Mother India Read online

  Sitting with her thumb in her mouth in her fat ayah’s lap in the state-of-the-art wheelchair her father had also sent along, she was steered by a turbaned retainer to the limo after the vans were loaded with the eight new jumbo-sized suitcases packed to bursting, not to mention furniture, paintings, books, linens, carpets, china, silver, kitchenware, and so on—any detachable object of value that she could claim and fit into the transport. She ransacked the place, took everything she could take from the penthouse condo that was our home in those days on Malabar Hill with its magical view of the sea. You remember how we would stand there at the great floor-to-ceiling expanse of windows, Maya, you and I, and imagine we could see over the waters into the houses of other little girls just like you in all those countries far away with names also beginning in the letter I—Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Iran, Israel.

  But no way would I have let her take you from me, Maya, not that she tried, I’m sorry if it hurts you to hear. She seemed to have lost interest in you over the last year or so, and truth be told, in me as well. This may be too personal a disclosure between mother and daughter, but I’m telling it to you because I believe it will bolster your self-esteem, reassure you that it was not your fault, if you knew that our sex life, Geeta’s and mine, was virtually over. It was a classic case of lesbian bed death, which usually hits around the five-year marker (not too different, by the way, from sex apathy in the heterosexual single-partner bedchamber), though for us it struck between the third and fourth year, still within the statistical range if that’s any comfort. But coming back to you—knowing Geeta, there’s no doubt she emotionally disconnected because you had blossomed into such a mature, beautiful young woman, and if there was one thing her royal highness did not appreciate, it was competition; like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, this queen too had to be the fairest of them all. Still, had she tried to stake a claim, I would have fought like a tigress to keep you, like a desperate wild woman I would have fought even from my disadvantaged position with regard to power, influence, money, and, let’s face it, my hopeless situation as a stranger in a strange land far from my home turf, condemned to a life sentence as an outsider with no reprieve, no matter how hard I might struggle to fit in. Still, I would never have let them have you, Maya, I would have stretched myself out under the wheels of their rolling motorcade rather than give you up. You were the one thing in our joint household, Geeta’s and mine, that was nailed to the floor. You were not a movable feast. Even now I cannot bear the terrible thought of how things might have turned out had I let you go.

  So thank you Shiv Sena and Bal Thackery and the whole right-wing, fascistic, cretinous gang of Hindu thugs and goondas, I gratefully acknowledge you at this point. At least you were there for me when I needed you. There was no chance that Geeta’s daddy-ji, even with all the resources and connections at his command, would ever go public with our case given the affront to Hindu culture and religion that our sexual preference and lifestyle represented to the xenophobic zealots. No chance that he would ever take the risk, personal and financial, of fighting in open court for custody, never mind that he is your own grandpa (adoptive, admittedly, but even so—behold the limits of his commitment and take heed). No chance that he would ever have allowed the sordid details to be laid out for the entire hungry population of one billion plus to gawk at and gorge upon and regurgitate in an invigorating after-dinner riot. Two women copulating, two women consecrating, two women cohabiting, two women co-parenting—explain that to the Sena boys. Such abominations do not happen in Hindustan, they never were and never have been and never will be. In no way would your grandfather have risked discharging all of these delectable family secrets into the Indian mosh pit—too much information, extremely bad for property and personal health. I pause here to note, Maya, that as soon as Geeta left us for good, I took pains to go through the official bureaucratic channels to change our company’s name to M&M Sati Trips. For you, Maya, you and me, melted together, like the candy, our two M’s conjoined forever by the stigmata of the ampersand, inseparable.

  It was a bitter end. We had been together almost five years, Geeta and I, not including the extended lapses and separations, in my case for business travel and to oversee the end-of-life managed care and remains disposal of my late mother, may her memory be for a blessing, in Geeta’s case, I can now no longer afford the indulgence of deluding myself, to perpetrate her treacheries and betrayals. But there were precious moments of intense closeness, and yes commitment, especially in the early stages of our relationship, which you may not remember, of course, you were so young and oblivious, like a spirit hovering, a holy waif, before you blossomed into such a ravishing young woman and were scarred by our battles. There was even a time we were considering having a child together, as near to our own biological offspring as possible, with my fraternal twin brother Shmelke, by then butterflied into a leading rabbi and guru, serving as the donor, either in a series of personal appointments with Geeta until he succeeded in performing the mitzvah in the time-honored way, or with a rack of test tubes sloshing with his sacred sperm. Shmelke, with whom I had for nine months shared a womb of our own, was the other free radical in our sibling brood. As our mother used to say, If you ask me to count how many children the One Above blessed me with, I can only answer that there are not seven, plus the twins, Min’ke and Shmelke. Growing up, we looked disturbingly alike; apart from the strictly gender-specific clothing we wore and the hairstyles (until the age of three, his in long ringlets, mine hacked short), most people could not tell which one of us was the boy and which the girl. And in fact, the deal was almost consummated when the whole project fell apart, and with one thing and another, never taken up again—just one sorry side effect of Shmelke’s forced flight from his longtime headquarters in Jerusalem, ending up finally after long and arduous travail in Kolkata, where he could continue to pursue in a warm and accepting environment his mind-blowing spiritual teachings, offering so much healing and consolation.

