Mother India Page 5

  Shortly before the rabbi and his gang of four showed up, however, Manika had returned with our quartet of eunuchs. They were hanging out with me at the bedside keeping the corpse company, the ends of their saris drawn in a discreet ladylike flip across the lower portion of their faces due to the intensifying stink of decomposition, when the rabbi and his forces charged into the room, pushing the door open so savagely with the metal corner of the stretcher. Our four mighty eunuchs rose at once, positioned themselves silently in a phalanx formation along the bedside facing the invaders, the first line of resistance, their lipstick-stained teeth bared, their arms raised with clawed hands like tigers set to pounce, displaying the long red-lacquered daggers of their fingernails.

  The unanticipated presence of the eunuchs along with their menacing maneuver brought the rabbi and his troops to a sudden halt, plunging them into a heated argument, to which, on our side, I alone was privy as it was conducted in Hebrew. The rabbi’s boys were indeed all Israelis, hardened veterans of the Israel Defense Forces morphed into stoned and sexed-out seekers in India, and now, seized by the influence and inspiration of Rabbi Assi himself, newly minted penitents, returnees to the faith. The crux of their debate was whether or not it was permissible for them to engage in battle with an enemy of questionable gender. Were their opponents women or men? If the former, were the laws of negiah applicable, prohibiting the physical contact that would inevitably ensue from hand-to-hand combat? If the latter, would not one be rendered impure simply by touching the perversion of the garb of a woman on the body of a man? And what if parts of their bodies had been altered by surgery or implants or hormones or some other repulsive engineering to resemble the female form? And whether they were male or female, what about the danger of inadvertently being brought to a state of physical arousal by wrestling with these freaks?

  Of course they were men, Rabbi Assi contended with exasperation, urging his warriors on, no different from an enemy who confronts you in camouflage or in the disguise of a burqa or chador. It is your duty to fight them, just as it is your duty to rescue a drowning woman regardless of your male status, the prohibition against touching the female does not pertain in such a case involving a threat to life, which trumps even the holy Sabbath. The drowning woman here is the dead body on the bed about to be sunk to the depths of the river in the form of ashes, and the life that is threatened is her afterlife.

  In any other circumstance, all of this pilpul and Talmudic disputation displayed by his students, not to mention the laudatory manifestation of the desire to adhere to the law to the strictest hairsplitting letter, would have been a source of extreme pride to Rabbi Assi, confirmation that all of his teachings had penetrated and taken root in the minds and hearts of his flock. But now he was growing increasingly impatient, their momentum was slipping away. And then their situation turned utterly hopeless. A pack of gray monkeys led by Fetter Feivish leaped into the bedroom, invading the premises through the door that the rabbi and his men had carelessly left open. The monkeys seemed to know who the enemy was, I believe by a sign from Manika who understood how to communicate with them, and began to harass them mercilessly, swatting them with their tails, climbing up their legs and onto their shoulders, nipping at their fingers, tugging their side-curls, pulling off their black flying saucer hats and putting them on their own heads, like in the children’s story about the caps for sale once so beloved by my daughter Maya, so that in the end the rabbi had no choice but to turn and abandon the battlefield, shouting at me as he and his raiders made their exit that he washed his hands of all of it, it was now all on my head, I would pay a very heavy price for it if not in this life then in the next, I might be the daughter but in this situation I was tantamount to the son, the rebellious and wayward son, condemned to death by stoning.

  At this juncture I feel it is necessary and appropriate to pause for a moment in my narrative of these traumatic events to acknowledge my debt to Manika. There is no doubt in my mind that without Manika, I would not have been able to honor my mother by carrying out her last wishes exactly as she had mandated them to me, I would not have been able to pull it off on my own. It was during the period between Ma’s disappearance and the immolation of the shell she had left behind that Manika’s extraordinary administrative and managerial powers and her fierce loyalty came to the fore—attributes that continued to enrich my life, for she remained at my side for many years after. After it was all over, I presented her with a thank-you gift of a perfect new set of teeth made to order, brought her to Mumbai with me where she served as my daughter Maya’s ayah, and, as an extra bonus, engaged a private tutor to teach her how to read. But during those terrible dark hours, when I was confined like a captive to the bedside on guard duty, it was Manika who took care of everything and made all the arrangements, operating on her own initiative, without requiring instructions or even a list, which she would not at that time have been able to read in any event. She knew exactly what had to be done, she did not have to be told, she stored it all in her head and made everything happen. Truly, she is my gem, to quote the rebbetzin, the jewel in my crown.

