Mother India Read online

  Privately, not long afterward, Ma recapped for me something she had read, also in a magazine—that it had been scientifically proven that certain women prefer women because they find men too powerful and threatening. And then she confided an odd bit of personal trivia—that she herself, ever since she had been a young girl, would play this little trick in her mind, turn a man into a woman whenever she experienced him as too uncontrollable and dominant, a practice she occasionally indulged in even to that day. “How?” I inquired. “By imagining him in a dress, of course, silly. Even your father sometimes. It’s very becoming.” My mother—she was such a bandit, or, as she would have pronounced it, bandit. God, I miss her and her rapier wit.

  Well, enough already about me. Bottom line—India was heavily punctuated on my mother’s radar screen. When it became clear that Ma was not budging, that she was firm in her determination to finish up in Varanasi in order to achieve liberation as the holy man had guaranteed, she let my father know her intention, framing it as her last wish. What could he do? How could he deny her? Would anyone with a heart turn down a dying child’s final request for a trip to Disneyland? The same principle applied in Ma’s case. I proceeded, not only as a good daughter but also as a travel specialist, to make all the arrangements and booked Ma’s passage to India. Toward the end of December, around Christmastime by the calendar of the goyim, we flew Turkish Air business class to New Delhi, with a brief stopover in Istanbul, and then Kingfisher from Delhi to Varanasi. Hodu laShem Ki Tov.

  The apartment I had leased in advance for my mother was located on the ground floor of the building in which the Chabad mission was housed, not far from Assi Ghat, the southernmost of the eighty-plus ghats stretching along the sacred bank of the Ganges River in Varanasi. My strategy was to settle Ma in a place where there would at least be some familiar markers, even if it were nothing more than the smell of chicken soup simmering on Friday afternoons wafting on the wings of malaria flies. The emissaries who ran this outpost, the shlukhim Rabbi Assi (yes, of Assi Ghat, an auspicious coincidence—short for Assaf) and his rebbetzin Dassi (Hadas), had in fact been very helpful to me in nailing down and setting up the apartment, and though we never came to a formal agreement, it was understood that they would not only be aware of Ma’s presence, they would also check on her regularly to make sure she was still breathing and had everything she needed, they would be my point team on the ground and serve as my contacts in case of an emergency. This was a mitzvah, the chance to perform a hessed, an act of loving-kindness for another human being; it was an opportunity that had fallen into their laps, as if from the heavens, they considered themselves fortunate and blessed.

  I feel obliged to note here, with no intention whatsoever of diminishing the generosity of Assi and Dassi but for the purpose of complete transparency, that they also were acutely aware that this old lady they would be babysitting was none other than the mother of Reb Breslov Tabor, as my twin brother, Shmelke, was known by then—notorious, hunted, the fiercely controversial leader of a rival sect, but still, indisputably, one of the gedolim, one of the greats of the generation before whom all must rise when he enters your airspace. It was bottom-line nothing less than an honor, and so they conceived of it, to be of some service in her final hours to the holy mother who bore this genius. And after all, Ma was a seeker, too, not so very different from all the other Jewish seekers who passed through this polluted idolatrous city whom they were charged with rescuing, mostly young Israeli post-army kids crashing after all the stress of their mandatory stint in wretched holes like Gaza and Jenin, ravenously into drugs, sex, and music—only my mother was into death at the other end of the age spectrum.

  They were not ageists, Rabbi Assi and his rebbetzin Dassi, they were inclusive, they didn’t discriminate when it came to saving Jews. They too had come to Varanasi from Israel, from secular families, he from the development town of Dimona in the South, home to the Black Hebrews who are not Hebrew and the nuclear reactor that doesn’t exist, she from the grim city of Afula in the north, otherwise known as the anus of the world, famous throughout the Middle East for the balls of falafel it excreted. They made their way to Varanasi in search of enlightenment directly after their rite-of-passage military service, and, like all the other deluded Israelis, sank to the lowest depths in this idol-worshipping underworld, they would spare me all the ugly details, until the true path revealed itself to them, as if a veil had lifted to illuminate what had always been there, their birthright, their legacy, right there in front of their eyes—It was like a vision, the rebbetzin recalled, We were as if dreaming. They would look after Ma, they assured me. The holy Rebbe Himself had sent them to this heathen place precisely to reach out to such wandering Jews, even to such endangered species as my mother no matter how little life remained in them yet. And soon, soon, God willing, the holy Rebbe Himself, our Master, our Teacher, our Rabbi, will rise from concealment in His true form as the Messiah the King to rescue the living and to raise the dead.

