by Tova Reich
The matter at hand that had been preoccupying the rabbi and his heir apparent concerned Moshe, little baby Moshe, a matter of great urgency for their future in Mumbai and beyond in the inner power circle of the Chabad elite. Aside from Moshe’le’s nanny, Sandra, with whom they were banned from communicating by the boy’s family and who would not talk to them in any case, you and I, they advised us, and you especially, are likely to be the only ones still around now who knew baby Moshe intimately during the first two crucially formative years of his life, when everything is determined. Was he a normal child, in both the negative and positive sense? The public had a right to know. Some said he had been irreparably damaged psychologically as a result of witnessing the butchering of his parents. Others said he possessed special powers like Moses our Teacher even as a baby—that he was born circumcised and came out of the womb talking Torah to his mother and father, and that now he continues to communicate with them every day morning and night, earth to heaven.
“Tell us everything you know,” Shmuly said in his most ominous, still soft voice, his eyes fixed on you in a concentrated focus perhaps for the first time, boring into you as if to flush out your lifeblood until your face drained white, you looked as if you might swoon. It struck me that I ought to put a stop to this inquisition at once. Why was I just sitting there paralyzed, letting them torture you like this?
“He was not even two,” you said finally, “and I was only eight.”
“Old enough to remember.”
“He used to stick his hand into the flames of his mother’s Sabbath candles,” you offered at last after a long silence. “Then he would put it in his mouth. He burned his hand and his mouth.” This was a graphic image I didn’t remember ever having myself observed, a disturbing sight you had witnessed more than once apparently but never shared with me. A daughter is supposed to confide in her mother. How had I gone wrong?
“Eh, like Moshe our Teacher when he was a little baby, when the Egyptian wise guys decided he was destined to grab away the throne from Pharaoh the king,” Rabbi Mendy interpreted. “So they put down in front of him a piece of gold the same like the crown and also a burning hot coal. Any normal kid would go for the gold—right? But the angel Gabriel, he takes little Moshe’s little hand and plops it down on the burning coal, and Moshe picks up the coal and puts it into his mouth—kids put everything in their mouths. That’s the reason for why Moshe Rabbenu was ‘heavy of speech and heavy of tongue,’ like the Torah says, why he couldn’t talk so good—because he burned out his mouth. So, did baby Moshe also have a stutter like big Moshe?” the rabbi asked you.
“I don’t know, I don’t remember, he wasn’t even two, he couldn’t really talk yet.”
“Something’s definitely not right here,” the rebbetzin said, pushing hard, baring her fangs like a tigress sensing danger to her cubs. “Why didn’t they stop him from sticking his hand in the fire? It’s criminally irresponsible. What kind of parents would do such a thing? They could have lit the Shabbes candles in a high place where he couldn’t reach. They should have been reported to the child protective services if you ask me.”
“The answer is right in front of our noses,” Shmuly said. “They were grooming him to take over the world for their own gain and profit, trying to clone him into Moshe Rabbenu, turning him into a Moshe Rabbenu celebrity starting with that public relations bit about the hand and mouth burning, like those Indian firewalkers, whatever they’re called—the fakers—excuse me, fakirs.”
Before my inner eye Geeta with the charred soles of her feet rolled off into the sunset in her wheelchair, never to return. The old woman next to me brought her mouth up to my face. Her breath was stale, her lips bubbling with white foam, like fat on the fire. “Pay attention,” she sprayed into my ear, “the child is in danger.”
She was referring of course to her grandson Shmuly, eighteen years old, from her perspective still a child. He had been reared with all the entitlement of Chabad royalty. Now he was being dethroned by an upstart little kid. The brilliant future they had all envisioned for him at the center of the innermost Chabad court, a major player sought out by presidents and prime ministers and kings on anything related to the Jewish question, with all the collateral benefits flowing to them as a family in terms of power, prestige, prosperity—all that was now on the endangered list. According to the rebbetzin, the overreaching, the sheer heresy in the circles surrounding baby Moshe was mindboggling. She sat there spuming as if a valve under pressure had been released. There was talk that baby Moshe was saved from the slaughter by a miracle, an angel from God in the form of the little Nepalese peasant Sandra; that he had been set apart, chosen for a special destiny, there were even some who called him a Holy Child. Excuse me, but the last time I heard Holy Child it was in reference to you-know-who, Yoshke Pandrek, JC, I’m not even allowed to say his name, a very goyisch idea to put it mildly, plain old apikorsus. Then there are the other heretics, the ones who say that baby Moshe is the Rebbe’s gilgul—like the Rebbe’s reincarnation? As far as I’m concerned, this is not one iota different than the fairy-tale garbage they believe right here in this cesspool of idol worshippers—Vishnu-Pishnu, Krishna-Pishna. Please! How can the Rebbe have a gilgul? You can only have a gilgul if you’re dead already. Everyone knows that the Rebbe is not dead. Any day now he will come out from that grave where he’s taking a short rest and rise up again as the Messiah our King.
The talk at that table was intolerable, there was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to extricate myself, go home and take a shower, and with luck, drag you out with me. I could have forced the issue by citing the fifth commandment now that you had become so pious in your observance, which would oblige you to honor your mother, but you wanted so badly to stay on with your “soul sister,” Malkie. I understood the pull of your desire to be close to that other girl. I didn’t have the heart to cause you more pain especially at that moment, after they had put you through such an ordeal. My only consolation was that Manika would remain to look after you and keep you from harm.