  Manika not only had the foresight to summon the eunuchs and mobilize the monkeys, anticipating the looming threat from the rabbi and his cohorts, but after that incident she made sure I was never again alone. There was not a moment subsequently when I was not surrounded by defenders and comforters—our four eunuchs and many of their fellow travelers just being there for me, spending quality time, spraying fine mists of patchouli into the air with atomizers they pulled out of their purses, Fetter Feivish and the mischievous members of his simian tribe tearing open bags of Bamba and Bissli meant for the rabbi’s kids, Bulbul and the delegation of bicycle rickshaw wallahs coming and going, and other assorted visitors. We sat around with our dupattas or the ends of our saris stretched demurely across the lower half of our faces because despite all the perfumes and joss sticks in the world, we could not deny the percolating smell of rot diffused by the microbes and bacteria released at last to gorge inside the carcass. With exemplary reverence and refinement, Manika knotted a kerchief like a pulley tightly around the still-uncovered face of the deceased as if it had a toothache, in order to close its mouth, which had been hanging down slack, wide open, revealing gray gums, an obscene dangling uvula, a swollen tongue, and all the secrets of my childhood.

  It was Manika who made all the advance arrangements at the cremation ghat—paying double the fee in anticipation of what would be the extraordinary nature of our cortege, which would include the essential participation of the eunuchs in full regalia, hiring the services of a willing priest at double the price, purchasing double the amount, due to the unusual size of the body, of the best sandalwood for the pyre, the best ghee for fuel, the best incense for fragrance, and so on, price was not an object. Manika was the one who went out with two of our eunuchs as her fashion consultants on an errand to buy the shroud, as well as the lustrous saffron-colored and gold-ribboned coverings, garlands of flowers in abundance, an extra-sturdy reinforced bamboo bier on which to carry the corpse in the processional along the ghats, cords to tie it down securely, and all the other supplies. With a wall of eunuchs screening the bed for privacy, Manika washed the body and swaddled it in the thin sheet of the shroud, shooing away the flies and moths as she labored, this tiny woman performing all the heavy lifting on her own without an audible sigh or groan. And shortly before we all set out, because of the prohibition against the participation of women in the cremation rites due to the well-documented female tendency toward hysteria and the possibility that a lady overcome with grief might lunge headlong into the flames, which is now illegal, it was Manika who transformed me into the eldest son, into my male twin, into Shmelke, by draping me within the concealing folds of a pure white robe, and she shaved my head entirely, leaving only a small tuft in back, a little below the crown.

  We set out while it was still dark, our four noble eunuchs honored with the first round of bearing aloft the bamboo stretcher on
which the shrouded body had been laid out, blanketed with vivid cloths for warmth, heaped with garlands of flowers for beauty, firmly anchored with strong bands to prevent shifting or slippage or any unseemly accident along the way, God forbid. As the eldest son and mourner in chief, renamed Mani for the occasion, I walked directly behind. At my side was the hijra guru himself, the eunuch chief in all his splendor, conferring upon Ma the distinction of his presence and the blessings of good luck in his power to grant it as she embarked on her journey toward liberation. Then followed an escort composed of additional initiates in the exclusive society of eunuchs as well as members of the fraternity of bicycle rickshaw wallahs led by Bulbul, all of them eager for the honor of taking their turn carrying the effigy of my holy mother. Making up the rear, at a respectful distance, came the woman and the animal, Manika and Fetter Feivish, accompanied by several of his colleagues. This was the core group, the nucleus around which many other spiritually attuned seekers would amass as we made our way from Ma’s apartment chanting, Rama nama satya hai, the familiar verse intoned over and over again every day by funeral processions wending through the lanes and alleys of Varanasi—the refrain that reverberated in your ears day and night and could never be fully unplugged, Rama nama satya hai, God’s name is truth.

