3

WORKING WITH AMMA’S TEAM was always a pleasure. I had been dealing with her outfit over the years in connection with my tour business, providing a steady stream of clients for shorter and longer stays at her ashram, some of them serious potential major donor material, many morphing in time into significant supporters and contributors, all of them committed shoppers, snatching up Amma dolls and jewelry and rose-scented soap and bits of cloth that Amma had sat upon with her buttocks comfortably splayed and other assorted Amma tchotchkes and holy relics. At a certain point we had even embarked on preliminary discussions revolving around setting up an Amma satellite ashram in Israel in the desert on the brink of the great Ramon crater, not far from the maximum security prison where Yigal Amir, the assassin of the sainted Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was being held for life, within shooting distance of the cell in which his conjugal visits with his mad Russian took place as the press massed outside, straining to hear their post-coital whispers as they lay spent side by side in his prison bed sharing their grand dreams for the fledgling messiah she would bear from his wild seed.

These plans fizzled out eventually, but this did not in any way diminish my faith in the incredible efficiency of Amma’s operation, which was borne out in every interaction directly connected with my business. This unparalleled competence and responsiveness was due to the fact that their guru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, known as Amma, was above all the ultimate mother figure. When your mother tells you to do something, you’d better listen if you know what’s good for you.

As a mother in India, Amma was a far more formidable figure than Indira-mama ever was, to take just one example, because unlike the lady prime minister and all mothers by definition with the purported exception of the Virgin Mary, Amma had never been forced to undergo the indignity of being literally fucked to the best of anyone’s knowledge, slander to the contrary about wild orgies with her cutest swamis notwithstanding, and she never had to deal with the day-to-day of actual children. All of humanity were her children, a much more manageable situation. Mrs. Gandhi could declare a state of emergency, but whatever its duration, it inevitably would have a beginning and end. Amma’s state of emergency was a built-in permanent fact of life, giving her unlimited authority forever, which she would never abuse in a tyrannical or dictatorial way because she was Mother, and Mother is good. While governments stalled, twisted up like pretzels, hopelessly incapable of getting their acts together, totally inept in the heat of such crises as tsunamis and earthquakes, Amma waded waist-deep through the foul water and floating turds on her own two bare thick-ankled peasant feet at the head of her army of devotees and got the job done, rescuing thousands, putting up shelters, homes, hospitals, universities, pouring crores of rupees into the relief operation. Amma gave the orders, she made things happen. She was not content like so many others, the pope, imams, rabbis, and sundry similar type makhers to just stand there grinning smugly for the cameras mouthing platitudes about the worldwide blight of human trafficking and slavery, to take just one of her causes. No, that was not Amma’s way. She said, Let all my little children who have been violated and exploited and discarded come to me—and she opened her arms wide and rushed them into her orphanages and schools that had sprung up overnight at her command.

Truly, despite unsubstantiated reports of temper tantrums, slappings, scratchings, bitings for even the smallest mistakes especially in the public relations department, as far as I was concerned, Amma was perfection. Every encounter I had with her or her staff was an unalloyed positive experience, but though I believed with full faith in Amma’s gift of spiritual energy and insight, and though whatever she might have demanded of me I would have obeyed without hesitation, between us it had always remained strictly business. Whenever I came into her presence anew, I bowed down to the ground to touch her feet giving the homage due a mother who sits for twenty-two hours straight without a toilet break (wearing adult diapers, according to her detractors, Huggies of course), hugging one stranger after another, making eye contact that seemed to bore right down into the very depths of an afflicted soul as if to pump in an infusion of love, offering comfort and solace, breaking the Guinness world record for total number of body hugs dished out with feeling.

For me, though, it was a personal point of honor never to allow myself to be pushed by the saint’s facilitators against her ample breasts to become the beneficiary of what by all accounts was a mind-blowing transformative maternal embrace. I had a mother of my own, thank you very much; dead or alive, one mother was as much as I could handle. Through her interpreter I struggled to explain that my reluctance to join the legions of hugged did not signify anything personal about Amma. For example, it had nothing to do with whatever might have rubbed off on her white sari or hefty arms or plump face in the way of deadly bacteria, say, or human body odors, or other dreck and schmutz and contagion and disease from her hours of hugging the unwashed masses, including lepers whose sores she licked, according to apocryphal lore. It was simply that I was allergic to hugs from either the giving or receiving end. I attributed this aversion to PTSD stemming from the discrimination and suffering endured by my twin brother, Shmelke, the Jewish guru, who was famous for hugging every living creature who crossed his path regardless of status or phenotype. He was an equal opportunity hugger—and what was his reward? Driven out of the Holy Land with his followers, ejected from one place after another in search of a resting place for the soles of his feet. It seemed that when it came to hug therapy, female providers benefitted from affirmative action in their favor because bottom line, they were judged harmless, the hug was not an opening move, it was the climax, punitive measures therefore were never taken against them. That’s just the way it was, there was no point fighting the inherent sexism in it. Amma listened to my explanation regarding my hug phobia; it’s hard to know how much she took in, it involved such a Western mindset and concepts. When I was through with my spiel, she waggled her finger at me, and with a sly gleam in her eyes declared in Malayalam through her translator, “On the day you come for my hug to save your life, I will be sitting here waiting for you.” I chose to accept this as a blessing.

