Mother India Page 4

  “How do you feel about it, Ma?”

  “I’m not worried, mama’le. Guru-shmuru. What does he know? He knows from nothing.” Silence fell, long enough to trigger the fear that I had lost the connection when, suddenly, Ma’s voice resurfaced. “My mama, may she rest in peace—she would never let anything bad happen to me.”

  2

  THE NEXT DAY the rebbetzin Dassi called. Ma had taken an unmistakable turn for the worse. I should come at once.

  I was in Jerusalem when I received the call, putting the final touches on the schedule for a two-week retreat at a meditation center in Dharamsala for some of the veteran members of Women in Black who, for over two decades, had been holding vigil in their black kerchiefs every Friday afternoon before the Sabbath at France Square (which they had renamed Hagar Square), not far from the official residence of the prime minister of Israel, against war and violence in general, and against the occupation of the so-called West Bank in particular. I am ideologically very sympathetic to this noble cause and was working especially hard to reward these obviously extremely well-deserving heroines with an amazing experience. Even so, I immediately dropped everything and handed over the entire dossier of their itinerary to one of my agents on the ground, in our branch office in an old Templar building in German Colony. I took the first flight out of Tel Aviv that I could get—price in this emergency was of course not an issue—and landed in Mumbai in the early hours of the morning. From there I connected via SpiceJet to Varanasi, arriving at my mother’s apartment in the late afternoon.

  The rebbetzin Dassi was in the kitchen, cradling an infant in one arm who was nursing at her breast, a toddler dragging down on her skirt. With her free hand she was stirring a pot of rice and lentils on the stove for her other children, who were climbing like monkeys all over the sofa in the living room, the cushions piled up to form the ramparts and turrets, the chambers and hidden recesses of a fort. Dassi nodded a somber greeting and jerked her head toward the closed door of my mother’s bedroom. Ma was in bed, with Manika’s face poking out from under the covers beside her. I kissed my mother’s dry forehead, like old parchment under my lips. “Ma,” I let out. “What took you so long?” she said. “I was waiting. I have to talk to you. I didn’t know if I could hold out much more.” Her voice was feeble, practically inaudible.

  Manika rose from the bed and left the room in obedience to a wordless signal from my mother. Ma indicated to me to draw nearer and bring my ear close to her mouth. “If you love me,” Ma spoke, “put your hand under my thigh and do me a favor. Do not bury me in America or Israel, or in the ground anywhere. But when I am dead, carry my body along the ghats, from Assi to Manikarnika. Cremate me there and throw my ashes into the river.”

  With my hand under my mother’s thigh I argued fiercely—her last wish, so beyond recall, such an unfair burden to lay on the back of your own child—but she would not listen to reason no matter how intensely I struggled, even when I resorted to an appeal to her lifelong religious convictions and observance, which was truly ironic since personally and publicly I had rejected all that. It’s a sin, a violation of our faith, and so on and so forth, I argued. The Torah says, Dust you are and to dust you return. We Jews bury our dead, that’s why we were given the land of Israel as our eternal estate—our resting place, in other words, our graveyard, our cemetery. Ma shook her head. She had already taken up too much space above ground. She could not bear to be weighed down under the earth with generations stomping on top of her, lying on her back in her grave looking up between their legs, the idea alone gave her a headache, suffocated her. She could not accept being plunged into the darkness, a plague so thick you could touch it. She could not abide the rain falling on her grave, the frost, the snow, the cold, she suffered at the very thought. She could not give herself over to be consumed by worms and beetles, recycled in the food chain, processed and excreted. She’d rather go up in smoke and be removed from the system.

  The family will scream bloody murder, they will disown you, I said. Ma’s lips tightened. Let them compare her to scattered dust, then. For scattered dust, you are not required to sit shiva, you are excused from saying Kaddish.

  You would have no grave or marker, I said, there would be no place you would be on this planet, I would have no place to come to if I need you.

