1

IN THE MIDDLE of the journey of our life, having passed through the phases of studentship and householder, the first two of the four stages allotted to mortals on this earth according to the wisdom of the holy men of the East, I found myself in a black hole. Two more stages stretched ahead of me—renunciation and withdrawal—on the long road to liberation, but I felt myself unable to go on, craving death.

How I had arrived to this dark place I could barely say aloud, the memory was too bitter to form into words. But as I was falling into the abyss and succumbing at this halfway point, weary and lost, there appeared before me a holy man from my deepest beginnings, like an angel with white hair flowing down his back parted in the center into two flanks like sidelocks, long white beard, robed entirely in white linen, starched and flowing. He clutched me by the waist, reaching up with two mighty arms strengthened by years spinning the wheels of his throne taking him along his destined path, and he halted my descent. “Let me go, Rebbie-ji, have mercy,” I cried. “Stay,” he said. “Even in this place of death, my message to you is, choose life.” His voice was my blood voice, my brother’s voice calling to me as if from the ground. There was no place to hide.

For his sake, conditionally, I continued in life, but not by choice. Choice was his domain. He had chosen for his sins to be a fugitive and wanderer on the face of the earth, marked and set apart. I had rejected all that when I had chosen to no longer count myself among the chosen. But he needed me now, he had asked me to stay, he had asked me to do him a kindness, to say I am his sister, in this strange and dangerous place he had asked for my help, never an easy thing for him to do. I remembered his youthful sweetness. He had been such a dear boy, my soulmate. My innards ached for him. I pitied him and could not refuse.

In special circumstances it is permissible to skip over one or two of the four stages in life and head straight to renunciation well before the designated age of seventy-two, or to personalize and tweak the stages in some way, or even to invent a fusion of sorts. This was the option I was forced to accept for the interim, under pressure from my twin brother, Shmelke, revered and reviled worldwide as Reb Breslov Tabor, Rebbie-ji, who had beseeched me to stay. The time had not yet come when I could indulge the luxury of dying, or even of withdrawing to a hermitage in the forest for the third stage of retirement and meditation to prepare myself for the fourth and final act, sannyasa. I was obliged to remain at Rebbie-ji’s ashram in the throbbing heart of Kolkata. My involvement was still mandated, I was still needed it seemed. I had not yet won liberation, a reprieve from my life sentence. I had not yet earned the privilege of setting out in search of moksha as a sannyasini, my face smeared with ash, my hair matted, nothing on my back but a garment made of grass chewed and regurgitated by a cow, nothing in my hands but a stick and a beggar’s bowl, but with full conviction of my sanity, oblivious to the world that might think me out of my mind.

Still, until the blessed moment arrived of complete renunciation, I could improvise. I could practice austerities and carry out various forms of asceticism. The ultimate goal was to achieve a state of detachment as if I were already dead. I regarded myself as my own widow. My husband who had died was myself. Instead of throwing myself on my pyre as a sati, I gave up all of life’s pleasures like a pious Hindu widow. I shaved my head, cast off all ornamentation, shrouded myself in a borderless white sari, fasted three days a week, and withdrew. I was dead in this world as if I had been reduced to ash.

I was doubly dead, since a sannyasi is considered to be dead too. Like a sadhu, I renounced all ambition, all striving and desire, except for the desire to be dead. During the day I collaborated at my brother’s side, counseling and strategizing, but it was as if I were doing nothing at all. At night I slept in a primitive coffin, a stretcher bier, on the floor of the cell I shared with the cast-off girls whose care Rebbie-ji had entrusted to me in his House of Holy Healing, formerly Mother Teresa’s Kalighat Home for the Dying Destitutes.

It was also during my time in Rebbie-ji’s ashram that I took upon myself the task of setting down this memoir in the first person, though the first person no longer mattered or even existed. I was completely detached, indifferent, merely an observer—the omniscient third person observing myself, the nonexistent first person, a work of fiction. It was simply an exercise in overcoming the limitations of the first person in the narrative of remembrance—a way of carrying forth with the me-me-meena story even when she no longer is present, a way of negating the first person by validating my witness even though I was already dead. It was a laboratory experiment, and I was the rat.

Unconsoled and inconsolable, I nevertheless sat down with my twin brother, Shmelke, at a table in one of the two great halls of his ashram that once had been packed with rows and rows of narrow cots upon which Mother Teresa’s lepers, tuberculars, malnourished, and other assorted terminally diseased had lain. This ward, which had housed the women in the days of the hard-hearted saint, now served as the common room of the House of Holy Healing—dining hall, synagogue, meeting place, the space in which my brother held audience when seized by the spirit. From hospice to hope, as Rebbie-ji liked to say—anguish to joy, mourning to holiday, like Purim, when all are obliged to turn themselves into clowns with Rebbie-ji banging his drum and gyrating in his wheelchair leading the way, like King David leaping and dancing half-naked, making a spectacle of himself as he brought home the ark of the Lord through the streets of Jerusalem.

In the second ward the men had undergone their death agonies, shards of their horned toenails hacked off by volunteer missionaries of charity still occasionally suctioned up by our bare feet as we moved about. Still visible on the walls all around us were the white numbers that had been painted over each cot once positioned there with a nameless dying body coiled up on it, sixty and more in each ward. Now the space had been converted into the ashram’s dormitory, with ropes strung across the length and width like a chessboard over which madras cloths and worn saris and old sheets and other assorted rags and even drying laundry were hung to form tiny cubicles accommodating at least four seekers stretched out in sleeping bags and on straw mats or directly on the floor in each pod, the sexes rigidly separated by a thick clothesline draped with woolen prayer shawls only slightly moth eaten to form a mekhitza bisecting the room. This is where I slept too, alongside my damaged girls, in a pod of cubicles set aside for us.

Across from where Shmelke and I we were sitting in the great public room, high on the opposite wall, Ma’s extra-large stained damask Sabbath tablecloth given to my brother upon his marriage in the expectation that he was destined to become a rabbinical eminence presiding at the head of a great tisch was draped over a wooden cross; we could make out its menacing cruciform skeleton underneath. In the dormitory ward, the cross was concealed by a soiled moth-eaten woolen prayer shawl, our father’s wedding gift to his gifted son. Somehow, by a miracle, Shmelke had held on to these gifts throughout all his wanderings. Through the high windows pouring down beams of dust motes and malarial flies, the smell of burning flesh drifted in accompanied by the tortured screams of the goats sacrificed daily just up the road in the temple of Kali, most fabulous and savage of mothers.

Manika padded in silently and set down before us on the table two steaming glasses of tea in monkey-dish saucers, and a bowl of brown sugar cubes irregular like chunks of granite. Tea was always served in glasses at the ashram, the very same type of glasses that had been used in the home of our Brooklyn childhood—yahrzeit memorial glasses, imported from Israel and stocked at the ashram by the caseload, recycled for drinking purposes after the candle inside was consumed during the chronic power blackouts of Kali’s cruel city. Without even thinking, operating on automatic as if in the private wombspace of our twindom, Shmelke and I each positioned a sugar cube between our upper and lower teeth, poured some of the hot tea from the glass into the monkey dish, lifted the dish in both hands with pincered thumb and forefinger and winged elbows to blow on the amber pool and cool it, then tipped it with a precise motion to send the tea streaming on its passage through the sugar cube, sweetening it thoroughly as it came into our mouths and glided along our taste buds. Nice tea, bliss, so good—and exactly as we used to do it at home in Brooklyn on a late Sabbath afternoon as the sun was setting and darkness descended. The comical synchronicity of our movements and the convergence of deep memory assaulted both of us at the same moment, and we burst out in wild and tragic laughter, sending our moist sugar cubes flying like a stone from a slingshot across the room in the direction of Ma’s tablecloth to pierce it through the heart.

How did this happen? If such a story were told, it would not have been believed. How had this brother and sister, separately and apart, made this terrible journey from there to here, from Bava Kama to Kama Sutra, as if blindly burrowing like worms through the bowels of the globe, and come out blinking together now at this end, in this most alien of places?

Simultaneously and wordlessly we had asked this question of ourselves and each other over the tea and sugar, my brother and I. It had appeared like a cartoon bubble over each of our heads for the other to read, discernible only to our eyes. It was in essence the question I was already embarked upon answering in my first-person experiment at night in the cell I shared with my ruined girls, by the light of a yahrzeit candle, working on my laptop even during blackouts, tethered at those times to the cell phone system at megawatt cost, thanks to Charlotte’s beneficence.

