by Tova Reich
Sitting in the balcony of the Leopold gazing at the action below, breathing in the secondhand heat of bodies pressing against the bar running along the wall behind me, I was prostrated again by the renewed awareness of how alone I was. When did it happen? Swirling in the ripeness of the semidarkness all around were couples and groups, muscle, hair, mouths, teeth, bodies that to my eyes were nothing but vessels evolved to house sexual organs packaged at all levels and degrees of attractiveness desperate for pleasure, mindlessly driven to breed and then self-destruct. No one saw me, I was invisible, my time had passed. Now and then some odd soul would take the risk, slide into the empty chair opposite me and venture the opening moves only to be wished away, a mortal presence too sad to absorb. Better to be alone. Too much weakness and neediness already coming into focus, in the end it would all trail off into familiar squalor and meanness. But supposing I wanted a part in it—how was it done, how did you play this game? I had forgotten the rules, I no longer knew the steps to this dance. All of those living units agitating frenziedly around me, in squads of twos, tens, were closed off from me, sealed up unto themselves, with a private history and a present known only to themselves, an intimate smell unique to themselves, a sound frequency only they could discern, out of my range. They were the insiders, I was on the outside, excluded. Who among them would ever notice or care about me enough to bother to sponsor me, as it were, take my hand, lead me into the inner circle of light? How would it profit them? What did I need to do to penetrate the walls they put up to shut me out, what did I need to do to belong?
From my solitary perch on the balcony I watched her enter at the usual time with her retinue, giving off star power glow that emanated from within her and shot out like rays from her skin, hair, stride, her flashing style, or perhaps it came from the light that instantly flicked on in me and beamed on her the minute she appeared. I had viewed her many times before and was always waiting, waiting without quite realizing it on my nights at the Leopold for her descent, a goddess from the heights. My eyes followed her every step as she was ushered in with her tight little clique, plucked by the establishment’s powers ahead of the queue of kids and tourists, expats and locals, hoodlums and hangers-on crushed against the wide unshuttered entrance and led straight to the prime table down on the main floor directly in my line of fire.
The group was unusually relaxed on this night, I noticed, ironically unwired for a change, infused it seemed with a more solid assurance of well-being, eerily calm. One of the women, someone I had not seen before, had a baby in a sling carrier that she nursed at the table while sipping her beer; when she was done, she let her breast remain casually out and ready for the next feeding, exposed in the most natural and charming way, poking from the nest like a curious little bird eager to check out the scene. They laughed, chatted, flirted, but without the shrillness and preening and desperation I had noted on other evenings, serenely nursing their beers and absently extending their paws to scoop up some crisp munchies. Geeta and Samson were depositing bits of spicy prawn chili into each other’s mouths, crossing their arms on the tabletop like hand wrestlers to pat away each other’s grease with a napkin. I watched as if through a window, it was a party to which I had not been invited. They were native specimens in a glass case, command performing their tricks in a private audience for me, exclusively for my entertainment. For as long as I looked at them they existed, I told myself; when I turned my eyes away they would cease to exist. I got up to pay my bill. It was already around nine o’clock, late, time to snuff them out and head home to real life—to supervise your homework and bath, Maya, the sacred hour of your bedtime. I slung my bag over my shoulder, waved farewell to Pasha the waiter whom I would never again see in this life (when I look back now at my actions that indelible night, the one thing I regret is not having left him a bigger tip), and headed down the stairs, approaching the periphery of their aura and breathing it in, though they took no notice of me, no different from a fly.
