Mother India Read online

  There then follow a series of photographs in which, in addition to her personal staff consisting of Manika and Bulbul, Ma is also shown accompanied by a strikingly glamorous woman young enough to be her daughter, on the wrong side of forty-five by my estimate, though others less experienced in sizing up women would have pegged her as much younger. This newcomer on the scene is always impeccably groomed and made up, dazzling white teeth showcasing dentistry at its most state of the art, nose job, face-lift, silky platinum hair, trendy bling, tight tank top, studded leather jacket, designer jeans, stiletto-heeled boots, the works, a masterpiece of maintenance—Zehava, Ma said, my life coach. She pronounced it koi’akh, like the Yiddish for strength. In her former life, Zehava had been a stratospherically high-placed minister in the Israeli government, with a portfolio in finance or the military, not something soft and womanish such as health or education, a paragon of feminist achievement—a big shot, according to my mother, a very important hoo-ha in the kitchen cabinet of the Knesset. Her name used to be Golda in those days, and she really did in her previous incarnation look uncannily like the legendary Golda Meir. But then she quit everything and changed her life—had an extreme makeover and turned into the Zehava, who, it seemed, had adopted my mother as her pet project.

  Zehava’s transformation was breathtaking. Manika sent me links to before-and-after photos of Golda/Zehava from an overpriced internet café meant for mommy-and-daddy-subsidized Lonely Planet travelers in the Assi Ghat area, the proprietor’s threadbare sleeping mat glimpsed on the floor through the half-drawn curtain in the rear. Before her metamorphosis, you truly might have taken her for Golda Meir’s twin sister, Golda’s reincarnation, Golda’s gilgul, Golda’s avatar—chunky build, stocky like a babushka, no-nonsense boxy clothing down to her super-sensible shoes, grizzled graying hair pulled back into a severe low knot to expose a well-scrubbed, coarse-skinned face aggressively stripped of any artifice, small shrewd eyes, bulbous nose laced with a cobweb of red vessels, dark mustache, cigarette plugged between thin dry lips. Now, in her new emanation, she was like the flawless marble statue that had been buried inside the rough stone, liberated by the sculptor, like the scullery maid transformed into the princess by the touch of the godmother’s wand. A YouTube video that Manika also sent to me features Zehava decked out in an iridescent leotard snug as a second skin and shimmering split tulle skirt, gliding smoothly in glass slippers across a polished floor with a devastatingly charming partner at least half her age twirling her to show off her tight satiny panties as the music pounds in a clip from the television show, Dancing with the Stars. Zehava is the star.

  Nobody comes to India and is not in some way changed. That is the truism behind Zehava’s radical transformation. She had written a book about it, Transfiguration: The Seeker’s Path to the True You, which was a best seller in Israel, Moldova, the Upper West Side of New York City, and South Korea (where it was translated as True Jew, to tap into the vast Korean market of Talmud readers mining for the secret of alleged Jewish academic genius and financial wizardry). Now, as an exercise, Zehava had taken on my mother as her ultimate challenge. The secret of Zehava’s success was India—more precisely, Hinduism, even more to the point, the linga, the symbol of the great god Shiva, destroyer and transformer. By visiting the temples of Lord Shiva, draping an offering of flowers around the erect linga, sprinkling some holy water, and worshipping there through immersion in a state of profound meditative self-obliteration, the supplicant is in effect destroyed and then transformed. The promise of transformation—of restored youth and health and desirability—is exponentially increased the more Shiva lingas you visit. Varanasi is Shiva’s city, his stomping ground. In Varanasi, there are said to be over one hundred thousand Shiva lingas of every variety. In Varanasi, it is said, there is not a piece of ground the size of a sunflower seed that is not capable of bringing forth its own linga. The pictures that Manika sent to me from this period show Ma and Zehava smiling broadly on either side of flower-draped lingas in an astonishing range of sizes and materials and colors, thick and thin, tall and short, mud and marble, granite and gold, cream and crimson, one in particular I remember standing out for the glowing light bulb at its tip. Of course Ma knew what a linga means to people with dirty minds, she responded when I inquired tentatively. I could feel her blushing at the other end of the phone. She had had nine children after all, although it is true she had preferred not to look. “I’m sitting Shiva,” Ma commented with a dry laugh. “Why not? Why not give it a shot? What can it hurt?”

