4
AND JUST AS I HAD HOPED, when the heavens caved in and the monsoon rains came crashing down at the end of June and I went to meet you at Shivaji International, I almost did not recognize you, you had slimmed down so radically. You were a stunning young woman ready to step out for all to gaze upon, any mother would have trembled with terrifying pride.
You had come to Mumbai for your summer vacation to do volunteer work in the Dharavi slum within shooting distance of the airport in which we greeted each other. Your plane had just flown low over the basti as it came in for landing, raising a mini-tsunami in the open brown sewage lakes, drowning out the sound on all the satellite TVs, the only source of light in every hovel. Dharavi had the distinction of being one of the largest slums on the planet. Community service in Dharavi was a highly coveted internship for prep school students with Ivy aspirations. There were summer camps for super-rich kids that for a fee exceeding the lifetime earnings of many slum dwellers put together offered two weeks in Dharavi sorting through the mountains of garbage scavenging for recyclables. But you were the real thing, any good admissions official could spot that in an instant. You had competed through the regular channels for the internship offered by a local nonprofit called Slum Power, you had no legacy, no affirmative action, no special protectzia, and you were chosen. It would look really great on your college application in three or four years’ time.
The next morning before eight, two strangers showed up at our door wearing jeans and bright orange T-shirts inscribed with the words, Slum Power, NGO¡—the exclamation point upside down, blooming into a raised clenched fist like a mushroom cloud. The subtext of this early-morning visit was that jetlag is an indulgence of the rich and pampered, the starving children of India can’t wait. They had come to fetch you, to take you to Dharavi for your first day—“To orient you,” as the young man explained, “since we are in the Orient,” he added in excellent English with an appealing smile that showed off a keyboard of strong white teeth in his dark handsome face. His name was Samir, Samir Khan, a Muslim, “But you can call me Sammy, mama,” he offered obligingly. His silent partner was Sita, a Hindu; Sammy was the designated talker at this party, it seemed. Slum Power was committed to diversity, Sammy said with a nod to Sita who was also smiling in such a professionally friendly way. “Multi-culti, yes?” he elaborated, shaking his head in that endearing Indian way from side to side. Yes, I agreed, and now they would be diversifying even further with you, I reflected, their token Jewess.
Sammy and Sita were codirectors of Slum Power’s internship program, he told me. They were in their early twenties by my estimation. They had come to show you how to travel safely and efficiently by train to Dharavi through the Churchgate station, always a treacherous trip in any weather but especially so now in the monsoon downpours and wetlands. Sita would accompany you to the ladies’ compartment of the train, necessary to avoid the occupational hazard of being groped and so on, and instruct you further on how to protect yourself from being pushed by the ruthless commuter mobs, not excluding women, out of the open doors of the car onto the track and crushed like a bug. His role would be general escort, as is proper since in truth women should not be permitted to go out into the street unaccompanied by a male relative, he observed with an ironic smile to signal that he was in politically correct disagreement with his own words coming out of his own mouth—he was only kidding. I could consider him my daughter’s big brother, he reassured me.
All of this special treatment was happening at Charlotte’s behest, I recognized that. Charlotte was a major donor to Slum Power, acting in turn in zombie obedience to top-down orders from Amma. Special favors, kickbacks, payouts, corruption—this was the grease that fueled everything in India, and especially Mumbai, so-called nonprofits and charities not excluded. I gave no indication that I understood the unsavory inner workings of the system, however; it would not have been in your best interest to show off how clever I was, however much I was tempted. I went to your room to inflict against my will the necessary blow under the circumstances of waking you up after the long ordeal of your journey and the stupefaction of your circadian rhythms. “What are they wearing?” was your only question, mumbled in hoarse grogginess. “Jeans—and this.” I handed you the oversized orange Slum Power T-shirt uniform they had given to me for you to put on.
While you were showering and dressing, I eased their wait by offering some chai and biscuits, and sat down myself with them at the table to socialize. I understood that even though you had agreed to live with me in our Colaba flat during your internship rather than be housed in some one-room shack with no toilet or running water in Dharavi itself with a multigenerational family of ten minimum in order to enjoy the full-body slum experience, the likelihood was minimal at this stage in your life that you would reveal anything of importance to me about your activities or anything else, in typical teenager mode. Now at least with these two as my short-term hostages, there was a chance to tap the politeness obligation in order to get some inside poop.
They were actually only sixteen, Sammy and Sita, I learned to my mild surprise, extraordinarily poised and mature for their years; I should have guessed—slum kids age fast and die soon. They had grown up in Dharavi, which was really a mini-city within the maxicity of Mumbai, as Samir who was monopolizing the talking described it, with all the infrastructure of a city in the form of what some might characterize as a cautionary tale. They had acquired their English by watching American films on TV. Every basti family owned a television set, he informed me, even if they owned nothing else, it was a vital connection to the possibilities of the outside world, it was the only thing that made life tolerable. Because of how well they had taken to English, and also what was regarded to be their personable and congenial natures, Sammy admitted with a modest dip of his head, they had been selected to lead Slum Power’s internship program, which catered primarily to North American kids, most of whom were paying top dollar for the privilege of shoveling waste matter out of the open sewage dumps. Slum Power also sponsored a recycling plant, a papadum bakery for women, a pottery factory, a fair-trade crafts workshop, and other small businesses in Dharavi. After expenses, including worker’s wages, every paisa was plowed right back into these startups and other essentials—so much was needed: electricity, water, sewage, toilets, roads, the list went on and on. The nonprofit survived on contributions. The donation form could be found on its website, all types of payments accepted, including credit cards and PayPal. Sammy took out a pen and scribbled the URL on a napkin, pushing it toward me across the table and remarking, “In general, I disapprove of paper napkins for environmental reasons—but sometimes they come in handy.” He flashed his ingratiating smile.
“So Maya’s going to spend her internship baking papadums?” Finally, I was moving the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go. The two of them paused to stare at each other, then as if programmed, simultaneously coughed up an amiable laugh. Sammy turned to me and sandwiched my hand between both of his, gazing into my eyes with practiced empathy like a doctor about to give vital test results. “Mama, I just want you to know, when the applications came in for the internship slots this year, your daughter’s rose like a spray of perfume to the top of the heap. Your little Maya was number one plus. Not only an excellent student at the best schools with English as her native language, but also fluent in Hindi, not to mention Marathi, Gujarati, some Urdu, some Bengali, some Tamil—plus a very nice reference note from Charlotte aunty. So maybe she’s a little on the young side for a westerner who matures more slowly, but it was a no-brainer, Mama.”
“Also Hebrew,” I said, who knows why, a mother’s boast, or just for the sake of completeness.
