A GIFT FROM GOD

Before my mother got to know my father, before she got on a plane to the Netherlands, before she packed two large suitcases with bangles, necklaces, and earrings, before all that, she looked after the captain of a ship. His name was Rajesh Mudgal. He was his family’s eldest son and had thick, dark hair that gleamed in the sunshine.

The captain had fallen ill on the Arabian Sea. The nearest coast was 36 hours’ sailing away. Upon his return to shore, Rajesh Mudgal was covered in lumps. He spent a day on the operating table at Bombay hospital. His life was saved, but at a cost: three toes on his right foot, the fingertips of his right hand, and his left leg up to the knee. Rajesh Mudgal would never captain a ship again; he would never sail the seas again.

As soon as the captain was strong enough, he returned home. A special compartment had been reserved for him on the train to Agra, where his parents lived in the gently rolling hills; where he had been born and raised. That night, on the jolting train, Rajesh Mudgal experienced his first phantom pains and screamed until sunrise.

The sight of his native soil brought tears to his eyes. He saw the trees, the houses, and the roads of his childhood; he saw the land he’d swapped for the sea, the dust for the waves. His mother uttered a cry that flew across the hills like a bird. Children gathered around the stretcher and gawped at the dark-blue uniform with the copper buttons, the beautiful trousers that had been mutilated with a pair of scissors. Days of prayer followed.

And then one morning my mother turned up among the trees, the houses, and the roads of dust. She was a white apparition in the sun, a nurse with a crackling aura. With her youth, beauty, and innocence, she entered the house of the Mudgal family, a large, bright home. The family was rich. Father Mudgal was a judge, a man with a voice of stone, each word heavy as a rock. My mother drank tea with the patient’s mother. It was quiet; this was a house of sorrow. You could hear a tear drop. Then my mother was taken to the patient. She scrutinised him, seeing his dark, gleaming hair, the perfectly straight parting: the hair of a film star. They didn’t exchange any words. My mother cleaned the captain’s wounds, changed his bandages, in silence. Rajesh Mudgal endured it all. He clenched his jaw, thinking of the sea: salty rain, waves as grey as elephants.

Slowly, very slowly, the patient improved, recovered his strength. My mother could tell by his eyes: new tiny wrinkles in the skin around their corners, a brilliance in the black lakes of his irises. Rajesh Mudgal’s eyes were smiling. One morning, she began to long for them. Suddenly it was there, the longing, and it was warm and quick as lightning, everywhere and nowhere at once. Never before had she woken with such clarity, as if the new day’s sun had been poured directly into her soul. Her body was made of light; her fingertips tingled.

She wondered what Rajesh Mudgal might be feeling. My mother tried to read his face. She saw furrows. The longer she looked, the more lines, the more creases of pain, she discovered: in his forehead, around his mouth, between his eyebrows. She was overcome by compassion. My mother took his hand, the hand with the five stumps for fingers. Squeezing it softly, she seemed to feel a spark. Startled, she dropped the hand. Suddenly, the situation dawned on her. She was a nurse; he was the scion of a wealthy family. He was an invalid; she was a woman in the prime of her life.

‘We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving,’ Cyril Connolly writes in his memoir The Unquiet Grave. ‘We may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times — so will a day in early September, though it be six hours shorter, seem as hot as one in June.’ And he adds, like a dagger thrust: ‘And on how that first true love affair will shape depends the pattern of our lives.’

Three years separated her farewell to Rajesh Mudgal and her meeting with Theodorus Henricus van der Kwast — three years in which my mother lived in various places and looked after other patients, cleaning their wounds, listening to their woes, and caressing their brows, but she never forgot Rajesh Mudgal’s smiling eyes. They wrote each other long letters, with words that got more and more impressive. When my mother touched Rajesh Mudgal’s words, she could feel the warmth in her body — the warmth that was everywhere and nowhere at once.