  That to me was the bitterest revelation of all. I had not realized until then how much comfort I had taken from Ma’s insistence that she not only wanted to die, she was looking forward to death and the liberation it would bring with every remaining metastasized cell. It had been on the basis of that assertion that I had supported her in her Varanasi adventure, made all the arrangements, carried out all her wishes. I was giving my mother what she wanted, honoring her living will, I was her enabler, I was helping her to die with dignity. That she had declared with so much conviction that she wanted nothing better than to die made everything so much easier for me, banished any qualms and reservations. And now here she was turning the tables on me, trying to wheedle a reprieve, choosing life, putting herself on life support, placing her trust in this operator, this hustler Zehava, in a last desperate plea bargain for an extension. Had I been in Varanasi at that time, I would have pushed Zehava in all her high-maintenance glory into the foul waters of the Ganges alongside the slimy bathers and the sweating launderers and the idol worshippers doing their puja not only for the sin of raising false hopes, but for the crime of betraying the entire feminist agenda, for choosing her inner Zehava over her Golda, which is completely unforgivable.

  How to understand Ma’s weird fixation with Zehava and her preposterous Shiva linga weight loss and transformation program? In the end I concluded that the only reasonable explanation was that she figured it might turn into a boon for India’s tourism, which could translate into more business for me. Ma was always looking out for her kids’ welfare. If she noticed someone talking to himself in the street, for example, she would hand him one of the cards she had had made up to publicize the powers of my twin brother, Shmelke. Go see my son, Reb Breslov Tabor, in Jerusalem, a miracle worker, a healer, he will make you normal, much cheaper than a psychiatrist, even with the airfare. But hey, bottom line, whatever Ma’s good intentions might have been on my behalf, however much she might have had my interests at heart by cultivating this con artist at the expense of her true desire for moksha, Zehava was messing with my mother’s head, it was a nonstarter. And not long after, Zehava was out of the picture—literally, the ones Manika was sending to me. No matter how many Shiva lingas Ma had stroked, she had not lost a single ounce, nothing at all had been transformed or transfigured. In a routine update email, the rebbetzin Dassi speculated that the cancer seemed to have dug its claws into my mother’s spine with a vengeance; it was becoming more and more painful for Ma to get around, though she still had her appetite, and her mood was still positive.

  The final set of photographs sent to me by Manika opened ominously, like dead birds strewn in the sand on the way to the sea. The first few pictures in this series did not even include my mother, but rather images of what she saw as she was carted by Bulbul in the bicycle rickshaw around Varanasi, and what for reasons it was left to me to decipher she had instructed Manika to photograph and pass on to me. There was a single theme to all of these pictures. They all showed stones upon which the image of a married couple was carved in relief, posed side by side united in devotion, monuments placed as a shrine near the spot where the good wife had set herself aflame on her husband’s funeral pyre. Ma was drawing nearer to the fires—that was the obvious message. So it did not surprise me at all that when next I saw my mother come into virtual focus it was at the burning ghat, the great cremation ground of Manikarnika.

  Manikarnika means jewel earring, Ma explained to me—Same like
my girl, Manika. It has to do with some bubbe meise of theirs, one of their gods losing an earring there or some sort of narishkeit like that. Ma, of course, didn’t hold with such nonsense, but she was drawn by the idea of likening death to a lost earring. She had once read, in a magazine geared to ultra-Orthodox women, that a holy Jewish sage and mystic had said that if you find sixty-nine earrings you had lost, you would achieve redemption. One loss after another—that was life in a nutshell—you lose everything until you have nothing.