There was internet at the ashram; this was something Rebbie-ji insisted upon and would never tolerate foregoing. But in every other respect, he was rigorous about maintaining the monastic austerities as practiced in the days when Mother Teresa had ruled this space with such righteous severity. There was still no private electrical generator to kick in during the perpetual outages. There were no large institutional appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers, and so on. We laundered our clothing by hand in tubs, slapped them against the stone walls, and hung them to dry on lines, just as the nuns in their white habits with the blue stripe (like the flag of the State of Israel, it had always struck me) had done in the days of the hospice. There was not even an elevator, though there was a shaft in which one could have been installed, and donors who had clamored to finance it. The saint had refused. Two slight nuns could carry an emaciated body up and down the steps, she had decreed, it was good for their spiritual development. But when Rebbie-ji needed to be moved from floor to floor, five muscled men known as the Bulvans were summoned, four to haul his person, since even on a vegan diet of beans and nuts and dates and tofu (which Rebbie-ji pronounced the original manna—white in color, and taking on all flavors and tastes) a human being can acquire superfluous padding amounting to many kilos, and the fifth ox to follow behind carrying the wheelchair in one hand. As a matter of principle Rebbie-ji had always refused a wheelchair upgrade to a top-of-the-line electric model, a wonder that could even bounce up and down the stairs. This self-denial was a personal form of austerity and soul affliction that he had taken upon himself, with a strictness akin to Mother Teresa’s who forbade painkillers for her sufferers before baptizing them and dispatching them to their reward. My brother’s lower body as a result continued to shrivel and waste away, its grossness appropriately nullified, while his upper body, arms and shoulders spinning the wheels that took him along his chosen path, grew more and more powerful like a god’s. His head remained untouched, its celestial brilliance shining through, illuminated even more blindingly now by the glowing whiteness of hair, beard, sidelocks that framed his face so that many of his followers dared not lift their eyes to gaze upon him if they wanted to live.

But as for the internet, Rebbie-ji regarded it as indispensable to his mission of spiritual outreach. Like Ammachi, he was never without his smartphone, except of course on the Sabbath and holidays when it is not permitted. The smartphone had evolved into essential guru gear it seemed. In his notoriety, my twin brother often was lumped in the mind of the public with the whole gang of indistinguishable ultra-Orthodox fanatics, including those who railed against the internet on posters and fliers, their polemical texts delivered to the printers as attachments to emails, declaiming that the internet is the cause of drought, cancer, diseases of the base organs, and the next Holocaust—Shoah: The Sequel—and so on and so forth. But Rebbie-ji declared the internet to be a mighty-blessed force of creation, like the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, omnipresent, omniscient, a glimpse of the divine consciousness, containing within it for those who truly knew how to seek for it, the answer to every question.

Yet though I was toiling by night in the first person to extract the larger picture of the trajectory of the first two stages of my life’s strange journey, with regard to the immediate question—how I got from that morgue in Mumbai to this hospice in Kolkata, as if risen from the dead—I simply had no recollection. It was a blank. I had blocked it out in classic trauma mode. Nor did I choose to inquire—a personal preference that those who surrounded me were considerate enough to respect. Manika was the first person I saw when I emerged from the blackest of pits to this false earthly reality. She was crouching like a tumor attached to the wall in a corner of a cell I was sharing at that initial phase in my brother’s private suite. My roommate laid out on the other bed, I eventually learned, was an exceptionally venerated woman whose worshippers could not agree whether she was alive or dead, she seemed still to be mutating through the stages of life; her fate was to lie there unburied, skin flaking down to the bone. Where was I? In Kolkata, Manika told me, in the Christian Kali’s hospice. Good, I thought, hospice means I’m certified dying. But then my brother rolled in and reminded me that he had taken over the site from that severe little Christian saint, asserting his squatter rights, as it was abandoned and vacant except for my roommate, who had been delivered just before his anticipated arrival and whom he allowed to remain because she reminded him of where he had come from and where he was going, and he had transformed it from a place of certain imminent death to a house of holy healing.

This was extremely disappointing news. I could only hope Shmelke would be kicked out of this squat as he had been from all of the others, and it would revert to a hospice so that I could continue with the dying process undisturbed. Charlotte arrived next with her entire girls band, Lakshmi and the Survivors, including her great reed player, Monica Lewinsky, blowing away. She was bursting with the fantastic news that her legal team was now closing a deal with the city thugs in Dalhousie Square and the Kali temple goondas up the road to buy this abandoned shelter for Rebbie-ji. It was looking very good, knock on wood, Charlotte said, tapping the air in the direction of the head of my narrow bed, over which a wooden cross was hanging covered by a bath-sized towel. We’re almost home free, keep your fingers crossed, she declared. After scuttling like a bug from one miserable country to another without rest to escape extradition back to Israel on such false and absurd charges that would be beneath us to even enumerate, Rebbie-ji will soon have permanent headquarters right here in tolerant live-and-let-live India, a nation that instinctively comprehends the duality of the spirit, the holy and the profane, the dark and the light. In this place he would at last have full protection and sanctuary from primitive Abrahamic vengeance and punishment.

From all of this I concluded that how I had gotten from Bombay to Calcutta had something to do with the interventions of Manika, Shmelke, and above all Charlotte, who now, having successfully redirected my past, was charging straight ahead to arrange my future. She invited me to join her in her private kabbalah tutorial with Rebbie-ji. They were working with clay to fashion a golem to defend all the persecuted and pursued of the world. “Do you know how therapeutic it is to stick your hands into clay and just squeeze?” she asked. “Excuse my French, Rebbie-ji, but it’s a privilege, like playing with your personal caca—pure regressive pleasure.” Such talk is permissible if you’re paying, I reflected, even to such a holy figure as my brother. She also insisted that I attend a performance of her band that night in the great room—for women only, she added, since Rebbie-ji has taught that the voice of a woman is nakedness and therefore cannot be listened to by men who are always so prone to sexual arousal. Rebbie-ji of course will be there, however, Charlotte assured me, the only man allowed to watch the show since he is completely hopeless below the waist, totally harmless and nonthreatening no matter what his enemies say, all you need to do is take one look at him in his wheelchair for God’s sake.

I am in mourning, I responded. For me, music is forbidden.

The wheelchair became Shmelke’s defining accessory early in his career, by our late twenties. By that time he was also already recognized as a scholar and mystic of extraordinary charismatic gifts, appearing only once in a generation to recapture the lost light of creation and usher in the golden age. The event that put him in the chair took place in Israel, where he had gone for higher studies at the age of eighteen, immediately after his marriage to the daughter of rabbinical aristocracy. The wedding was attended by more than ten thousand invited guests, the ceremony held under the stars in the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, closed off to traffic and encircled by ranks of New York’s finest in their blue police uniforms stretched across formidable guts. It was rumored of my brother, and also confirmed by him in a lecture of tremendous esoteric profundity that could be interpreted only by those with exceptional powers of penetration, that he was the reincarnation of the great Hasidic master, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who died in the year 1810 in the city of Uman in Ukraine with no male descendant to carry on the dynasty, leaving his disciples, thereafter known as the Dead Hasidim, leaderless, adrift, in perpetual mourning until his promised return. So great was the joy of my brother’s followers when the good news was privately circulated that the master had come back at last after nearly two centuries of concealment that they renamed by brother Breslov, and he became known worldwide as Reb Breslov Tabor. Only Ma and I, and also his wife, Zlatte, who by the time of his confinement in the chair had already given birth to all nine of their children, all girls (almost a statistical impossibility, but nevertheless my brother’s burden, like Rabbi Nahman’s, to be left without an heir) continued to call him Shmelke.

Central to my brother’s teaching was a mystical reinterpretation of the concept of tikkun, focusing on the personal obligation of each individual to repair the world, hugely corrupted and damaged when Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But as Shmelke conceived of it in esoteric kabbalistic terms, such tikkun often entailed sin and transgression at the behest of a holy man such as himself, a mandatory plunge into seemingly immoral behavior for the purpose of rescuing the divine light lost in the lowest depths during the fall of Adam from paradise, thereby restoring the world to its original state of illumination and bringing on the messianic age. This teaching, along with the ways in which so radical a form of tikkun was implemented, inspired intense controversy and also severe condemnation, including from the more mainstream Breslover Hasidim, who ultimately disavowed and excommunicated him. At the same time it also attracted a multitude of supporters, among them vastly wealthy donors, primarily American fundamentalist and evangelical Christians bent on hastening the rapture and the end of time, which pivoted on the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land; it was they who endowed his activities and financed his compound in the Muslim Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. By his late twenties, my brother had also amassed thousands of followers and devotees, many of them ex-hippie returnees to the faith, but also countless souls discarded by society whom he had rescued, literally pulled them up from the depths, from the streets, the slums, the drug scene and the underworld, from prisons and lunatic asylums, exactly as he would descend to the lowest realms to pull up through acts of radical tikkun the hidden divine sparks trapped during the fall in the filth below, and restore the world to the purity of its original light as at the time of creation.