The moment I waited for on those nights, the cherished anticipated moment when I would pass within a foot of her and inhale her voraciously on my way out to the street, the greatest intimacy I could ever imagine myself aspiring to with her—that was the moment of the first explosion. Smoke plumed up almost immediately, and after that the screaming, wailing, panic. I ran and grabbed her, pushed her under the table, and like her majesty’s secret service exploiting the only window of opportunity for physical contact between common folk and royalty, I dared to throw myself on top of her for her own good less than a minute before the second grenade was thrown, sputtering out like a cautionary warning very close by. Then came the staccato of the machine gun firing rapidly, nonstop, seemingly at random. It was as if I were dreaming. It was as if we were extras captured in yet another battle scene in the endless cycle of Mumbai’s gang wars, this time being fought out on the atmospheric turf of the Leopold Café, like a stage show to draw tourists into this noir hotspot. It flashed through my mind that maybe Samson was the guy the Indian mafia had fingered this time and come here looking for; it might after all be in everyone’s best interest to end this drama simply by identifying him and handing him over.
Cautiously I lifted an edge of the skirt of the tablecloth that was our sole screen of defense, and poked my head out a fraction in an effort to locate where Samson might be cowering, praying not to dislodge the sheet of glass I knew was flattened over the splayed menus on top and send it crashing. One of the assassins was only two feet away from me, spasmodically jerking out his AK-47, shooting frantically, indiscriminately, even into bodies seemingly already dead. Small and scrawny and intense, greasy black hair, cheeks so pathetically smooth over which a razor had never passed, the feathery dark down of a mustache, milk-white teeth, a rucksack on his back filled with ammunition like any other third-world tourist who could handle an automatic rifle and a satellite phone but didn’t know how to use a flush toilet—this was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen years old maybe, the gang lords had sunk to a shameful new low in the recruitment of their hit boys. Later, of course, I along with the whole tuned-in world was notified that it wasn’t a gang war this time around but a full-blown terrorist attack, and these poor primitive suckers doing the dirty work were shahid wannabes, suicide martyr material plucked from the most miserable holes in Pakistan and sent over the waters to turn civilization into carnage on their blood-red carpeted road to paradise. But while it was unfolding it seemed so unreal, so unbelievable, like a scene from a Bollywood movie. I was waiting for the villains to sling their AK-47s over their shoulders and break out in rousing song and dance, and I was not afraid.
In the space between the dying down of the shooting and the dawning absorption of all that was happening, I dragged her out from under the table. She was trembling audibly. It was all I could do to hold back from scooping her up in the cradle of my arms and carrying her away to a safe zone if one still remained on this planet. Grasping each other’s hands, like two little girls fleeing a boogeyman lumbering behind them down a dark alley, we ran across the war zone restaurant, past bodies huddled on the bloodstained floor, wounded or struck down forever or simply shocked out, overturned tables and chairs, shattered glass, smashed crockery, bullet-pocked walls and doors and windows, the metallic smell of firepower, the rust smell of blood charging the atmosphere. I cast my eye for a sign of Samson but could not find him. Later she filled me in that he had escaped at the first all clear with the bare-breasted woman and her suckling, commandeering one of the taxis that were by then already being requisitioned to ferry the victims and survivors to hospitals, and rerouting it to the sanctuary of his lair in Bandra. So she had been in touch with him, I should have made a mental note, but she related this information with dripping revulsion, and she chose to stay with me. By the time we reached a side door of the café, the ghostly end-of-the-world silence in which everything had been frozen, rendered all the more silent by the punctuation of the shrill insistent ringing of unanswered cell phones in the pockets of the
dead and dying—that silence now cracked open never to be recovered. The crying and screaming was terrible as we ran out into the darkness to escape it down a narrow lane toward the sea.
Our flight came to its terminus at a seawall outcropping, and we collapsed on the rocks. The Taj Mahal Hotel in all its opulent grandeur loomed darkly above us nearby, and beyond that rose the great basalt stones of the Gateway arch on the waterfront. Welcome to Mother India. A weighty silence engulfed us from which every living heartbeat had been bled. We could hear the lapping of the tide in the distance. The plaza was hauntingly deserted, even by police and criminals. The world had come to an end. We lowered our heads into our hands and wept. I did not forget you, Maya. The airwaves gave off no signal from you, the smooth black cell phone in my pocket was a miniature tombstone. Everything had been blown up and swept away, nothing was left. We were alone.