  Well, he’d better hurry up, I was about to say but held my tongue. The other day Ma dropped a reference to cremation. Does the Messiah do ashes?

  What I need to report here, though, is how irrationally, regressively thrilled I felt when my mother approved of nearly every detail of my arrangements. Not only that, but for the first time in God alone knows how many years she even gave me a compliment on my appearance—she admired my long black braid. “So shiny, like a shampoo ad in a magazine.” She pressed her finger tenderly on the red tikka on my forehead as if she were suctioning up the last moist cake crumb from the table—my third eye, the sign that I am a married woman.

  As for the apartment, she was unambivalently enraptured by it—it was perfect. She had never had even a room of her own, much less an entire dwelling place. She appreciated the mezuzot that Rabbi Assi had affixed to the doorposts. She was pleased with the simple but adequate furniture, the clean bed, the soft couch, the sturdy kitchen table and two solid chairs, the dishes and cutlery and pots and pans all clearly marked in big, bright letters for clouded eyes—blue for milk, red for meat. She acknowledged my thoughtful considerateness in choosing an apartment on the ground floor with no steps for her to negotiate. She was grateful for the uniformed guard at the door of the building in the wake of the bloody slaughter by terrorists at Nariman House, the Chabad headquarters in my own city of Mumbai. She especially enjoyed the drop-in visits of the two oldest of Rabbi Assi and Dassi’s seven children, the fraternal twins (precious evocations of Shmelke and me no doubt), Menachem Mendel and Chaya Mushka, age six. There was always a supply of unhealthy treats stocked for them, such as bags of Bissli and Bamba imported from Israel, in a special drawer they flew to directly.

  But above all she was delighted with the small terrace situated off the living room with its white molded plastic porch furniture. During her first weeks in Varanasi, her period of adjustment, she would sit there almost every day for as long as there was light with a can of diet soda on the table beside her or an unglazed clay cup of lemon tea, which she sipped to its dregs through a sugar cube wedged between her dentures, then thrillingly threw on the stone-tiled floor smashing it to pieces, ecologically recycling it back to the dust whence it had come. With her edematous feet propped up on a stool, she took in the uproar, the perpetual frenzy of the swarming street as if on stage before her, streaked with color, pulsing with sound—ox carts, bicycle rickshaws, autorickshaws rumbling by, horns bleating in desperation nonstop, children running wild, weaving through the throngs, picking pockets, squatting to defecate on the ground with one arm extended for alms, naked sadhus smeared in white ash with matted hair, beggars with missing limbs, women pounding on car windows, opening and closing their mouths like marionettes to mimic hunger, deformed children harnessed to mutilated babies, goats, cows, water buffalos, stray dogs, monkeys, now and then a boar, once an elephant, several times a day a dead body covered in saffron-colored cloth, bedecked with garlands of orange and yellow marigolds, borne through the stree
ts on a bamboo stretcher followed by chanting mourners on the way to the cremation ghats of Harishchandra or Manikarnika along the banks of the Ganges.

  When things quieted down, toward evening, she would continue to sit there leafing through magazines, talking on the cell phone I had given her, feeding pieces of challah and matzah to the silver-gray monkey that had befriended her whom she called Fetter Feivish, since he reminded her both in expression and the habit of casually manipulating his privates of her long-dead Uncle Feivel, or simply leaning back with her head resting against a cushion and her eyes closed, her face turned up to receive the last rays of the sun.

  The weather was still warm and comfortable when I settled my mother into her Varanasi apartment. The crushing heat had not yet arrived to stupefy the brain and bring on the annual epidemic of sluggishness and madness. The monsoon season was still months away with its drenching rains that would flood holy Mother Ganga and send her waters choked with the ashes and bones and unburned body parts of the dead and the rotting carcasses of lepers and pregnant women, children and cattle rising up the steps of the ghats and lapping like a prehistoric monster through the streets of the city.