‘It’s better this way,’ she told herself after saying goodbye to the captain. But she cried. And in the quiet house, her tears were as loud as a waterfall up in the mountains. The captain heaved himself out of bed and dragged his body across the floor to my mother. Not at sea, looking death in the eye, nor in hospital, waking up without his left foot, had the captain ever cried. But now the tears rolled down his cheeks, dripping onto the white tiles of the large, bright home.

The judge’s voice remains etched on my mother’s memory: ‘Disappear and don’t ever come back!’ And so she went; she left without looking back, with her eyes cast down, fixed on the dust on the roads.

By the time my father falls in love with my mother, much of the pattern has been woven: dark thread, a shroud. They meet in the library of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where my father has a part-time job as a library assistant and my mother tries to come to grips with the angular Dutch language. She’d packed two suitcases, boarded a plane, and got off at Schiphol. Through a sister living in The Hague, she found a job as a nurse in Rotterdam. My mother wanted to get some experience abroad, but less than six months later she was ready to return. The words in the captain’s letters were so big that my mother succumbed to them. But then she’s offered a job as a theatre nurse. The hospital will pay for her training and give her a contract. She writes to the captain to say that she’ll stay one more year before coming back with enough money for a house, in which she will look after him forever. There are no bigger words in a human life.

It’s the last letter.

This is what happened: my father proposes marriage to my mother in the library. She says no right away. But my father doesn’t understand her. He doesn’t get the word no. The meaning of the word is suddenly beyond him. My mother repeats it.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No, no, no.’

My father doesn’t take no for an answer. He remains on his knees, waiting for the word we all wait for at least once in our lives.

In the days that follow, my mother says ‘no’ more than a million times. That, at any rate, is what has been passed down — passed down by her: ‘I said no so many times that if I had a grain of rice for every no, it would feed the whole of India.’

This is followed by the tears, the tears that soften my mother, the tears to which I owe my existence. ‘I felt sorry for him,’ my mother tells me when, years after my birth, I ask her why in God’s name she married my father. ‘I couldn’t bear any more pity, or shed any more tears.’

They got married one day early in September — warm, yet so much shorter than the endless days of longing in the hills of Agra. Those never-ending summer days. Three months later, my mother is pregnant. Gently, she caresses her belly, her fingertips tingling. And her body grows light again, even though it’s the darkest month of the year: a rainy December.

The letters keep coming. The envelopes get thicker, the captain’s words sadder. My mother doesn’t have the heart to write him back.

My eldest brother is born at Dijkzigt Hospital in Rotterdam on 28 August 1977, at a quarter past seven in the morning. The baby’s gender comes as a big surprise to my parents. They were expecting a girl; both had this strong gut feeling. It was probably the only feeling they ever shared, and perhaps wrong for that very reason. Their first child is a boy, and that boy now needs a name. My mother, her hair wet, her forehead still sweaty, comes up with Ashirwad. It’s Indian for gift from God, just like Theodore. My father doesn’t come up with anything. Perhaps he still can’t believe he’s holding a son in his arms: a small creature with pink arms, legs, and a willy.

Ashirwad van der Kwast. He’s the firstborn, the eldest son, the pride and joy. Before the clock strikes noon, my mother makes her way to the bank located inside the hospital. In her arms she holds my brother — a shrivelled little pear, a groaning potato. His eyes are open, his dark eyes with that bluish tinge only newborns have. ‘That swimming, sloping, elusive something’, as Nabokov describes the baby iris blue, ‘which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born.’

At the hospital branch of AMRO bank, my mother opens an account for my brother and deposits 1,000 guilders. My imagination deserts me when I try to picture where she gets those 1,000 guilders. Where were those bank notes during the delivery? In her hair? Under the bed? My mother hands the bank clerk the money, the money she saved up as a nurse, and thinks of the future, when Ashirwad is studying and dating girls and he can buy them drinks with her money. My brother sees ancient, fabulous forests, birds, and fruit, and groans softly — peaceful music on a peaceful day.