We wept for all the noble reasons, for having survived, for the massacre that would define us now forever, for the meaninglessness and absurdity of human suffering and striving. The long manicured finger of her left hand, the one not for eating but for washing after using the toilet, pressed into the corner of my eye and tenderly traced the path of a tear down my cheek. I yanked the elastic out of my hair and shook it loose. Her eating hand slipped coolly under my kurta against the skin of my belly, then down to the cord that held up my homespun cotton khadi Gandhi trousers, liquefying me. The world had come to an end, the possibilities were endless. I could go on, Maya, but as you know, I don’t consider this an appropriate subject for a mother to share with her daughter, so I’ll stop here. Let me just say, as I’ve told you many times, men have their practical uses, but when it comes to loving a woman, they don’t know what they’re doing. The conclusion is obvious. All I will add here for the sake of closure is that on that night of all nights what we enacted on the rocks, she and I, was the natural consummation of our destined union born in the shadow of mortality under the table on the bloodstained floor of the Leopold Café. Later, afterward—ah, such rich signifiers!—entwined in each other’s arms, we fell asleep in a cleft of the rocks.
To this day I don’t know what woke us up, the sound or the light. There was a series of thunderous blasts and the sky lit up, illuminating a hidden universe of lovers tucked in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their eyes startled open and fluttering wildly. Spears of flame were shooting up from the Taj. Its magnificent dome seemed to be burning. There was a brilliant otherworldly light, neither day nor night. What time was it? I foraged in my bag for my cell phone, and it was only then, Maya, that I realized that the reason I had not heard from you was that time had stopped for me at the Leopold when I turned off my device to prevent a ring from jolting the killers and drawing their hyper-jittery attention to our huddled mass under the table. It was now nearly midnight, I saw, and there were six messages, five from you, text and voice, all identical, Mommy, come home now! The sixth was from Varda Aunty: Terrorist Attack Chabad House Saving Maya-Baby.
Black smoke canopied the Taj. I turned to her and said, Go home, it has nothing to do with you, it’s all about the Jews again, but she shook her head. Under no circumstances would she leave me at this time. The child was in danger. Nothing is more precious than a child. One little Jewish girl. Ten little Indian boys. It is the lesson of the Holocaust. A Jewish life is worth fifty non-Jews. A fine thought. The wisdom of the terrorist handlers recounted in the aftermath, final instructions but flipped: one dead Jew is worth fifty dead non-Jews. Everything was deconstructing all around us, but we were armed with our newly hatched love and we set forth to rescue you.
The sea was black to our left as we ran clutching each other’s hands, knees bent, stooped perpendicular, like enemy targets in all those war movies, locust scuttling from trench to trench. Hunched over in this way, we wove unimpeded through the web of darkened alleys and lanes, arriving too soon at our besieged backstreet, swept clean of its night crawlers and regulars, and muffled as if under an executioner’s hood. Police in khakis and soldiers in jungle camouflage with helmets weirdly festooned with twigs squatted against the buildings, pistols and rifles cocked at Nariman House, the Chabad center, lit up like a stage with its fourth wall gouged out to expose the furiously ravaged interior cavities of its set. From its blown-out windows intermittent bursts of gunfire sputtered down, a bullet-sieved white flag waving like a mockery of surrender—the rabbi’s ritual garment, fringes flying.