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which he prophesied was a herald of far worse future shock and disaster, a forshpeis of hurban, as he put it, his tikkun activities intensified, spilling out into the streets. It was imperative to descend to the depths to dredge up the divine sparks in order to forestall the coming annihilation, he believed, and to do so at once, without delay, with the greatest possible alacrity. Toward that end he instituted the tikkun of pursuit of the holy man, calling upon his followers to pursue him every night after midnight as he set out at top speed on his motorcycle from Jerusalem to the Galilee to pray and beseech for mercy at the graves of the righteous. Behind him rode his inner circle, heaven’s angels, and in their train, scores of followers in all kinds of vehicles in a wild and raging caravan, including taxis and buses, and also some on horseback, donkeys and camels. They rode without helmets or seat belts or saddles, heedless of danger, which was beneath them spiritually to contemplate. They rode at top speed, two hundred kilometers an hour and more, defying all civic laws and regulations, never stopping for lights, flouting all road signs, cutting through traffic, jumping onto sidewalks and highway shoulders, leaping over dividers, zigzagging lanes, plowing through to the opposite side of the road wherever they spotted an opening, leaving the laggards far in the rear, leaving behind the fallen and casualties and smashed up as necessary sacrifices in pursuit of their rabbi as he headed at breakneck speed to the graves in the North, in Tiberias, Safed, Meron, of such luminaries as Rabbi Simeon son of Yohai, Rabbi Moses son of Maimon, Rabbi Meir Master of the Miracle, Honi the Circle Maker, Rabbi Hutzpit the Interpreter, and all the other lofty souls with power to intervene and prevent the looming catastrophe.

Every night on their wild ride in pursuit of my brother, the pursuers would be pursued in turn by the police with shrieking sirens and flashing lights, and even occasionally by the military, a veritable chase scene as if from the movies to electrify the heart and leave the viewer breathless, but at some point the authorities would inevitably fall away, their wallets fattened, or simply wander off on the strength of the conviction that the world will be a better place if all of these nutcases simply self-destruct of their own accord without official interference. On the occasions when the speeders were forced to halt by an uptight rules-and-regulations type, it would be patiently explained to this obsessive-compulsive that religious law required obedience to the rabbi, and the rabbi required pursuit. There was no higher mitzvah than chasing the rebbe; the officer was welcome to join in the pursuit if he liked. Nothing could be done to stop it; it was a decree from heaven. If the earthly powers had a problem with the free and unimpeded exercise of these religious rights, they were welcome to go take up the matter with the holy rabbi himself. There he is, up front—see him? And they pointed to the posse riding furiously ahead astride their motorcycles, every one of its members with exceptionally long black sidelocks and long black beards whipping in the wind, large white crocheted yarmulkes pulled low over their heads, long black kaftans draped over the seats of their motorbikes, and fluorescent crash goggles. Which one of these bikers was the holy rabbi? They all looked exactly alike, like creatures of another species from outer space, you couldn’t tell them apart.

Yet despite this massive effort of pursuit and prayer, the cosmic forces remained in a state of agitation, the celestial sparks still lost in the putrid depths. In time, my brother, Reb Breslov, declared to his followers that the midnight rides as enacted were not sufficiently strong to avert the imminent disaster, much less restore the nobility of divine light. Greater risks and sacrifices were called for. Now under cover of darkness he raced into hostile territory—to the tomb of Mother Rachel in Bethlehem, the tomb of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, and potentially most powerful of all, Joseph’s tomb in Nablus, also known as Shehem, in the shadow of the mountains of the blessing and the curse. His followers pursued him in long speeding convoys over the hills of Samaria, through Ishmaelite territory, ignoring military and police checkpoints, heedless of warning shots, crashing through barriers, until they arrived at Joseph’s holy gravesite, desecrated and ransacked, where they fell to the ground kissing it passionately, and hugged the stone walls, praying and weeping.

Joseph’s tomb became the destination to which my brother now led his flock in pursuit of him night after night. Who but Joseph—favored son in the light-suffused household of his father the patriarch Jacob, twice cast into the darkest depths, the pit and the dungeon, then rising again like a brilliant star to the heights as ruler of Egypt—who but this first court Jew, this first paradigm of spectacular Jewish success in the diaspora could be a more perfect embodiment of the fall from paradise and ultimate elevation? Every night they arrived in pursuit of their rebbe, my brother, under a hailstorm of rocks and rotten vegetables and old shoes hurled by the enemy. “Not even old shoes will we throw at you,” one of the hooligans was quoted in the press. “Flip-flops we will throw at you—old stinking rubber flip-flops. You don’t even deserve to be hit in the head by a shoe.”

They worshipped and studied at the tomb and left before dawn, carrying away their casualties, but there were no fatalities. They were under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces in occupied territory, though they never gave the military advance notice when they would appear, as required. The site was their rightful heritage, it was their property as far as they were concerned. “You don’t have to make an appointment to enter your own house that belongs to you,” Reb Breslov, my brother, said. The fatality occurred the night the tomb was handed over by the Israelites to enemy jurisdiction—Joseph once again sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites, as so many had noted. One disciple dead, shot in the head by thugs masquerading as the official Muslim police force armed with AK-47s, a second grievously wounded, condemned to spend the rest of his days on earth as a cauliflower, as my brother so sadly observed—and the biggest prize of all, my brother, whose back was broken but not his spirit when he emerged half a year later jubilantly clapping his hands over his head and singing at the top of his voice in his speeding wheelchair to the ecstatic celebration of his followers dancing in the streets along the entire route from the private rehabilitation center where he had been put up by his benefactors, back to his headquarters in his compound in the Muslim section of Jerusalem.

It is the fate of the righteous man of the generation to absorb the suffering of the world in order to save mankind, Rav Nahman taught. My brother, Reb Breslov, as his gilgul, now felt the truth of this observation even more keenly, weighed down as he was by the confinement of his wheelchair and the increasingly painful urgency of his prophetic vision—the inexorable approach of the next and final holocaust. Averting this calamity was a priority. No personal suffering inflicted upon him would be too much in the fulfillment of this mandate, but given his revised circumstances, the performance of tikkun through pursuit no longer seemed the best option. Rather, it was necessary to repair the world by retrieving the divine light through an act of extreme degradation—by crawling again and again down to the lowest depths of sin and transgression where so many of the holy sparks had fallen and were lost, crawling on his belly and eating the dust of the earth, like a snake.

The gematria of the Hebrew letters adding up to snake (nakhash) is exactly the same as the numerical value for messiah (mashiakh)—358. Together, they equal 716, the numerical value of the Hebrew word found in the second book of Kings, le’hitrapeh, to heal—holy healing! It was impossible to overestimate the significance of these confluences both in terms of my brother’s personal physical circumstances and his overarching obligation to enact tikkun, which bottom line amounted to nothing other than ultimate healing; only an idiot would regard this convergence as coincidence. Now that my brother no longer was able to stand up and move about on his feet, the only way to perform the necessary healing act of tikkun, retrieving the hidden light that would bring on the messianic age, was to crawl, to turn himself into a snake, the most vulgar and naked of seducers.

According to a secret scroll, it was mandatory for the purpose of carrying out this tikkun that eighteen women be attached at all times to different parts of his body like tumors, like an affliction of elephantiasis, causing him excruciating pain and rendering him grotesque in the eyes of the world. Each would submit to him, but afterward she would despise him and tread on his head. The suffering he would absorb would be endless, but the sins he would be obliged to commit with these women would be essential to bringing about the redemption. Instead of being pursued as a holy figure, he would be pursued like the most base and repulsive of criminals. Yet through this suffering that he took upon himself, the imminent catastrophe would be averted, and the hour of reunification of the lost sparks with the infinite source of the mystical light would draw closer and closer, the radiance beckoning just over the horizon.

