Mother India

by Tova Reich

  When darkness descended the fighting finally waned for the first time that day. For a brief otherworldly moment, we were encased in the unaccustomed texture of silence. Then great cheers burst out from the throng of onlookers now packing the streets and alleyways, celebrating on surrounding rooftops and balconies. The commando heroes were filing out the door of the war zone of Nariman House grinning jubilantly and waving their arms, flashing thumbs up signals and V’s for victory, graciously bending down to accept kisses of gratitude from exquisite little girls, in training as sex slaves. The siege was over, the insurgents were dead. So thorough had been our commandoes’ sweep that not one perpetrator had escaped alive to terrorize ever again, the populace was assured.

  The young rabbi and his wife and the other Jewish hostages did not come out to take their bows in that triumphant curtain call. Maybe it was simply a tactful gesture of deference to the heroes of the hour lest the victims steal the limelight. Maybe they had been whisked out a back door, maybe even on stretchers in a condition not suitable for public consumption. Was there a back door? We were dying, dying to know what happened to them, there were all kinds of speculation. They were alive when the Indian forces entered but were killed in the crossfire. They were already dead by the time the showdown began, murdered by the terrorists. They had been spirited away to Israel by the Mossad in Elijah’s chariot for a joyous reunion with little baby Moshe in his reed basket fished out of the Indian Ocean. There were rumors of barbarism and torture. The bodies had been mutilated, what looked like a fetus had been ripped from her belly, his member had been hacked off and stuffed in his mouth, two women guests at the house were bound together with wire, raped and slashed, the eyeball of a male hostage was resting on his cheek, Torah scrolls were smeared with excrement and torn in shreds, stray dogs and feral cats were roaming, licking the blood-soaked floor, it was a pogrom. The fate of the hostages was the main topic on all the screens on our rooftop in the aftermath of the final battle—along with postmortem wrap-up interviews with the commando heroes. “We went in, we did our job, and we got the hell out of there,” a beaming commando laid it out for the interviewer. “I’m not going into details. I don’t need those crazy human-rights wallahs breathing down my neck.” I turned to Geeta as one does to one’s closest dearly beloved to share the moment, but she was no longer at my side.

  She was not in the apartment either. I ran down the stairs outside and there you were, Maya, in front of our building, whimpering and drooping as if you had been drugged, so small and slight in Varda’s arms. A restless mini-crowd of street regulars already bored with the main event, searching for new action in other places, menaced around you as a runt reporter who seemed to have lost his way in life, wearing a badge affiliating him with an outfit called the Hindu Orphans Press, stood there videoing Varda with his mobile phone. “I had to save the child right away,” Varda was declaiming. “There was not one minute to waste. She was no longer safe in her own home. It had been taken over by depraved criminals. She was in grave danger. I did not stop for one minute to think about myself. I grabbed her and ran.” This was one sick lady it now struck me, your soon-to-be-former nanny, Varda. How could I ever have left you alone with her? Forgive me, Maya. Her grandiose delusions were pathological. Among nannies, she was deserving of the most honor, more honor even than the great Sandra, innocent babes she snatched from the jaws of death. Her paranoid delusions were off the charts. Not a single sanctuary remained on this planet that had not been infiltrated by alien invaders. She was the savior, celebrated and feted.

  There was a great roar nearby and your eyes darted open, but then as if losing interest you turned and stared at Varda, cocking your head with such sweet curiosity, trying to make sense of her bizarre utterances. Varda cupped the back of your warm shapely head in the palm of her hand and sought to draw you close to her breast almost smothering you, but you wriggled desperately out of her clutches, squirming down barefoot to the filthy road paved with shit crying, Mama, Mama, and with both arms spread out wide you ran toward me as I squatted down in the filth opening my arms in turn so wide to receive you, and the motorcycle gunning behind me now roared in front of me slowing down just enough for Geeta to lean over and scoop you up and set you down between her and the rider in his leather goggles and Luftwaffe cap with a frill of black hair peeking out on the edges, and Geeta sang out, Let’s go for a ride, Maya, and you weren’t even wearing a helmet.