The paan wallah proprietor of the stall across the road hauled us in as we hugged the walls of his tin-roofed shack sidling past, scolding lunatics (meaning us, me and Geeta, eyeing Geeta greedily, what was this luxury item doing here in our savage bazaar?)—we were the lunatics, not the villains center stage in the show now being broadcast live direct from the Chabad house across the pit. Two locals had already been shot, he was telling us this for our own good, maybe they were already in Hindu heaven by now. Some old guy fleeing from the house trying to pass himself off as yet another Jewish victim had been lynched by community watchdogs, taken for a terrorist, his bones broken into pieces, it will require hundreds of thousands of dollars in mental health therapy to get him to venture out again to peddle his diamonds. The Israeli army was expected to make a surprise appearance any minute, its legendary, ruthless, crack, elite commando force of superheroes slated to swoop down in the darkness of night to drop their nuclear payload right here in a spectacular display of fireworks, right here on Hormusji Street, according to the most top-notch reliable sources, which is why the street is being evacuated—hadn’t we noticed? Bad girls, you deserve to be spanked—what are you doing out on such a night as this?
Don’t worry, Geeta said to me. We will find her.
She took my hand and led me away to you. It was such a blessing, to be enclosed within those brackets of reprieve from the weight of always being in charge to which I had been sentenced for life. I let myself go, let myself be taken by Geeta, I put myself in her hands, though she could not possibly have had any idea in which of the buildings in this war zone you were crouching terrified, or from which you might have been spirited away by the lords of evacuation. She was sublime that night, Geeta, pure essence of mother animal in the wild, she picked up your scent as it had translated itself through me and brought us straight to our building, straight to our floor, our door, which she opened with the key she plucked neatly from my purse.
Inside, darkness and void, nothing, nothing, you were not there. No sign of life—those words bore down on me, sign of life, none, not even a note from Varda, the least she could have done was to leave a note to quiet my pounding heart. So we were located within the minefield after all, it was as I had always suspected. You had been evacuated, cleared away, ethnically cleansed for your own good. Where had they taken you? To what detention camp, what umschlagplatz, what collection point awaiting deportation? We ran out into the hallway and vented our four fists in wasted rage on Varda’s door, rattling the tchotchkes inside, the brass elephants, the laughing Buddhas, the incense burners, sending the mauve Post-it note with the smiley face she had affixed to that door twirling slow-motion downward to the floor. Gaga, she had written in her loopy Hebrew with her signature violet felt marker, and beside it an arrow, pointing upward.
Up on the roof the party was already full blown. The residents of the building had all spumed upward and out with their dogs and cats and birds and goats, their numbers strengthened by friends and neighbors also escorted by their pets expelled from the restricted zone, all variety of spongers and oglers including news media types, camera wielders, journalists, bloggers, along with politicians carping the diem, as well as army sharpshooters and snipers who had identified the prize view from our rooftop. We had been declared to be just at the outer fringe of the officially designated off-limits strip, as it turned out, safe, if such a concept can be said to exist on this planet. It was past one, Thursday a.m., predawn, Thanksgiving Day. Everyone was settling in on that rooftop for the grand finale however long it would drag on, stakin
g out a space, spreading blankets and camping gear, laying out food and toothbrushes and water and other supplies, setting up computers and assorted electronic hookups to supplement whatever might not be detectable to the naked eye with a running minute-by-minute authoritative stream of what was unfolding on the ground. The Chabad center glowed in the dark across the divide suspended in the black hole of an alternate universe, silent, a mass of hot gas about to combust.
We searched for you everywhere on that rooftop, Maya, we searched for you but could not find you. Daughters of Jerusalem, if you see the one my soul loves what will you say to her? Tell her I am sick with love for her, sick. A group of Israelis sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor around a centerpiece of six burning memorial candles was strumming guitars and belting out defiantly “Am Yisrael Hai,” the rousing Carlebach tune that brought back to me involuntarily so many memories of my kumsitz days with your father, Shmiel. There among them in that campfire circle, eyes closed fervently, was your nanny, Varda, singing along. Okay, Varda, we get it, the Nation of Israel still lives, still yet, as we used to say in Brooklyn—but where is Maya? As if in answer, a gunshot rang out from the Chabad house below, floodlit in the crater, then a scream such as never was and never had been created, a woman’s scream, followed by sobbing, sobbing, and Geeta cried, There she is, and yes, there you were so young and tender in your pajamas, your mouth open and no sound coming out.