by Tova Reich
You were such a sensitive, delicate child, Maya—what could Varda have possibly been thinking by bringing you up to this rooftop and allowing you to witness such X-rated abominations? Still, there was no point in confronting her at that moment, high as she was in the orbit of her Jewish persecution and survival support group, and besides, her responses would have been predictable: The child needs to know, she needs to see with her own eyes how they hate us and always will hate us, in every generation they will rise up against us to destroy us, she’s got to be taught, and so on and so forth. I made a mental note to myself: Later, later when all this is over, deal with Varda.
We carried you down to the apartment, Geeta and I, and laid you our baby on the bed between the hovering warmth of our two bodies, murmuring to you, stroking you until at last your face rigid with horror, your mouth frozen in the zero degrees of a scream thawed to life again and the voice you had lost was restored to you. The voice in that scream was the voice of the rabbi’s wife, distorted, but you had recognized it, you knew her voice when she had a voice, she was our neighbor, your friend. What had they done to her to wring out such a scream? What sight had they flashed across the screen of her eyelids before she might have closed them forever? What was the last thing she saw in this life?
We had met her and the rabbi her husband nearly three years earlier, not long after we arrived in Mumbai and settled into our apartment. It was a Thursday too, I remember. We were returning home from your admissions interview at Cathedral, which went very well, I’m proud to say, and he was lugging home over his shoulder like Santa Claus a canvas sack stuffed with a dozen bleeding chickens he had just freshly slaughtered for the Sabbath. He decoded us instantly by our surface DNA and invited us to his table. The chickens were roasted, she supervised her dark-skinned menials in all the preparations, she blessed the candles and fed the hungry—the Lonely Planet gang, the dutiful tourists sweating from the rounds of Jewish heritage sites, the diamond traders from Ramat Gan and Antwerp and Forty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, the Israeli post-army dropouts, the spiritual seekers, the useless kosher eaters, wandering Jews, eternal seekers, passing through on the road to the messianic age, a cast of millions in multiples of six. When it came my turn to introduce myself around the table our first time there, I said, “I used to be a rabbi’s daughter when I was a little boy.” The rabbi coughed up a sharp laugh, bunched his wiry red beard in the shaft of his fist and adjusted the black velvet yarmulke on his head. “Ah, a rebel!” he declared. “Like your brother, the famous Reb Breslov Tabor. But still yet we love you. The Rebbe says it’s a mitzvah to love all Jews, irregardless.” Already he knew everything worth knowing about me.
The rebbetzin in her long sleek Sabbath wig sat down next to me, took my hand, and confided that she was pregnant. It was her third pregnancy; her first two babies had not survived, cut down by a hereditary Jewish disease. “Jewish hereditary diseases are so unfair,” I commented, “considering that just being born Jewish is a hereditary disease.” What drove me to regress like that, to act up like such an adolescent? Why was it so vital for me to signal that once I had been an insider, I knew their territory, but I had seen the light and now was proudly out? To this day I still cringe with shame when I remember that first night. Even so, she embraced us, Maya. She smoothed your cheek and said, “Such a sweet little girl, the sweetest of the sweet, may no evil eye befall you. When my baby is born, God willing in a good hour and in good health, I hope you will be friends. I hope you will come to visit every day.”
You visited so often in your uniform on your way home from school I suppose I should have set limits. They could have brainwashed you, reeled you in, another stray Jew; I was familiar with their mission and their tactics, I knew their power. But you insisted on going, and swept over by personal nostalgia and my conviction that the familiar, however harmful, was at least manageable, I let it happen. Almost every afternoon you stopped by for a short playdate with little Moshe while Varda waited for you outside their building smoking bidis with the security guard. (And where was he on that day the monsters rose up out of the wine-dark sea and cut a straight path to this Jewish hostel?) Intentionally, she did not remain inside to consort with Moshe’s ayah Sandra, in order to show the entire world so wildly attentive to her every move that she was not a common nanny in the same category as this little peasant from Nepal, she was really an astrophysicist slumming as a childcare provider; as for the guard, he was actually a chemical engineer between jobs, she informed me. “Moshe’le is my favorite baby in the world,” you would say. “His mama lets me hold him and carry him around.”
