel for travelers, an internet café, a resource library, offices, a museum in memory of the slain martyrs, fabulous, fabulous, no expense is being spared, everything top of the line, everything high end, one look at it even at this stage and you would see in a flash where all the money went, all those donations, you would see immediately how ridiculous, how slanderous, how just plain ugly they are, those accusations of embezzlement.

I spent the remainder of that Sabbath day at home stationed at my computer scouring the internet for the goods until I blew the electrical circuits throughout the subcontinent, tripped the power of my building’s backup generator, ran my battery dry. Where had I been? I must have been napping. It was by then already old news. Mumbai Moshe’le was a gold mine. Undisclosed millions reportedly had been harvested at fundraising events held across the globe after the terror attack. What happened to all that loot apart from the well-publicized trust fund set aside for the orphan? There were cries of theft, fraud, falsification of accounts—a squalid unseemly feud tearing apart the innermost circles of the organization. The heartrending banner of little baby Moshe’le crying, Ima, Ima, had been unfurled throughout the civilized world and milked for all it was worth. There had been an avalanche of sympathy, the megarich had opened wide their purses, but already I understood that nothing I could possibly see during our private exclusive VIP tour of the restoration of Nariman House, only just begun four years after the event, could match the sums that must have been amassed and stashed under God alone knew whose mattress. She might not have possessed the subtlety to realize it, but the rebbetzin had just confessed as much, she had alerted me. I could read the subtext. Finally, my eyes were opened and everything was revealed.

On the appointed Sunday in the middle of July, we pulled up in our black-and-yellow taxi, you and I, behind two black Mercedes limousines already double-parked in front of Nariman House alongside the caravan of police trucks that had evolved over the years since the terrorist attack into a fixture on that dysfunctionally narrow street, objects of resentment and hostility by merchants and residents alike. A pack of urchins was buzzing around the limos, darting in to press their noses against the tinted windows and snatch a glimpse of the drivers in the splendor of their uniforms and the luxuriously plush interiors, then scampering away, shooed by armed guards and police in khaki uniforms languorously stroking their lathis up and down. Manika had not accompanied us; she was attending a one-day women’s self-empowerment seminar offered by an NGO in a slum near the airport. I had given her the time off and had even sprung for the fees.

An Indian worker in a hard hat was posted behind the security wall at Nariman House’s newly installed steel door, straining against its weight to keep it partially open for us. We were late, it had taken forever to get you moving. You lay curled up on the sofa muttering something about Malkie having forewarned you that our VIP tour group would include a major donor and his daughter, that she had been tasked with looking after the daughter and making sure she had a good time, that there was really very little chance Malkie could spend any time with you during the visit—so what was the point of going? It was only after I clamped down, an indulgence I seldom permitted myself when it came to you, insisting that I, your mother whom the Torah charges you to honor, had been investigating the backstory of the Nariman House restoration project and it was really important for me to seize this opportunity to get behind the scenes to follow the money and check out with my own eyes what’s going on there. Only after I had made that case for myself did you get it together to overcome your resistance and start moving, in compliance with the fifth commandment and its promised reward of length of days—a long life, an outcome that no one could possibly have wished for you more than I, my Maya. It was essential therefore that you obey me.

Despite our lateness, we nevertheless lingered for a while in the street in front of Nariman House, knee deep in water, rancid and brown like old tea essence filmed with scum, afloat with objects large and small, dead rats, dead dogs, live lizards, to gaze nostalgically up and down the street—Hormusji Street, our street. Nearby, a building had collapsed, struck down perhaps only yesterday by one of the wild storms of this very monsoon season; there were still some electrical wires and strips of metal that the scavengers had not yet ripped out. Down the lane we could see that the roof of our own building had caved in, the same roof on which we had all gathered during those first rapturous nights of my passion for Geeta to watch the unfolding of the terror attack on the Chabad center as if it were an apocalyptic blockbuster on a giant screen. The roof, too, might have been a casualty of the attack; the wear and tear from that very night could have compromised it structurally. Whenever it came crashing down, though, I felt confident that Varda had not been under it, she was still operational somewhere on the planet, doing her harm, I had no doubt about that. I had not seen her in years, not since we moved into Geeta’s flat on Malabar Hill very soon after the terrorist incident, but I had heard from someone that she had been spotted with several other women in a Tel Aviv storefront window, all of them clad in so-called intimate wear, with a prominent price tag hanging from each of their necks as if they were being offered for sale as part of an in-your-face protest action against sex trafficking of women including very young girls in Israel and throughout the civilized world, which was, it seems, Varda’s latest cause.