  In faithful compliance with Ma’s extraordinary request to be transported to her final destination not by the traditional route through the constricted streets of the city itself but rather along the wide promenade at the top of the broad concrete steps of the ghats, we progressed from the apartment through some twisting roads and alleys, then down the clay slope to our first station, the great Shiva linga under the pipal tree at Assi Ghat. The darkness was still intense, an hour at least remained until the sun would begin to rise over the eastern shore of Mother Ganga, there were no electric lamps or other lights to guide our way as the power had failed as usual, yet already there were bathers and pilgrims at Assi Ghat performing their daily salutations, rising wet from the holy river as if reborn, their clothing clinging to their bodies and rendered translucent, climbing up the slippery incline. By the light of candles affixed with their own melting wax around the base of the linga, I instantly recognized among the Shiva devotees Ma’s girlfriend Zehava, despite the helmet she had on to protect her hairdo. I did not hesitate to approach and introduce myself. Addressing her in Hebrew, I informed her whose remains we were now carrying, and invited her to show her respect to the dear departed by joining our cortege.

  She declined on two grounds. First, she was at that very moment engaged in an emergency political action to counteract a string of outrages perpetrated by a radical group that provocatively called itself SS, which stood for Safe Sex, and, to add insult to injury, used the Indian Aryan backward swastika as its symbol. As a Jew she simply could not countenance such Nazi references however much she might be in agreement with this organization’s program to stem the population explosion that dumped more poor people in India than in any other country on the face of the earth, and however deeply she was in accord with its agenda to stop the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases and especially AIDS by truck drivers on gouged-out Indian roads whose throbbing vehicles so agitated their groins and sex organs that they had no choice but to seek release with infected prostitutes at rest stops and then bring the disease back home as a present to their own wives in their villages. Moreover, she absolutely could not tolerate the repellent tactics of this group, including its most recent particularly offensive campaign to promote the virtue of protected sex in a startling act of desecration that would make everyone sit up and pay attention—swathing every Shiva linga they could get their hands on, no matter how small or large, with a condom. Just before our arrival, as it happened, she along with a few other Shivaniks, had peeled off an extra-jumbo plus-sized rubberlike condom from this very impressive linga under this pipal tree right here at Assi Ghat. Clearly, it was more vital that she devote her energies to this immediate crisis. A threat to the living always took precedence over attending to the final rites for the departed, who were anyway already no longer players and past caring.

  That was the first reason Zehava gave for not being available on such short notice to join our procession. Her second reason, which she stated succinctly since it required no explanation, was that as a matter of principle she boycotted Hindu funerals since they excluded women for sexist reasons. Hysterics, all of us—and she telegraphed a sisterly smile, taking it for granted I was on her wavelength. That was her inner Golda talking, and I told her so. No, it was her outer Zehava, she corrected, the highest articulation of feminism, the most powerful manifestation of liberation—women’s liberation in the full expression of the lived reality of her femaleness. “Your wise mother, may she rest in peace, she understood this. She told me you’d never get it—and she was right.”

  So, Ma had talked about me to this vulgar stranger, and in such a negative light. It required all my self-control to keep from bursting into tears at this betrayal, sobbing wretchedly like a little girl again until I was panting and could no longer catch my breath, falling down crying right there at the foot of the Shiva linga at Assi Ghat, and beating the ground with my fists in a tantrum like your stereotypical female hysteric—but it was necessary to maintain the decorum of the occasion. Lips pumping fishlike, throat constricted as if an umbilical cord had again been twisted around my neck by Shmelke my twin, I nevertheless had to carry myself with adult male dignity and move on. Already our forces were advancing, the bamboo litter at the head with the cadaver like a beached whale dredged up from the sea strapped down to it carted by the next shift of four eunuchs. I took my rightful place directly behind, followed by the founding core escort, our ranks swelling with bystanders and gawkers as we processed along the way—sadhus and holy men, yogis and ascetics, beggars, boatmen, launderers, pushers, touts, dreadlocked kids stoned on hashish, strumming their sitars, banging their tablas, seekers, tourists, the jet-lagged and the insomniac and the homeless, dogs, goats, monkeys, cows. The mood was celebratory and festive, and not discordantly so. Death held no terror here even in the darkness of night. This was Kashi, the city of light where death was bound up in the fabric of life, accepted like any other bodily function, taken in, passed through, and eliminated.

