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  We advanced past Kedar Ghat, churning onward, lugging our load through ghat after ghat, past the launderers slapping saris against the stone and stretching them out to dry as the sky began to lighten and we came to Dashashwamedha, the busiest of all the ghats. To the east, at our right, Mother Ganga was already crowded with bathers and pilgrims performing their daily puja. The silvery dark water was strewn with flower petals and flickering with candles floating in banana leaf baskets, gifts to the gods. Boats packed with tourists and guides plied up and down, stopping to bob on the water to allow the passengers to gape at the quaint rites. Along the ghat itself in front of us and to our left, streams of devotees were descending to the river to carry out their ablutions, washing their bodies with the murky water, brushing their teeth with neem twigs, gargling and spitting. Hawkers peddling snacks and souvenirs, boatmen and masseurs, drug dealers and flower sellers and silk merchants and guides already were hustling for clients—it was business as usual at dawn on the main ghat, the only remarkable intrusion was our procession of dropouts transporting physical remains of extraordinary proportions through this sacred territory rather than through the streets of the city, chanting in one voice our praises to the truth of Rama. Now our ranks already swollen by the mixed mob collected along the way grew even greater in number, increased by the curious and the sensation seekers pressing in for a good vantage point as we stopped at one of the pandit stations shaded by a bamboo umbrella, and I climbed onto the wooden platform to say a few words in memory of my mother.

  This eulogy was the only feature of the familiar Western ceremony that I retained. My mother never mentioned it, so she never explicitly forbade it. I wanted to have an opportunity to say something and I knew it would not be possible to betray my woman’s naked voice when we arrived at the cremation ghat, Manikarnika. With the ancient priest sitting cross-legged on the platform under his bamboo umbrella looking up at me tolerantly through steel-framed glasses, oddly familiar like Bapu on all those rupee notes, I spoke my requiem in English, hoping it would be incomprehensible to the more fanatic members of the audience so that no one would take offense at the irregular nature of our congregation and observance, and deem it all some kind of mockery.

  The truth is, in recalling the words of my eulogy, I’m not sure if what I am now reporting is what I actually said or what I wish I had said or even if I dared to speak at all, I was so wiped out physically and so emotionally drained by all the events of the past days. But assuming I did speak, I believe this, more or less, was the content. I believe I went on for a bit, addressing Ma directly, assuring her that I was carrying out her wishes to the letter, exactly as she had communicated them to me when she had trapped my hand under the weight of her thigh so near to the opening of the birth canal through which I, followed by my twin brother, Shmelke, had made our entry into this world of woe, hoping, I guess, that she would find some way to express her approval and gratitude from the other side in the presence of these onlookers, a simple thank-you, some small token of appreciation and recognition, it was the least she could do. The rest of my eulogy, as best I can remember, was focused on speculation as to why Ma had wanted to be processed in this particular way, so alien to someone of her background and lifestyle. If she was thinking along environmentally friendly, ecological recycling lines (which I doubted), I might have speculated that it would have been more sustainable for her to have requested to be laid out on a mountain-top like carrion in the Parsee way and devoured by vultures; I would have done whatever she asked, she could have counted on me. In any event, in choosing between burial and cremation, clearly she preferred to leave a greater carbon footprint than to take up extra space on this already overcrowded planet. Finally, in conclusion, I played with the idea that Ma had chosen to avoid a traditional rite because at all costs she did not want to be called a Woman of Valor, an Aishet Hayil, which is how every respectable dead religious Jewish woman is summed up and characterized in the eulogy at her funeral and on her gravestone regardless of how she may or may not have conducted her life. Charm is false, beauty is vanity, a God-fearing woman, she will be praised, and so on—this is the Aishet Hayil, the grunt in the army of husband and sons, laughing all the way to the end of time. Ma wanted no part of that—that was my hypothesis. She’d rather go up in smoke. I turned to the great corpse at my feet, supported by the eunuchs as it was partially propped up against the platform on which I was standing, and addressed it directly. “So Ma, I just want you to know that you have made your point. Rest assured, you are no Aishet fucking Hayil.”