The roof of Nariman House itself was covered with a heavy blue tarpaulin to protect it from the lashing rains that could mow down far more solid structures. The building was now completely caged in the orthodontia of scaffolding from which, here and there we spotted such festive decorative touches as tassels dangling from bars, garlands of flowers, clusters of coconuts, streamers and ribbons, shimmering gold, magenta, turquoise, like trucks on the Grand Trunk Road hurtling to an early death in Lahore. Within the scaffolding, the Nariman House facade was even more dilapidated and undistinguished than I remembered it, looking as if it could disintegrate in an instant, blotched and blackened with fungus and pollution, with the added punctuation now of the ellipses of bullet holes not yet deleted. The hard hat posted at the entrance waited smiling and uncomplaining, keeping the door sufficiently open to signal unqualified welcome as the heavily armed security personnel in the temporary porta-guardhouse, the sturdiest structure on the block, took their time checking our identification documents against the names and numbers that had been provided in advance, gravely examining the papers we had handed over to them, then riveting their eyes upon us again and again, their heads bobbing up and down to verify that the photos and our faces matched and were one and the same, nodding finally in a signal that looked like no but on the subcontinent actually means yes—yes, come in, welcome to the slaughterhouse.

The orders were to take us directly up to the fifth floor where the living quarters of the martyred rabbi and his rebbetzin had been located. The VIP delegation was already up there now on its tour under the expert guidance of the museum’s chief designer plucked from the most cutting-edge upscale New York firm. We were very late, we had almost missed the whole show and were in danger of not being seated, the hard hat reminded us with a rueful smile, making a not altogether successful effort to avoid a tone of reproach. I felt aggrieved for your sake. The good news, though, he added, is that the tour itinerary had skipped over the fourth floor with the intention of returning to it on the way down and making it the last stop since that was the highlight, the grand finale of the fireworks; after the fourth floor it was all downhill, anticlimax. That was where the madam and the sahib were executed. He put a finger up to each of his temples to illustrate—bang bang.

As we made our ascent he kept cautioning us to take care, ladies, I implore you, I am responsible. The staircase seemed to be wobbling under us as in a nightmare, there were black holes, missing risers, gaps along the banister. I grasped your hand and placed my other arm around your waist to steady and steer you, to guide where you set down your feet, anxiously conscious of the falling stage you were going through at this time in your development. The walls of every floor we passed were brutally cracked and cratered, as after an earthquake. The place seemed to be a hopeless ruin, a wreck. What was the point of trying to salvage it? Better to tear it down and start all over again from the beginning. Yet on every floor as we continued our climb we could see busy workers, building materials and tools piled in the corners, an upbeat atmosphere of industry sending out positive vibes, signs of purpose, though to what end and at what price were beyond me. What a mess! The words popped out of my mouth. “Yes ladies, today a mess, tomorrow a holy Jewish temple, covered in Kevlar—our Hebrew National in a bulletproof sheath top to bottom, protection to the maximum.”

We arrived on the fifth floor, the former residence that we, and you above all, knew so well, which, I had heard, would eventually showcase a replica of the holy family’s living quarters, including a kitchen with a talking fridge that when opened would expound on kosher laws as part of the outreach mandate to educate unsuspecting visitors. Voices were coming from the direction of little Moshe’s room, drawing us in. It was such an overwhelming experience to stand once again in that doorway surveying that familiar space now with the full knowledge of what had transpired that almost immediately you threw yourself down prostrate on the floor overcome as if on sacred ground, just as you had described it to me, as if seized by a supernatural force. Malkie and a petite girl standing opposite holding hands let out a joint gasp, then brought their free hands simultaneously up to their mouths in horror. The rebbetzin made a sharp move forward as if to stoop to your aid, but Shmuly raised his hand like a traffic cop on duty to stop her. “Don’t try to pick her up, she’s too heavy for you. Anyways, she’s okay. She’s used to it, she’s a faller,” he added unforgivably with a little laugh. I glared at him as I was helping you to your feet. “It is a spiritual moment for Maya, like a divine visitation. Places have their power.” That was all I said. It was stunning to me that someone like Shmuly so saturated in the Hasidic tradition of uplift was still so incapable of recognizing ecstasy when it lay stretched out on the floor at his feet.

We stood against the wall, you leaning into me as if to keep yourself from falling, leaning into me as you used to do when you were a small child in a strange place, as if it were just the two of us against the whole world, and we listened as the top museum designer described the plans for this space. He was an American, a secular Jew or maybe not even Jewish at all to judge by the yarmulke rising to a peak on his head, made in China of a glossy gold synthetic and stamped with the logo Bar Mitzvah of Elvis Goldberg. He had donned this headgear out of respect for the holy site upon which we were treading and in deference to the two significant players in his audience whose goodwill was essential, Rabbi Mendy and another man, bearded, robed in a black, heavy, silk kaftan richly tailored, stretched open into a keyhole in the vicinity of his navel area across a rajah’s paunch—without doubt, the major donor.