When a young woman would come to his chambers for a blessing, my brother, Reb Breslov, was able to take one look at her and recognize at once if she was potential material for one of the eighteen boils destined to be attached to him for tikkun purposes. If she was married and arrived with a husband, he would inquire when she had last immersed herself in the ritual bath. Depending on the answer and other mystical factors known only to him, he would command the couple to abstain from intimate relations for a specified period of time based on his calculations, after which they would receive a visitation in the form of a child. He would then request that the husband leave the room and wait outside while he sanctified the wife. He would ask the woman to sit on his lap in his wheelchair, drawing the prayer shawl he always wore up over his head and down over hers, thereby creating a sacred space of seclusion as after the breaking of the glass at a wedding. Within this talit tent he would insert his hands under her clothing to check every part of her body for as long as necessary to certify if she was one of the eighteen buboes chosen to be attached to him, soothing her the entire time during this procedure with such words as, Take comfort, daughter, you have entered the world of nobility. If she passed this test, he would request that she take off her clothing and stand before him naked as he licked her entire body with his tongue; it was important for the sake of salvation not to miss a spot. If he found her worthy, he would then order her to undress him as well and help him from his chair so that he could lie down beside her on the daybed in his chamber, the two of them naked.

Nor was it necessary for the woman to be newly married; she could also be even younger, a virgin. For the purpose of carrying out his work of purification and deliverance and of averting another holocaust, as he informed the candidates, the essential point was that there always be eighteen females attached to him, married or virgins, since as might be expected, some fell away for one reason or another over the course of time, like scabs, there was always natural attrition, and replacements might be required. It was with one of these younger unmarried girls that he was lying one afternoon, when he turned and saw the face of a disciple pressed against the half-open window. As if no one had told him he was naked, with the innocence of Adam before the fall in the Garden of Eden, he slithered off the daybed and crawled on his belly to the window to confront the disciple perched on a ladder. “You have merited to see your master in the midst of performing the act of tikkun,” he said. He reached his powerful arm up from the floor and slammed the window shut, sending the ladder reeling backward as the disciple hung on to the ledge like a spider.

The disciple unfortunately was possessed of a limited understanding of what he had witnessed. In recounting all of this to me, my brother speculated that the boy likely had base designs on the girl, and for this reason alone, to protect the maiden, a few of his stronger followers were dispatched to teach him a lesson. Even so, within twenty-four hours, false and sensational accusations involving my brother leaked out, appearing in the press and all the media, and a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Israeli police. For his own safety and protection, his supporters had no choice but to spirit him immediately out of the country. The whole thing was completely ridiculous, Shmelke told me, reverting to the Brooklynese of our childhood, to our conversations in the womb. By that point, because of his regimen of fasting and the various forms of ascetic practice that he had taken upon himself to hasten the redemption, not to mention the obvious desiccation of his lower half as a result of his injury and his confinement to a wheelchair, his whole sex drive was a nonstarter; he would not have been able to get it up if you paid him, he confided to me. I was after all his twin sister, we had been naked together for forty weeks in the womb, we had played naked in the mud as children, his baitzim had shriveled to the size of two raisins, he confided to me. Nevertheless, and despite his disability, he was branded an abuser and offender, and forced to hit the road and take up again the extremely onerous tikkun of pursuit, but now he was pursued not only as a holy man by his disciples who chased him exuberantly into exile wherever he might lead them, but also by the authorities, who pursued him relentlessly like a common criminal.

For seven years, as his hair and beard turned a brilliant patriarchal white, my twin, Shmelke, was on the lam. In general the family had no idea of his whereabouts—and I least of all since I had so radically severed the ties not only because of my marriage to Geeta, a gentile, but especially after word reached them of the manner in which our mother’s remains had been processed. I was cut off without hope of access, any reference to me inevitably followed by a sputtering execration as if I were already dead, May her name and memory be blotted out forever and ever, pooh pooh pooh. Nor did Shmelke contact me privately, through alternative underground channels, falling back instead on our extraordinary soul connection from prebirth, trusting that I would know, simply know, trusting that I would be his ally and never betray him. Except for a single extremely critical occasion that forced him to solicit my collusion, he never overtly thought of me, never reached out until finally he arrived in the lap of Mother India and found a haven there at last. During the greater portion of his years as a fugitive, I, like everyone else in our family and the public at large, was not briefed as to where he was in the world. Only when some mention of him and his merry band hit the news were we able to get a precious clue as to his location and stick a voodoo pin into the map, usually when he and his loyalists were kicked out of a place where they had found some temporary sanctuary, or when the Israeli government from which nothing is hidden, every hollow and cavity, blocked or ruptured, all of it exposed and revealed before its seat of glory—only when all-knowing Israel was inspired for some reason to insist yet again on extradition from the country in which he had taken refuge could we pick up his trail and follow it in the media as the case was fought in the courts by his armies of lawyers bankrolled by the exclusive secret society of his supporters and benefactors, independent thinkers one and all, including, thanks to me, the very influential and very rich Charlotte Harlow.

The tale of his wanderings as my brother, Rebbie-ji, recounted them to me in Kolkata at Mother Teresa’s starter hospice, now reconsecrated as Rabbi Tabor’s House of Holy Healing ashram—that tale as he laid it out before me to cheer me up with its happy ending, had by then already been sculpted and polished into lore—epic and myth. Whenever he and his flock, including women and children, arrived in their wanderings at a new place, Shmelke told me, their modus operandi was to take over an entire motel and camp there until, for one reason or another, they were forced to move on.

As he recalled those unsettled years, Shmelke shook his head as if in disbelief. The most amazing thing about it all, he said, was that just about wherever we went—and they had stopped at a multitude of out-of-the-way places, seriously off the beaten track on this lonely planet, he assured me, he would only mention some of the major power points—the motel they took over was always owned by an Indian named Patel. After a while, Shmelke would just roll up to the front desk upon arrival surrounded by his tight escort of the inner circle of his Hasidim secret service, his arm outstretched in readiness for a hearty handshake provided the clerk behind the counter was not a female, and he would boom out, “Sholom aleikhem, Mottel Patel. How’s it going? Vos makht a Yid?” And indeed two of these Mottel Patels, big Mottel and little Mottel, eventually converted to Judaism thanks to my brother’s charismatic influence and took the names Mottel Patel-Aleph, since he was the Patel from America, and Mottel Patel-Zayin from Zimbabwe. Now that these two freshly Jewish Mottel Patels were back home in India they rechanneled the skills acquired for survival in exile, bustling around the ashram in their glossy black beards and sidelocks, great bowled white yarmulkes fitting snugly on their heads setting off their dark skin, robed in long kaftans girded with a rope belt, in charge of overseeing the hospitality end of the operation.

He couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to read the sign hurled directly in his face over and over again by the Master of the Universe, Shmelke told me—that his final destination was India. It could only have been the built-up tension and pressure from being cast adrift as a wanted man, forced to run in circles like a cockroach in the beam of a searchlight that blinded him to the obvious signification of all these Mottel Patels, he thought. My antennae were going bad, the wax was drying up, I wasn’t picking up the vibes. I should have headed straight to Mother India—she was calling out to me, arms open, breasts bared, Come to me, my darling boy, suck, suck—how come I couldn’t see what was right in front of my eyes? My own mother of blessed memory was in India, her earthly remains in the form of ashes, like so many of our holy martyrs scooped with a shovel from the ovens, and you were there too, my sister, my seeker, my twin, calling to me. What was wrong with my head? India and Israel—one and the same—both equally renowned for their formidable mothers and math-genius sons and over-the-top weddings and wildly successful diaspora communities of unstoppable ambition, number one in so many realms, not only motels. Coming to India was like coming home at last, returning to the true Zion, it was as if I were dreaming. From the spiritual angle, India and Israel, both the final destination of the holy seekers of the world, from the political angle, both spitting out their British oppressors, then brutally torn asunder, partitioned in the same blink of an eye 1947–48 in the universal timeline. It was a trauma from which neither has yet recovered and never will, a violent slashing that fired up the sons of Ishmael, wild asses of men, their hands mixing it up with everyone and everyone’s hands mixing it up with them. Israel and India, together they will bring on the end of the world.

In addition to the Patels, my brother picked up other converts along the way, easily identifiable in his retinue and circulating through the ashram because, Let’s face it, didi, as he put it—he had taken to addressing me by the Bengali term for older sister, which I was, by six minutes—even with the beard and peyes and the whole getup, they don’t look Jewish, right? It was not that he sought them out like a missionary, God forbid. It was simply that coming from a place of extreme suffering and despair, the lowest depths, they were restored by Reb Breslov’s potent cocktail of ecstatic release mixed with meditative, confessional solitude, and as if born again.