  The priest attending cross-legged uncoiled like a cobra and levitated unexpectedly. “Ah, it is Mama-ji,” he said. “I knew I recognized her. So the end of life has arrived for her. Yes, she is gone, but she has not yet come. She is poised now in a very dangerous place. It is a very delicate moment.” He raised his index finger significantly and placed a red tikka on my forehead. “Go at once, the gate to moksha is soon closing.”

  We sped northward in a blur through the remaining ghats—Man Mandir, Meer, and so on. The sun rose on the eastern flank of Mother Ganga, and we arrived at Manikarnika.

  There’s something about ritual, especially death ritual that sucks you in like a sealed train and carries you along to the end of the line, you need to accept that you’re in it for the ride. Not that I went like a sheep to the slaughter, not that I didn’t in some measure resist. It took so long for that great mass, allegedly my mother, to burn completely, that at a certain point, well beyond the three hours allotted for the incineration of an average body, the Doms began to hassle me to conclude the ceremony and vacate the cremation grounds. No way I was going to just follow orders, and not out of any personal elitism either—certainly not because the Doms are untouchables, predestined to sink their hands into the pollution of death—I trust that by now you know me well enough to give me more credit than that. No, it was because I knew they intended to wrap up Ma’s case the minute I turned my back and left—sweep up the ashes along with the big chunks of meat and body parts that had not yet been deconstructed, and toss the whole lot into the river to be ravaged by the dogs, ogled by tourists in their boats, pounded by oars like a schnitzel, devoured by snapping turtles and strange sea monsters. The assembly line had to be kept rolling, and Ma was clogging up the works. The Doms may belong to a defiled caste but they are also reputed to have prospered garishly. Death is big business, Varanasi, the mother lode.

  So it was an exceedingly long day—from dawn when we arrived at Manikarnika chanting, Rama nama satya hai and marched purposefully down the bank of the ghat directly to the ritual bath mikvah of the Ganges to give Ma her final dunk, until dark when Ma combusted to the last crisp, and I performed the ultimate filial rite required of me, following which I was free at last to go my way. And yet, though I know the day streamed into the night until it blurred into a day that was neither day nor night, and though my memory when I revisit it takes the form of frames unfolding in slow motion, like video replays of a sports event that bestow an aura of gravity and consequence on the smallest details—despite all that, while I lived through it, it seemed to race by, like a fleeting dream.

  Throughout, I felt Ma’s hovering presence, as if she were checking out the scene from wherever she was, doubtless horrified at the attention garnered by the remains attributed to her, especially at the terminus of Manikarnika. The sequined and spangled spectacle of her eunuch bearers had been enough to turn all heads during the processional, but at the cremation ghat itself, the sacred space where nothing is sacred, where all pretension and artifice are stripped away, and everything is transparent and on view, the action truly stopped at the sight of the massive husk itself that my mother had shed. The Dom Sonderkommandos standing knee-deep in the sooty water sifting with sieves of mesh and screening for gold teeth and jewels that might have been deposited with the ashes, froze in their labors to stare at the body as it was lowered for its last dip. The emaciated haulers in ragged lungis and shredded T-shirts unloading the b
oats, trudging up the hill to add to the great woodpiles stacked behind the ghat, paused with the burden of logs pressing down on their heads at the landing platform where Ma’s double had been laid out to dry, gaping with dropped jaws and blackened toothless gums. The regulars and hangers-on and loafers and prowlers speculated and bantered at the novelty of this imposing specimen. It couldn’t be an elephant as it was forbidden to cremate a beast on this holy ground, so it could only be a man of enormous wealth, a maharajah or a prince, an eminent personage who, though he could doubtless afford the purest ghee to fuel his own cremation, might even derive some perverse postmortem satisfaction from saving a few rupees by recycling all that built-in fat.

  Converging from all sides, they formed a merry parade behind the main attraction as it was moved on its bamboo stretcher from its drying rack to its next station at the ghat, and set down on the ground beside the capacious altar of sandalwood constructed for it by the Doms. Cows and goats squeezed through the crowd in anticipation of a grand feast as the cords were untied and the appetizers and salads of beribboned cloth and flower garlands cast off; dogs pressed in to sniff out the territory, chewing on bones dredged from the scummy water. With a great communal intake of breath and a deep grunt, the Doms joined hands to heave the body wrapped in the thin sack of its shroud onto the bed of the pyre, which partially sank under its weight, collapsing the lattice-like gaps between the pieces of wood expertly arranged for the flow of oxygen to feed the flames. There it rested on top of the altar, served up, its pathetic mortal shape fully on view for all to see. The staggering mound of its torso rose behind its feet, which were pointed in the general direction of Mother Ganga as if about to soon set out. The Doms went to work piling the sandalwood on the peak of the belly, the logs sliding down its slope one after another, to the jolly amusement of the bystanders, until at last an artful meshing was devised, and the body was entirely encased in kindling, leaving only the knob of the hooded head exposed at the other end of its soaring bell curve.