Their happiness is immense. It’s the kind of happiness that only a firstborn generates: love so pure you can’t imagine ever feeling it again. I think of the moments of light right after the birth of my son, my own firstborn — light so bright it illuminates everything: the days, the years, right up until this moment. And so I can visualise the happiness of 1977: a new life, a new dawn. Slowly, tender-loving-slowly, the little hands, the little fingers move. Slowly, the eyes open. And tender-loving-slowly, you can see the mind thinking, feeling, and wanting. My baby brother drinks from the breast, looks at everything shiny and reflective, and cries when it all becomes too much: the people, the things, the world. His eyes fall shut.

Then the days fly past. He touches everything and stuffs clothespegs and pencils into his mouth. His hands are grasping and groping, his legs trying hard to stand. My father leans over him, his hands under the boy’s armpits, and so they make the first few steps together. Crowing — a smile trying to be bigger than the mouth that forms it.

If only time could issue a warning: gears that start grinding, a dial that starts slowing down. But no, time stands still, all of a sudden, just like that, and the clock never ticks again. My eldest brother has an epileptic seizure. With his arms and legs flailing and his eyes rolling, he stops breathing. It happens at night, in The Hague, where my mother is staying with her sister. Sleeping in the carrycot is Johan, my middle brother, two weeks old, his irises pale blue. Next to my mother, on the guest bed, is Ashirwad. She tries to insert a teaspoon between his tongue and his teeth. When I think of loneliness, I picture this desperate scene: my mother, my thrashing brother, and a teaspoon being wrenched into his mouth. My father is in Rotterdam, working on his PhD thesis — a study into mice with the red blood cells of sheep injected into them.

Twelve hours earlier, my parents had gone for a walk, pushing the dark-blue pram in which Johan was sighing and sleeping. I wasn’t there; I hadn’t been born yet. I’ve never looked up the weather report for Thursday 15 March 1979, and yet I can smell the air that day: paving slabs drying in the sun, crocuses, wet grass. The words evoke a dazzling day in spring, in the way that people with synaesthesia can see colours at the mention of numbers.

Ashirwad is with the next-door neighbour, the woman who will be known to me as Aunt Ank years later. She has offered to look after him, so my parents can go for a quiet stroll with the baby. At first my mother doesn’t want to leave the house without Ashirwad, but my father manages to persuade her. She takes the boy to the neighbours, where she plants a kiss on his forehead, telling him they won’t be far, they’ll be back soon. She’ll never forgive herself. Half an hour later, my mother is handed back a sick Ashirwad. His poo is green and foul-smelling. He’s running a fever.

A crying baby, a sick child, and a thesis that needs to be finished: my mother decides to go and stay with her sister in The Hague. There, in a small room, in the dark, my eldest brother has a seizure. There, the tears that from now on will be my mother’s constant companion, anywhere and anytime, start flowing.

A child doesn’t understand grief. His world lets grief trickle through like sand does water. I never understood my mother’s tears. Life was beautiful to me — full of joy and energy. I spent my time playing, running, and yelling. I learnt to write my name, figured out how much three times seven is, and told my parents the time. But in all this, my mother saw the things that Ashirwad would never be able to do.

It would be many years, dozens of visits to the consultant’s office, and just as many examinations in hospital before the doctors finally diagnosed my brother. Hell for any parent. ‘Learning disabilities’ was the label attached to Ashirwad. The label was supposed to lighten the load. Now, at last, my parents knew what was wrong with their son; now they could carry on with their lives. But for my mother, time had frozen.

The older you get, the more grief you retain. It begins to cling to you, and you learn to take it all in. Yet I didn’t understand my mother’s grief until I was 27, until the summer I became a father myself. As I read Job by Joseph Roth, tears rolled down my cheeks.

The novel’s subtitle is the story of a simple man. Its protagonist, Mendel Singer, a teacher at the village school and father to four children, is indeed a simple, God-fearing man: ‘Hundreds of thousands before him had lived and taught as he did.’ Yet his wife, Deborah, is one of a kind. She’s the saddest of all mothers in literature. She was the one who first revealed to me the extent of my mother’s grief. Deborah’s son has a skull the size of a pumpkin, his legs are crooked and limp, and, like Ashirwad, he suffers epileptic seizures.