Most of the converts were collected in America, because it was in the heartland of America, in Postville, Iowa, that my brother and his Hasidim sojourned for the longest period of time during their wanderings in the wilderness; Postville, Iowa, was their Kadesh Barnea, their oasis. A Jewish infrastructure was already conveniently in place around the Chabad kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking sweatshop located there, the town’s main natural resource. And to ease the way for my brother, Shmelke (a vegetarian from his earliest years), there was the flat terrain, so friendly to the disabled in wheelchairs. Above all, he was born in the USA, he was a citizen, he had a US passport, he could even run for president. As an American citizen he could expect full rights and protection from his government. Even if an extradition treaty existed with Israel, he would not be handed over, his legal team assured him, without serious prior concessions from the Jewish State in territory, right of return for Arab refugees, and other nonstarters as part of the deal. Just keep the old lecher, he’s all yours, we’re not giving up anything, Israel would declare, and wash its hands of the whole business. And should his enemies persist out of sheer stupidity and stubbornness, committing the gravest of sins by turning into informers, chasing and pursuing him in exchange for nothing but the sadistic pleasure of the hunt, his lawyers would fight his extradition all the way to the Supreme Court, the fight would drag on for decades, plenty of time to pack up and move on in search of the elusive Promised Land.

As it happened, though, what caused my brother and his followers to decamp from Postville, Iowa, in the end was not the notorious event that took place there—the massive raid by immigration authorities on the Chabad-owned meatpacking plant and glatt kosher slaughterhouse, the arrest and deportation of hundreds of illegal immigrants, the charges of child labor law violations, identity theft, social security manipulation, sexual harassment, fraud, money laundering, and so on and so forth, not to mention the ethical issues churned up when labor exploitation is linked with kosher certification, toxic work environments in which human beings are treated more cruelly than animals destined to be served up in a cholent stew for the Sabbath lunch. Rather, it was the ongoing war between the Chabadniks and the Breslovers over messianic issues—whose rabbi was really dead, whose would reappear quickly and in our time as the Messiah in white robes riding on the back of a white ass, and other matters of equal gravity and weight.

This war had, over the time of my brother’s stay, played itself out mostly in petty, even childish, skirmishes—puncturing each other’s tires, wrapping toilet paper around each other’s trees, chalking each other’s kaftans, fistfights, flicking spitballs, seltzer squirting, dumping slop from rooftops on passersby below, women from rival sects tearing off each other’s wigs and kerchiefs, and so on. Then one day it burst out into a full-scale gang war rumble involving knives from the slaughterhouse and other weaponry. The immediate provocation was a disagreement over which of the two groups could take credit for having inspired the conversion of an exceptionally desirable candidate, a six-foot, six-inch former sheriff named Buck, who came complete with a six-pointed silver star badge. The rumble took place in nearby Waterloo, at the National Cattle Congress fairground not far from the sheep and swine pens, the very same umschlagplatz where the illegal immigrants rounded up from the kosher slaughterhouse had been held, handcuffed and chained together in packs of ten like slaves on the block.

That very night, on the urgent advice of his lawyers and financial backers, my brother and all of his followers left town, and to play it super safe, they also bid farewell to the good old USA, his native land. Joining their ranks, in addition to the Mottel Patel of Postville, Iowa, and his entire extended family, was a mixed mob of leftover illegals who had managed somehow to hold on after the raid and deportations and become converts too, Mexican, Guatemalan, a Ukrainian, a Somali, a Micronesian, and also, as my brother, Reb Breslov, was so proud to inform me, the big prize, Buck himself (but this of course was public information, his figure so striking as he blissfully undercut the Bulvans at every opportunity to carry his beloved guru on his back around the ashram), who, upon his conversion, had taken a new name as if he were reborn. Thereafter he was known as Buki ben Yogli, cited as the leader of the Tribe of Dan in the book of Numbers, alluding in this fashion, for those paying attention, to that most famous Danite of all, the Jewish Hercules, our legendary strongman, Samson.

In consequence of that experience, Shmelke confided to me, he resolved that wherever in the world his wanderings would take him, under no circumstances whatsoever would he step foot on two continents—Antarctica or Australia. The reason for this was that the first was overrun by penguins and the second by Chabadniks, both in their black-and-white suits, an external physical manifestation that possessed deep negative mental and emotional associations for Shmelke, and even more negative inner spiritual signification, so far beneath his sacred mystical level in the aura of the divine. The five remaining continents were enough, he reasoned, in which ultimately to find a haven from his pursuers. On this point, he was immovable. He was going with his instincts, which since childhood had always been impeccable, empowering his survival and ultimate victory over his enemies, shaping him from Rabbi Shmelke Tabor into Reb Breslov Tabor—and ultimately, triumphantly, into Rebbie-ji, the world-famous guru whom the entire global congregation had come to recognize for his extraordinary spiritual access.

In all of the Americas, north, south and middle, Shmelke told me, his favorite stop was Cusco, the old Inca capital city in Peru. He and his followers settled into the Mottel Patel just beyond the astonishing stonewalled Inca ruins of Sacsayhuamán, on a hill overlooking the city. The setting inspired teachings about the temporal nature of human existence, a passing shadow, a fleeting dream, as well as about the rise and fall of empires and nations, and attempts throughout history by human predators to exterminate whole peoples—why some survive, such as we Jews, and others disappear, for instance, the Incas. It was also of course an occasion to reflect on walls—walls that protect, walls that divide, and so forth—Walls that are worshipped, Shmelke added pointedly, such as our own Western Wall in Jerusalem, a form of idolatry, didi. But even Herod the Great could not have constructed walls of such magnificence and perfection as the walls of the fortress or temple or whatever it was of Sacsayhuamán—giant, smooth boulders fitted together without mortar to perfection like a jigsaw puzzle so that even the thinnest blade of a knife could not be inserted between them. Who were the master masons that built these walls? The Spaniards believed it was the work of demons. Others are convinced it was extraterrestrial aliens transporting the giant stones in their spaceships from a faraway planet in a distant solar system, and setting them down on this hill, since such a creation is beyond human power.

But whoever was responsible, for us it was an almost ideal setting, my brother recalled: Walls behind which we could seek the privacy and seclusion in nature to meditate, to practice our hitbodedut and converse with God in solitude from the depths of our souls with such closeness and intimacy, as with a loving father; large open spaces within the walled compound in which my Hasidim could dance ecstatically in circles for hours as tour groups in identical logo hats came and went led by guides holding aloft an umbrella to show the way under the sun, stopping as they trudged back to their buses to drop coins and bills into the cups my boys held out. They were young, my wild boys, busting with energy and enthusiasm in their white, knitted kippot and striped, blue-and-gold kapotes, their beards and peyot flying like birds. I don’t hold them responsible for what happened, they were soaring on spiritual heights, on the condor wings of the one above. But in short order the Incas showed up as if risen from the dead, climbed up the hill in their bright woolen ponchos, blowing on their bamboo windpipes. Who knew they still even existed? We thought the Spanish had taken care of them all. We had no intention, God forbid, of poaching on their territory.

For a week or so, it is true, there was competitive dancing. They were a strange looking bunch, short and squat, stomping around in their striped blankets and vaudeville bowlers, men and women, some even cloaked in the full skin of a llama performing their Andean flash dances, but in the end we had to do the right thing, and cede the turf to them. They claimed to be the indigenous stock, the true Canaanites from time immemorial. I wasn’t about to argue with them. Who is an Inca? Who is a Jew? If you say you’re an Inca, fine by me, you’re an Inca, as long as in return you respect my right to be whatever I decide I am, even the extraterrestrial who built these walls. Because up on that hill, there was no question that in their minds, we were the aliens come back to stake our claim on the rocks.

Still, there was no profit in fighting it. Under the circumstances, for practical reasons alone, it was obvious that in this instance we were the ones who must yield. I don’t blame those so-called Incas, Shmelke said, everyone has to make a living, they just couldn’t deal with the competition. I still regard Cusco as one of the best places we visited. I would recommend it with five stars if I were writing a guidebook, but I was in flight, I had no time for such indulgences, I was not a tourist, I was running for my life, and so I mounted my steed, my trusty wheelchair, and I led my flock down the hill to our next station, whatever it might be, taking along as a convert their best panpipe player, renamed Yehuda Puma. Even now, didi, he is busking in the street outside Kali’s temple, collecting rupees for our cause. The music penetrates my soul, my spirit, my anima, my neshama, you can feel within it the breath of life, struggling.