“Yes, also Hebrew, for sure, betakh. So Mama, with all that under her belt, do you think we would waste such talent setting her to baking bloody matzahs all day? Of course not! Your daughter will be a teacher in Dharavi—a beloved, respected teacher of women and girls of all ages. She will teach English, computer skills, maybe another subject or two. After she’s oriented, with her superior language gifts, she can also fill in sometimes for Sita or one of the other girls as an apprentice tour guide. You know, our tour business is very successful, Mama, one of our biggest moneymakers—slums by day, the red-light district and Falkland Road with the merchandise on display in cages by night, a huge tourist attraction—the Lonely Planet kids love it, it’s a must-see, a tremendous draw, awesome. But of course, for such a respectable girl like your Maya, we would only put her on the slum tour detail, no trolling by night, no cages, don’t worry your head about it for one minute.”
Slum tours. It had been a proposal that had crossed my desk in connection with my own business, I now recalled, but I had quickly rejected it as prurient, disgusting, and above all too confusing for my clientele in their designer traveling gear seeking their spiritual center in accordance with their idea of India. Who would want to go on a tour of a slum anyway, with its filth and disease, its sick cows and goats, its squealing copulating rats and squealing defecating children squatting in the mud, its full-frontal exposure of every revolting insult life dishes out, from birth to death? Only mental cases, people with a screw loose, voyeurs, masochists, perverts, only nutjobs would want to slosh through the open cesspools, subject themselves to such an ordeal—it was a sick idea, obscene.
I could have gone on in this vein, but you stepped into the room in your jeans and orange T-shirt taking our breath away, the three of us earthbound there at that table were overcome as if struck by a vision. On top of everything else, she’s also gorgeous—I could read that in their eyes.
As you were pulling on your knee-high rubbers and poncho, arming yourself to go out and face the elements, Sammy went on. “It’s our hottest ticket, the slum tour. You should try it, mama, it’s not only for the backpackers. We’re always full up, first come, first served, always turning people away, but if you SMS me, I’ll jump you in the queue as a special favor for our friends. It’s very illuminating.”
Yes, I’ll register myself for this abomination right away, I decided the minute you left, no matter how distasteful I considered the whole idea morally and aesthetically. I would do it for you, Maya. It would be a way to get closer to you, to bond, mother and daughter.
For some reason though I kept putting off signing up for my slum tour. Already we were three weeks into July. I would rise up in the morning meaning to get the job done, but the rains hammered down against the windows and puckered the walls with mildew, wetness permeated everything. I pictured myself sloshing through the muck and contagion of the basti, and my good intentions washed away with the day. But what really was stopping me? Tourism after all was my business. If a particular destination however repugnant or contrived draws in the paying customers, who was I to object? I hadn’t yet stooped to peddling sex tours, it is true, but certainly I knew very well how I myself took full advantage of the sad human longing for meaning in this life, for relief from suffering by delivering all of those spiritually needy souls to the feet of gurus such as Amma and other frauds. Truly, the entire India itself that I served up was a freak show—tourists flocked to gape as if at performing monkeys, they couldn’t get enough of the grotesque novelty, the garish exotica, the nonstop street performance, within half a day after arriving they were all flying high in shawl and salwar kameez, and I was their enabler. I had no right to sit up there on my high horse declaiming about this pathetic minor manifestation of human prurience, these harmless sideshow tours of the slums with their landscapes of shit lakes and garbage mountains, and especially because in the end it seemed everyone left feeling good, everyone benefitted, spiritually or monetarily, and no one was harmed.
You didn’t pressure me, you never even reminded me to sign up, which, to excuse myself for my procrastination, I interpreted as a sign of your dread of being embarrassed by having your mother show up at your place of work in front of all your friends, a totally normal adolescent reaction, I was not offended. It was your preference that I stay away, I decided, I was only doing what you wanted. Still, your friends were the ones who had invited me—that was a fact. I knew virtually nothing about what you did all day, even into the night. You were coming home later and later, always escorted by someone, you assured me, Sita, Samir, others I had not met, though they never came in to show their faces and say hi mama, they didn’t want to disturb me, you said. There was so much to be done after the day’s teaching, you said, paperwork, planning, meetings, but otherwise you revealed almost nothing. You were not silent though. You talked over the light supper I set before you. Whatever the hour you came home, I was always waiting up for you with a warm meal, lentil soup, biryani, vegetable curry. You talked with striking animation and heat in fact, but never about yourself, always in generalities, about social and political issues, your consciousness was being raised, in principle a good thing. I suppose in retrospect, though, I should have realized that this was your way of talking about yourself, you were trying to send me a message, I should have understood.
Your main topic, in essence your only topic when you talked on and on so passionately on those nights, was slums—not only Dharavi, but slums in general, the condition of slumdom. Everything else you touched upon seemed to flow from this theme as from an open drain. How could we allow ourselves to be bystanders while human beings lived like that—no toilets, no privacy, cardboard walls and rusted tin roofs, all of it lashed together with old electrical wires, bits of rope, tape. Yet even so, this was home, neighborhood, community, you declared. Why don’t people get that? Why is everyone on the outside so clueless when slum dwellers hold out against fat-cat developers, even when they’re bribed with lakhs of rupees and a brand new flat in a concrete block? They never asked to be relocated, they never petitioned for slum clearance—all they wanted is a working toilet of their own instead of being condemned to stand in the pouring rain in that humiliating loo queue every morning, for God’s sake, you declaimed as I nodded now and then to prove I was listening, marveling to myself, and yes, also deeply moved at the wonder of youth pouring forth newly discovered knowledge with such ardor as if it were fresh wisdom on the face of the earth, never before thought or heard. And really they’re such good people when you get to know them, you went on discharging your grand associative verbal torrent, such kind, generous neighbors, there’s such a real sense of community in the basti, it’s a village really, everyone helps each other, everyone looks after each other’s kids, everyone gets along just fine until suddenly, some evil spirit blows in—politicians, gangsters, cops, big money, all the usual instigators and perpetrators, and the whole place explodes. Rioting, killings, mutilations, rape—the Hindu nationalist majority comes rampaging through the Muslim ghetto, which makes it by definition a pogrom—right? The Muslims are plotting to shoot off rockets from the slum aimed at the airport, they’re screaming, get them out of here, it’s ethnic-cleansing time, ship them all in cattle cars to Pakistan, they’re all terrorists—exactly like what’s happening now in the Middle East, in Gaza for example, which they call a refugee camp, but what’s a refugee camp anyway? It’s really just another word for slum. Gaza is one giant slum when you think about it, a filthy, disease-infested shantytown, the most populated strip of land on the planet. Nobody wants Gaza, not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Arabs, not the Zionist entity, nobody.
The Zionist entity? Where did that come from? If only your father, the Holy Beggar Shmiel Shapiro, either devoured by cannibals on the Andaman Islands or perched there on the lip of Reb Shlomo’s grave in Jerusalem, strumming his guitar and warbling on about how the Nation of Israel lives, could hear you now—what would he say? Oy, this needs such a fixing, he would say. But as for me, I remained silent. I merely sat there admiring your precocity. Already you were ready for the Ivy League.