That grief is as big as an ocean — an infinite mass, deep and dark. Since her son Menuchim’s birth, night has reigned supreme in Deborah’s heart. Grief slinks into every joy; all celebrations are torture. And for Menuchim’s mother, too, time stands still: ‘There was no spring and no summer. All seasons were winter. The sun rose, but it did not warm. Hope alone refused to die.’

My mother’s hope refused to die, too: the hope for a miracle. Year on year, the money in Ashirwad’s savings account grows. Before bed, my mother tells me that in the future my eldest brother will take me everywhere in a car. She whispers to me, sitting at the foot of the bed. When I am a teenager and go to parties, Ashirwad will lend me a white shirt and give me pocket money. That’s how it’s done in Indian families; that’s what an eldest son is for — the family’s pride and joy. Then the light is switched off and my mother’s footsteps die away in the night. The fairytales of my childhood were not Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, but Ashirwad. He would become a doctor, buy a car, marry a beautiful princess, and live happily ever after.

Every morning, my mother combs a parting into Ashirwad’s hair. Right now, he’s still going to a school for children with severe learning disabilities, but as soon as her prayers are heard, he’ll be going to primary school de watertoren, just like Johan and me. Mr De Gier, the head teacher, has already met him. My mother introduced him as follows: ‘This is Ashirwad; he’ll be skipping five classes soon.’

Day in, day out, Menuchim’s mother prays to her Jewish God, but when her prayers aren’t heard, she turns to her dead ancestors. She invokes her parents; Menuchim’s grandfather, after whom her cripple son has been named; Abraham, Isaac, and Jakob; and Moses’s bones. My mother, on her part, makes grateful use of the many Hindu gods.

First she addresses her prayers to Shiva, who’s responsible for the destruction of evil. My mother sees Ashirwad’s mental disability as an evil spirit that must be exorcised. This may sound harsh, but it isn’t. (At a later stage, my mother will also pray to Shiva on Johan’s and my behalf. My middle brother ends up marrying a Muslim woman, while I stop studying to start work on a novel. We, too, are possessed by an evil spirit that must be exorcised.) It’s routine, good practice.

Praying is something my mother always does in the attic, a room we children are forbidden from entering. That said, every now and then we’re allowed in on our stockinged feet. I remember my mother with a red, transparent shawl over her head, chanting softy and rocking back and forth. Incense fills the attic room with exotic fragrances and swirling coils of smoke that I try to follow. Here, too, are tears. But the tears rolling down my mother’s cheeks in the prayer room dry faster than they do elsewhere. They seem to revitalise her. They’re a shower of solace.

My mother tasks me with measuring the effects of her prayers to Shiva. And so, every day, I point to the antique wall clock in the living room and ask Ashirwad to tell me the time.

‘Time to eat,’ he usually says.

Or else: ‘Time to watch television.’

Before long, my mother begins to address her prayers to Durga, the many-armed goddess who’s often depicted seated on a tiger; Durga, the renowned slayer of demons. But Ashirwad remains Ashirwad. Even Krishna, the source of everything, is invoked, kneeling, singing, crying, and rocking. Many Hindu gods follow — a total of 52, the number to which my mother adheres. Some Hindus go with one or three; others swear by 30 million gods. My mother sticks to a reasonable 52, and when all of these gods have been invoked in vain, she concludes: ‘You don’t need to be able to tell the time to get your driver’s licence.’

Hope springs eternal.

Yet something changes. My mother grows restless, irritable, and one day suspicion sneaks into her life. It’s a form of paranoia that grows progressively stronger and comes to shape the rest of her life. The first time we’re confronted with it, the whole family is sitting at the dinner table. We’re eating spaghetti with ready-made tomato sauce when suddenly my mother shouts out: ‘Kelly!’ Nobody knows what’s going on, or to whom my mother’s referring. My father is the first to react. He chews and swallows his mouthful before asking: ‘Veena, who’s Kelly?’

Her eyes fill with tears: a sea to the left, a sea to the right. We don’t breathe a word and look down at our plates.