  Ma looked at me as at a stranger. She could no longer be at her post forever, faithfully waiting for me in case I needed her.

  When the Messiah comes at the end of days, I cried in desperation, you would have no remains, you would have no body to resurrect, you would be reduced to ashes.

  She closed her eyes sanctimoniously. She would be in good company then, with the six million.

  Throughout this ordeal, my hand was under my mother’s thigh. I could feel the weight and heat of her body in which she had lived her life, through which she had experienced her reality, I could feel what it was like to be her, the constriction of her fears, the insistence of her desires, my hand was very close to the womb that was the source of my own being. This is a very ancient form of oath taking, the hand under the thigh, biblical. It was what the patriarch Jacob required of his son Joseph when he too was on his deathbed, under the thigh, grazing the testicles, through this most intimate contact transmitting the full urgency of his final wish with regard to his own funeral arrangements, to be conveyed back to the land of Canaan to lie with his fathers in Hebron rather than to be buried in Egypt, a wish Joseph granted with an extravagant royal spectacle of mourning, though first he could not resist embalming the old man in accordance with Egyptian rites albeit in breach of Jewish ritual, probably a good idea after all, to forestall the inevitable rot and stink on the long trek through the scorching wilderness to the final destination. Jacob’s thigh under which Joseph’s hand was pressed had been wounded when he had wrestled with the angel of God until the break of day in Mahana’im. My hand under my mother’s thigh, I could feel how grievously she too had been wounded, how damaged she was.

  “I’ll do it, Ma,” I said.

  She startled me by opening her eyes. “Promise me.”

  I promised.

  Satisfied, Ma signaled to me to leave the room. She needed a few minutes of privacy, to gather herself. I am myself a great believer in respecting other people’s right to privacy as I would hope they would respect mine. After what I had just been through, and the great burden of the promise to my mother that I had just taken upon myself, I practically lurched out of Ma’s bedroom in search of my own space. The only place to go for some solitude in that apartment raucous with children was the bathroom. I staggered in, locked the door, sat down on the toilet slumped with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, like Rodin’s Thinker. What I was thinking was, Why is my mother doing this to me? How had I failed her that she was demanding this last extreme act of devotion from me? Was she creating this scenario so that I would leap into the flames of her funeral pyre? Was that why she had sent me all those pictures of the inscribed sati stones? I believe I must have drifted off into another dimension, lost touch with my reality for a brief spell on that toilet, depleted by my travels, emptied by the devastating scene I had just enacted with my mother, voided by the promise I had committed myself to that would, so to speak, put the final nail in the coffin of my alienation from my origins. I woke up shivering, agitated by a memory from my childhood—Ma always cold, piling on sweaters and shawls and scarves, blankets and quilts. She hated the cold—the cold, cold ground. It clamped her with terror. She held with those who favored fire. She must have tasted of desire, as the poet says, and I never gave her credit.

  When I opened my eyes, the last mysterious light of the waning day was filtering in. It was only then that I noticed I was not alone. Manika was at the other end of the bathroom, bent over, pushing a broom, its bundle of straw wrapped in wet rags. The walls and ceiling and floor of the bathroom I now saw were covered with undulating gray insects, strange feathery otherworldly bugs, like waves of silver gossamer, like a gauzy
veil, like ash. Soundlessly, with her muted broom, Manika was pushing these ghostly creatures down the drain in the center of the cement floor. Our eyes met. I rose at once, flushed the toilet, and left.

  Dying is a very private human act, like going to the toilet, like sex. One of the more embarrassing aspects of the punishment of those who are condemned to be executed is to die in public. They wet and soil their trousers, their sexual members are aroused. Even animals that are mortally wounded are given the grace to be allowed to slouch off into a secluded corner to die with dignity. Ma was no longer there when I reentered her room, she had been eliminated and effaced. A stranger had taken her place in the bed, waxen, bloated, rigid, swollen blue hands and feet, a figure that in no way resembled my mother. I would not have been able to identify this suspect in a police lineup. I do not believe in the soul or the anima or the ch’i or the vital spirit, not even in the neshama, literally, the breath of life, the Jewish soul train, or any of that mystical junk, but that creature in that bed was not my mother. It was a husk, a hollow shell, a carapace, such as a locust casts off. My real mother had taken advantage of the privacy I had granted her to escape through the window.