  Since her departure, though, we have not seen each other, Geeta and I, not once. She disrespected me grievously by refusing to grant me the pittance of a private audience even when I dragged myself over seven hundred miles up to Delhi to petition in your behalf, Maya. She never bothered to come down to visit you; set that as a seal upon your heart. She left us flat, not only you, but our union, hers and mine. Remember, we were married not once, but twice, rabbi and pandit, two traditional weddings with all the trimmings—a Jewish ceremony followed by a dark meat roast chicken reception in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, courtesy albeit grudging of my biological sponsors, the rabbi and rebbetzen, in a gilded mirrored catering hall owned by the mafia under the elevated tracks with the D and N trains rumbling overhead, a Hindu ceremony paid for by her clan in a mirrored gilded private room at the Taj Mahal Hotel (where else?) featuring mostly her pals from the Mumbai Bollywood scene thanks to the movies her father bankrolled and her bit parts in the dancing chorus when she was in the mood for a workout, a spectacular party.

  God, she was beautiful that night at the Taj, your adoptive mother, in her blood-red silk Benares sari and gold bangles, the henna filigree intricately stained on her palms rising up along her arms like the most elegant lace evening gloves, like creeping disease, the heavy diamonds clasping her throat and suspended from her ears, her head-piece sewn with lustrous white pearls setting off her oiled black, black hair. She was playing the bride in a Bollywood film, another over-the-top Indian fantasy wedding production. Still, we were an astonishing couple in India, a two-mom household insisting on recognition, legitimization, but truth to tell, at bottom no different from any other nuclear family unit with a beloved child at the center of its solar system, interpreting your every sign like astrologers, poring over you, obsessed, like weathermen watching the skies day and night, utterly powerless to talk about anything other than you whatever the season. I did not have a family fortune like Geeta, but I had you. I gave her the ultimate gift of motherhood. You were the greatest treasure in my trove. I
shared you without reservation, I gave you. I bought off your father, convinced him to give up any and all claims. I lured him away from the Singing Rabbi’s gravesite in Jerusalem with the promise of spiritual nirvana, an all-expenses-paid private deluxe tour of every ashram in India, north and south. As far as we knew then, he had never returned. The last reported sighting of the yacht we had hired for him in which he had set sail over the horizon deeper and deeper into the mysterious east after he had put his signature on the official papers—Shmiel the Holy Beggar Shapiro hereby gives up all property rights to the female Maya and so on—was coming up upon the coast of the Andaman Islands. For six years I believed he had been eaten. I erased his Shapiro from your book, Maya, and slung a hyphen like a lifeline between Geeta’s Devi and my Tabor to attach them to you. Maya Devi-Tabor. In you, East met West. Despite the postcolonialist mindset, in you the twain met. Devi-Tabor—our goddess with drums and tambourines, and all the women coming out dancing behind you.

  Everything—I gave her everything. There was nothing I held back. Who can fault me then, when a month after she dumped us I trekked up to Delhi and stationed myself a barefoot supplicant outside the gate of her family’s compound under the eyes of the uniformed guards swinging their lathis, the monkeys screeching and baring their teeth on top of the stone walls. My demand was not negotiable: child support, full throated and open handed, or no-holds-barred disclosure in all the media of the scandalous, shameful decadence of the tiny elite of the indecently rich and sinful in this seething land of unspeakable need and injustice—enough to ignite mayhem between the factions of resentment that would have recast the memory of the riots between Hindus and Muslims of the last decade of the millennium into a trance party. Reparations—she owed me, she owed you. Yes, for you Maya I debased myself, and it paid off. They paid us off—coldly, impersonally, mechanically, but they paid, like good Germans. There was nothing to do but set pride aside and shame, and to take it. The checks arrived like clockwork. You would never be hungry, you would never squat in the gutter, a beggar’s bowl raised between your palms, you would continue to live with all the comforts and opportunities that were your entitlement. This was Geeta’s buyout from us at no personal cost to her, no penalty other than payout for what she had done to me, to you. She never had to face me and see the rapid rise and fall of my chest and the ripple of the quiver I struggled to suppress in the unnaturally wide-open eyes of she who had been slapped.

  Within half a year after our separation, when you were already at boarding school in the US, she married again without having the decency to even pretend to go through the motions of filing for divorce. Face it, girl, I tell myself, she never really took our marriage seriously. It was not real, it had no binding meaning, it was nothing but liberal slumming, sexual experimentation, she could afford it. The minute she wanted out, all her same-sex hoo-ha turned into vapor. She could move on as if what had been formalized between us were disposable—no truth, no consequences, no need for a legal mop-up. For sure that was the counsel she had been given by her family’s top lawyer, Samson Elijah, the man she left me for—You don’t have to bother going through the hassle of a divorce, baby, that marriage was a joke, not even a starter marriage, just two little girls playing house, you be the daddy I’ll be the mommy. Whatever small comfort I could derive from seeing her stuck with a Jew again for her sins was hollow. Something about us must turn her on, some baseless myth or idea, something primitive but powerful enough to overcome her Aryan Brahmin alarm sensor against untouchables, the flipside of whatever dangerous and incendiary delusions about us Jews that have turned others off over the centuries, with such catastrophic consequences.