You, on the other hand, at those times I was compelled to take you along with a group to Amritapuri, typically when Geeta finked out on her parenting responsibilities and I had no one to oversee your care, would climb joyfully into Ammachi’s lap for your hug. There you would curl up, your beautiful lithe young girl’s body going limp and relaxed as Amma hugged you to herself with all her might, tickling you playfully, stroking your back clucking, MaMaMa, bringing her face down into your silken hair to breathe in your heavenly fragrance, holding on to you far longer than was practical for the continuous efficient flow of the conveyor belt of the masses of aspiring hugees awaiting their assigned turn, to the unconcealed agitation of her inner circle of enforcers conferring tensely on the stage in their bright orange robes. Yet not a single one of her closest attendants would ever have presumed to interrupt this prolonged communion no matter how seriously it disrupted the schedule because it was believed that you were among the rare souls with the power to inspire Amma to reveal her true identity as the incarnation of the goddess. This conviction grew out of an astonishing event that occurred during one of your early hug encounters, when, pressed against Amma’s bosom, you told her through a translator that you had just been to the Kali temple on the ashram grounds. “Kali is very scary,” you confided to Amma—not an unreasonable reaction. With her garland of skulls and girdle of severed arms and earrings of dead fetuses, her tongue sticking out of her mouth lolling down like an obscene red flap on her blue-black face with its eyes crazed with bloodlust, a detached head dripping blood held up by the hair in one of her four arms, her warlike stance, foot stamped down on the body of lord Shiva her husband, who seemed to be either dead or just relaxing and enjoying himself, Kali was a child’s nightmare. Amma rocked you like a baby who had woken up in the dark screaming. “Do not be afraid of Mother Kali, my child. Do not be deceived by her terrible exterior. Kali is the warrior-mother, destroyer and creator, punisher and rewarder, nothing can stop her from doing her will, she is the force, she is Mother Nature, she is the greatest of all mothers, love her, respect her, obey her—or else!”

Instantaneously transformed, Amma pushed you away from her with such force as if she were ejecting you from inside her own body, fortunately into the arms of one of her handlers who caught you like a seasoned midwife. She rose from her cushioned throne on the low dais, stuck out her tongue for all to see, and with her face contorted into a ferocious mask, her arms flailing wildly so that they seemed to multiply into four arms, she raged in an otherworldly voice, “I am Kali Ma, warrior-mother, goddess–rock star”—throwing everyone present in that hall, veterans and visitors alike, prostrate onto the ground, overcome by this vision, this manifestation of the divine, many of them writhing and weeping, some fainting and struggling for breath so that they had to be spirited away on stretchers by medical emergency crews from Amma’s Ayurveda clinic and her world-class hospital across the river. I alone was left standing, caught up in a fit of hilarity with Amma when our glances collided and our thoughts clicked. Amma’s laughter was later featured on her website as a precious glimpse of divine bliss, the highest maternal wisdom, according to the hermeneutics spin. She had a highly developed website from which you could purchase ashram gifts and elixirs, and even virtual hugs in an emergency, when you were in crisis far away, in desperate need of Mother. The site was managed by a devotee who twenty years earlier, at age eighteen, had sold his internet startup for an undisclosed stratospheric sum to dedicate the remainder of his life to Mother.

When you came to my bed that night, babbling gibberish about being spoiled, ruined, your self-esteem in tatters, and I proposed a healing visit to Amma, I wasn’t even sure if the guru was at her ashram, she traveled so frequently to personally deliver her actual hands-on hugs. On top of that, I certainly could not guarantee that after your deep dive into the Chabad ritual bath, you would be willing to set foot on soil polluted by idol worship. You promptly agreed to come along, however, one of your first overt expressions of rebellion against the indoctrination you had been put through, for me a truly reassuring sign that the process of mental and emotional healing was underway. I was so proud of you.