  The apartment also came equipped with a servant who was sitting on her haunches in a corner of the kitchen in a kind of copse composed of the squeegee, the stunted straw broom, the mop, the dustpan, and other assorted forlorn cleaning implements as Dassi was showing us around, so that we did not at first notice her during the tour. Only when the rebbetzin announced that she was also throwing in her helper as part of Ma’s package, and called out, “Manika?” did she come into focus, a tiny creature, black and shriveled like a prune. She flashed a bashful toothless smile, and automatically twitched the loose end of her green-and-orange print cotton sari forward over her head like a monk’s cowl. The rebbetzin said, “Manika means jewel in their language, and I’m telling you, she is like her name. She’s my gem.”

  Ma objected ardently, it was the only feature she disliked in the entire setup. She had been looking forward to living on her own, she valued her privacy, she didn’t want or need a maid, but the rebbetzin insisted. “She’s a present, you can’t refuse a present, a very good girl, from the sweeper and toilet cleaner caste, we don’t hold by that but it’s the lowest of the low, she’ll lick the cow caca off your feet for two paisa, that’s their mentality, she’ll do anything you ask, you won’t even know she’s there, like a fly.”

  For my part, although I found the rebbetzin’s patronizing, even racist language deeply offensive, I pleaded with Ma to accept, if only for my sake, for my peace of mind, so that I could feel reassured that she would not be alone after I left. What if you slip in the tub? What if your food goes down the wrong pipe? What if something happens? My mother shook her head—she didn’t want this alter cocker around, it made her feel like an old lady. “She’s probably younger than I am, Ma,” I said, but still my mother wouldn’t yield. It was only after I reminded Ma of the courageous loyalty of the Indian nanny who had rescued the baby Moshe’le during the Mumbai massacre, an event as Ma well knew that had seriously impacted my life also, and of how this blessed Sandra ayah had gone on to become a heroine of the State of Israel and deservedly so, that my mother softened and finally relented, in patriotic solidarity, to hold out an incentive to other budding righteous gentiles no matter what caste, no matter where situated on the great chain of being, to do the right thing and save a Jew.

  And in the end, she was happy for the company, even though, or maybe in part because they had no common language between them to communicate with. Nevertheless, they understood each other in their bones, like mother and daughter. She especially loved the long head and foot massages Manika administered, and her unfailing cheerfulness, which given her circumstances was a mystery Ma sought to unravel in the hope of gaining some spiritual insight, she told me. This was during a telephone conversation after I had already left Varanasi and returned home to Geeta and Maya, and to my office in Mumbai. Ma then went on to inform me with the superior air of an old India hand that the name Manika fit her even better than the rebbetzin could imagine—not only because she’s the rebbebtzin’s so-called gem, but also because of the way she would creep into Ma’s bedroom at night to steal a piece of jewelry. (Ma believed in jewelry, especially gold, you could never have too much; in this as in so many other ways, I might point out, Indians and Jews are more alike than you would ever have dreamed of in your philosophy.) “She thinks I’m sleeping while she’s poking around in my jewelry box, but the whole time I’m awake and I’m thinking—C’mon, hurry up, take what you want from in there and get out. Just finish your business already and let me sleep. Same like I used to think in the old days, with your father, when he used to bother me.”

  There was also an unforeseen advantage in setting Ma up with a servant, which I regard as priceless and treasure to this day. It emerged very soon after my departure, when I began to receive photos taken by Manika on the cell phone I had left with my mother, a reasonably high-tech mobile toy that gleamed like an onyx gemstone, which this illiterate little woman from a village without running water or sewage system or electricity promptly mastered thoroughly. These pictures form a kind of visual archive of Ma’s time in Varanasi, charting her sojourn there. At first, they tended to be taken against the background of her apartment, generally on the terrace where the light must have been best. It seems my mother did not object despite the traditional strictures she had abided by all her life against allowing herself to be photographed for reasons of modesty (and also, to be completely frank, because she always thought she looked too fat). Here in Varanasi she was mellow, laid back, zen, going with the graven-image flow, easing into liberation.