Night after night into July to the accompaniment of the drumroll of thunder and the beating of the rain, I sat there nodding in silence as you played variations on this theme, starting always from the rogue cell of slumdom and ending always in the scapegoating of Islam. I am your mother. Whatever you hand out, I take. I was simply grateful that at least you were talking to me. I no longer expected any classified personal information. Often I admit my brain would zone out, confident I could deliver an appropriate grunt if you ever addressed me directly. But then late into the month, you surprised me; you snuck in something almost personal, as if to catch me off guard, like some of my teachers would do when I was still in school to see if we were awake, if we were paying attention. As if in passing, as a sidebar, you let drop that Geeta had come to Dharavi that day, on a VIP tour.
“Geeta? How did she look?”—the first question that popped into my head, then right out of my mouth.
“Filmi. Like a movie star. She looked straight at me, but didn’t recognize me.”
I was stunned that you had volunteered this morsel—eye contact between you and Geeta, such an intimate detail. I had no idea when this window of opportunity would slam shut on me; I felt intense pressure to find out as much as possible while you were still ready to talk. “She was leading a delegation from the orphanage ministry or whatever,” you said in response to my next question. “They’re giving full scholarships to fifty slum girls under ten to come to Delhi to be educated. Their families will also get a lot of money. She was there to pick out the girls. She gave a little speech and promised to be like a mother to them.”
“I hope you talked to someone high up,” I said. “She would be a terrible mother.”
But by then the well had dried up, you no longer were talking. You lowered your head. I was afraid you might start to cry. I understood what you were feeling. Quite apart from your own personal loss—a mother is a terrible thing to lose, even a terrible mother, and yes, let’s face it, for better or worse, Geeta was also a mother to you. What would have happened had you gone up to the slum bosses with your pals trailing behind you, Sita, Samir, the whole gang, to warn against letting the girls go off with such a travesty of a mother as Geeta? They would invariably have inquired how you knew her, and at that point you would have been obliged to tell them that she had been married to your mother, that she had been your mother’s wife. It was an impossible situation. They would not have believed you, they would not have understood it, such things do not happen in the world, they would have thought you were joking, they would have thought you were mocking them, they would have thought you were mad.
“It’s okay, Maya,” I sought to comfort you. “I understand. It’s not your fault, whatever happens to those girls.”
At the same time, though, I privately resolved to go on the slum tour as soon as possible. If Geeta your cold-hearted absentee parent could gaze upon you on planet slum where you passed your days, I certainly had earned the right to see you there too, I who had stuck it out.
I decided not to let you know when I would be coming. I wanted to spare you the state of living dread, or the obligation in such a traditional society to drop whatever you were doing and come forward to greet me, your honored mother. In any event, there were over a million people living in Dharavi. Chances were very small that we would run into each other. I could come and go, and you would never even know I had passed through, but anything I might learn would give me some insight into where your head was at now, and I could help you—helping you was my reason for staying alive. I was doing it for you, Maya, but it would not be an invasion of your privacy, like opening your mail or reading your journal. I had been invited, publicly and in your presence, fair and square, and now I was accepting the invitation as discreetly as I could to spare you. I would leave no footprint.
But who leaves a footprint on this earth anyway, and especially in a slum where life is so cheap, and most especially in a slum during the monsoons when every sign is washed away and erased? Trailing through the thickets of narrow congested lanes behind the backpackers, tuning in and out to the upbeat patter of our guide Sunil/Sunny, the first thought that hit me as we waded up to our knees in brown sludgy fluid floating with dead vermin and turds with personality, decomposing flesh and rotting garbage, was, did the Hindu princess Geeta really trek through this? The second thought was, maybe you had made up the story of Geeta’s visit in order to finally get me up off my tukhes to go on this damn tour—a sweet thought only in that, contrary to every indication, its implication was that you might actually have wanted me to come, you were not ashamed of me after all as I had so foolishly imagined—but it was also a thought that I quickly scratched as fantasy since I knew that the memory of losing Geeta was still too fresh and painful for you to evoke, even for my sake.
Still, I simply could not picture Geeta wading through this sea of offal like other mortals. She must have been forearmed, she was probably wearing a pair of offensively expensive thigh-high custom-made designer boots cobbled by hand out of some high-tech water-repellent material, I decided, a monsoon fashion statement on the slum runway, or maybe she was borne aloft in a palanquin like the Maharini of Mumbai, and her feet never touched the ground, she never left dry land. Then I thought of you, Maya, I pictured your tall rubber boots caked with stinking brown gunk that you took off every night in the hallway outside the door, I pictured you sloshing through this filthy soup day after day, with more liquid pouring down from the low black clouds overhead, and again I thought, thank God your falling sickness days have passed—what if you slipped and fell into this swamp, infested with parasites and feces and disease, what then? The kids trudging ahead of me were soaked, but still they kept badgering Sunny, Where’s the shit lake? Are we there yet? The open lake of raw sewage, it seemed, according to the yelps, was the highlight of the slum tour. They kept on nagging him until finally, even with the positive, gung-ho demeanor all Slum Power employees were required to maintain, he lost it. “The shit lake overflows in monsoon,” he snapped. “You’re walking in it right now.”
It was still midafternoon, but the low cloud canopy brought on an early end-of-day darkness. The blue tarpaulins that were stretched across almost every rooftop in a pathetic effort to keep out the steadily falling rain gave off a dusky, twilight disorientation. In the cramped passageways, people moved about as if in an underworld, picking their way through the large objects bobbing in the water by the light of their cell phones. Water had risen into almost every shack, we could track it flowing in inexorably. Through the doors, open to catch the fading rays of daylight, the whites of eyes glowed out as if from the portholes of a doomed ship, the lower half of bodies were sunk in still, stagnant water like emerging life forms in evolutionary distress.
To demonstrate how ingeniously some citizens improvised and coped, Sunny led us into a comparatively larger hutment, constructed on a slight elevation of compacted trash and recycled junk. Even so, inside the water was at least ankle deep. We were clumped at the entrance, not wanting to invade as uninvited guests by venturing boldly into the interior, pointing the flashlights we had been instructed in advance to bring along as part of our slum tour gear, listening to the master of the house muttering, Welcome, welcome, observing him smiling genially and nodding his head as if in total agreement with every word spoken in a language he likely did not understand, while Sunny directed our attention to the shelves and ledges jutting out high up along the walls. Human figures were reclining on them, or engaging in some domestic task, a mother nursing a baby, an ancient grandma curled up snoring, flicking away in her sleep the drops of rain falling on her hollow cheek, children eating street food, samosas and bhel puri off torn sheets of newspaper since the contamination permeating everything made cooking at home a mortal threat, Sunny explained. In the most protected position, the place of honor, Sunny pointed, we could see the family’s most treasured possessions wrapped in plastic, the television set above all else, though unfortunately it was impossible to switch on the electricity in the basti during the monsoon, not only because the power was on the blink almost full time as usual, but also because of the danger of shock due to the moisture saturating everything.