On the other hand, the worst place we stayed was our final stop in Africa—Western Sahara, not even a country, as far as I know, a territory ruled by Morocco, at least the part of it that our spaceship touched down on bearing our rocks. Thank God the good old reliable Mottel Patel stood out to receive us like a beacon even there, perched in the distance on those miles and miles of sand as far as the eye could see. Other than that, there was nothing there. Nothing! Gurnischt mit gurnischt, I’m telling you. Some tents, a few nomads shuffling around scratching their balls, Bedouins, Berbers—who knows what?—and camels. All the time my wheelchair was getting stuck in the camel hoo-ha. The only positive thing about the place, didi, was that it was like a frontier town in the old West from the cowboy shows, lawless. They never even heard the word extradition, they had no diplomatic relations with anyone, nobody bothered to even recognize them, there was no chance they would ever hand me over. But the place was so inhospitable to human habitation, like the landscape of that distant planet from which we Jews were said to have hauled down the stones of Sacsayhuamán, that at times I even considered turning myself in. Expatriate me, please, I’m begging you, turn me in, get me out of here. Anything is better than this. Think of all the treasure you can acquire from the Israelis to stuff into the carpet saddlebags of your camels in exchange for this old cripple with a long white beard stuck in an antiquated wheelchair. They didn’t know much about the world, these tribals, but one thing they did know for a fact: flip a Jew upside down and shake him, and the coins pour out of every hole, enough to adorn all the wives of Arabia.

Luckily, just as I was about to give into this irrational urge and surrender to some boss man, the king of Morocco himself did me a favor and kicked me out—not in a deal with Israel, he just wanted me gone, he didn’t care where in the world I went. He had heard the false rumors regarding the indecent charges leveled against me. It was not in the interest of the good name and image of his degenerate nation of debauchers to harbor even within the borders of this disputed territory such a reputed deviant and pervert as I so falsely was accused of being.

I regret to report, didi, that these trumped-up charges involving me reached the ears of the king from fellow Jews—for the slanderers let there be no hope, may they perish in an instant, may they be cut down, uprooted, smashed—Israeli Mafia and criminals of Moroccan descent given safe haven in Marrakech and Casablanca in exchange for baksheesh, bankrolling the realm. Murderers and extortionists and money launderers like themselves were one thing, the kingdom could handle that; but an alleged sex offender was intolerable, insupportable in terms of pubic relations. Harboring such a fugitive from the point of view of the officials could damage a country’s good name, ruin its image in the eyes of the civilized world, yes, but even more important, the way our Jewish gangsters so cynically calculated, it could seriously jeopardize by racial association the asylum granted to them.

And I had been so good to these guys in Israel. I had done them so many favors, rescuing their sons and other low-life relatives from drugs, murder, gang warfare, crimes of rape and sex offenses, arms dealings, and so on and so forth, reaching out to their troubled youth, drawing them close, using my powers to rehabilitate their children, turning them into pious, religious Jews who prayed with such fervor three times a day. The transformation was breathtaking, everyone marveled, you can see my handiwork even today, these Sephardi and North African returnees to the faith dancing rapturously in circles and carrying out the good work of our ashram. And this is how they thanked me? Where was their gratitude? You may wonder, didi, how it is that I know they were the ones who squealed on me to the king. The answer is, one among them whose son I had saved from sure madness and death due to heroin addiction, plucking the kid right from the brink—that father still possessed a shred of decency, and he alerted me. I cannot mention his name, his life would not be worth a single dried-up turd of a constipated camel. But he gave me a heads-up, and moreover arranged for a private jet to transport us in the night over the waters and snowcapped mountains to Switzerland, another haven for criminals who could afford it. How it galled me to be regarded as a criminal, didi, I cannot even begin to tell you.

As my brother, Reb Breslov, formulated it, the unique attraction of Switzerland consists of two factors—money and sanitation. For him, the problem arose when these two values collided. From Lugano Airport they were conveyed in a fleet of limousines like dignitaries headed to the World Economic Forum, up over five thousand feet into the Swiss Alps to Davos, and settled into their magic mountain. On the face of it, this might be considered an obvious welcome change from the squalor of Western Sahara, but the problem was, it rained nonstop, through the summer and into the fall, so that even carrying out the daily practice of hitbodedut within the splendor of nature was a dispiriting, sodden affair. Most of the time they were stuck in the sanitarium of their Mottel Patel noshing chocolate, going stir-crazy staring at the cuckoo clock, Shmelke recalled.

It all fell apart in the month of October, when several thousand of his followers made a pilgrimage up the mountain from every corner of the globe with their families and other assorted relations to join him in celebrating the holiday of Sukkot, to partake with their rebbe in the Feast of Tabernacles, sit at his holy table and grab the blessed leftover crumbs from his plate. They put up their personal huts all along the promenade in the center of posh, immaculate Davos, constructing them out of cardboard and plastic and whatever salvageable materials they could find from the hidden trash dumps of this elite burg, reinforcing them with their own garbage, which they generated continuously, including soiled paper diapers and other toxic wastes, covering them with roofs of straw and twigs and a fantastic collection of material culture and junk.

There they lived in those flimsy booths for eight days oblivious in their ecstatic state to the rain as it continued to pound down, eating, sleeping, praying, singing, dancing rapturously in their ethnic costumes, which became less and less interesting as the days passed, drenched through and through. When the luxury hotels and shops lining the avenue refused to allow them in to use the facilities, they made do in the street beside their booths and behind municipal buildings, or squatted along the river, the men separated from the women of course. “What? Do you think this is India?” the town bosses demanded of my brother when they barged one day into the super-sukkah that had been erected for him in his Mottel Patel parking lot to accommodate his tisch. They went on to remind him that Switzerland had an extradition agreement with the State of Israel. Within twenty-four hours, if this eyesore weren’t removed and the freaks weren’t gone, he would be handed over to the Mossad or Shabak or whoever the appropriate Jewish authorities were. They had done the math. No amount of cash was worth turning their exclusive paradise into an Indian slum.

India! Why hadn’t he thought of India before? Why did he keep missing the signs? Despite the personal and racial insults and innuendoes heaped upon him by the fat town burghers, as Shmelke recounted it to me, he would always be grateful to these Swiss anti-Semites for pointing him in the right direction, sparking the idea, telling him where to go. Now he could hear me at last, calling out to him from Mother India across the vast distance, he said, faintly at first, but then with increasing urgency and distress. There are times when your ears can be opened even by the most despicable of wretches, he said. I hear you, sister. You are pulling my umbilical cord as you were wont to do so playfully in our mother’s womb, how well I remember it. I’m coming, didi, I’m on my way.

Over the seven years of my brother’s flight, stopping at many more spiritual stations than I have strength to record, until he arrived in the earthly India for my sake, he said, and found physical refuge at last (but too late, too late for me—and you), he reached out to me once only. I recognized his voice on the phone instantly, it was my own blood voice calling to me, resonating from our shared gestational chamber, though he never identified himself by name, it was not necessary. “I am now going to the most dangerous and symbolic of places. If you are contacted, say, please, that you are my sister, so that things will go well for me, and my soul will live because of you.”

And I was contacted, relentlessly, within the limited brackets of the attention span of the public. It was one of those times during my brother’s journey that his movements surfaced in the media. It was also the exceptional occasion when he did not opt to stay in a Mottel Patel, but instead took up residence with his closest followers in Block 5 at the Auschwitz death camp. He chose Block 5 because of its museum display of mounds of prosthetic limbs, crutches, and similar artifacts confiscated from inmates, to which he ceremoniously added his own wheelchair. For the interim, he was transported on the back of the sheriff, Buki ben Yogli.