  What followed then was like the worst kind of dream—the dream that paralyzes you with horror and won’t let you go so that you can never wake yourself out of it into the relief that it was only a dream. From the moment I returned to that room until we disposed of the remains, I did not leave the side of Ma’s impersonator for a minute. I had already paid a terrible price for my brief absence, which my mother had exploited so cruelly by snatching her death when no one was looking and running with it, stealing away forever. Now I resolved to remain fixed in my place, partly, yes, in homage to the Jewish exhortation to guard the dead until properly settled, which I count among the more humane and enlightened mandates of my lost faith, but above all in my determination to show my mother that I was capable of honoring the promise I had made to her.

  I could feel Ma’s unquiet presence vibrating there in the room, watching me as I watched over her, challenging me, testing me, loitering there to see if I possessed the spirit and life to follow through and keep my word. Already there were forces converging to obstruct me. Within the hour after Ma split, the pale gray flies that Manika had been sweeping down the drain in the bathroom started migrating into the room, forming a frothy canopy of filaments and streamers over the corpse, which had begun to emit the stench of decay, sending it forth in putrid shafts that seemed almost to glow. The rebbetzin Dassi opened the door slightly, pressing her bundled infant up against her nose. She glanced into the room, took in the situation, automatically muttered the obligatory phrase of acceptance and fatalism, Blessed is the True Judge, shoved the door closed with her shoulder, collected her brood, and rushed out of the apartment with Manika following swiftly after, as if on assignment.

  Within minutes, Rabbi Assi himself showed up, striding into my mother’s bedroom without knocking or announcing himself in any way, with the entitlement of a doctor on rounds in a hospital. I was at that instant still focusing inward on how to carry out the incredibly complex and loaded task before me in strict compliance with the highly transgressive promise my mother had extracted, so I did not fully apprehend his approaching heavy tread. There was no question in my mind that I would do everything in my power to realize Ma’s last wish. She had already broken so many taboos and taken so many risks and sacrificed so much in her quest for liberation, she had rid herself of all desire in her surrender to death other than that single final request, I could not fail her now at the finish line. I was immersed in the immediate problem of how to deal with my father and siblings on the issue of cremation, which without doubt they would find irredeemably abhorrent and repugnant, when the rabbi burst into the room. I had just come to the decision to proceed with the rite as soon as possible exactly as Ma had requested and to hit the family with the news of her passing and the manner in which the remains had been disposed of after the fact—after nothing was left but some clumps of fibrous black ashes in the dark womb of Mother Ganga. There would be nothing they could have done to prevent it thanks to the gift of ignorance I will have bestowed upon them, so they would in no way be liable. I alone, already dead in their eyes, a branded defiled spirit, would be guilty.

  Rabbi Assi muttered the requisite verse of consolation and resignation, Barukh Dayan haEmet. With his fingers stroking his nose up and down in what he fancied was a discreet gesture in no way connected to the rank smell suffusing the space, and pinching his nostrils together so that his words were partially muffled, he instructed me with full pastoral authority that Jewish law requires that the funeral take place immediately, optimally on the very same day if feasible. That was fine with me, I replied; as night was already descending, I was in any event planning it for the first thing next morning. His eyes opened wide in bafflement. But where was I going to bury my holy mother, peace be upon her, in this idolatrous place? He went on to advise me that he had the infrastructure at hand for the purification and preparation of the body by a holy society of righteous women in strict observance of Jewish tradition, and for its shipment to Israel or America, or whatever hallowed ground I chose, for a proper burial; he was offering me a full deluxe funeral and interment package free of charge purely out of his love and respect for my holy mother, a true seeker, may her memory be for a blessing. It then fell to me to let him know that my holy mother the seeker of blessed memory had requested to be cremated. “I promised her, Assi,” I said. With my right hand under her thigh, like Joseph at the deathbed of Father Jacob in that famous scene from the Torah. If I forget my promise, may my right hand forget its cunning.