The night little Moshe’s mother let out that scream you lost your voice, Maya. For hours you did not speak a word there on our bed lying between Geeta and me, until dawn when released at last from the evil spell that gripped you, you turned to Geeta and said, “What will happen to Moshe’le?” “He will be saved,” she replied with an assurance no one would dare contradict as you sank into sleep, and over your fragrant head our lips met like the wings of the cherubim over the holy ark.
As we slept in our apartment the constant pounding on the roof directly above us did not abate. Up and down the stairs there was stomping and thudding all through the night constricting my throat and chest with a deep grinding-bass pulse. I knew I must wake up for the sake of my family, to protect you from a threat I sensed very close by, but a great weight was pressing down on me, and I could not move, as if I were paralyzed. Mama! you cried out to me, but you were too far away for me to reach you. I summoned up every remaining shred of my strength to rip the coils holding me down in which I was trussed and drag you from the window where you stood staring into the cockpit of a helicopter, the pilot’s dark eyes smiling on Geeta, shaking his helmeted head side to side in a movement the rest of the world translates as no, but in the official Indo-Aryan and Dravidian body language of the subcontinent it is yes—yes yes yes.
We waved as his helicopter brushed our window so close, dipping down low then lifting and whirling away, no longer ours as it joined the flock of choppers suspended under the clouds. From the windows of buildings all around faces popped out, citizens were spilling out onto the balconies, the street so strangely deserted last night was coming back to life, filling with humans panting with curiosity and excitement at a calamity not strictly their own, stray dogs, goats, the whole teeming mob, all pressing toward the poisonous blot of Nariman House. A large white van had drawn up there, maybe an ambulance, maybe a hearse, the airwaves were buzzing, something was happening. Still creased by sleep we ran barefoot up to the roof. With Geeta carving out our pathway we shoved to the head of one of the packs gathered in front of a screen. “It’s Moshe’le,” you cried, pointing to the baby on the screen. “He wants his mama.”
Ima, Ima, baby Moshe was sobbing on the screen, the bullet-pelted facade of the Chabad house in the backdrop behind him, sobbing in the arms of his ayah Sandra, blinking in the dusty late-morning daylight of the street. He would not stop crying despite all her tricks to calm him, nothing could stop him from calling, Ima. His body stiffened, arching desperately in the direction of the place that contained his heart’s only desire, as if he would launch himself from the street back inside there whatever the consequences. A clump of fuzzy black microphone spider-heads was thrust at Sandra’s face as she was being lifted into the white van struggling to hold on to the baby. She had been hiding in a closet when she heard him crying, she paused to recollect. She didn’t think, she said, she just ran and grabbed the baby. She found him wandering dazed in circles around his mother and father lying there so still on the floor—but alive, Sandra insisted, still alive. “My rabbi and his lady, they were so still—I should have carried the baby out, then run back inside to save them. I will never forgive myself.” The door of the van sealed behind her like breath expiring, like a spaceship, just as a grenade tossed out of one of the windows of the Chabad center exploded nearby killing a scapegoat, and the crowd ran for cover.
Var
da materialized beside me. “Ha, super-ayah Sandra! How much do you think they paid her, those guys in there, for that little public relations stunt? Muslim freedom fighters release Indian nanny with her Jewish charge in a compassionate gesture. We love all little children. It is the Zionist entity we must uproot. Tell me something—who arranged for that van to show up just at the right minute? Such a big hero, Sandra! Say bye-bye to your ima, Moshe’le. You will never see her again.” Tears were streaming down her face.