The action was titled, Occupy Auschwitz. Every attempt by the Polish officials who ran the complex and museum to eject him and his band of loyalists was fearlessly resisted, dismissed, derided. My brother would not even look at them, or speak to them directly. Astride the shoulders of Buki ben Yogli, framed by the dark opening of Block 5, he would address the mass of his Hasidim gathered outside. He would address them in the softest of voices, and they would repeat what he had just said word for word, clause by clause, in unison, booming it out. Exceedingly quietly my brother said, “The motherfuckers locked us up in this shithole against our will. Now that we voluntarily demand to be here, the motherfuckers are kicking us out. Fuck them!”—and his boys in turn shouted it out. This was an occasion when such language was permissible, my brother ruled, even necessary in the name of heaven for the sake of capturing the attention of the world, unfortunately sick and tired of Jews still kvetching about their Holocaust; a shock to the system was needed to get them to focus. From the perspective of the authorities, the only way to shut them up would be to drag the crippled rabbi out along with his groupies, or turn them over to the Israeli kapos. Either way, it would not be pretty for Polish–Jewish relations.

“I am a child Holocaust survivor,” my brother practically whispered from his Buki ben Yogli heights.

“I am a child Holocaust survivor,” his Hasidim screamed on cue.

He pointed to the dark interior, to three protruding ledges of planks behind him lining the wall in the barrack. “That’s where I slept, on the bottom level of that triple-decker, squeezed in the middle, between ten grown men, the diarrhea from the prisoners above us dripping down through the slats all night long, like leaking toilets, covering us with shit.” His words were repeated, amplified. Who needed microphones?

Within hours a well-fed bureaucrat was produced, affiliated with the august Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, who delivered a passionate speech about the dangers of abusing Holocaust memory—providing fodder to deniers, anti-Semites, and so on. Moreover, he said, they had certified records to prove that my brother was born well after the war, in Brooklyn, New York.

“I am a child Holocaust survivor, asshole,” my brother reiterated calmly and evenly, and the chorus echoed this again, syllable by syllable emphatically at the top of its lungs. “My twin sister, Meena, is also a child Holocaust survivor. She was used as a child prostitute, a sex slave. It screwed her up for life, which is why she now lives in India. You can check out our fucking Holocaust creds with my sister, motherfucker”—and every word he had uttered so softly, so wisely and deeply for those with the gift of understanding, was repeated by his boys at top decibel at the rest stop of each designated clause, including my telephone number, which was the last thing he gave them, digits like a tattoo branded on a forearm, and after that, silence.

When the call came, I provided confirmation. Yes, he is my brother. Yes, we are survivors, my brother and I. After Auschwitz, we are all guilty of surviving.

After Auschwitz, your existence is illusion, as you were marked for death and only by chance were you spared. After Auschwitz, including the arrival of my brother and his merry band to India, wherever they stopped on their journey, chimerical places, mirages, too many to recall here, it is all Maya. Their penultimate station was Uman, in Ukraine, in a final attempt to carry out the tikkun of pursuit of the righteous, the resting place of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the most seductive, most healing guru of them all.

They tried to talk my brother out of making this pilgrimage, his apostles and those who loved him. Way too dangerous, they declared, especially now on Rosh Hashanah when tens of thousands of Hasidim, men only, from all around the world flock to Uman to chant the Tikkun HaKlali beseeching the holy Rabbi Nahman for his intervention in granting a blessed New Year, and also to prophylactically vaccinate their young sons, dragged along for the festivities, from the pollution of wet dreams. It was the Jewish version of the annual Muslim hajj, the Hindu Kumbh Mela, Woodstock, they would be stampeded to death by the herds. The Ukrainian high-rises, slapped together by alcoholics from the cheapest junk, which had been vacated by the locals so that they could rent their apartments to the Jews for extortionate sums, these excuses for housing would crumble and collapse thanks to the pounding and stomping of the Hasidim dancing twenty-four hours a day in ecstatic circles. He would be crushed to death for sure along with the rest of them because, due to the fact that he was crippled in body though not, God forbid, in soul, his apartment would be located on the ground-zero floor, anything higher was not feasible, the elevator, if one existed, chronically out of order, the Sabbath elevator, programmed to stop automatically on each floor on days when it is forbidden to summon it electrically, lost in limbo, the whole pile of schlock would come smashing down upon his head, his precious body parts would be buried in the rubble, their sacred sparks growing more and more feeble. The town would be crawling with drug dealers and bootleggers and prostitutes from end to end, converging on Uman from Kiev and the far corners of the cursed land, Baba Yagas from the black hole of Babi Yar, descending on the Rabbi Nahman mosh pit during this holiday season to service the Hasidim who were soaring on the heights, all their senses ravenous and aroused. Under the circumstances, it was not in his interest to add fuel to the fire by letting himself be seen and recognized in such an environment, considering the nature of the false charges that had been leveled against him, which had launched him into such a mercilessly grueling flight. He would be obliged to go around in public wearing a heavy modesty veil attached to his black hat draped over his face to hide his identity, but above all to conceal such offensive sights from his eyes, to prevent himself from unwittingly catching a glimpse of the short, tight skirts packaging buttocks like two rising challahs, the high heels like a dagger to the prostate, the overflowing milky breasts, the meaty lips, bright, moist red. Above all, his disciples pleaded with him, Uman was now infested with Israeli official types, ruthless enforcers, Mossad, Shin Bet, cops, many of them disguised as fellow Hasidim so that you couldn’t tell who was what. Ukraine had a very strict extradition treaty with Israel, it welcomed these judenrats with open arms, let them do the dirty work. As far as they were concerned, he could be their very own Son of God, JC himself (not to compare, God forbid, to separate by thousands upon thousands of separations), it would not stop them from snatching him in a flash and turning him in for thirty silver shekels, disappearing him, handing him over to the Pharisees, they were shameless, without scruples. No one would ever see him again, except maybe in a glass booth Israeli-style like a freak in a circus, or an iron cage Russian-style like an animal in a zoo before he is dumped into the sea and finds his resting place at last in the belly of the big fish.

God will help, my brother, Rebbie-ji, is reported to have responded with angelic calm. A Mottel Patel will appear to give me shelter. Those girls don’t turn me on, he was immune to that type. Anyway, with all his tzores over the last seven years, his yetzer harah had dried up and shriveled to the size of a raisin, as he liked to remind his tormentors. If ever he had lusted, he lusted no more. Besides, just for their information, the State of Israel had no jurisdiction over him whatsoever. This is because the crimes he is alleged to have committed were not committed in Israel but in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, internationally contested no-man’s land; setting aside the fact that there was no crime, no one disputes the scene of the noncrime. Any charges brought against him by Israel would never stand, even in an Israeli court of law. Don’t worry so much, brothers, Rebbie-ji said. As Moses cried out when he laid eyes on the golden calf, and also Matathias the Maccabee echoing him down through the generations more than a thousand years later in the days of the idol-worshipping Hellenizers, Whoever is with Hashem, come with me! And by Hashem I mean God Almighty ruler of heaven and earth, not some Arab kid named Hashem picking his nose and flicking the snot into your hummus.

Stirred by my brother Shmelke’s words, they followed him into the breach to Uman, their hearts overflowing with pure joy. As the buildings all around them shuddered and quaked from the marathon dancing of the pilgrims, they too danced, but in the streets, around the plastic rubbish bins they set on fire, tossing in all the Israeli flags they could lay their hands on, cremating them. When no more could be found, they improvised with blue paint on white linen or underwear, oblivious to the yellow and brown stains, and on paper, two stripes, a Star of David, a simple design, child’s play, dumping these into the auto-da-fé as well, dancing rapturously in circles as the flames shot up toward the heavens, higher and higher. Reb Breslov, meanwhile, disguised as a Ukrainian peasant, in an embroidered shirt, homespun trousers tucked into his felt boots, and a sheepskin chapka, so as not, God forbid, to go bareheaded, was pushed in a wooden cart by Sheriff Buki ben Yogli, honored for the occasion to serve as my brother’s ba’al agalah, right up to the holy grave of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. For the sake of good diplomatic relations with the host nation, the boss Hasidim in charge of the site for the holiday gave way, standing back alert, waiting to see what this goy would do, watching with eagle eyes for what would happen, their security squad ready to pounce.

Tears streaming down his face, Reb Breslov, my brother, raised his voice and cried out in English, in an all-purpose Russian accent picked up from so many of his disciples rescued from heroin dens and jail cells. “On kholiday of repentance, I make long journey to ask forgiveness for sins against your people.” He named names, pounding his chest mightily with his fist with each recitation: Bogdan Khmelnytzki. Symon Petilura. Ivan Demjanjuk. “Remember Babi Yar!” he suddenly bellowed. “For sins we commit against Jewish people, let khassids waste Uman, please, trash khole place, it is okeydokey, we deserve, khave fun boys, welcome, welcome, khappy New Year!”