‘He ate Kelly’s food,’ my mother says, pointing to Ashirwad. ‘When we took Johan for a walk in the pram and left Ashirwad with the neighbours, he ate dog food.’

Kelly is the neighbours’ dog, Aunt Ank’s Jack Russell. He’s the new evil spirit.

My mother takes a deep breath. I can see the deluge welling up in her eyes. Her voice trembles when she speaks, when she says it was the dog food that caused Ashirwad’s epileptic seizure.

Ashirwad is the only one who carries on eating, slurping up long strands of spaghetti.

And then my mother’s eyes burst their banks. ‘I didn’t want to,’ she screams. ‘I didn’t want to go out walking without Ashirwad. You forced me!’ She takes off one of her slippers and hurls it in my father’s direction. He manages to duck just in time. It’s the first flying object in a long series punctuating my childhood. The second slipper does hit its target. A plate follows, and then a glass, resulting in crashing shards, and tears streaming down her face like rivers.

Ashirwad puts down his cutlery and says: ‘I don’t like dog food.’ He pulls a disgusted face, before picking up his cutlery again and taking a large mouthful of spaghetti with tomato sauce, his favourite food.

‘Mum, are we eating snakies tonight?’ he asks practically every day. To him, spaghetti is known as snakies; the pasta reminds him of snakes. He’s got a point.

In the days that follow, Kelly has to fear for her life. My mother launches a guerrilla war against the neighbours’ dark-brown-spotted Jack Russell. She chases the dog with her rolling pin and feeds the animal dog biscuits rubbed with hot chilli peppers, and when Kelly takes a piss outside our front door, my mother drops a telephone directory from the third floor. As sacred as the cow is to Indians, so devilish Kelly is to my mother.

The day after Aunt Ank’s children complain about singed fur following a failed attempt to sacrifice the Jack Russell, the police turn up on our doorstep. My mother manages to give the officers the brush-off with a story about sparks jumping from the tandoori clay oven onto the dog. We don’t actually own a tandoori clay oven, but why tell the officers that? They eat heartily from the chicken legs my mother dishes up, and even take some home to their wives. My mother’s tandoori chicken is mouth-watering, and beyond compare in the Netherlands. How she does it without a traditional clay oven remains a mystery to me, but whoever has a taste of it is sold.

In the end, Kelly meets her demise by accident. She’s run over by a garbage truck. It’s the destructive force of chance — of fate, you might say — but my mother’s adamant that Shiva is behind the fatal accident. At long last, the slayer of evil has done his job.

‘If it hadn’t been for Kelly, Ashirwad would be normal. Now that Kelly’s gone, Ashirwad will be normal again.’ These are my mother’s words; this is her firm belief. And we gradually turn away from her — my father, my middle brother, and me. The only one who can’t stand up to her is Ashirwad. He’ll always be a four-year-old child, tied to his mother’s apron strings. He takes her at her word.

‘Ashirwad, one day you’ll be better and you’ll be able to tie your own shoelaces.’

‘One day you’ll be studying at Cambridge and become an eminent lawyer.’

‘And when I’m old, Ashirwad, when your mother is grey and she spends all day in bed, you’ll make me proud. You’ll drop by in your chauffeured car and I’ll kiss your forehead.’

There’s a mine inside her, a shaft leading to an infinite store of hope. It’s so dark down there you can’t see a thing except darkness. But my mother finds solace in these subterranean vaults. Wandering through its tunnels, she’s as lonely as she was the night Ashirwad suffered his epileptic seizure. She calls out his name, and the dark tunnels respond in a thousand voices. One day she’ll recover him — her pride, her everything.

In Job, Deborah’s eternal hope is nourished by the words of a holy man. When Menuchim is thirteen months old and he starts groaning like an animal, the desperate Deborah travels to the Rabbi of Kluczýsk. She’s determined to gaze into the rabbi’s eyes to see if they truly reflect the Almighty God. But her own eyes are oceans, and she sees the holy man from behind white waves of water and salt. And although he whispers, she hears his voice from up close: ‘Menuchim, Mendel’s son, will be healed. There will not be many like him in Israel … Have no fear, and go home!’