  She was conveyed to Manikarnika Ghat sometime in the morning and sat there all day, often into the night. The fires burned twenty-four hours, never stopping, for my information. She arrived in the bicycle rickshaw with Manika squeezed in beside her in the carriage and Bulbul pedaling furiously. He would pull up as close as possible to the top of the steps. Four eunuchs awaited her; she had won their hearts weeks before when they passed her terrace begging in their hormonally deep belligerent voices, which she softened and soothed by feeding them rugalekhs and strudel while stroking their arms. The eunuchs greeted the arriving rickshaw with bowed heads and palms pressed together in a namaste. They approached, bearing an ancient palanquin with a flaking gilt cabin and shredded upholstery, which they had appropriated from the decaying museum in the crumbling palace and fort of the Maharaja of Benares on the other side of the river where the dead souls go. Each of these eunuchs was a formidable giant, unusually large for an Indian man, thick layers of makeup masking their stubble, false eyelashes, long dangling earrings jingling as they moved sinuously, parodying an idea of woman, lustrous saris in silk and chiffon synthetics. Effortlessly they lifted Ma’s 250 pounds from the carriage of the rickshaw and transferred her to the seat of the litter. With the poles resting on their broad shoulders, they bore her halfway down the steps to a platform in the middle of the cremation ghat, the best seat in the house, the ideal position for viewing. Manika followed closely in their perfumed wake, carrying a folding lounge chair and a pile of cushions, and set it all down on the designated spot. Gently, as if positioning a rare artifact, the eunuchs moved Ma from the palanquin to the chair and parked her there.

  This is where my mother sat all day for three weeks, eighteen days in total not including the Sabbath when it is forbidden to drive, and on Fridays she was delivered back to her apartment early, in time to light candles and welcome the Sabbath queen. The weather was still mild. If it grew cool as evening descended, Manika would spread a blanket across my mother’s lap, though the flames rising from the dead burning day and night were like a monstrous furnace perpetually heating this last earthly station.

  On each one of those eighteen days I was sent a single picture. The central figure was always my mother in her chair on Manikarnika in a white sari with a blue stripe, like a grotesquely inflated Mother Teresa, the end draped over her head, which is tightly wrapped in a white kerchief threaded with gold, and over her shoulders a wool paisley scarf. Her eyes are blacked out by an oversized pair of sunglasses, a celebrity guarding against being recognized and mobbed by her fans.

  Each photo presented another variation to ponder, like impressionistic studies by an artist in changing lights. What was not visible to me was what Ma herself was seeing, what it was that drew her to this inferno again and again; her dark glasses guarded her thoughts against betrayal, reflected nothing, nor was she forthcoming when we talked at night about what was unfolding before her day after day. In a single phone conversation only, after I had pleaded with her, in pity she opened up slightly, as I remember it, to liken the scene she was witnessing to an end-of-days landscape of altars, human sacrifices laid on top of them, burning, roasting, pluming in smoke, flaking into ash. Your body that matters so much to you in your lifetime, that is such a big deal to you, this body is basically the same like everyone else’s, Ma said, with everything in the same place more or less. You think you’re different but you’re nothing special, you start with the head, you end with the feet, arms, legs, kishkes, bowels, your shriveled and dried-up little unmentionables that give you so much aggravation and tzores in your life—who needs it? You take up so much and so much space on this earth, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but always, give or take, the length and width of an altar, that’s what you see at Marnikarnika. Most of the bodies brought here for cremation are small—very small—Ma observed, Not like my body, but it’s all the same basic model. These are so small though, most of the time you can’t tell if it’s a man or a lady stretched out there on the altar wrapped in a sheet with the face bagged like for an execution. You think they’re all women they’re so small, but they could also be shrunken old men, in death the differences are wiped out. It’s just so relaxing to sit there so warm and toasty and watch, Ma said, it’s just such a relief to finally stop fighting, to just sit back and surrender yourself to the facts of death.