A quick call to my contacts at the ashram even in the early hours of dawn confirmed that Amma was in residence, as was often the case in August and September as the monsoon season waned, barring an unforeseen world crisis or other major humanitarian emergency during which every afflicted soul inevitably cries out for Mother. Amma always heard their cry, dropped everything and came running. She was, and I insert this here with a heart bursting with admiration for this amazing lady, addicted to the camera, a shameless self-promoter, not for personal aggrandizement, I hasten to add in her defense, but solely as a tool to manipulate the media on whom she depended to spread her message. Her staff was expected to function on all cylinders at very short notice, so when I called it was totally set up to handle my request. I was assured that arrangements would be made at once for our visit—unfortunately too brief, I informed Amma’s personnel with regret, a day at most, due to intense work pressures. I proceeded to book a flight for the next morning on IndiGo air from Mumbai to Cochin for the two of us and for Manika as well as a special treat—she had never been hugged by Amma and had never flown in her life, for Manika it would all be a delightful first.

A driver from the ashram, a devotee called Krishnapuri, who in his former life when he was known as Chris had been a pilot on Air Force One before giving it all up during the Clinton administration and coming to Amritapuri to perform seva selfless service for Mother, was waiting for us at Cochin International holding up a sign with our name inscribed on it. He took over our luggage, heavy with the requisite offerings to Amma, including my mother’s candlesticks, her silk saris, and whatever jewelry remained that Manika had not filched with Ma’s full laissez-faire awareness, plus decorative and household artifacts that Geeta and her goondas had missed while ransacking the Malabar Hill flat, which all in all was a good thing as there would be less junk and fewer painful reminders for me to transfer to our new digs in Colaba. We were led to the ashram car parked in a VIP spot for the three-hour drive along the Arabian Sea through the backwaters lush with tropical greenery to Amritapuri, rising like a vision as if out of nowhere into the night sky, its lofty pink buildings brilliant with the only lights on the subcontinent that never failed, Amma would never have tolerated that.

From the window of our room on the fifteenth floor in the hotel’s top-class wing, I could see the light pouring out of the main hall where Amma sat and dispensed public darshan. It looked as if Amma were pulling one of her all-nighter marathon hugging sessions, an athletic display of extraordinary stamina for which she was so justly renowned. Thanks to my longstanding business relationship with the Amma operation and the well-endowed clients I brought in, we were assigned a room in the luxury category. I could not help but be aware, though, that there was a higher level of accommodation one floor up that had not been allocated to us this time; we had not been offered the upgrade. In Amritapuri, nothing happened by accident, without Amma’s direct input. Like all great mothers, Amma was 100 percent hands on. Our room assignment could only mean that an exceptionally important guest was visiting. It crossed my mind that it could be the famous movie actress Sharon Stone, who had been running around at that time cheerleading and boosting for Amma devi, the angel, the hugging saint. I could only hope that if Sharon was not scheduled to be given a private audience, such as is sometimes granted by the pope and by other distinguished personages in the papal league like Amma to special friends of influence, when her turn came during public darshan to assume the position in preparation for being launched by a staff member for her hug in the bosom of Amma, she would be a good girl and remember to wear her knickers.

Standing at that window looking out beyond the world of Mother, if such a world truly exists or matters, it crossed my mind that we could simply run down to the main hall now where Amma was sitting, you and Manika could grab in your hugs, we could then check out at dawn or even directly after the darshan and talk Captain Krishnapuri into earning a few extra seva points by transporting us back to the airport, maybe even hijacking a plane and flying us home in presidential style, returning to Mumbai by early afternoon at the latest. Things might have turned out so differently had we seized that moment and gone for it. But you were already phasing into sleep patterns in your bed under a huge portrait of Amma, her moon face shining benevolently down upon you and Manika, who was cocooned in a blanket on the floor at your feet. After the spiritual hazing you had been put through in Chabadland, you had taken to sleeping as much as possible, a common teenager syndrome, I had read in a magazine somewhere. Teens required almost as much sleep as newborns and babies, according to the experts, due to an accelerated stage in the growth and development of their unstable nervous systems.

Now, with Amma smiling down upon you, it was as if you were recharging your batteries for the next morning when, before queuing up for your hug, you planned to revisit the original cowshed shrine in which Amma had experienced her first ecstatic visions when she was a young girl of about your age, swept up by compassion and love for all suffering creatures, moved to spread her arms wide and comfort with her embrace all the wretched of the earth, human and animal, including the family cows whom she kissed like Mrs. Murphy, their faces and flanks and tails smeared with dung. From what you had personally shared with me regarding the ecstatic nature of your falling stage, I recognized that you too counted yourself as an initiate in the rarified ranks of soul sisters seduced by the spirit while still legally underage, young girls who refuse all offers of marriage and survive by eating feces and shards of glass, as Amma was said to have done, who are shunned by family and tied to trees, beaten by their fathers for giving away the family treasures. I recognized that it was essential to give you the space you needed to work through this dangerously delusional stage without sabotaging your future, so that you would come out on the other side back on track. I counted on Amma to support me in this, which is why I let you sleep, and resigned myself to waiting for the morning.