Everyone was weeping on that rooftop as they milled in front of the screens watching the baby crying inconsolably for his mother. It was a communal cry-in, incredibly cathartic, an emotional enema, the deeply satisfying pleasure shared by an audience in a packed movie theater viewing a tearjerker together, absorbing the same stimuli and responding as one. But this was not just discreet sniffling and dabbing at the corners of the eyes with a tissue. It was racking sobs, loud and heaving, wailing. I stood there among them taking it all in, struggling to suppress the lump rising in my own throat, fighting to keep my voice from breaking out in howls and losing itself in chorus with theirs. There’s nothing like the cry Mother to turn on the waterworks even in the most base and hardened human specimen. I had had a mother too, gone up in smoke. With all my willpower I resisted being manipulated like a Pavlovian dog by this universal trigger, it took every ounce of my inner strength to keep my emotions from churning up and flowing over. Those weeping most openly and lustily, I marveled, were the mighty special commando saviors who now dominated the scene on the rooftop, armed with submachine guns and gleaming knives with sawtooth shark blades. They were the ones who had been stomping up the stairs all through the night I realized to take up their positions on the roof. Now they stood there sobbing helplessly in their black jumpsuits as the baby on the screen bawled, Ima, and would not be comforted. Tears poured out unrestrained from the catlike eye-holes of their black balaclavas.
The commando who materialized as the leader of the unit assigned to our rooftop wept his fill, then dried his eyes, gave his nose a good blow, and turned to peer into his scope pointed at Nariman House. In a deliberate public display of professional diligence, he took his time surveying the scene, communicating coordinates and other data to underlings. Only when he had thoroughly satisfied himself that his duties had been properly dispatched did he acknowledge the reporter and cameraman agitating his airspace. “The mission is Shoot and Scoot,” he declared. “My boys are the cream of the cream, tried-and-true veterans of the Gujarat riots, class of 2002. We know how to deal with these loonies. The Israelis are breathing down our necks. There’s nothing they’d like better than to jump in and take all the credit. I don’t give a damn if it’s Jews in there, or Israelis or Disraelis or Queen Victoria’s pet monkey. I have one word to say to you Israelis, so listen up: This one is our baby! This is Mother India, a sovereign nation. You stay out of it!”
Not too far away on the rooftop, a politician in jacket and tie was discoursing expansively, aiming his remarks at the entire sub-continent and the movers and shakers beyond, sucking microphones like lollipops poked forward by media enablers. He was pleased to announce that the situation was now under control at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Based on a classified intergovernment update he had just now received, all he was in a position now to disclose was that guests still inside the Taj were safe, they had taken refuge in the Chambers, the posh members-only lounge, where they were enjoying free drinks and tasty hors d’oeuvres, settling in comfortably for the duration until the crisis is fully resolved by our brave first responders. The terrorists have no clue where they are hiding and will never find them.
Even Varda had found a reporter and cameraman team settling for her insights during this lull in the siege, while commandos and snipers stood around sipping chai from unglazed earthenware mugs then hurling them against the stone parapet or like missiles down into the empty street. She identified herself as a proud Zionist, an Israeli, and a Jew in that order, who unfortunately had already had far too much experience with situations like this, she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemies. If there’s someone out there who imagines for one second that the Jews are not the main target of this little exercise and the designated victims as per usual, she was here now in the fabled land of enlightenment to enlighten them. She reached into the pocket of the vest over her kameez, drew out a crumpled sheet of paper, and held it out in front of the camera lens. “This is the terrorists’ top handler who is now pulling the strings from Pakistan,” Varda declared, bobbing the photo annoyingly to rivet the audience’s attention to the image. It was a blowup of a headshot of a man, balding, ponytailed. He reminded me of someone—someone I associated with group-spirit dining, maybe at the Leopold Café. At first I thought it might be the celebrated writer of a doorstop novel about the Bombay underworld—what was his name?—a former murderer and hoodlum who had reportedly escaped from life imprisonment in Australia to become a bestselling author with a cult following and whom I would spot now and then holding court at his reserved table at the Leopold with his consort at his side, an Indian princess, stunning even through her veil. But then it came to me, and I remembered where I had seen this guy. It was at the Chabad center, at the Sabbath table. He had been wearing a yarmulke. I had filed him away then as just another hung-up Jewish male on the road, indulging a midlife identity crisis. For two weeks at least he had lived at Nariman House, Varda briefed the press, a Muslim fanatic disguised as a religious Jew, scoping out the place, Varda could now authoritatively assert, stashing ammunition, planting bombs, turning it into the terrorist base in anticipation of the attack. She, Varda, had sat right next to him at the Sabbath table. She shuddered at the memory. Between the chicken soup with matzah balls and the schnitzel he had dared to reach out his hand and touch the tip of her chin, urging her never to pluck out her bristles; he found them very sexy. She would never forget his face, she went on. It was the face of the devil. His eyes were two different colors. One eye was green, the other, brown.