Except for some necessary structural and cosmetic touchups, the museum designer was expatiating, the room would be restored to its original form, as it had been when baby Moshe’le had occupied it: the ornamental frieze of brightly colored Hebrew alphabet letters, the cheerful markers charting Moshe’s growth, even the furniture and toys, all of that would be recreated—“Everything the same for when baby Moshe comes back to replace his father,” Rabbi Mendy chimed in, turning to the major donor, who flipped a nod of approval.

Was this his idea of a joke? His buying into Moshe’s return was astounding, a public betrayal of the aspirations of his own son and the family’s ambitions for Shmuly as they had expressed them to us with such agitation so recently, soliciting our input and support. Besides, what if Moshe never wanted to return to Mumbai, a perfectly understandable post-traumatic reaction? Had anyone even considered that possibility? What if Moshe’le didn’t want to be a rabbi after all when he grew up? What if he wanted to be a dentist or a rock star? What if he had a sex change and became a female rabbi? What if he came back and didn’t want to play with his old toys? “Something fishy is going on here,” I said in your ear. You recoiled from my breath as if I were an alien species with a contagious terminal disease, pulling away from me and curling into your shell, and made no response. I must have unintentionally embarrassed you, speaking too loudly and too freely. You always claimed that I was missing the whispering gene and the appropriateness gene, maybe both on the same chromosome.

We took our place at the rump of the group as it exited baby Moshe’s past and future quarters, following docilely behind the museum designer and the rest of the flock lumbering down the precarious steps to the main exhibition space on the fourth floor. The sections of wall and ceiling that had been ravaged by shelling and grenade blasts and spectacularly pocked with bursts of bullet holes were already protected behind glass like precious artifacts bearing testimony. “We will leave it as we found it,” our guide informed us with suitable solemnity. The spot where the rabbi and his wife were murdered will be marked with a plaque engraved with the traditional phrase, May God Avenge Their Blood—which should not be interpreted to imply any negative Islamophobia, our guide hastened to caution. What it means is, the business of vengeance is left to God; that’s not our department. The main installation will be seven glass plinths representing the seven Noahide ethical laws incumbent on all humankind. Through the prisms of these seven plinths the sunlight will be refracted, casting a rainbowlike arc in the room, like the rainbow after the greatest of all monsoons in history that wiped out every living being on the face of the earth in the time of Noah, the rainbow that symbolized the Lord’s promise never again to destroy what He had created—Never Again! The main point, the designer elaborated, is that this museum is not only about the six Jews who were murdered here, or about Jews in general in any configuration of six, six million or whatever, or even about the 166 men and women of all faiths who were mowed down in Mumbai in this attack and whose names will be inscribed on the terrace of honor right here in this museum. This is a museum about the rainbow coalition, all of humanity in all of its diversity, in all of its victimhood, survivorship, and trauma, including Hindus, Christians, Muslims, even the terrorists themselves, if I may be so bold. The overarching message, like a rainbow, is humanistic, inclusive, universal—global morality.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” the major donor said.

“I agree with you 100 percent, Reb Meylekh,” Rabbi Mendy said. “The Rebbe himself was all the time saying to us shlukhim that just like it’s our job to reach out to all Jews to obey the 613 commandments, it is also our job to reach out to the goyim to obey the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t fool around with your sister—stuff like that, the basics. Why? Because it’s good for the Jews.”

“Seven laws, seven plints, beautiful, beautiful, a good investment, vort’ every penny.” The major donor, whose good name we now possessed, Meylekh, Hebrew for king with a Yiddish inflection confirmed by his accent—Yiddish with some other garnish, maybe a pinch of German, plus a soupcon of French—tightened his silk gartel rope belt around his belly and paused to ask a question. “So nu, apropos, I vas vundering—vhat’s a plint’?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the exit. He had heard enough.

He was from Antwerp, we learned on the drive home. Exiting Nariman House, the rebbetzin Mindy graciously invited us to join her along with Malkie and Reb Meylekh’s daughter Ella in the ladies’ limousine, the smaller and older model of the two. Four of us squeezed into the back seat, while you, still a growing girl, sat in comfort buckled up in front alongside the driver. Malkie notified us that Ella had just completed her secondary studies at an exclusive finishing school for ultra–Orthodox Jewish girls in Switzerland. With my practiced eye for female stock I took her in as she sat there wedged demurely between Malkie and me in her designer suit perfectly tailored to her trim size-zero figure, her coordinating heels, works of art worthy of being mounted on a plinth. She had majored in shopping. I probed gently. What were her plans? “Selling gay engagement rings—for same sex marriages. It’s a huge new market. Business is business.” She offered me a charming, suspiciously intimate smile. Her accent was European, refined. The rebbetzin leaned over toward me across the two girls. “I hope you see now from our visit that it’s all aboveboard. Embezzlement? Please! Everything 100 percent kosher. End of story.” I nodded, stroking the exquisite softness of the limousine’s leather interior with true appreciation. Every cent well spent, I could not have agreed more.