And so my mother and Deborah go on, while the bellows of hope keep moaning and groaning. Then, one day, the longed-for miracle happens. Menuchim utters his first word: ‘Mama.’

Deborah’s eyes fill with tears, sweet and warm this time.

‘Mama,’ Menuchim says again, and again, and a thousand times over.

Her son speaks. Her prayers haven’t been in vain. ‘It meant that Menuchim would be strong and big, wise and good, as the words of the blessing had promised.’

Wise and good: it sounds like the profile of a judge, or a lawyer. Menuchim, too, is headed for a glorious career. Besides ‘mummy’, my eldest brother could also say, ‘Daddy, why do you always shake your head?’ But he can’t read or write. He still can’t by the time he’s twelve, and my mother continues to comb his hair into a side parting. Every morning, she sprinkles Ashirwad’s thick, dark hair with a watering can in the garden, before combing it into a perfectly straight parting. ‘How handsome you are,’ I often hear her mutter. ‘The girls will be all over you.’

One glorious morning in summer, the comb drops from my mother’s hands. ‘Rajesh Mudgal,’ she says, the way she once uttered Kelly’s name. It’s the sun sparkling on my brother’s black hair, on the parting — the hair of a film star. My mother screams the captain’s name, and again, a thousand times over.

From that day on, Rajesh Mudgal is back in my mother’s life, and a new feature of ours. We’re sitting at the table, eating spaghetti with tomato sauce, as my mother unfolds her theory. We keep calm and carry on eating, my father and my brothers. We’ve heard worse. This is the theory: Ashirwad is disabled because of a curse put on him by the captain. My mother tells us about Rajesh Mudgal. Like Ashirwad, he was the firstborn, the eldest son, the family’s pride and joy. ‘He had two toes, half a right hand, and no left foot. But he had eyes that smiled like spring and summer.’ Not much later, the first slipper comes flying at my father, followed by several other items on the table. My mother yells that it’s all his fault. If he hadn’t proposed marriage to her, she’d have married the captain. And if she’d married the captain, Ashirwad wouldn’t be here now.

This is what she yells; this is what she cries.

Like Mendel Singer, my father is a simple man. He picks up the slippers and carries them back to my mother. He gathers up the shards of glass and the bits of food.

Ashirwad puts his cutlery down for a moment. ‘It’s a good thing Mummy didn’t marry the captain.’ Then he carries on shovelling food into his mouth.

‘Days drew themselves out into weeks, weeks grew into months, twelve months made a year.’ And ten years turns my mother into a woman possessed — possessed by hope. She takes Ashirwad to mass healings with Jomanda in Tiel, a famous medium, and she takes him to Lourdes. Anything that reeks of miracles is given a go. Wizards, clairvoyants, and spiritualists — they’re all on the list. There’s even a visit to a psychic fakir in a Rotterdam suburb. By then, Ashirwad is 22, averse to physical contact and prone to temper tantrums. When the fakir tries to pierce my eldest brother’s cheek with a needle, the man has to pay for it with a black eye. Even next-door neighbours, postmen and -women, and bus drivers are no longer safe. And sometimes my mother gets hit, too. Ashirwad is 1.96 metres, my mother more than a foot shorter. When he flies into a rage, there’s nothing she can do except shout, telling him to stop kicking and lashing out. And when he’s finally calm again, she tells him: ‘I love you so much, Ashirwad. You’re my darling, my firstborn, my pride and joy.’ Confused and crying his eyes out, he puts his head on my mother’s shoulder. She’s crying too, and always confused, and rests her head on his.

Once upon a time she was a white apparition in the sun, with the crisp aura of youth, beauty, and innocence.

If only she’d never left.

If only she’d never married my father.

If only she’d never gone for a walk without Ashirwad.

This is what she tells herself. This is what she’ll never stop telling herself. And she caresses Ashirwad’s dark hair.