Varda’s voice breaking this news reached us when Geeta and I were already back down in my apartment. We were lying naked in bed making love with the television blaring to keep the sounds of our intimacy from assaulting your innocent ears, Maya. We stared mesmerized at the screen. OMG, did Varda really say that about the bristles? On TV? Did she actually think that what she was sending out over the airwaves about a terrorist mole at the Chabad house was good for the Jews? And how could this guy have hauled all those supplies and ammunition into Nariman as she claimed without anyone inside wising up to what was going on right under their roof? Was this an inside job? Maybe the guy with the ponytail was really a Jew after all. Maybe he was a Mossad agent setting up the operation to incite even greater hatred of Muslims in the hearts of over a billion mother-loving Indians, to stir up riots and ethnic cleansings and partitions such as the world had never seen.
Geeta turned to me and nuzzled my face with her lips. “I just love the goat hairs on your chinny-chin-chin,” she whispered. “Never tweeze them—okay?” A laugh squirted out of me, I thought she was spoofing, but she placed her long slender hand softly like a stopper over my mouth and said, “No, really—I’m serious. Promise.”
We were living those days of the siege in a bubble, abdicating the responsibility for our survival to the protectors entrusted to watch over us. Mumbai was paralyzed, schools and businesses shut down, its masses huddling in high-rises and slums and chawls as the beasts ran wild through the streets. It was an enforced vacation from daily life, from all the schedules and stresses that constricted us, and though we knew that outside our sealed door catastrophic events were unfolding, it was, I admit, a restful break for us, a time-limited reprieve, an interlude, and we let ourselves sink into it. What else could we do? We had no choice, it was out of our control. You spent the time playing quietly in your room with your same-sex parents’ paper dolls. Geeta and I passed the day in bed not even bothering to get dressed.
Toward evening we put on robes and gathere
d at the kitchen table for a simple vegan Thanksgiving meal of dal that Geeta shaped into a rooster of India, tarnegol hodu as they have it in the holy tongue, a tuki, decorating it with a wattle made of sweet mango pickles and setting it on a bed of basmati rice. You gave thanks for mommies, the more mommies the merrier, and you added a little prayer for baby Moshe’s mommy, may he see her again soon, amen. Geeta gave thanks for the terrorists for bringing us together, but for nothing else, thank you. I lifted my third bottle of Kingfisher and drank to that too but added, Yes, there is one more thing to thank them for: empowering me to do what every self-help guru and spiritual mentor so strongly advises but which only today, thanks to the enforced confinement imposed by the terrorists, I’ve succeeded at accomplishing—living in the moment. And mindfully.
We slept deeply through the night, having by then already been conditioned to the sporadic bursts of gunfire and explosions, the tramping on the roof, the stampeding up and down the stairs, until sometime in the morning when a series of blasts such as had not been in the repertoire until then jerked us to alertness. We threw on some clothing and headed out of the apartment. The door to your bedroom was still closed as we had left it the night before. Why trouble you? Let the child go on dreaming in her purity and innocence.
From our rooftop we had an unobstructed view of commandos rappelling down on ropes dangling from a helicopter onto the roof of Nariman House. At street level, a commando brigade stormed the building through the front door. The fighting raged through the afternoon into the evening, so prolonged and intense for a battle between such a reputedly crack battalion of well-armed warriors and by most accounts such a small band of unseasoned guerrilla amateurs that I was almost leaning toward giving some serious credence to Varda’s paranoid conspiracy theory about enemy infiltrators and ammunition stockpiling. Rocket fire boomed from Chabad house, windows shattered, black smoke and tear gas poured out, walls crumbled exposing the bullet-riddled wasted interior, soot smeared walls, furniture broken in pieces illuminated like a postapocalyptic movie set by floodlights aimed from surrounding rooftops. Toward night what sounded like a bomb exploded, set off by the gunmen according to sources, rocking buildings up and down Colaba Causeway to the Sassoon Docks, sending everyone diving for cover.