You made no gesture to join me in the back after the rebbetzin got out with the two girls alongside the tank at the fortress they called home, and with a pointed smile in my direction sealing our collusion, ordered the chauffeur to deliver us to our door on Malabar Hill. We were not invited to dinner. “I’m never going back to Chabad again in my life,” you announced from the front seat as soon as the driver put the engine in gear, the first words you uttered since we had entered baby Moshe’le’s room. You were facing forward like a stone in the passenger seat, not deigning to turn around.

In spite of your stated resolve, however, Chabad came to us. Its latest bulletins continued to prance along the internet; I at least had not unsubscribed. Three weeks after our visit to the museum concept in progress, the online Chabad personals prominently featured the announcement of the engagement of the young man, Mr. Shmuly Schlissel, may his candle shed light, of Mumbai, India, to the chosen one of his heart, the bride, the virgin, Miss Ella Goldwasser, may she live, of Antwerp, Belgium. The entire Jewish community of Mumbai was invited to the gala vort, to be celebrated in the grand ballroom of the Taj. The wedding itself would take place at the end of August in Antwerp, where the young couple would reside, and where, I learned later, Malkie would also be settling after her marriage, so inseparable had she become from her future sister-in-law. Shmuly would be joining his future father-in-law’s diamond business, with Malkie’s husband as his chief of staff. No young man was better prepared than Shmuly to lead the campaign against the main threat to the survival of the ancient and venerable Antwerp Jewish diamond establishment—the rogue Indian diamond traders descending in their hordes with their goats and monkeys and painted idols, the international Indian conspiracy. Shmuly straddled both worlds. The silk road to heaven where this match was made was paved with diamonds.

The rains began to subside around the time you cut loose from Chabad. Still the ground was saturated, everything that once was hidden had been heaved up and exposed on the surface. Pigeons perched on our windowsill bearing tampon applicators in their bills. We came out of the dark blinking and went back to planting our vineyards full time. I prepared for our move to a flat I had found back in Colaba and focused intensely now on the coming tourist season, which due to personal circumstances I had seriously neglected—excusable maybe, but still, the workload had piled up, I was swamped, the stress level was intense. You set off to school every morning with Manika trotting behind you, chanting, Enjoy the rest of your day. In the evening you came straight home, no longer stopping for your spiritual fix at Chabad. You ate your meal, went into your room and closed the door. You were remote, into yourself, normal for an adolescent, but overall you seemed calm, at peace. The good news was you had stopped falling. I gave you your space.

The day Shmuly’s engagement was announced, I did not mention it at the dinner table. You gave no sign that you were aware of it. That night as I was lying in my bed in the dark with my eyes open, weeping as I remembered Geeta, you came into my room to comfort me. You curled up beside me, burrowing into me as you had done so often when you were a small child before Geeta had invaded our lives. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. You buried your face in my neck, the passage of years shrank to nothing. I placed an arm around your shoulder drawing you even closer. You babbled into my body. It was not your fault, Malkie had told you, you were only a child, it was the fault of others, adults. It was not something you had done, it was something that had been done to you, against your will. Still, even though you were innocent, you were required to do teshuvah, Malkie had said, though even the most severe repentance could never fully erase the damage and renew you, it would never be possible for a boy like her brother to marry a girl like you at any age because you are spoiled.

You were zoning in and out of sleep—shuddering from the static of your sobs. I put my face into your hair to breathe in the scent of freshness that had always moved me with such tenderness, but tonight your smell was humid, gamy—female. What do you mean spoiled? I never spoiled you. Who said you were spoiled? It was a childish crush, nothing more. Your innocent heart had been ensnared by a snake who seduced you for your baby Moshe’le connection, then dumped you for blood diamonds. You are blameless, pure. What is this spoiled garbage? Time to move on. Get past it, Maya. Tomorrow the rains will end. Even with my schedule so overloaded I was nearly choking, I made the decision then and there that for your sake, tomorrow we would set out to Kerala, to Amritapuri, to visit our guru, the divine mother Amma, and receive her darshan. It has been too long that we have not seen her. Amma will look at you and instantly understand everything, I said as your breathing grew calmer and you rested at last. Amma devi will give you her healing hug and set you firmly back on course.