When Sunny concluded his spiel, an awkward silence descended, the meaning of which as a travel professional I instantly grasped. I seized the initiative, opened my purse and handed a nice pile of rupees to our host, which he accepted with a practiced gesture, placing the cash over his heart with both hands flat on top of it and bowing his head in gratitude. All the backpackers followed my lead and did the same, except for the kid outfitted head to toe in top-of-the-line travel wear, who inquired if they took credit cards. The master of the house reached up to one of the shelves and pulled down a plastic bag containing a portable credit card gizmo, and the transaction was completed.
The gratuity for the owner of the monsoon showhouse was on top of the price we had paid for the tour itself, amounting at the very least to what an upwardly mobile slum dweller might earn in a month. Now Sunny was warming us up for the biggest payout of all—I recognized this as a tourism insider—the contribution we would be asked to make at the end of our tour to his worthy nonprofit with an additional tip to him for his superior services. In anticipation, for the grand finale, he announced that we would now be taken around to view just a small sampling of some of Slum Power’s cutting-edge, life-altering projects. All of it was contained in a very small space, he reassured us, so there would not be that much more walking on water to do; in any case, the basti itself with its one million inhabitants right in the heart of the frenetic metropolis of Mumbai hardly took up more than a square mile of land, he reminded us.
He failed to mention the climbing, however, up narrow, steep staircases, sometimes even ladders in near darkness to the factories where men and boys sat shoulder to shoulder, melting recycled plastic water bottles, firing clay pots, stitching garments, a rapturous smile lighting up every face, they looked as if any minute they might all burst out in song as in a socialist realism propaganda film. Most heartwarming of all was the happy leather workshop reeking of animal carcasses employing Dalit untouchables and Muslim outcasts. “Equal opportunity employment, nondiscrimination, that’s our motto, the rejects of Indian society empowered by Slum Power,” Sunny intoned. The previous week alone this factory had shipped out five thousand designer belts, he proudly announced, special order from a very famous chain of stores that we may have heard of, Sex Filth Avenue in the United States of America.
“But what about the other 50 percent?” a pretty blond feminist called out, right on cue. “Good question, Pipi.” Sunny replied. Was I the only one not given a name tag? He flashed an irresistible smile, and promptly led the way to the women’s workplaces set up by Slum Power—embroidery shops, children’s nurseries, bakeries, and the like, as well as self-improvement programs ranging from basic literacy to computer literacy, women’s healthcare and hygiene, and yes, even family planning, or more to the point, sex education. Slum Power had fought a mighty battle against the prevailing conservative mindset to get that sex-ed class up and running, Sunny told us, but the need was undeniable. The last stop on our tour would be a rare glimpse of the fruits of Slum Power’s progressive victory in one of the most reactionary communities of all, though in deference to the sensitivity of the subject and the modesty of the young ladies, it would be only a very brief stop, yet even so, highly informative. Yes! One of the kids leading the way pumped his fist. Even better than the shit lake.
It was on the fringe of the basti, in what you had called the Muslim ghetto. We clustered in the doorway of the classroom, not quite entering, the women of our group in front and the men and boys screened behind us, craning their necks for a view over our heads. It was a traditional schoolroom setup—rows of student desks, blackboard, the teacher’s desk in front facing the class and us. The students ranged in age from approximately nine to somewhere in their midteens, according to Sunny, the prime age for marriage, every head covered in a hijab. You sat at the teacher’s desk, your face veiled in a niqab, only your eyes were visible. Spread out on the surface in front of you were packets of Nirodhs and a bunch of bananas. One of the Nirodhs had already been unrolled in a demonstration on a banana. In a Skype audio conversation we had had over the past year, one in which you had been a bit less guarded, you mentioned that the sex-ed instructor in your fancy girls school in Washington, DC, had also used bananas to demonstrate protection with a selection of pleasure-enhancement condoms—flavored, fluorescent, ribbed, and so on—to enlighten you at the same time on the joy of sex. Recalling this you had laughed so girlishly, it had been so sweet to hear your laugh. But the condoms you were demonstrating for your students were just ordinary, no-frills Nirodhs. “Condoms are permissible in special situations after marriage,” you said, “such as during jihad, to prevent the birth of orphans. For even then, the excess energy of the faithful must find release in order to carry on the work of the shahid.”
What? What? The people behind me couldn’t hear what you were saying; you were speaking so softly in a mix of Hindi and Marathi, but mostly Urdu. They would not in any event have been able to understand you even if you had shouted in English; your words were incomprehensible, they made no sense. Your eyes were cast modestly down, no doubt because you were aware of the presence of one of your colleagues and his group, including male members. You did not raise your eyes for a second, even out of curiosity. You did not know I was there, I felt sure of that. You did not feel my presence, you did not see me turn and push my way through the group past Sunny’s hand extended for a tip, out of the collapsing building into the dark lanes of the slum, churning up the brown water and sloshing it all over me as I ran, searching for my lost reality.
No taxi would stop for me after I had finally found my way out of the basti. I looked like an alien being emerging from the primordial soup, molded out of mud and clay like the first attempt at golem-making by a novice in a kabbalah workshop run by Madonna, still missing the divine spark that would give me a life. The autorickshaw driver who pulled up alongside me at last out of desperation for a fare first handed me a soggy Mumbai Mirror left by a previous passenger, and would not let me board until I had spread it to his satisfaction over the seat as well as every surface with which my befouled physical person might come into contact.
Skidding and bumping along on the slick, potholed and rutted streets in that tuk-tuk, my entire being wanted nothing more at that moment than to be cleansed of the slum filth, like a prisoner in a sealed cattle car dying for a shower. But the first priority was to save your life, Maya. Above all it was imperative to get you out of Mumbai, out of India, back to the rational side of the globe, far from the Hindustani soul trap. I needed to be in touch with Charlotte, she was responsible. She was the one who had engineered it all, who had snatched you away from me, who had sent you to a school that encouraged such a lethal internship, with such catastrophic consequences. It was her fault. Now it was her duty to repair the harm she had wrought—to pluck you out of the slums at once, call out the big guns if necessary, Amma herself and even loftier personages, not excluding the Obamas up the street, especially her best friend, Michelle, to fall down on her knees and supplicate Michelle during one of their naked hot-yoga sessions in her private home studio, to insist that Michelle get the Man to order the Green Berets or some other superhero special commando unit to evacuate you. Michelle needed to be made to understand that she must do for you exactly what she would have done for her own daughters had they too come home from Sidwell Friends School one day with their heads wrapped in hijabs, slated as brides for shahids, stepping out of one of the fleet of presidential limousines with the cameras flashing, had her girls too been seduced by the masochistic self-annihilating romance of Islamic fundamentalism, their souls taken into captivity, as I now understood yours to have been taken; it could happen to them too, they were not immune. This was an emergency situation, no possible remedy should be overlooked. You were in terrible danger, there was not a minute to waste.