  We made our way chanting along the promenade rising above the holy river Ganges, past Tulsi Ghat, and the Jain Ghat, and onward, with the hope of reaching Harishchandra Ghat as our next station, to switch bearers, change horses as it were, when an unforeseen event occurred at the ghat named for the great god himself, destroyer and transformer, Shivala Ghat. This is the ghat favored by cows and water buffalos, herded here from the cramped teeming interior of the city and marched down the steps into the waters of the river to bathe and cool off, leaving in their wake great wet mounds of waste matter, sloppy heaps of dung. On the bright side, when our bearers stumbled and slipped on the muck, they managed to stop their slide after rolling down only about four or five steps and were spared crashing down the entire flight. Most importantly, the body on the stretcher thank God remained securely in place and did not suffer the humiliation of plummeting with a horrifying thud. Still, it did not emerge unscathed. It was smeared with shit as if it had been rolled like dough in sugar, the eunuchs were shrieking, their saris and makeup were ruined, we were obliged to stop and wait while they descended into the water with the stretcher and submerged entirely to clean off as best they could. When they came up out of Mother Ganga there was no time for drying, no warmth from the sun, which had not yet risen, our schedule had been disrupted, it was imperative to move on. Ten fresh eunuchs, four on each side in file, plus one at the head and one at the feet, were now required to ferry the waterlogged body, weighed down even more by the coverings soaked through and through. Alluding to the excrement that had in such a ghastly spectacle toppled the guest of honor and her bearers, the hijra guru said, “It is the filth of Shiva and therefore pure, all opposites are illusion.” We took whatever comfort we could from this
wisdom as we continued on our way.

  Because of this unexpected pit stop at Shivala, we now moved ahead at a purposeful clip in our legions, chanting our Rama nama satya hai, hoping to pass Harishchandra Ghat without stopping there to pay our respects as we had originally intended. This, however, was not to be, and perhaps in hindsight it was correct that we pause for some moments of silence at this holy site, since it is the more ancient of the two cremation ghats and regarded by many of the Kashi old-timers as the more sacred and therefore the preferred access route to moksha. What prevented us from pushing ahead directly was the small mob of children who slept in Harishchandra in the shadow of the electric crematorium, and in the pavilion, and on the benches, and along the retaining wall, and in any sheltered nook they could curl up in the fetal position to stick their thumbs into their mouths even among the open-air pyres, burning continuously. The boisterous parade of our throng passing in the night jolted them into wakefulness. Illuminated by the fresh and smoldering flames of burning bodies, the urchins descended on us like tiny demons, the whites of their eyes and teeth gleaming in the darkness of that underworld as they penetrated our ranks, circling our legs, squeezing in very close, groping, clawing, grasping, begging, stealing.

  Still, even as they clung to us and hung from our necks and arms, we barely slowed our pace, plowing ahead, shooing them off like mosquitos, the eunuchs letting out terrifying cries and howls from the monster abyss of prebirth dreams, startling the imps into flight. We thought we had succeeded in shaking them off entirely, but a small hardcore contingent had regrouped ahead of us. In a straight row barring our way, they were squatting bare-bottomed and defecating, staking out their territory like dogs, looking up at us defiantly, sniffing and grinning triumphantly. It stopped us in our tracks, their pathetic barricade. We stood there gazing far too long, overcome by the realization that this was their only line of defense, there was nothing we could do to save them. So we simply circled around and went on. I wanted to call out to my mother, Ma, wherever you are (certainly not in that obscene blob we were hauling), these are the poor starving children of India you were always reminding me about when I refused to finish all the food on my plate—take a look, Ma. Ma, why did you have to fixate on Manikarnika for your cremation? You’re too heavy, Ma. You love little children, Ma, you could have chosen Harishchandra. Then we would already have arrived.