  2

  THE NANNY WHO SAVED YOU WAS MANIKA. True, she no longer was technically your nanny by the time Geeta dumped us; you were twelve, a woman. Had it been your fate to be born in a village somewhere in India, you would already have been squatting in your mother-in-law’s hovel picking the worms from her dal, wiping her grandson’s behind with your left hand while her son, your husband, followed his bliss building a career poking wires into tourists’ ears to trowel out the wax. But at first, when I brought Manika home from Varanasi as my mother’s legacy, she was your faithful ayah. When you no longer needed an ayah, she simply was grandmothered in as a member of our household, your companion, your duenna. She fed you with her own hands when she came to us as your nanny, you were so ethereal, so slight—Such a bad eater, my mother would have lamented. Manika shadowed you with spicy snack mixes to pique your thirst, relieved by chasers of warm cardamom milk and rich mango lassis. She never left you alone, she was your personal secret service attachment, she moved within your breath cloud. When Cathedral barred her from entering your classroom along with the other privileged little scholars, she staked a position in the schoolyard. When it banned her from the yard after she attempted to scratch out the eyes of a kid she suspected of looking at you funny, she took up her station across the road in the public domain. There she stood every day from drop-off to pick-up, her eyes burning through the stones of the fortress in which you were imprisoned lest anyone dare harm you. It made the children laugh and play to see faithful little black Manika at school—but tell me, Maya, how many of us in this life have been the repositories of such love? I said to myself, Someday you will understand and appreciate, it will become a song, a poem, a ditty, you will no longer be ashamed.

  We were dogs with our tongues hanging out, panting from the heat when Geeta left us. The air pressed down upon us, and behind it the weight of the monsoon, but still the rains would not come. The ground was parched, the breasts of beggar women suckling in the street were dried up and shriveled. We pushed our way out against the heat wall in daylight hours to do what was necessary, hunting, gathering, then staggered home and collapsed on our beds, Manika shuttling between us. I was grieving over my loss, entering the second stage. All that futile stage-one denial had gotten me nowhere, I moved on to anger, fury at her for abandoning me, reviewing obsessively all of the humiliations and betrayals and deceptions that now were so obvious, how could I have missed them, I must have been blind. I could not swallow it, I could not swallow anything Manika brought to me, I sucked lemons and spit out bitter seeds.

  You at least ate, I was relieved for Manika’s sake. No matter how prostrate you were with the lethargy of the season, you ate. Your bed was gravelly with salt crumbs, slick with oil stains, sticky with sweet drinks. Your nymphet days were well past by then. More than a year earlier, Geeta had summoned me to observe you as you slept, your covers kicked off, thighs pulpy and succulent. When had you morphed into such a morsel? At breakfast next morning, as you were shoveling rose petal jam straight from the jar into your mouth, Geeta asked, Do you really need that, Maya?—and snatched the spoon out of your hand, a highly counterproductive tactic as I happen to know exceedingly well from the experience of having grown up with a fat mother. Nevertheless, I switched loyalties, siding with Geeta against you, I admit it—I chose her over you as we held you there captive at that table counseling you as a team for your own good about the importance of diet, exercise, not wearing horizontal stripes, and other weight-control and fat-concealing tips, especially now that you had been initiated into the sisterhood
of blood, sweetening our message by reminding you of what a pretty face you had. More and more you were coming to resemble your grandmother, Manika noted with so much pride—my mother who had gone to such lengths across the planet to remove herself almost without a trace from the system that had insulted her so profoundly, who had trekked so far at such cost to achieve moksha, to unstrap herself from the torturous wheel of life, achieve liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, and here she was nevertheless, reincarnated in you. Rosy plump cheeks for pinching, breasts like cream for licking, hips like a basket for filling, you who had once been such a dark-eyed heartbreaking waif, ethereal with two thick braids down your back that I plaited every morning standing behind you as you picked at your breakfast—you had been recycled into my mother. Manika, how did you do it? And where would we find the rabbi to take you off our hands and marry you?