Charlotte picked up right away. It was her private line, the access code available to only the chosen few. “What a coincidence, Meena darling!” There was a condescending edge to her tone, it pierced me instantly. “I just got off the phone with Maya. She said you’d be calling any minute. Ha ha. She mentioned you had dropped into her sex-ed class for Muslim brides-to-be today at Dharavi with one of those tour groups, but then suddenly you ran off without even saying hi or bye—maybe some business emergency you had to attend to, she thought. I hope everything is okay. I hope it wasn’t the Mumbai version of Delhi belly—that would be a real bummer, everything is always a million times more intense in Bombay, maxed out to the limit. Frankly, I have no problem whatsoever with Maya teaching sexed, if that’s your concern. It’s very therapeutic, such a cathartic form of emotional self-healing, such a healthy channeling of all that bad stuff—you know what I mean? Anyway, she’s feeling great—she was calling to tell me that. Her three doshas are all in correct balance. Her seven chakra centers are completely open and unblocked. Her self-esteem has come back like gangbusters. She’s feeling so healed, she’s decided not to return to DC after the summer but to stay on in Mumbai, go back to her old school, and continue doing volunteer work in the slum, which will look absolutely brilliant when she applies to university—don’t you think? I’m totally in support of this plan. It’s just so rewarding when one of my girls graduates from my program completely detoxed and ready to press the restart button. It’s like an extreme makeover, it makes me feel like jumping on top of my seat and giving her a standing ovation.”
Charlotte was flying high, nothing I said in response was registering. She simply brushed me off when I insisted that it was essential for you to go back to DC right away, that you had fallen in with a very negative crowd, there was a danger you might run off to some terminally misogynistic Middle Eastern country, not Israel, and marry a terrorist suicide-bomber wannabe and maybe blow yourself up too in the bargain, or turn into a sex slave, or get yourself honor killed, or stoned, or blinded with acid, or some other stock variation on the theme. You were being brainwashed, I informed Charlotte. I begged her to get Amma to force you to leave India and ship you to DC immediately, as she had done the previous year. “We didn’t force her,” Charlotte said coldly. “She wanted to go, it was her idea.”
Could that really be true? But now was not the time to fact-check the past, you were in immediate existential crisis. I reminded her of how impressionable you were, how sensitive. I was practically weeping. I told her that you were under the influence of a Muslim fanatic; granted he was cute, terrorists can be super cute and super sexy, you were in love and therefore irrational. Had she been with me today and seen you in that classroom, she would have gotten the picture. You were talking about shahids, jihad, surrender, your face was covered with some kind of schmatte, all you needed was a pair of dark sunglasses, and not one inch of skin would have been visible, like wearing a burqa. I felt I was suffocating when I saw you in that classroom, I told Charlotte. I had to get out of there, I simply could not breathe.
“Ah, burqas,” Charlotte mused. “I consider them the ultimate feminist fashion statement. It’s like walking around in a room of your own.” She had just hired a team to design and market variations on the burqa for the contemporary woman. Perfect for when you’re feeling a little fat, or your face breaks out in zits, the burqa could become the mumu of the new millennium.
“Meena darling, relax. I do believe you are overreacting.” Charlotte was focusing; she was making an effort. “Maybe Maya’s going through a minor adolescent romantic Muslim stage, but it will pass. If it makes you feel any better, the variety of Islamic religious experience she’s involved with happens to be really quite liberal and gender-friendly from what I can tell. She’s planning to go tonight with a group of friends to Haji Ali, she told me—you know, the Sufi saint, his tomb? Sufis are the good Muslims, everybody loves the Sufis—right? They’re the Muslim hippies, the mystics, the poets, the cuddly Muslims. I mean, didn’t you ever go through a Rumi phase? Anyway, she was telling me how it’s really so fun to walk to Haji Ali at night during the monsoon singing a malhar raga with the waves crashing against the long concrete causeway leading to the mosque on its little island. But there’s always the possibility of flooding, or high tide and the causeway getting submerged. So she wanted me to tell you when you called that there’s a very good chance she might not be able to get back right away, she might have to stay there overnight or even longer, she doesn’t want you to worry or call the Mumbai lost and found or the cops or the missing persons squad or something. But the real reason they’re going to Haji Ali, you’ll be so proud to hear, is not just for the scenic walk, or for the view of that lovely little white mosque in the middle of the Arabian Sea as if floating detached in mist. No, she and her friends are going for the express purpose of occupying Haji Ali, to protest the recent ban against women entering the inner sanctum of the saint’s tomb. The Dargah trust likes to boast that they’re open to all races, religions and creeds—so hey, what about gender? I am so proud of Maya! She and her pals are not just taking it—no. They’re planning an action, speaking truth to power. They’re going to walk right through the barricade blocking the women and stage a sit-in at the tomb, she told me, which is just so cool—Girls at the Grave. Now doesn’t that make you feel better, Meena?”
I have no memory of hanging up and ending that conversation with Charlotte. I believe it continues to this day, all the things I should have said, every regret articulated. What I next recall is being startled into alertness by the constriction of my heart, a polluted gray dawn filtering in through the window, and I am still sitting in that chair at the kitchen table clutching my mobile, flakes of stinking slum excrement peeling off me and mounting in piles on the floor, continuing to shed as I make my way to your room to divine for signs of preparation for an extended absence. The same mess as always, untouched. Under the circumstances, I reasoned, it would not be a transgressive violation of your sacred privacy if I were to open your laptop to check for even a cryptic reference to plans for a demonstration at the mosque, but all of your devices were gone. Of course—you took them along with you to the slum every day in your backpack. I had failed to pay attention.
As the hours passed, my entire self continued to fall away in flakes of dry slum shit, exposing my vital organs to every insult. Compulsively, I was checking and rechecking on my own computer on every conceivable news source site, listening to the radio and TV for bulletins and alerts, every cell of my body susceptible to the slightest reference to a takeover at Haji Ali. Nothing, not a syllable. In India a mosque, a temple, is a tinderbox; set a spark to it and the fire spreads ravenously, the whole madhouse convulses for days and days and is ravaged. It was clear to me that the powers, police, politicians, all of the main players, were ruthlessly focused on keeping the incendiary news of the takeover from leaking, bent on negotiating covertly with the occupiers, to extricate them from the premises with stealth tactics so as not to trigger yet another riot of unforgiving dimensions.
By late afternoon the waste matter of the slum that had attached itself to me—whatever had not already seeped into my skin and permeated my inner core forever—finally washed off in the monsoon rains. I was standing soaked, holding up my wrecked umbrella, spoke-twisted and shredded, at the entrance to the causeway to Haji Ali. I could no longer bear the media silence—the state of not knowing what happened to my loved one, by all accounts so detrimental to achieving closure following a disaster according to the testimony of survivors. This situation became intolerable. In desperation I left my flat in spite of my fear that you might show up while I was gone and I would not be there to welcome you home, and came to the scene to find out for myself what was going on. My heart soared at the sight of the barricade at the causeway entrance, and the policemen hanging out under a nearby shelter, perhaps rather too casually it occurred to me, though I quickly censored the thought, and there were not as many as I would have expected or liked to see considering the provocation, nor any sign of the loved ones of the other kids demonstrating inside, a danger to themselves and others. I was the only parental figure present. Still, there was a barricade, there were armed guards with visible lathis barring access. I stood there letting myself be washed by the lashing rain, taking comfort in the thought that at least I knew where my child was tonight.