  The photograph of the day, on the other hand, communicated far more information. And, I should note, it was a testament to how my mother came to be regarded that these pictures even existed in the first place. As every tourist is forewarned, it is forbidden to take pictures at the cremation ghats, out of respect for this most personal of religious rituals, never mind that it is so transparently enacted in public, and in deference to the mourners, who in any event, seem strangely detached and almost indifferent, like the dead themselves, they do not scream and yell openly, to wail and tear your hair is considered bad form, inauspicious for the dead poised in this delicate space of transition. Self-appointed guardians of the faith prowling the burning ghat on the lookout for any violators of the no-photos rule will pounce on alleged flouters, but not one of them ever dared to mess with my mother or her support staff. She was protected by her eunuchs, their long red lacquered fingernails curled like talons to rip them to pieces, lurid lipstick-smeared mouths quivering in readiness to open and let out a hideous harpy shriek.

  In the first of these eighteen pictures, Ma is captured with her eunuchs robed in luminescent saris in shades of red, two eunuchs on each side, all leaning in toward my mother enthroned in her chair shrouded in widow white, flanking her with crimson lips pursed into a Cupid’s bow and heads fetchingly posed in a flirtatious tilt. In another of these earlier pictures Ma is not even making eye contact with the camera. She is engrossed in sharing her lunch with her gray monkey, Fetter Feivish; Ma is eating a banana, Fetter is sipping from a can of diet soda through a straw. There are a few more photos of Ma with other snacking animals in this open-air death processing factory—one surrounded by seven emaciated black cows, dung caked all over their flanks and tails, grazing on the discarded marigold wreaths that had decorated the litters of the dead, another with a goat, the upper portion of its body clad in a torn striped polo shirt, to whom Ma is feeding a piece of saffron-colored cloth laced with silver ribbon that had been used to cover a corpse, another showing Ma with two wild dogs in front of her gnawing on a human foot.

  But most of the images by far are of my mother adorned with heaps of flower garlands, gold, red, orange, circling her neck, draped over her head, spilling out of her lap. At her feet are rows of small baskets fashioned out of leaves filled with flower petals, sprouting bouquets of incense sticks. On cloths spread out on either side of her are piles of coins and rupees, and offerings of sweets in vibrant colors and textures. “Oh no, I would never touch that stuff,” Ma said when I inquired. “What are you talking about? It’s not even kosher. It doesn’t have even an OU, not even a K, I’m not even talking glatt. Besides, it’s very fattening. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hutz-klutz, all of a sudden they decide I’m some kind of saint, or nokh besser, it shouldn’t happen to a dog, a god—Mamadevi, the latest goddess. As if they didn’t have enough already—now they have thirty-six million and one. Ma Kali, they call me. At first I thought they were saying Ma Kallah—you know, like a bride? Mother of the bride, ha ha—but no, wrong again. It seems they really have this dolly named Kali, she’s one of their big shot goddesses, mother superior, they tell me, and also she like
s to hang around the cremation grounds, like me. I even saw a picture of her, on an old calendar in Bulbul’s rickshaw. Black face, long red tongue sticking out of her mouth like a very bad girl, her hair a mess, bloodshot eyes, cut off heads everywhere spritzing blood, crazy lady breaking all the rules and nobody can stop her, out of control. But thank God, at least she’s skinny. Maybe even too skinny, if such a thing is possible. So, okay, so now I’m Ma Kali—I accept, why not? Every day they come and bring me presents. I try to tell them they’re making a very big mistake—but who ever listens to a crazy old lady?”

  Lurking in a corner of almost all of these pictures is the figure of a small, slight man, baldheaded, bare chested, with leather chappals on his feet, a white dhoti around his waist, round wire-rimmed glasses. In the eighteenth picture he takes center stage. “That’s my end-of-life guru,” Ma said when I ventured to ask. “I call him the angel of death. Every day he comes up to me, he points to the burning fires, and he whispers in my ear, ‘It’s the end of life, Mama. How do you feel about that?’”