  The windows of the heavens crashed open at last, the rains came slashing violently down, flooding and clogging the vessels of the city, heaving up in great spasms the foundation of sewage and garbage it rested upon, coating its millions with a mossy fuzz. We were extras in a Bollywood horror movie, topiary animations lumbering about ponderously as if risen from underground. For weeks we did not see the sun. We dwelt in dampness, confined by the monsoon within our four walls for hours of gray daylight, battered by darkness.

  Manika believed you were sad because Geeta had left us. It is I who am sad because Geeta has left me, I corrected. I’ve lost not only Geeta but my best shot at India, now I belong to nobody, nowhere. Maybe there was a time once when Geeta had paid attention to you, Maya, willingly looking after you when I was forced to travel for business, even bringing you along some nights like her pet lapdog to exclusive clubs and restaurants when there was no school the next day, or taking you on long holidays and adventures to spas and exotic settings where white tigers stalked and peacocks strutted, treating Manika too, buying fancy gifts for both of you, trendy clothing, designer saris, diamond studs, gold bangles, ruby slippers, every high-tech device update, but that was history, all that had ended more than a year ago. For a year at least Geeta had lost all interest in you, she scarcely noticed you. When she left us she was not thinking about you; when she left me she wanted the hand-held luxury ergonomic bidet, she didn’t want you. No, I explained to Manika, the child is not sad because Geeta split, she is sad as in SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, presenting with depression, hopelessness, apathy, carb craving, and so forth due to the leadenness of the monsoon, the absence of sunlight. I went out in the gloom to buy a light-therapy box to reset your circadian rhythm, and ordered Manika to park you in front of it for as many hours as you would tolerate it, supplementing with St. John’s Wort, and Dr. Bach’s Rescue, and mustard flower remedies, reinforced with yoga and meditation.

  The light-therapy lamp could also be beneficial for your acne, you decided, like those aluminum foil reflectors offering up to the healing rays of the sun gods the mottled fruit faces of your grandmothers, or the tanning beds upon which your mothers were stretched and tortured, and since in any case you were already lying around inert, paralyzed, there would be no extra exertion required in letting it shine upon you. One Friday in June with the weekend looming, in the bleak afternoon teatime hours of the day, too early for dinner or bed, you were soaking up the beams of simulated sunlight to impregnate you with joy when suddenly the permanent battleship gray of the monsoon season engulfing us deepened to pitch black, and there was an explosive boom. The power grid of the entire subcontinent had collapsed. Light was drained from all of India, everything came to a halt throughout the land—traffic, railways, airports, waterworks, the complete slapped-together inadequate improvised substandard electrical infrastructure gave up with a groan, including your light-therapy lamp. It crackled in an otherworldly golden red zigzag as if God were calling you from the burning bush—Maya, Maya, put your shoes on your feet—and then it went out.

  You bolted up from your bed as if recharged. Cloaked in darkness you groped your way to the table where Manika, so spiritually tuned in at that time, had already set out the two brass candlesticks that her beloved mistress, your grandmother, would light every Friday when the sun went down in Varanasi even as she was plotting to set herself on fire like a pagan in this polytheistic land and incinerate herself to ash. With gestures as if programmed, you blessed the candles and brought back the light. You opened both arms in a welcoming circle to greet the Sabbath queen and drew them back toward yourself three times like a swimmer treading water to save her life, as if to say, come in, come in. You covered your eyes with the flattened palms of your hands and recited the blessing over the candles, taking on with this ritual the burden of the daughters of Eve down through the generations to restore light to the world, in perpetual atonement for the first woman’s original sin of falling for the seductions of the snake and plunging her descendants into darkness.