The cops occasionally aimed a glance my way, judging me to be harmless, inconsequential, female, possibly hysterical, possibly deranged, reluctant to venture out of their snug little clubhouse to deal with this nuisance. One was finally dispatched, however, a Sikh. He approached with a plastic grocery bag over his turban, annoyed, his beard dripping into another plastic bag, the handles looped over his ears. “Madam, move on, the mosque is closed today.”
“My daughter’s in there—you know, with the kids protesting the ban against women? I respect your need to keep this top secret because of the possibility of rioting and all that, but I had to come, I am a mother.”
“There is no protest, madam. No one is in the mosque except the dead saint, and he is not causing any trouble at the moment. The causeway is closed due to flooding. It is underwater. Standard procedure in July and August during monsoon—unscheduled closings, weather related. You can return when the water recedes. Now madam, you must go—or I will be obliged to take action.”
“What kind of action? Are you going to encounter me, or something? Go ahead, encounter me, I don’t care.”
Let him shoot me, let him eliminate me like a common thug and claim self-defense, dispense with justice and law, it was so much more efficient, but then I reminded myself that one of the privileges you give up when you become a mother is the right to commit suicide. This is a rule my own mother had violated—and I have never forgiven her. At the same moment it struck me with perfect clarity, as if I had been given an unobstructed view down the kilometer stretch of the causeway through the walls of the mosque complex now rendered transparent to me, that you were not in there. I did not know where you were. I had to get home. I had to wait for you. I had to be there when you came back, to open the door and let you in.
A bicycle rickshaw slowed down, then zoomed off at the sight of me dripping rainwater like endless tears, raising waves in its choppy wake that drenched me even more. I sloshed on through the filthy puddles, gesticulating with thumb pointed backward for anything that moved to stop, stop in the name of heaven, give me a lift, raise me up, take me away from all this. My throat was clamped by a painful urgency—I needed to get back home at once, to be there for you. Ahead of me, the words Slum Power beckoned, glowing like a burning bush through the rain, I thought I might be dreaming. It came back to me then that the NGO’s office was in Worli, close to the Haji Ali shrine; I recalled that now from having mined the website. This is where I would have been taken after the tour, to write a fat donation check, had I not fled at the sickening sight of you shrouded in veils. Now it seemed to me a sign from heaven, reaching out to me with the promise of news of you. To ignore it, to pass it by even with the pressing mandate to be in my assigned spot at home when you returned would be an unforgivable sin of omission. I would have lost my chance.
Other than some filthy cows that had come inside to take shelter from the rain, only one employee was in the Slum Power office at this late hour of the day, a young woman festooned with silver piercings dangling from her eyebrows and lips, and a name tag—Maya. “My daughter is Maya, too,” I informed her. “She’s an intern here. Do you know her?” Interns come and go, she observed, she never bothered with them; for her they did not exist, Maya is illusion. She added this with an insider’s smile. And even despite the tongue ring that snagged her speech, I could tell by the lilt of her studied English that she was Israeli—post-army road-trip decompression, she confirmed when I inquired in Hebrew to soften her up, tarrying in India beyond the finding-yourself grace period to the terminal distress of her parents, both of them professors of international affairs at Tel Aviv University with a specialty in Middle Eastern and Muslim studies, lingering in Mumbai on account of her Indian boyfriend, Sunny, the night manager of a dance club in Bandra. But she knew all the full-time Slum Power employees, she conceded when I probed—so did she know a guy named Samir Khan? She boomed out a coarse snort resembling a laugh, startling me. Samir Khan? Wasn’t he that idiot Pakistani American guy who got himself killed in Yemen? Deftly she did a quick Google search on the office computer. Nakhon—taken out two years ago by an American drone strike, along with another Muslim fundoo jihad propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki, a really big prize—Good job, says Mr. Barack Hussein Obama insincerely. Anyway, beineinu, Slum Power never hires Muslims, even though it calls itself equal opportunity multi-culti, blah-blah. So no way any Samir Khan ever worked here, that’s for sure. Besides, every other Muslim in Mumbai is Khan, and every other Khan is Samir. Sorry mama.
This namesake overdose was verified when a few days later Charlotte prevailed on me to leave my apartment where I had voluntarily confined myself to faithfully await your return, and to spend the morning at the police station viewing a lineup of Samir Khans rounded up from all over the city. Finally, Charlotte was getting up off her toned little overaged bum and swinging into action. She was panicking; her benefactions and patronage on which she so prided herself, and with which she manipulated and controlled so many of her vassals, had backfired. It was now an established fact—you were missing, gone. This was not some delusion on my part. At last she was convinced, and on some level I believe it also penetrated her thick wall of defenses that she was to blame. At first, though, I refused to leave the apartment to go to police headquarters, despite Charlotte’s litany of persuasions, agreeing only after Manika was flown up by Krishnapuri in Amma’s private jet from the ashram to Mumbai to take over watch duty from me in case you returned during my brief absence checking out the Samir Khans of Mumbai.
It was surely through Amma’s interventions, too, with Charlotte oiling her strings, that I received such exemplary VIP treatment. An unmarked black Ambassador drew up at the door of my building, the driver darting out flapping two rubber mats, which he set down before me one in front of the other, bending over again and again after I stepped upon the first mat to reposition it ahead of the second, unrolling a dry pathway for me in this way to the car door so that for the first time in days I was spared wading through puddles of fetid water. Policemen unfolded from their slouches as I was escorted into the station, rising to greet me with a cordial dip of the head and a respectful, Namaste, madam. I was ushered to a plush seat as if in a theater in front of a one-way viewing window screen as the Samir Khans of Mumbai with numbers on their chests were rolled out one by one for my inspection, smacked under the chin to provide a full-face view, slapped hard into right profile, another hard slap to spin the head into left profile, all of these visuals to the background static of, Stand up straight, maderchod, open your bhenchod eyes, gaandu, or I’ll cut off your golis—then dragged offscreen as if with a cane by the shirt collar like a bad act in a burlesque that the audience hisses and boos out of its sight as I shook my head, no, no. It felt as if hundreds of Samir Khans were passed in front of me, from slum urchins, to enraged teenagers, to the newly radicalized with full black pubic beards, to skullcapped merchants, to imams in white-robed splendor, to the aged with wiry beards hennaed bright orange. My eyes blurred over, all pity was leached out of me for these mothers’ sons, each of whom surely had sinned in some fashion to deserve such treatment, I reasoned, but the sinner I was seeking was not among them—the Samir Khan who had stolen you from me.
Most apologetically for the failure of this exercise, with an exaggerated show of solicitousness, a senior official approached to suggest that under the circumstances, since I was already out of the house, I allow myself to be conveyed to the city morgue to view the remains of unidentified female missing persons—a painful experience, yes, but necessary, and one that he and his staff would do their very best to facilitate with utmost sensitivity. I allowed myself to be taken into the stone edifice of the morgue, through the autopsy chamber where naked bodies were laid out on the tables constructed of stone like altars, torsos split open into two flaps folded back as in an anatomy textbook, scalps lifted off like the stem of an aubergine, then onward to the cold room to view the corpses already processed but unclaimed. At the entrance I was offered a mask against the stench, which I rejected with a proud dismissive brush of my hand, exactly as I would refuse a blindfold on the road to my own execution.