  He was from an old Bombay Bene Israel family, low-caste untouchable oil pressers swollen to moguls in the spice business. But what truly set him apart from most of the other youth of his tribe was that after full-body exposure to the bounty of America at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, preparation H all the way down, he did not gleefully jump into the marching ranks of the international Indian diaspora conspiracy but packed his bags and came home to the tinderbox of India, an occurrence noteworthy for its rarity. The intoxicating rot of Jewishness smothered in all the perfumes of Harvard—for Geeta, what could be sexier? I ask you. It is common knowledge that her father acquired him for a stratospheric sum. The old gangster made him a partner in the business, that’s on the record, invited him to join the noble enterprise of polluting the subcontinent from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, with shopping centers rising like mushroom clouds on leveled slums, an offer, by the way, that he had never seen fit to extend to me, not that I would have done anything other than stand on principle and refuse. Samson was the man she was with that cosmically auspicious night I met her. I recognize now that she had been cheating on me all along with Samson Elijah with his gelled black ringlets almost shoulder length, his wet-look hair scrunched on either side of a too-wide middle part, coifed to hide something suspiciously male patterned. With this prize specimen and who knows what other hijra of indeterminate gender she had been deceiving me, discounting me those years of our doomed marriage in which she had never for a minute believed.

  I was alone as usual the night I met her, in my spot on the balcony of the Leopold Café overlooking the scene below, my pitcher of beer in front of me placed on the table by Pasha the waiter as soon as I sat down, without any superfluous exchange between us other than the coded nod of recognition. It was a Wednesday in late November. In the US, it was the eve of Thanksgiving, and as I brooded over my beer that night I was clutched by the pangs of exile. You were too young to comfort me, or to ease my loneliness at the time, Maya, only eight years old, born at an apocalyptic hour in the land of Armageddon at the turn of the millennium. Thank God, you were safe at home that night, guarded by your ayah, Varda, in the apartment we were renting during that stage of our journey after I unloaded your father the Holy Beggar and we moved our spiritual epicenter from Israel the land of the Messiah syndrome, to India the land of the swami syndrome, to the buzzing corrupt super-metropolis of Mumbai sinking under the weight of its overpopulation on its soggy landfill, to set up a sister branch of my tour operation business, known in those days as Seekers International.

  Do you remember Varda Aunty? To give credit where it’s due, despite all her shortcomings, her deceitfulness, her deviousness, and so on, had it not been for Varda coming so fortuitously into our life at that time, I would not have been relieved enough of childcare burdens to carry on full steam with my business, put food on the table for you and a roof over our heads, fork up the scandalous baksheesh required to get you into Cathedral, not to mention the tuition and all the essential extras for that most posh of feeder schools to the world’s most elite universities so crucial for your future, or, for that matter, to treat myself to a few hours at the Leopold a couple of nights a week to ruminate over a pitcher of beer for some necessary restorative inner peace. All in all, I still maintain that in retrospect we were incredibly lucky to have come upon her on the very first day we moved into our building on Hormusji Street in Colaba, down the narrow teeming lane from the Mumbai Chabad center, and best of all, a short stroll from the Leopold. Clad only in her bra and panties with her varicose veins pulsing and bulging like one of those light-up tourist street maps, she was standing on her head on the landing outside her door when we arrived, going native like all those Indians carrying out their most private personal maintenance activities in public spaces, out of sight of their core inner world whose opinion matters, but under the eyes of millions of strangers who are meaningless to them and don’t know who they are. We took each other’s measure immediately, she scrutinizing upward, I down, recognizing at once a fellow member of the tribe, the Israeli oldies floating on the airwaves from her flat, triggering nostalgic synapses unnecessary for identification purposes but serving as gratifying confirmation, sealing our instant relatedness.

  She had come to India to find her son Golan wh
o had, in her opinion, dropped out too long in Manali in the North on his post-traumatic post-army rite of passage travel flip-out. Within a week of running into his mother as he was closing a deal on some stash with the local Hebrew-speaking Indian hashish wallah, the boy turned around and headed straight back to Israel, morphing in due time into a life insurance salesman, an amusing anomaly in the land of Gog and Magog teetering on the brink of extermination. Varda, meanwhile, settled in Mumbai where she went native, trading her senior citizen hair dye from Israeli burgundy to Indian henna orange. My second thought after laying eyes on her perpetrating her daily exercise routine in our faces, after classifying her intuitively and definitively as a fellow wandering Jew, was, Bingo! Maya’s metapelet. For someone messed up in my particular way, a Jewish mother is a known quantity, ideal nanny material. I could handle the damage control, no problem.