Amma’s active energy source was love, and the idea of Mother is love without limit. That’s why she never dried up like a battery or blacked out like the chronically failing electrical grid of Mother India. She was the ultimate Mother, powered eternally by love juice. The first person we met almost immediately after we stepped out onto the ashram campus the next morning, as if he had been posted there to wait for us, informed us rhapsodically that Amma was still hugging away in the main hall, she was on a roll, unstoppable—gods do not need sleep like spiritually challenged mortals or neurologically temperamental teenagers. We had better rush to get our hug tokens if we wanted a good number for our turn in line.

The air was pendulous with the sense of a rare holy hour. Amma was very on, in tune with an exceptionally high spiritual chord not discernible to the rest of us. Banners, flags, posters, and giant portraits everywhere with Amma’s face blown up, smiling so beatifically, beaming such sweet unconditional mother love and acceptance, seemed to be glowing especially brilliantly that morning, as if backlit by a heavenly radiance, like stained glass windows. Devotees were chanting the three hundred names of Amma, singing bhajans, meditating, crawling on the ground and picking up litter with their teeth, a singularly mystical form of seva. In the cowshed temple, worshippers were enacting a fire ritual and doing their puja, but as it turned out the cowshed was not your final destination after all, as I had assumed you had intended. Instead, you cast a bored glance at the scene there, then walked away and led us directly to the food court area, choosing the Western-style cafe where you ordered everything on the menu including a large pizza with tomato sauce (Let them eat pizza, Amma had ruled, when confronted with the hungry Western mobs at her gate), pasta with pesto, a grilled cheese sandwich, mashed potatoes, a cheese omelet, muffins and pastries, washed down with milkshakes from the juice stall. Amritapuri was strictly vegetarian, gliding toward a full commitment to veganism blocked only by a nourishing mother’s concern for the needs of her Western children. Already its food service was certified organic, local, composted, recycled, solar powered, sustainable.

You consumed every carb molecule and fat globule spread out in front of you slowly and silently, with no sign of feeling pressured about securing a good spot in the queue for your hug and no sense of embarrassment, a proud fat girl flaunting her human right to eat. Amma wanted you to eat. Amma said you may not be excused from the table until you cleaned your plate. Amma was feeding you. Mothers feed their children. Feeding her children is right up there at the top of a mother’s job description.

The main hall was packed when we arrived, not only with transient seekers and tourists, but also it seemed with the entire population of ashram residents, filling every space on the floor and vying nonviolently for precious spots on the stage directly in Amma’s force field, praying, chanting, meditating in anticipation of a rumored stunning revelation. After we removed our shoes as was required and set them on the rack outside the entrance, divested ourselves of all carryons, passed through the security gauntlet of metal detectors and X-ray scanners, you and Manika were each handed your token with a number indicating your place in the hugging queue. Despite the masses that had poured in that morning, the numbers you were given were not a long way off from the ones already flashing up on the board, like at a train station with its row of ticket booths, alerting you that your turn is coming up, you’re next, prepare yourself—know where you are going. From previous visits, I was aware that a stash of tokens was kept in reserve for visitors of status flagged for special treatment, media types and celebrities, politicians, major donor material, and also the chosen people with nothing obvious to recommend them, set apart for reasons known only to Amma herself in her divine maternal wisdom.

A volunteer named Shosh, a former attack-dog trainer in the Israel Defense Forces, a white shawl draped over her hair, ushered us to our seats in the front very near to the stage, removed the reserved signs stuck there, and with a blunt hand gesture, indicated to us to take our places. All of this was entirely in accord with the professionalism of the Amma operation as I had come to know it over the years. Holding a number of premium seats in reserve is always good policy in any people-moving performance-oriented enterprise; distance from the stage always needed to be factored in to optimize human traffic flow and keep the assembly line moving smoothly. We would not have a long wait. Our presence had been anticipated, we had not been forgotten even in this moment of intense spiritual excitement. Flexibility was built into Amma’s shop, to accommodate among other contingencies, sudden visits from persons of interest, among whom we felt ourselves privileged to be counted.

The stage directly in front of us was a great hive with the queen bee at its center surrounded by her attendants, monks and nuns, every cell filled with devotees sunk as in honey into a personalized form of sitting meditation practice, from catatonic obliviousness to heads thrown back rotating wildly, dreadlocks flying. The music blared nonstop filling the hall, pouring from the speakers, band after band replacing each other in shifts. It was a coveted honor to play for Amma during a sacred hugging session, and especially one such as this, so spiritually high.