A righteous gentile. The establishment overseers were satisfied, they relaxed.

He pressed his forehead against the side of the holy tomb, my brother, my twin, brushed his hand over the faint remains of graffiti, Jew-hating slurs not fully wiped away, and wept, his shoulders pumping. “Tatte, Tatte,” he cried in muffled Yiddish, “I have suffered so much, I have no home, there is no place in the world for me to go. They pursue me for no reason, like a dog, they surround me all around, yet in God’s name I will cut them off, for from your commandments I have never swerved.”

As he departed the holy gravesite with no discernible provocation or incident to mar the visit, but with agonizing regret, never knowing if he would ever again see his holy father in this life, a building to his right crumbled almost silently to the ground. To his left, a tongue of flame leapt up. Word had passed to his Hasidim as they formed a train behind him, that the holy Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav had appeared to his gilgul Reb Breslov in a vision. “Shmelke, Shmelke,” Rabbi Nahman had called out to him from the depths of his tomb. “Here I am,” my brother had replied. Rabbi Nahman spoke: “Wherever I would go during my brief span on earth, I was always going to the land of Israel. The heavenly land of Israel. Follow in my footsteps, my son. India is now the earthly Israel. Go to India. Seek there and seek there, because for now, until my return, all that there is, is there.”

They processed away from the site, my brother and his Hasidim, past buildings collapsing on one side, on the other side, everything burning, directly to Sofia Park, where a helicopter awaited them on a clearing. Within minutes they were swooped up and carried away, “As if on eagle’s wings, like the chariot of Eliyahu the prophet,” Shmelke was telling me when I opened my eyes to find myself in Kolkata, in his House of Holy Healing—when finally I was ready to let it be known that I had emerged from the depths of self and had begun tentatively to take in the other. “As you know, didi, our sages teach that danger to life trumps the Sabbath. Also here in this country of my refuge, saving a life is considered the supreme dharma according to the Vedas and the teachings of the most learned Brahmins. I was in mortal danger. My cover was blown. The Israeli collaborators were on to me, also the Ukrainian perpetrators, also the Hasidim bystanders from other sects. Under those circumstances it was permissible to violate the prohibition against travel on the holiday. This was confirmed by the mystical appearance of the chopper on that pad. It was literally a sign from heaven, ignoring it would have been the gravest of sins, it was a positive commandment from the One Above that could not be refused, it was my duty to save my life and let myself be borne aloft, higher and higher.”

He had taken to visiting me once a day for the relief of unburdening to his sister, his twin, all that had happened to him during the years of our separation and his wanderings, even though in his heart he believed I must already know everything without needing to be told, just as, when we were children, I could always tell him, in case he had forgotten, what he had dreamed in the night by virtue of having shared a womb for forty weeks, and he too knew everything about me without requiring further elaboration. He would roll up in his wheelchair at unspecified times when the spirit seized him, into the room in his private suite in the House of Holy Healing that I shared in those first weeks with the old woman on the bed across from me who gave off a warm, faint fragrance like chicken soup with matzah balls, filling us both with such sweetly painful nostalgia. I had been as motionless and as uncommunicative as my roommate laid out over there when he had started coming by, he told me. But it was not the same, Shmelke insisted. I was his wombmate. Let them all think I wasn’t registering a word he was saying as he went on and on at my bedside about his ordeal of wanderings. He had no doubt I was taking it all in, not missing a single thing, I was absorbing and understanding every syllable. Besides—he flashed me with his wicked grin—there were definite advantages to talking to a woman with no chance of being interrupted, no chance she’d butt in to demand equal time to disgorge her own problems or to contradict or to argue, it is an ideal situation for good conversation.

The old lady on the twin bed across the room had been shipped to him special delivery from Varanasi via Mumbai coinciding almost exactly with his arrival in Kolkata. She was his one-woman welcoming committee to this former hospice. It was believed she was a Jewess, a Hebrew holy woman, and therefore his department. This conclusion was reached after she was removed from her funeral pyre on the cremation ground of Manikarnika Ghat, when she sat up, opened her eyes with their singed lashes, and inquired if she was dead yet. Eventually it was determined that she must be Jewish as history and experience have shown that Jews are not flammable, like cockroaches they cannot be entirely exterminated, they stubbornly survive in some form as an entity to haunt you, to remind you for eternity of how you tried to stamp them out. She was passed off to the Jewish team at Assi Ghat because she could no longer remain among the living; she had been contaminated by death, it was mandatory that she be isolated from human society. From Benares she was dispatched to the Bombay emissaries, and now here she was where the powers decreed she belonged—with my fugitive brother in a former hospice for the dying right next door to the temple of Kali, the great mother goddess who fornicated among the dead on the cremation grounds, Shmelke said.

He didn’t mind. She was no trouble at all, especially now with Manika attending to her with, if anything, a tenderness even more exemplary than she poured out on me, if that was possible—dribbling hydration into her mouth, washing and changing her, sticking a tissue down her throat to draw out the thick green gelatinous globs of slime blocking her passage. She could stay on as long as she liked as far as Shmelke was concerned, until there was agreement on her status, whether she could be counted among the living or the dead—“A far more complicated determination than you might imagine,” he observed.

He would give me an example from his own personal experience. Had I ever wondered about the ready acceptance that he, a proud, openly Jewish man, had enjoyed and continued to enjoy here in Kolkata, in a former Christian hospice, abutting such a volatile major Hindu temple? It would be a mistake to attribute this to Indian tolerance, which, in any case, did not exist, it was a total myth, or to the cash Charlotte and some other fat cats forked over, or to anything else of that sort. No. It was that the local Bengalis, when they had laid eyes on him with his long white beard and long white hair and long flowing white robe, were gripped with overwhelming joy that their divine poet, their Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whom they had mourned with such a massive outpouring of grief, had returned. He had come back to them, he was not dead after all, here he was, yes, it is true, confined to a wheelchair now, crippled unfortunately, but still dazzling with his white mane in his white robes as if packaged by central casting—their beloved poet possessed of such fine lofty sentiments, their prophet, their Oriental mystic, known familiarly as Rabi Thakur, Shmelke recounted, relishing the memory. And when word spread that my brother’s name was Rabbi Tabor, all doubts vanished. Thousands mobbed the House of Holy Healing to celebrate the return of Rabi Thakur, lining up to perform pranam due the elderly, and especially an honored sage of such renown and distinction, waiting patiently for the privilege of bending down to reverently touch his feet with their hands as he in turn reached out to touch their heads in blessing. He sat there in his wheelchair for a week, my brother, Shmelke, receiving pranam and giving blessings, it almost completely wiped him out, his arms felt as heavy as stones, two of his Hasidim were required to hold them up, like Aaron and Hur held up Moses’s hands so that Joshua could triumph in his battle against the Amalekites in the field below. In just this way, with his raised hands, my brother, Shmelke, defeated his Israeli pursuers and tormentors of the innocent. There was no chance they would dare try to grab him and spirit him away now. It would start a world-class riot for sure in a fiery nation possessed of nuclear capacity. He was home safe.

What terrible sin had Rabi Thakur committed, and the old lady in that bed across the room, that prevented them from being set free? And I, what terrible sin had I committed in a past life to be stricken with such suffering? Cut me loose from the wheel of life, I cried. Where is my liberation? I have lost everything. I have nothing, like a sannyasi who is regarded as dead. Let me set out then like a sannyasi with nothing in my hands but a stick and a bowl to find my moksha.

Not yet, sister, Shmelke responded.

He needed me now. There was no one else he could trust as he could trust me, for my loyalty, my advice, my discretion. He was a wanted man, wanted in both senses, negative and positive, by enemy and devotee, all of it a burden too heavy to bear alone. He needed my help. If I loved him, I would stay. If I felt an uncontrollable need at this time to cycle into ascetic mode without delay, I could begin my austerities here in the House of Holy Healing even as I carried out my duties as his counselor and confidante—let my hair grow wild and matted, abstain from food and drink three times a week, clothe myself in rags, carry a skull for a drinking cup, sleep on a stretcher bier on the cold ground, detach myself from all comforts and pleasures, surrender desire, cease wanting. If I felt I had sinned in another life, I could undertake tikkun now through selfless service. As it happened, right at this very moment, there was an urgent need here at the House of Holy Healing for a woman to oversee the prepubescents, my brother said. He would have me moved tonight from this room in his suite to the prepubescent pod in the great ward. He would put me in charge of them, the girls they had rescued who had been sold by their mothers.