  By the light of the Sabbath candles, Manika showed us a printout of the email she had received. It was from the replacement Chabad rabbi, Mendy, and his rebbetzin, Mindy. They were inviting all of Mumbai’s nannies and their guests to a special Friday night dinner that very evening in honor of the heroic nanny Sandra who had saved baby Moshe from the hands of the murderers who rise up against us in every generation, may their names and memory be blotted out. Manika had already RSVP’d for three.

  We clothed ourselves in our Sabbath best, and over that we draped our rain ponchos. We pulled up our green rubber Wellington galoshes over plastic grocery bags to slosh through the streets streaming with putrid brown rainwater. Manika packed our dress shoes in my company’s tote, a personalized gift bag stuffed with a stash of goodies and essentials that I presented at orientation to each embarking spiritual seeker. This one had been intended for my dear friend and repeat client, the staggeringly rich Washington, DC, heiress and hostess, Charlotte Harlow, but fortunately just in the nick of time I noticed the typo imprinted on it; some joker had replaced the w of her surname with a t, so I decided to keep it—why waste a perfectly good bag?—and put in a rush order for a replacement. Manika was the only non-Jew among the three of us, which meant that by strict religious law she was permitted to carry objects beyond the home boundaries on the Sabbath. It was not that I wanted to give to the new Chabad emissaries a false impression with regard to the level of my observance or piety. It was simply an irresistible need to send the message that they were dealing with a seasoned insider, albeit lapsed, a former member of the club, an initiate who knew the ropes and saw through their agenda, a warning to them in effect not to try any funny business, especially with you.

  With you our precious jewel bezeled between us, Manika in front gripping one of your hands leading the way, I the rearguard clutching your other hand, we set out single file into the perilous darkness illuminated here and there by yellow lights powered by emergency generators. In our hooded rain ponchos, we were silhouetted like medieval pilgrims fleeing the apocalyptic devastation of water and plague through the deserted streets of Colaba and the Fort District, trusting our survival to Manika our guide. Not far from the porpoise atop Flora Fountain, in front of a massive edifice, weighty and indestructible in the mighty Victorian Gothic style bequeathed to Bombay by the British occupiers, a tank with a rotating gun was stationed in the brilliant glare of the headlights of a cordon of army jeeps.

  This was where Manika halted. A sizable military battalion, uniformed and fully equipped, was encamped there, the troops smoking and checking their cell phones, carrying out official duties. Manika immediately drew out the invitation and handed it to the officer in command. She opened the sack and dumped our shoes into a designated bin, took off her boots and plastic bags and poncho and indicated to us to do the same. Two pitiless attack dogs on leashes were brought forward to sniff us. A female officer approached and without a word began the pat-down, frisking us one after the other right out there in the public space since this was India where nothing is private, her hands exploring the entire topography
of our bodies, over and up and in between, nothing was sacred, nothing was new or unique or special, we were all endowed with the same stuff, simply variations on a theme. Ah, to be touched by a woman again, it was good, how I missed it, though I did not appreciate at all being forced to witness the same treatment administered by this low-level type to my child. Watch it kiddo, I was tempted to blurt out, that’s my innocent daughter you’re violating, but Manika telegraphed a cautionary glance and I restrained myself. Clearly, she had been here before, she knew the drill.

  We were subjected to full-body radiation exposure in an X-ray booth, then waved through to what looked like a bank vault but was in fact a private elevator manned by two guards armed with submachine guns, which whisked us up to a floor that had no number and let us out in front of a retractable steel grille. Four more officers were stationed here, and the entire security procedure was replayed in quick time—documents, body check, metal detection, interrogation, and so on. At last the steel grille was drawn back to reveal a thick door padded in black leather and studded with brass nails, which was opened, and beyond that another door, mahogany, elegantly wrought and richly lacquered such as befitted this luxury apartment building. Nailed to the doorpost was a large ornate silver mezuzah, which out of perversity I kissed as Rabbi Mendy himself opened the door.