The band on stage just then was an all-female group called Lakshmi and the Survivors, consisting of women and girls of all ages, some as young as five or six by my estimation, all costumed in crisp white linen. The leader, on clarinet or oboe (I could never tell the difference between those two but it was for sure a mouth instrument of some sort), was a clone or exact double or the twin sister of Monica Lewinsky, if not the great Monica herself. But it was only when my eyes took in the star singer, a senior citizen in her late sixties, that I realized who had gotten the best room at the ashram hotel, the one denied to us. It was Charlotte Harlow, my repeat client. I was the one who had introduced Charlotte to Amma during her first tour with me. She had subsequently become an ardent Amma supporter and devotee, taking the spiritual name Lakshmi, for the goddess of prosperity—money.

I recalled now that I had heard that Amma had tasked Charlotte with the care of rescued girls, abused through the sex trade, the ones who, based on the wisdom of the guru, would not thrive in her shelters in India, but would benefit most from being sent out of the country to live in Charlotte’s mansion on Foxhall Road in Washington, DC, under the care of professional PTSD therapists, be educated in one of the two most prestigious local girls’ schools of which Charlotte served on the board, either National Cathedral or Holton-Arms, and be given the full entitlement of private instruction, from tae kwan do to music training at the famous Levine conservatory, which Charlotte also endowed. The fruit of these music lessons was now on display in the band right before us—violins, flutes, and also voice training to provide the backup for Lakshmi/Charlotte clutching the microphone, singing in her aged, tobacco-ruined, upper-crust New Orleans–accented voice, “The House of the Rising Sun,” the Joan Baez version. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, and me, oh Lord, I’m one,” she crooned huskily over and over again like a mantra. This was the only number performed by Lakshmi and the Survivors but nobody seemed to mind. It was after all just soundtrack, and it was in the nature of soundtracks to repeat themselves. It was background music—the kind of music that is played over and over again while you are kept on hold to reassure you that you are still in the queue, you have not been forgotten.

We were on hold as the main show unfolded in the foreground. That was where the star attraction, Amma herself, sat on her low mother-soft settee-like pouf throne, all eyes upon her. The packed line of hug seekers inched along slowly and steadily toward her, flanked by seasoned crowd-control enforcers. As they approached the godhead, each supplicant was relieved of eyeglasses and any other facial obstructions or hazards, including nose, lip, eyebrow, and other rings in unexpected places that might rub against Mother’s ethereal personal surface area. Faces and other exposed body parts were sanitized with a baby wipe. The entire prepped package was then collapsed down to its knees at Amma’s feet, in readiness for the gentle tilt into her bountiful chest to receive a public hug of extraordinary intimacy lasting twenty seconds on average but sometimes as long as two minutes at Amma’s divine discretion. She signaled its conclusion by offering from her own hands a prasad that had been passed to her by a devotee performing one of the most desirable forms of seva—handing Amma the prasad for the freshly hugged, a gift of candy in a packet of sacred ash. Clutching this precious prasad, the drained human specimen from whom so much emotional and spiritual pus had just been squeezed out, was lifted up by the armpits, cut off from the maternal source as if reborn, removed and replaced by the next in line.

I could see all this unfold very clearly from where I was sitting alongside you and Manika, but the entire ritual, enacted over and over again, was also projected on a giant screen at the back of the stage, frame after frame visible to the ends of the hall of Amma’s mighty embrace, Amma rubbing a back, stroking a cheek, looking deeply into eyes and getting it, understanding exactly what was needed—planting a kiss, smiling, laughing, tickling, cooing baby talk, Amamama, loving unconditionally, comforting the suffering souls buried in her cushiony breast aching for the mother that is every human being’s inalienable right, handing to each of her children a piece of candy as the immortal rabbi of Chabad had once not quite handed to me a crisp new dollar bill but rather set it down on the table for me to pick up when I was a teenager and my mother had arranged an audience for me at his main headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, in the hope that his blessing would straighten me out; I was such a difficult kid, Ma said, headed for no good. For me the institutional choice between a gift of sweets or cash spoke spiritual volumes, which went a long way, I felt, to explaining why I left Brooklyn for Bombay. Where was there another guru like Amma who gave of herself so personally in this way, who allowed herself to be felt up in public by her needy, deprived children? The rabbi of Chabad would not even touch me, he would not touch a strange unrelated female of any age, he would not even hold one end of the dollar bill for me to grasp the other end, but dropped it on the table between us instead like a bone dropped for a dog. And now here I was observing Amma’s full body hugs in large-scale format stretched out across the screen, Amma’s children whispering their most private secrets into her ear, weeping, sobbing, fainting, falling into a trance in her arms so that they had to be peeled off by a volunteer like a limp rag to keep the show rolling.