  The little priest, who had stationed himself at my side so close I could hear his neurons synapsing, rummaged deep inside his dhoti, then pulled out a cell phone. There had been no ring, he must have set it on vibrate. With the phone pressed to his ear he was nodding emphatically, but since no sound came out of his mouth, my eyes followed the arc of his gaze, which was focused intensely up the slope of the ghat to the very top, where Manika was positioned talking animatedly into her cell phone, gesturing furiously. Manika was directing the show from above, she was the power behind the throne, pulling all the strings. It was an exquisitely complex and above all sensitive operation to bring together, not least because each of its elements was in violation of the faith, from its leading lady, the Hebrew corpse herself in all her splendor, to its supporting cast of bearers and mourners of ambiguous gender. But this little sweeper and excrement wiper Manika was on top of every detail. She was wielding the clout of money. The priest too was on retainer and was being lavishly rewarded.

  Orders received, he shoved the phone back down into the folds of his dhoti, dragged me along to the boss Dom assigned to the job, and pointed severely to a significant stash of untouched ghee. The crooks had been caught in the act, attempting to pirate these blocks of soft gold to sell a second time, figuring Ma could stew in her own juices, but Manika was having none of that. We stood there grimly, alert and unblinking as more and more cakes of ghee were inserted into strategic pockets of the pyre, leaving just enough in reserve to add as needed once the entire bed had been set alight. Fistfuls of incense that had also been hoarded were now generously sprinkled on top and scattered within. The priest handed me a flaming sheaf of twigs, ignited from the eternal fire that the Doms are said to maintain, and instructed me as the eldest son and chief mourner to walk around the altar, like a bride circling her bridegroom under the canopy at a Jewish wedding, only counterclockwise, because in death time unravels and leaks back into chaos and formlessness. When my bridal bouquet of burning twigs became too hot to hold I gave up running in circles like a rat in a maze, shoved it deep into the heart of the sandalwood cage, and set my mother on fire.

  The netting of logs spun by the Doms in which the victim was caught collapsed almost instantly, sizzling and frying the great hump of the belly until it simply deflated, liquefied, and then seemed to vaporize. Her right leg flexed suddenly, startling me, as if she were unfolding in an effort to settle into a more comfortable position. A bare foot kicked out, the horned yellow toenails shockingly flecked with chipped polish, cherry red—and I had always thought I knew my own mother. The thin muslin in which she was swaddled clung to her skin, blistered, melted into translucence, outlining precisely each delicate seashell whorl and crevice and cavity of her ears. Dom boys stoked the fire with long wooden poles, throwing in more incense, adding ghee and sandalwood to keep it going.

  She burned for more than twelve hours, through the day and into the night. In the darkness stray dogs gathered around and stretched out on the ground to sleep, warming themselves by the hearth. What I would not have given to lie down beside them and rest, just another dog among the dogs. But I never moved from my place, never turned my eyes away, I kept faithful vigil into the night since that was my duty. One by one our entire mixed multitude, including our inner core of eunuchs and Bulbul and Fetter Feivish, crept away. Manika, alone at her post overlooking the inferno, and I, in the ninth circle in the pit down below, were left standing in the dark, my little Virgil priest still joined to me at the hip, paid by the hour.

  The body laid out on top of the altar had been reduced to pulverized white bone dust and ash that the Doms would collect and dump into the river. Only the skull remained, resting with unseeing eyes in its place as on a pillow. In accordance with my duty as mourner in chief and eldest son, I accepted the bamboo stick from the hands of the priest in order to perform the last rite. I smashed it down on the skull, cracking it open and liberating the soul.

  Ma, Ma, she sobbed.

  But I scuttled away and never looked back.