  Calmly at first, Rabbi Assi instructed me that my promise was null and void. My holy mother, may her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life, was now in another place, a place of wisdom and enlightenment, where she now sees her error and recognizes the truth. She now prefers a proper Jewish burial, he assured me. Therefore, my under-the-thigh oath to my mother, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, is canceled, void, invalid, without force or standing or power, completely vaporized as if with the full clout of the Kol Nidre prayer intoned on the eve of Yom Kippur, annulling all the year’s oaths. I was not only permitted to break my vow, I was obligated to do so as it had been superseded by what my holy mother, peace be upon her, actually wants now at this very moment as she stands at the gate of heaven. What she wants now, Rabbi Assi advised me with complete certainty, is to return to the earth from which she had come. I merely shook my head. Nice try, Assi, good khop, but no cigar. It was Ma’s living will to be cremated. Unless she shows up now to tell me right here in person that she has changed her mind and signs a release waiver, I’m moving ahead as scheduled, all systems go.

  I continued to shake my head like a pendulum back and forth as Assi poured out a string of objections mostly pertaining to the reasons for the prohibitions against the mutilation of the body, dead or alive, from tattoos to autopsies to cremation—sacred vessel, God’s image, on loan from God, the whole predictable banal drill. When finally it sank in that I was battening down the hatches and not budging, he drew out his last and best card. “Very soon now, very quickly in our time, the holy Rebbe Himself, our Master, our Teacher, our Rabbi, will rise up from concealment in His true form as the Messiah the King to rescue the living and to raise the dead. If you go ahead with this atrocity, your holy mother, peace be upon her, will have no body to resurrect. On that great day she will be forced to come back to life in a different body and no one will recognize her and no one will greet her.” “That’s okay, Assi,” I said, for some reason oddly serene maybe in reaction to his foaming agitation, “Ma never liked her own body very much anyhow. Next time around, I think she’d prefer thin.” “Vantz!” the rabbi spat out. He turned furiously, sparing himself the indignity of a total public meltdown, and darted out of the room. Frankly, I was stunned that Assi knew some Yiddish, even if it was limited to a few common curse words. He was dark
skinned, I had taken him for an Oriental Jew stemming from the Levant or North Africa, Sephardi, though of course some Yiddish must have been part of his purebred Ashkenazi Chabad curriculum. And I wasn’t sure if by vantz, which translates as bedbug and is not exactly meant as a compliment, he was referring to me or with his pidgin Yiddish to the swarm of insects hovering over my mother’s double in that bed, like the gray cloud over the Israelites in the wilderness. Tomorrow, it would be replaced by the pillar of fire. Now I was even more unshakable.

  It was not the last I would see of the rabbi, of that I was sure the second he stomped out in such a rage. I needed to remain exceedingly vigilant and alert. And just as I had predicted, he was back within the hour, this time accompanied by four of his toughest Hasidim, elite ex-paratroopers by the looks of them, lugging a heavy-duty stretcher. It was obvious that they intended to seize the body by force, to kidnap it in order to save it from the abomination of being consigned to the cremation pit. From the rabbi’s perspective, there are times when it is permissible, in the name of heaven, to commit even an act explicitly forbidden in the written law, such as kidnapping, an act, moreover, for which the death penalty is mandated (though some might argue that this same severity does not apply if the kidnapping involves a corpse, especially one slated for the fires). It was entirely correct in this emergency, according to the rabbi, during the small window of opportunity still open to them, to use any means necessary to rescue the dead from an impending sacrilege, including brute force and violence. Clearly my mother had been in a deluded state when she had made her final request. Assi was acting in her interest, for the sake of her salvation in the world to come.