By then, I’ve already left home. Likewise, my middle brother is living somewhere else, in Utrecht, where he’s studying physical geography. We only come home at the weekends, with our dirty laundry and empty stomachs.

Sometimes we eat tandoori chicken, but usually snakies.

Then comes the moment Ashirwad leaves home, too. He moves into an assisted living facility for disabled people on Corrie Hartonglaan, a ten-minute bike ride from Tiberiaslaan, where my parents now live. Although it’s the best solution all around, my mother is struggling to come to terms with it. Every day she cycles over to see her eternal four-year-old. She asks him what he did in daycare, how much he’s eaten, what shows he’s seen on television. And then she cycles home again, where it’s quiet and she’s afraid she might hear her own tears drop.

On Corrie Hartonglaan, Ashirwad lives with seven other people — or clients, as they’re called. There’s Jopie, who likes to plunge her hands into a bowl of sweetcorn; Rik, who’s crazy about Michael Jackson; and Arno, who’s always dressed in his football kit: Feyenoord shirt, Feyenoord pants, and Feyenoord scarf (even in summer). One of them teaches Ashirwad the word handicapped. But he doesn’t agree with the meaning; that’s to say, he doesn’t think it applies to him. One day, when my mother is visiting, Ashirwad says: ‘I’m not handicapped. I’m Ashirwad.’

My mother nods and says: ‘You’re a gift, a gift from God.’

Like many other Jews, the Singer family emigrates to the United States, where they hope to secure a better future. Menuchim stays behind, even though the Rabbi of Kluczýsk has entreated Deborah: ‘Do not send him away from your side; he is yours even as a healthy child is.’

The hope, the unfailing, the undying hope, had finally crumbled and blown away. The miracle Menuchim’s mother had been waiting for all those years — ‘day and night, hour after hour’ — hasn’t come to pass.

My parents emigrate to Canada, and Ashirwad stays behind, too. My father sets off first, and months later my mother boards a plane as well — with all her earthly belongings, except her children. On the day of her departure, I was abroad myself, so I didn’t get to say goodbye to her or see what the parting between she and Ashirwad was like. I only know how painful the other goodbye was: ‘Weeping, she climbed into the wagon. She did not see the faces of the people whose hands she pressed. Her two eyes were two great oceans of tears. She heard the clatter of the horses’ hooves. She was off. She cried aloud; she did not know that she cried aloud; something cried in her; her heart had a mouth and cried.’

The grief that once flowed through me like water flows through sand, and that later began to stick to me like a wet leaf in autumn — that grief now suffocates me. It’s the grief for children who’ll never learn to read, write, do arithmetic, or tell time; who’ll never go on dates, but who’ll grow quieter and start pulling out their own eyebrows and lashes, because they don’t understand themselves.

Ashirwad never skipped five classes. He never skipped a single class.

In the end, Menuchim does quite well for himself, although his mother doesn’t live to see this. Deborah dies before the great miracle manifests itself. Several months after her death, Mendel Singer meets his long-lost son in New York. He fails to recognise him. Menuchim is a handsome young man in evening wear. Going by the name of Alexis Kossak, he’s now a world-famous composer.

Granted, that’s not quite up there with a doctor or a lawyer.

And now that the ocean divides us and we’ve all gone our separate ways, we communicate on Skype: a crackling connection, a picture that’s blurred and keeps jumping. Sometimes I can’t hear my mother, or else there’s a delay, so we’re constantly talking over each other. But it’s free. And anything that’s free is good. So say Indians; so says my mother.

When I tell her I’m writing a story about Ashirwad, she nods. It’s early morning in Toronto; it’s still dark. Since my mother saves energy by not making use of lamps, her face is illuminated only by the screen: a white square on a dark, deeply creased face.

‘All right,’ she says. And after a long while, which may be shorter than it feels: ‘You can write what you want, invent and distort everything. Everything. Just don’t say I ever gave up hope.’

The screen freezes. My mother has turned to stone. The speakers emit a waterfall of noise.

I don’t know if she can see me or hear me.

I promise.