  Maya

  1

  O MY DAUGHTER, Maya, my daughter, my daughter, Maya—twice you fell in love, at twelve and at thirteen, both times in Bombay under the lashing rains of the monsoon, most dangerous of seasons, the nighttime of the gods. The gods of the East understood the demonic power of the rains to seed wild growth and release passion and calamity. That is why the gods go to sleep during the monsoon, and holy men are forbidden to travel. But you Maya, child of water and illusion, you went out.

  Geeta hated my gods-of-the-East, holy-men mantras in all their boring, predictable variations, as she never held back from reminding me. This was one of the running themes in our arguments, which reached a crescendo that scorching May she left us, as the dark clouds gathered for the monsoon season. Forgive me, Maya, I know how much you suffered from our fights, the screaming in the night, the crying, the doors slamming. Geeta loathed my romanticization of India, as she characterized it over and over again in case it had slipped my mind. How could I be so softheaded on India when I was so ruthlessly sharp and unforgiving about my own lost Jewish faith? That’s what she wanted to know. India was nothing but a filthy, backward, pitiless sewer, she informed me with all the condescension of a born insider enlightening a clueless alien—a ticking time bomb with a moronic religion, vulgar god dolls, infantile superstitious worship practices, nutcases parading around in diapers muttering drivel. So deep, wow! Nothing but a holy scam, a con job, I should have known better, born into the business as I was, a rabbi’s daughter. (Don’t go there, I would caution myself when she would plunge into these rants, control yourself. Above all do not bring up now her sweet little Ganesha shrine in the corner of our bedroom illuminated at night by the flat-screen TV, her personal four-armed potbellied elephant god comforting her all her years like a beloved stuffed animal, big Dumbo ears, long swinging linga of a trunk. I was the mouse at the foot of the elephant watching her perform her puja. To me it was all so dear, so dear.)
/>   And don’t get me started on the caste system, Geeta would push on, an obscenity perpetrated by the rich and powerful to justify their entitlement, to squelch every charitable instinct since it follows that however wretched your life, you deserved what you got based on your conduct in your previous incarnation. Even more cynically, if you hoped to improve your status in your future birth, your suffering in this life was mandatory; any effort by misguided do-gooders to relieve your misery was counterproductive. The starving children of India were monsters in their past lives. Don’t even bother feeling sorry for them, much less finishing all the food on your plate.

  She would know. Because when she finally got it together to leave us in the middle of that sweltering June, on your first day back at school after your two-month summer break, her billionaire father dispatched a black Mercedes down from Delhi with a driver in livery followed by a fleet of gleaming white Tata vans, her dear old ayah coming along as part of the entourage to wipe her nose and hold her hand through the separation anxiety. Thank God you were spared this sight, it was sickening, but you remember surely that she was in a wheelchair then, from having burned her feet firewalking. She had been threatening to leave, nothing new, but this time unlike all the others she had actually taken the extreme measure of doing the groundwork, flying up to Delhi to line up a job as vice president in charge of human relations for an NGO chain of orphanages for abused girls. In case you’ve ever wondered, her declared human relations specialty was the culture of bullying, so harmful to a young girl’s self-esteem. Well excuse me, but in the context of rape, so-called honor killings, mutilations, child marriages, forced sex enslavement, trafficking, beatings, acid burnings, starvation, and shitting in the street, to mention just the short list, a focus on bullying, to put it mildly, is quite an indulgence. Of course, thanks to her family’s influence, landing the job was a foregone conclusion. Still, there was one point on which that slimy nonprofit with its eye on the prize (Nobel, Peace) could not budge if it had any hope of maintaining a good working relationship with the Hindu cosmos, earthly and divine: the rite of passage hazing to propitiate the combustible female principle as manifested in the savagely powerful mother goddess, Kali—the requirement that each new top management recruit walk on a bed of burning coals, like a stupefied fakir, levitating above it all. Holy men say there’s a method to carrying this off without suffering any collateral damage, but the divine mother Kali, creator and punisher, engorged with all that hot female energy, would not be deceived. The pink soles of our poor Geeta’s aristocratic feet that I had so often taken into my mouth and adored were tandooried, turned scarlet like a baboon’s behind, ulcerated and blistered, the skin hanging in shreds.