On the giant screen all the assembled to the far ends of the hall could witness Amma’s unparalleled gift of empathy in full blockbuster display, and not less impressive, they could also observe her administrative genius, they could watch with awe her brilliance as a multitasker. They could see with their own eyes how Amma could hug so full heartedly and mindfully, and, at the same time, give orders to her staff, how she could hug the next seeker in line while finishing a conversation with the one who had just been extricated, how she could carry on with her hugging without skipping a beat while talking or texting on her smartphone or checking her email, which was perhaps the most uplifting and affirming sight of all, the one-armed hug showcasing the promise of technology deployed in the service of humankind. Nobody protested or objected. Everyone knew that it was essential for a mother to be a multitasker, and Amma was mother supreme.

Amma continued to text on her mobile as Manika knelt before her, holding up as an offering a huge red carrot that she pulled out of the knot in her sari. The texting went on as Manika, so tiny and compact, curled up in the shallow saucer of Amma’s lap, resting her head against Amma’s breasts, lost in their fullness, as if pumped up with mother’s milk, talking with the intensity of one who feared any minute she might be interrupted and silenced, crying so hard the bones of her entire little body rattled and shuddered as if she might break apart in pieces. I had never seen Manika talk so much, or with such fervor, as if she were telling something she had never dared tell anyone before, dredging it all up painfully, pounding her hollow chest with both fists, and I had never seen her cry, not once, not even as she watched my mother burn.

Amma absorbed it all, this heavy word flow, she nodded and murmured, wiped away Manika’s tears, stroked her hair and cheeks, caressed her shoulders with her left hand, while she continued to text on her smartphone with her right. She held Manika locked in her embrace for five minutes at least, prioritizing a first-timer, some said, which was her policy, but it was a radically long stretch, and even after she released her and you were settled in Manika’s place against Amma’s breasts nestled within the secure loving circle of Amma’s arm, Manika went on telling her story standing there at Amma’s right as Amma texted while rocking you in the crook of her left arm, purring, My daughter, my daughter, and softly singing lullabies to you so that very soon your eyelids grew heavy and drooped, and then you were asleep.

I admit that as I witnessed all this, I could not suppress the feeling that it was one thing to multitask while hugging Manika, but when it came to my daughter, I expected Amma to give you her full, undivided attention. She owed me. I was not a connection to be slighted. I had brought Amma many valuable contacts, including Charlotte/Lakshmi Harlow croaking away up there, warning her baby sister to never do as she had done. The vibes of annoyance I must have been giving off were picked up by Shosh, the former IDF attack-dog trainer, who looked me in the eye and commanded: Sit. Down. Stay. That was when I noticed that Amma too had fallen asleep cradling you, like an exhausted mother who had been rocking her baby for ages, and now at last the baby was finally asleep. The hall was hushed. Lakshmi and the Survivors were on pause. Movement was frozen, as if a spell had been cast in a fairy-tale castle. All eyes were gripped by the holy pietà vision of Amma sleeping, with you asleep in her arms.

Suddenly Amma’s eyes shot open. She stood up, holding you in her arms extended like an offering. Her long red tongue came out, lolling down unfurled. She lifted you with ease. She was strong; as a young girl toiling in the family cowshed she was known to carry a sick cow for miles. Manika approached from the right, Monica Lewinsky from the left, little Manika and big Monica, sisters, joined by some of Amma’s closest attendants in their orange robes, as if the ritual had been rehearsed. They lifted you off the altar of Amma’s arms and stood you up wobbly on your legs, supporting you from all sides. They walked you over to the band. Charlotte herself came forward to welcome you into the circle of Lakshmi and the Survivors, drawing a white linen shift over your head as if preparing a human sacrifice. The band no longer was doing “Rising Sun,” but providing backup instead for Amma, center stage, now fully transformed into the goddess Kali your mother-protector, singing your mantra over and over again—Om Kali Kali Kali, Om Kali Kali, Ma Ma Maya, Ya Ya Maya, Ma Ya Ya Ya—swaying from side to side faster and faster, clapping her hands over her head, stamping her feet, rising higher and higher into a place of spiritual exaltation, taking along with her the entire assembly, everyone soaring, shedding their earthly mass, joyously accepting the darkness and light, creation and destruction embodied in Mother Amma Kali, leaving me behind, motherless, childless, alone, an earthbound speck with no gift for spiritual abandon, and no gift for happiness.

The kiss of the godmother. Instantly her kitchen cabinet swung into action. That very night, you were shipped off with Charlotte and her band back to the USA, no problem, no special interventions required. You always carried your American passport. I was meticulous about making sure that as the daughter of a US citizen born and bred sojourning in dangerous lands you had this precious, essential document, and moreover kept it in your possession at all times, insurance against the inevitability of another Holocaust.