  The pictures that stand out from that period focused on her evolving look. In one, Ma is wearing the long tunic and ballooning pants of a salwar kameez, to my eyes, on my mother a costume utterly shocking, completely mind-blowing. When I mentioned it during our daily telephone conversation (yes, I called my mother every day, religiously, I’m such a good girl) adding that all of us—not only I but also her daughter-in-law Geeta and her granddaughter Maya—thought she looked absolutely gorgeous, that it suited her perfectly, Ma reflected that she had never worn pants in her life, not counting her underpants, she had never thought she would live to see the day when she would be wearing pants publicly on the outside, she should say a She’hekhiyanu that she had been kept alive and sustained to reach this season. The only pants she had ever expected to wear other than her personal oversized pink bloomers, her long turn-off granny gatkes, she went on to make a point of informing me, were the breeches that would form a part of her white linen gender-neutral burial shroud, which of course she would not be alive to see, no one would see them other than the pious ladies of the holy society who washed and purified and dressed her body for the grave, and the worms and maggots who devoured her.

  In another photo from this period, Ma’s head is tightly bound in a glossy magenta kerchief streaked with gold tinsel. She’s sitting on her porch with Fetter Feivish, her fancy Sabbath wig plopped askew on his head. With tweezered fingers, the monkey seems to be picking nits out of her everyday wig, which is perched atop the egg-shaped Styrofoam wig stand propped on the table. “Yes, darling,” Ma said, automatically slipping into her role as reinforcer of my self-esteem by complimenting me on my keen powers of observation, “that’s what he’s doing, Fetter. He loves lice, they’re for him a delicacy, like for us chopped liver.”

  This was my mother, the same woman who had passed on to me her fear of animals, which still resides in me on a subliminal level but which on the surface I manage to give the appearance of having overcome, a Jewish mother who true to the boilerplate would do anything for her children, turn herself into a doormat and beg them to tread upon her, but at best could only bring herself to satisfy our entreaties for a pet by offering a doomed goldfish swimming in deep depression in a plastic bag, which she had won in a synagogue raffle—and now her best friend was a beast, a
monkey, this son of Hanuman. As for her wig, I never saw it on her again. She kept her head covered with a succession of brilliant silk scarves wrapped like a turban over the downy white fuzz of her hair, which was beginning to sprout back like a tender lawn. And I never again saw her dressed in the long skirt and loose long-sleeved blouse or sweater or jacket that is the Orthodox ladies’ official uniform for public appearances or the housecoat for at-home leisure wear, but always either in a salwar kameez or on special occasions, a Benares silk sari, and of course, topping it all, a shawl. Even with her mass of natural built-in padding and insulation, even before she had been consumed by malignancy, Ma was always cold. Our task as children had always been to run and fetch her a sweater or a blanket. When we would reach up for her hand, we always found a tissue there, crumpled for warmth, as if enclosing an ember rescued from the flames.

  Ma is wearing a deep-green silk sari embroidered with gold thread and embedded with mirror chips and a pale pashmina dupatta, in one of the first of the series of pictures showing her venturing out of her Varanasi apartment, seated in the carriage of a rickshaw, the driver, malnourished, his brown face cratered by a childhood disease he could not have recovered from too long before, half-straddling his beat-up bicycle, beaming jubilantly. “That’s Bulbul, my personal chauffeur,” Ma explained. “Don’t worry so much, Meena’le. He maybe looks like a ninety-pound weakling, but he’s strong like an ox, he can pedal like nobody’s business. He calls me Mama and tells me I’m light like smoke, the little tukhes licker, even though my own personal tukhes is hanging the whole time over the bench from the rickshaw because it’s a bench not made for zaftig old ladies like me, it’s made for Indians with no meat on their behinds. But I’ll tell you something, Meena’le, I love that boy, I turn my pocketbook upside down and shake it out in his hands, all my rupees I give to that little no-goodnik, my last red cent.” Another image in that series shows Ma enthroned in the rickshaw carriage with Manika tucked in beside her, like a tiny doll from which most of the stuffing had leaked out, a favorite, beloved doll the child refuses to leave home without. Bulbul must have shot that one.