Inside, we pushed against the density of the stink even in that purportedly subzero environment. The floor tiles were slick with body fluids and fat leaking out and liquefied chemicals. Racks of naked men were stacked against the wall. Across the room, as if on the other side of the partition in my father’s synagogue, the naked bodies of the women were piled in a haphazard mound, a mass grave, reeking of atrocity, evoking the death camp imagery we would pore over when we were children, so horrifying and yet so pornographically gripping. Workers with long poles were already stationed there, untangling rigid limbs and flipping corpses to expose drained waxen faces for my inspection and deflated bodies stitched closed down the middle with coarse black thread. Thank God, thank God, I kept muttering to myself, you were not there, no child of mine would ever be found in such a place, in this obscene heap of the disposable and discarded.
After that I remained at home waiting for you, except for the occasional summons back to the morgue when a potential candidate was delivered, generally either an unidentified female accident victim or a foiled terrorist or suicide bomber loosely fitting your specs, and once even a sex-trafficked juvenile mutilated to the point that it was no longer possible to suppress my nausea, my gut heaved and I vomited on the floor, contributing to the laminate of bodily fluids. Manika stayed at the apartment the entire time, sacrificing her berth at Amma’s ashram, giving up her grand call-center ambitions, just to be available for those periods when I might be whisked away for one of these grim viewings; otherwise there is no way I would have agreed to go and leave the house empty, I had no idea if you had the key. All day Manika squatted on her haunches in the corner, she could have been mistaken for a footstool, head lowered, the pallu of her sari drawn up across the lower portion of her face. Now and then she would get up to bring me a glass of chai, or a bowl of rice and lentils and some naan, or to urge me to lie down and get some sleep. Why do you do it? I once asked her. For Mama, she responded. Was she referring to Amma, or to my own late mama whom she had tended in her last days, or could she possibly have meant me? I too was a mama, wasn’t I? Your mama. But I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. What difference did it make? She stayed, that was all that mattered, she didn’t budge from her mission, condemned in this life to be forever invisible and forever on call.
I sat at the kitchen table, my laptop open in front of me, my cell phone juiced within easy reach awaiting the call. Even now I cannot say how long I sat; I never inquired, and no one has come forward. The shades were drawn, there was no day, no night, no passage of the season. My tour business no longer interested me; I left it to die of mismanagement in the hands of my associates. I was entirely consumed with searching the internet for even the slightest reference to girls who had vanished into the black hole of the Muslim universe never to be heard from again except for the occasional rare smudge of their existence preserved in the ether like a bloodstain on a sheet, or who emerged for one final spectacular big bang of martyrdom, taking along with them the children of other mothers. Whether they were swallowed up out of love or conviction, or dragged away by the hair flailing and screaming, whether they went actively or were taken passively, whether they set forth as jihadi brides to anoint the fighters with the lubricant of their bodies, or as mujahid mothers or black widows bent on revenge, whether they drew their kitchen knives out from under their burqas to plunge into the flesh of strangers or implanted explosives in their breasts or bellies feigning pregnancy to expiate the violation of their honor perpetrated deliberately to turn them into living bombs, whether they detonated themselves by their own agency or were triggered by remote control in the hands of a man standing watch in the distance—all of this that had happened and was still happening, and so much more, I followed obsessively online, hoarding every possible detail about how a girl could throw herself away in that world until I felt that I had covered every inch of the territory. I had exhausted all the possibilities and could not find you. Among such girls who had thrown themselves away there was no sign of you. Wherever you were, you were not there.
My cell phone connecting me to the world within easy reach faceup on the table had an app to alert me with bulletins of terrorist acts worldwide, zeroing in on those featuring Muslims in India and Pakistan either as perpetrators or victims. The alert sound was customized from a siren to something less heart-stopping since it went off so frequently as if malfunctioning, seeming to shudder in place like a spoiled child on the verge of a tantrum, demanding immediate attention. Most of the alerts were not relevant to your case, but now and then the deadly silence in the room where Manika and I sat waiting for you was broken by an alarm that conceivably could apply. Then, my heart pounding, I would call my friends at the police station to check out the situation if they had not already contacted me first, and more than once, with Manika on duty on the home front, the black Ambassador was dispatched to collect me for yet another gruesome viewing on the stone altars of the morgue—but the good angel always appeared right on cue, crying, Stop, let another living creature be sacrificed instead, this time it will not be you.
Except for contacting the cops on those occasions, I almost never used my mobile to call out. I did receive some calls, though, quite regularly from Charlotte, to assure me that she was here for me—I’m here for you, Meena darling, she said—stressing that she was speaking also on behalf of Ammachi, who had made special offerings to mother Kali to find you among her lost children. The rebbetzin Mindy also got in touch, expressing regret that she was unable to carry out the mitzvah of coming by in person to sit with me, taking for granted that I was already in mourning because you had run off with a goy, may the merciful one spare us. She was calling me from Antwerp, she said, where she had gone to help out with her two new grandchildren, born to Shmuly and to Malkie in the same week, they looked like twins, two boys no less, so handsome, the greatest blessing, grandchildren, she had gotten in touch with the Ayin haRah Lady to make sure that any evil eye cast upon these precious babies by the envious and the bitter whose children did not turn out so well and did not produce grandchildren in the normal course of events be rendered null and void at once. The Ayin haRah Lady cost an arm and a leg, by the way, but never mind, she delivered her money’s worth. She poured the molten lead into a pot of cold water and chanted the powerful holy words as the bubbles swelled and burst, and now the babies are safe, 100 percent safe, thank God. Maybe someone had given you the evil eye, the rebbetzin speculated, maybe that was the explanation for your disappearance, and I had never bothered to spend some money on the Ayin haRah Lady to neutralize it. You were such an intelligent girl, with such a pretty face, the rebbetzin reminisced, if only you had kept to the path. You were making such good progress for a while under Malkie’s influence, you were Malkie’s personal special pet project. She recalled how Malkie had instructed and guided you with the visual aids of the paper dolls. But you were always falling, that was your problem, falling, falling, such a pity, and now you have truly fallen into the lowest depths, into the abyss, it shouldn’t happen to us. What can you do? Blessed is the True Judge, the rebbetzin pronounced, May you be comforted among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
From Jerusalem your father Shmiel the Holy Beggar called—the last thing I needed at that moment. I hadn’t heard from him in over five years, when I had bought off all his rights to you with an all-expenses-paid, five-star deluxe spiritual tour. I had assumed the cannibals of the Andean Islands had taken care of him for me, but apparently he was unpalatable even to them. Now he was calling to inform me that business was very bad at the gravesite of the Singing Rabbi, nobody came anymore—and why was that? Because word had spread that his daughter—his own daughter, the daughter of Shmiel the Holy Beggar no less—had run off with an Arab. According to the intelligence reports, there was a danger the couple might figure out a way to sneak into the country on her Israeli passport even though there was an all-points bulletin out blocking them, and make their way to the cemetery to blow themselves up at the grave of the Singing Rabbi while everyone was sitting around having such a nice kumsitz, and feeling mamesh so high, so openhearted, turning their pockets inside out and emptying every last grush into his guitar case. The whole cemetery was crawling now with military types with shaved heads and walkie-talkies, Mossad, Shabak, guys in suits and sunglasses and hearing aids, the security was so tight with X-rays and shmex-rays and body searches and pat downs and friskings and the whole shmear, nobody wanted to put themselves through all that garbage even for the Singing Rabbi, nobody was coming to the gravesite anymore, it was just too much of a pain in the you-know-what. His whole personal income, his livelihood, his bread and butter, his pita and hummus, all of his revenue was flushed down the toilet, down to minus zero—and why was that? Because bottom line, he claimed, I was too busy to do my job as a mother and watch over my own daughter in the proper way, I was too busy bowing down to elephants and monkeys, sinning and causing others to sin like Yerovam ben Nevat, with my idol-worshipping tour business, I was too busy chasing after other women like a “prevert,” and so on and so forth.