It all happened so fast, there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was as if a boulder had been slammed down on my head. I was knocked out. The boss called me into her private office behind the former cowshed, a rare insider invitation. Multitasking as always, astride a stool with her legs spread, bare calloused feet stoutly planted on a floor carpeted with straw and manure, thick hands tugging at the teats of a cow so fat it almost entirely concealed the bilingual aide behind it so that it seemed as if the cow with her ruminating mouth was doing the translating, Amma laid out the facts on the ground. Manika would remain at the ashram, emptying the toilet compost pails, a form of penance for a sin committed most likely in a previous life from what I could surmise, a caste thing, her karma. You would depart that evening with Charlotte and her troupe on a direct flight first-class to Washington, DC, where you would be given every advantage, including a tip-top education at an elite girls’ school with the very same name as it happened as the one you were now attending, Cathedral, so hardly any adjustment would be necessary. There in the capital of the free world, looked after by a five-star team of mental health professionals, you would heal. If all went well as planned, you might be able to return home for your summer vacation—when the rains came again, in our monsoon floods. As for me, in ten minutes I would be starting my journey back to Mumbai, Amma informed me. My suitcase had already been packed courtesy of the staff and stowed in the trunk of the car. Krishnapuri was idling at the wheel right behind the cowshed. At Cochin Airport he would exchange his chauffeur’s cap for a pilot’s helmet and fly me home in Amma’s private jet.

The former milkmaid who for relaxation and nostalgic reasons it seemed still liked to keep a hand in, passed her full bucket to an aide without the faintest splatter, and wiped her palms on her white sari. Capisce? Yes, I understood. I appreciated her concern for your welfare, I said. It was probably true that you were suffering from a mild form of depression, I was ready to concede that. You had been traumatized. The last four years had been hard, bookended by your Chabad encounters, the psychological insults dealt you first by the terrorists and then through Shmuly by the double whammy of first love and betrayal, not to mention your cruel abandonment by your adoptive mother Geeta and the death and difficult disposal of my mother, your grandmother, resulting in the erosion of your self-esteem, precipitating, then exacerbated by, your unfortunate weight gain. Did I get it all right? Amma nodded her head up and down. I took that to be yes in Western terms, though side to side in India also meant yes. Maybe the Indians just didn’t know how to say no. Maybe that was their problem. Maybe that’s why there were so many of them.

I accepted it all without protest. To this day I cannot explain the extreme passivity that overcame me, as if I had been drugged. Later on, it was suggested to me by my brother, Shmelke, an ordained guru just like Amma, that the explanation for my strange failure to resist in any way, in manifest contradiction with my sense of myself as a proactive mother, was related to an instinctive healthy recognition of my own desperate need at that time for some relief, for a private space of my own in order to undergo my personal healing process for all the losses I too had suffered. I needed you to go away, for my sake and yours—that was Shmelke’s original interpretation, his brilliant new hidush. I needed to be alone, being alone was a delicious illicit pleasure I craved, I needed a break from you and all the burdens and worries that came with the blockage in my life that was you, my own daughter. A preposterous, horrifying notion, I said to Shmelke—I rejected it completely. What did he know of women, of the maternal instinct? I am mother. That is my main identity, the justification ultimately for my existence, my link on the great chain of being. Nothing could be more terrible for a mother than to have her child taken away from her, it is the primal fear.

As the plan for this seemingly unnatural separation was being laid out before me, I had reassured myself that it was after all coming from none other than Amma herself, the paradigmatic archetypal mother. Amma was the generative force behind it, the mother who was making it happen. It was a mother’s idea, which by definition can only be for the good of the child. I remember how this thought seeped like a painkiller through my veins as I stood—yes, stood—there in that shed undergoing your amputation from me, listening as Amma unpacked the intricate logistics of the plot through what seemed like the chewing organ of a talking cow. If Amma is proposing this, then it must be right, I told myself. Save the child, that was the bottom line. The child was at risk—accident prone, susceptible to all kinds of harmful influences, in danger of being seriously derailed, and now here was supermom Amma swooping down to perform a classic rescue—transporting the kid to an exclusive boarding school to keep her on track, a solution, I had to admit to myself, that was essentially in tune with my own child-rearing philosophy, especially as it applied to preteens and teenagers, with their hormonal big bangs. Granted, the kid is going through a stage, and you as the mother must allow it to play itself out for the sake of her mental health, her growth and adjustment, but you must also do everything in your power to prevent her from destroying herself in the process. The exclusive prep-school education that Amma was prescribing along with all the other perks was the obvious way to keep you with the program—that was my thought even then as I was losing you on the floor of that cowshed. No matter how badly you screwed yourself up during this admittedly normal, age-appropriate stage that supposedly would pass—it would pass as all life cycle disruptions pass—the entitlements that would become your portion would still land you in some prestigious fortress of higher education, you would be wearing protection, you would be kept on course with no significant long-term damage or fallout, everything would be okay.