I cut him off; I could not bear it any more. I did not deserve this, I was in pain. I was quite possibly a candidate for the title of em shakulah, for which there is no equivalent word in the English language, as if only a Jewish mother can be a mother who has lost a child in the tradition of our Mother Rachel weeping over her children, unreceptive to comfort of any sort, and here he was your own father thinking as per usual only about himself and where his next falafel would be coming from, it was inhuman.
Since he had the audacity to refer to Geeta, however, albeit indirectly of course, without of course uttering out loud the anathema of her unmentionable name, I should tell you in case you were wondering, that, yes, she did get in touch during this period—exactly once. I don’t know who told her what was going on, maybe it was Manika who had a smartphone of her own, one of Amma’s old models; Amma was always upgrading, the castoffs were encrypted and wiped clean of all data by the techie devotee and presented as a much prized trophy to a chosen follower. The entire communication from Geeta amounted to a tweet with the hashtag, #ItsNotMyFault: “She’s not here, if that’s what you’re thinking. No clue where she is. Ready to offer help. Just ask nicely.”
Not her fault? My head spun, I was barely holding myself together, and now it felt as if I might not be able to go on after all, I would just fall apart, collapse. Whose fault did she think it was if not hers? Did she imagine for one minute that it’s a small thing to be abandoned by your mother? She was your mother exactly as I was, we had always regarded it that way, we had never discriminated between biological and adoptive or whatever, that was how we conducted our life together, yet she just picked herself up one day and walked off without looking back. You were traumatized, your self-esteem plummeted to ground zero, everything that happened to you happened after she walked out on us—your two sad little crushes, first on Shmuly, then on Samir, one and the same—hopeless, doomed monsoon crushes, which you fixated on subconsciously to court rejection, to confirm that you were essentially unlovable. After all, how could anyone ever love a girl whose own mother had abandoned her? The most basic human right, a mother’s love, and even that you couldn’t count on, even that had been withdrawn from you. How dare she claim it was not her fault? Of course it was her fault, she was entirely to blame for everything that had transpired after she walked out, including the smashed hopes and endless depression of the monsoons, and now your disappearance. There was no way I was going to stoop to ask for her help—nicely or otherwise, thank you very much. Fortunately, I did not need it. For cash and connections I had Charlotte and Amma, with resources in and out of India that sufficiently matched Geeta’s to get the job done. And for the human touch, for tenderness and sympathy, I had my twin brother the guru, Shmelke, known worldwide as Reb Breslov Tabor, safe at last in the asylum of India, venerated now as Rebbie-ji, who somehow, I believe through his own rare mystical powers and the unbreakable connection formed between us in the pools of amniotic fluid in which we had floated side by side during our gestation, discovered what was going on and reached out to me.
Every day throughout my ordeal, Rebbie-ji found a few minutes in his busy schedule to call and check on me. How ya doin’, Meena’le? His intimately familiar voice wrapped me in the warmth of the Brooklyn of our innocence, it took everything in my power to keep myself from opening my mouth and howling. Not a single call passed without him urging me to come to his ashram in Mother Teresa’s old hospice in Calcutta, near the big Kali temple, his House of Holy Healing, HHH, like Ha Ha Ha. He erupted in laughter. It would do you so much good, he declared. Come and stay for as long as you like, Meena’le. You are so, so welcome, not only are my doors open to you, but also my heart. I know you will come soon. Maybe next week you will come, maybe tomorrow you will come, any minute now I will see you, you are on your way, I feel you are near, ah, here you are.
The alert went off. A developing story was unfolding very close by in the packed women’s compartment of a commuter train as it was coming into the Churchgate station during the evening rush hour. Details were still sketchy, but so far what was known was that two burqa-clad passengers had suddenly shouted, Allahu Akbar in the mosh pit of the ladies’ car and thrust out their hands from under their black robes waving butcher knives. They proceeded to slash indiscriminately in every direction, according to eyewitness accounts, inflicting numerous injuries and drawing streams of blood until the heroic ladies in that car banded together and took matters into their own hands. With the full united force of their bodies, the ladies pushed the alleged perpetrators off the train through the open door of the compartment down onto the tracks. According to early unconfirmed reports, the two suspects were neutralized either from the fall itself, or crushed under the wheels of the train, which was still moving, or beaten to death by enraged citizens who happened to be in the vicinity.
I have no memory of summoning the black Ambassador, or of my ride through the choked traffic to the morgue. My first vivid memory was of incredible relief as I paused to gather strength at the now-familiar entrance to the autopsy room where the two bodies were laid out on top of the stone altars, side by side, naked, still awaiting the knife of the medical examiner, and I was struck by the unmistakable sign of maleness. It was a common tactic for men to disguise themselves in burqas and chadors, I reminded myself, assuming the roles of women, the perfect cover-up for all kinds of male mischief. As I drew nearer I could see that the bodies were severely battered and discolored and swollen, the noses smashed in, the limbs broken, they had been dumped from the train like trash. The maleness of the one nearest to me was confirmed as I stood beside him—Samir Khan, the one we had been seeking, surfaced at last. On the altar beside him was the girl, so young, so slight, so beaten, so abused, no one on the face of the earth would have recognized her except her mother.
Save your poor daughter, mother. See how they have tormented her.
O my daughter, Maya, would that it had been me in your place, my daughter, my daughter, Maya.
Her name is no longer Maya, mother says. It is Malala. Look, she lives. They tried to kill her in the Swat Valley but kind-hearted souls saved her and brought her back to life for the good work she was destined to do for the sake of the feminine gender. The perfect daughter, a mother’s heart bursts with pride. Did you know that she has just won the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest laureate ever? Rejoice. It will look awesome on her college application.