In less than ten minutes I was going to be carted away. I would not even be granted a moment to say goodbye to you, to give you an embrace that would keep an ember of mother’s warmth stored within you through the winter of our separation. A fast break—that was deemed to be the wisest course, always the least painful option in a situation universally acknowledged to be right up there at the top of the human suffering charts—the ripping of a mother from her child. In any case, Amma assured me you were doing fine, I could see for myself. She whipped out her phone from among the folds of her nine-yard sari and swiftly accessed the app for the video camera streaming in a room presumably somewhere in the ashram where I could observe you surrounded by Charlotte’s band of survivors, unwrapping presents, one high-tech toy after another. You were laughing uninhibitedly, with childish carefree abandon as I had not seen you laugh for ages.

Were there cameras everywhere in the ashram? I must have spurted that question aloud, without full consciousness. Amma barked a seasoned laugh. “Amma does not need cameras,” she said through the grinding lips of the talking cow. “Amma sees all with her third eye.” She pointed to the bindi on her forehead above her eyebrows, the white circle of purity with the red kumkum dot inside it signifying the sixth chakra center, the zone of insight, rich with the deepest wisdom—so so deep, the deepest of the deep, as your ex-father Shmiel the Holy Beggar used to intone. I recognized then that what was now happening had all been determined, as if from above. This is how it would be and not otherwise. I was helpless.

“Maya, Maya—when will I ever see you again?” I cried out.

You stopped playing with your devices and turned around sharply as if you had heard me, staring directly at me with unseeing eyes, without registering. There you were facing me as if from a planet far away on the screen of Amma’s smartphone. It was a setup that reminded me of the baby monitor I had once installed to keep you in my sights, but vastly updated, with no material barriers in the ether. But now in this new age I could not only see you and hear you, I could even talk to you and sing to you from my end from wherever I was in the world, no matter how far away. I should have seized the moment to sing “Die Gedanken sind frei” the Pete Seeger version, your favorite lullaby, to remind you of your basic human rights—who you are and where you came from—but convulsed with grief, I was levitated off the ground by two Amma controllers and borne away to the waiting Black Maria.

I wept through the entire flight from Cochin back to Mumbai. I’m telling you this Maya not to make you feel guilty but just to let you know how I ached for you, my forehead pressed against the window seeing nothing outside, only a black hole of sorrow sucking everything in. My sole consolation was that you would be wired head to toe, I had seen your loot. We could communicate online, I was assured before I left the ashram, once you were settled into your posh new quarters and habituated to your new life and the mental health dominatrices gave the green light for the resumption of our normal mother-daughter intercourse.

And we did communicate during that time of separation—by Skype, in chat rooms, instant messaging, texting, email, Facebook, and so on, but only you were allowed to initiate, that was one of the ground rules. The other rule was, you would not allow yourself to be seen. Those were your wishes. I needed to respect your wishes, I was advised.

I accepted it all. I was on call full time, perpetually psyched to receive your summons no matter how else I might at that moment have been otherwise occupied, and I also resigned myself to the blocking of the camera, to the banning of your image on my screen. Even when I was in Washington, DC, on business in cherry-blossom April around the time of your thirteenth birthday, the despots decreed it would be in your best interest if we did not actually meet face to face. I was half a block away from you, having coffee with Charlotte Harlow, your keeper. You and I touched base by phone.

I described to Charlotte how I pictured you possessed of your former heartbreaking beauty once again. You wanted to surprise me with your metamorphosis when we were finally reunited, I said—in that way I comforted myself for your allegedly self-imposed purdah. I imagined you shedding all that baby fat inside of which you were hiding, and emerging in dazzling glory like a butterfly ready to be seen. You were on the school lacrosse team, Charlotte informed me, you were involved in other fitness activities too; you were doing well in your studies, you were in the top group in math; you were participating in extracurriculars, you had played the black witch Tituba in the school production of The Crucible, raising the dead and going mad in a jail cell in Salem, Massachusetts; you led a healthy social life, you were close to Charlotte’s other survivors and had made some new friends in school, an anorexic and a recovering bulimic, or maybe it was a recovering bully, you even had a boyfriend, a Princeton-bound senior at St. Albans, Charlotte mentioned his name but it slips my mind—it ended in junior, or maybe with a roman numeral III. Charlotte was my source. An investigator must stroke the source, make nice to the source in order to keep the line open, and especially in this case, because you were so reticent in our conversations, so unforthcoming and private, though always properly polite, waiting for me to pull the plug and sign off. But at least you were doing everything right from what I could ferret out. You were squarely on track, exactly as I had hoped.