As I stood at the door wrapping myself in my rain gear, the rebbetzin came up to administer her mandatory hug that every female guest was required to endure going and coming, and by the way, to also invite us, you and me, for an exclusive VIP preview tour of Nariman House now in the process of being restored into the new Chabad center—The best revenge, let them see that they couldn’t destroy us, the people of Israel live. The renovations were still underway, she advised me, but you could already see the finished product taking shape—a synagogue, a study hall, a kosher restaurant, a hostel for travelers, an internet café, a resource library, offices, a museum in memory of the slain martyrs, fabulous, fabulous, no expense is being spared, everything top of the line, everything high end, one look at it even at this stage and you would see in a flash where all the money went, all those donations, you would see immediately how ridiculous, how slanderous, how just plain ugly they are, those accusations of embezzlement.
I spent the remainder of that Sabbath day at home stationed at my computer scouring the internet for the goods until I blew the electrical circuits throughout the subcontinent, tripped the power of my building’s backup generator, ran my battery dry. Where had I been? I must have been napping. It was by then already old news. Mumbai Moshe’le was a gold mine. Undisclosed millions reportedly had been harvested at fundraising events held across the globe after the terror attack. What happened to all that loot apart from the well-publicized trust fund set aside for the orphan? There were cries of theft, fraud, falsification of accounts—a squalid unseemly feud tearing apart the innermost circles of the organization. The heartrending banner of little baby Moshe’le crying, Ima, Ima, had been unfurled throughout the civilized world and milked for all it was worth. There had been an avalanche of sympathy, the megarich had opened wide their purses, but already I understood that nothing I could possibly see during our private exclusive VIP tour of the restoration of Nariman House, only just begun four years a
fter the event, could match the sums that must have been amassed and stashed under God alone knew whose mattress. She might not have possessed the subtlety to realize it, but the rebbetzin had just confessed as much, she had alerted me. I could read the subtext. Finally, my eyes were opened and everything was revealed.
On the appointed Sunday in the middle of July, we pulled up in our black-and-yellow taxi, you and I, behind two black Mercedes limousines already double-parked in front of Nariman House alongside the caravan of police trucks that had evolved over the years since the terrorist attack into a fixture on that dysfunctionally narrow street, objects of resentment and hostility by merchants and residents alike. A pack of urchins was buzzing around the limos, darting in to press their noses against the tinted windows and snatch a glimpse of the drivers in the splendor of their uniforms and the luxuriously plush interiors, then scampering away, shooed by armed guards and police in khaki uniforms languorously stroking their lathis up and down. Manika had not accompanied us; she was attending a one-day women’s self-empowerment seminar offered by an NGO in a slum near the airport. I had given her the time off and had even sprung for the fees.
An Indian worker in a hard hat was posted behind the security wall at Nariman House’s newly installed steel door, straining against its weight to keep it partially open for us. We were late, it had taken forever to get you moving. You lay curled up on the sofa muttering something about Malkie having forewarned you that our VIP tour group would include a major donor and his daughter, that she had been tasked with looking after the daughter and making sure she had a good time, that there was really very little chance Malkie could spend any time with you during the visit—so what was the point of going? It was only after I clamped down, an indulgence I seldom permitted myself when it came to you, insisting that I, your mother whom the Torah charges you to honor, had been investigating the backstory of the Nariman House restoration project and it was really important for me to seize this opportunity to get behind the scenes to follow the money and check out with my own eyes what’s going on there. Only after I had made that case for myself did you get it together to overcome your resistance and start moving, in compliance with the fifth commandment and its promised reward of length of days—a long life, an outcome that no one could possibly have wished for you more than I, my Maya. It was essential therefore that you obey me.
Despite our lateness, we nevertheless lingered for a while in the street in front of Nariman House, knee deep in water, rancid and brown like old tea essence filmed with scum, afloat with objects large and small, dead rats, dead dogs, live lizards, to gaze nostalgically up and down the street—Hormusji Street, our street. Nearby, a building had collapsed, struck down perhaps only yesterday by one of the wild storms of this very monsoon season; there were still some electrical wires and strips of metal that the scavengers had not yet ripped out. Down the lane we could see that the roof of our own building had caved in, the same roof on which we had all gathered during those first rapturous nights of my passion for Geeta to watch the unfolding of the terror attack on the Chabad center as if it were an apocalyptic blockbuster on a giant screen. The roof, too, might have been a casualty of the attack; the wear and tear from that very night could have compromised it structurally. Whenever it came crashing down, though, I felt confident that Varda had not been under it, she was still operational somewhere on the planet, doing her harm, I had no doubt about that. I had not seen her in years, not since we moved into Geeta’s flat on Malabar Hill very soon after the terrorist incident, but I had heard from someone that she had been spotted with several other women in a Tel Aviv storefront window, all of them clad in so-called intimate wear, with a prominent price tag hanging from each of their necks as if they were being offered for sale as part of an in-your-face protest action against sex trafficking of women including very young girls in Israel and throughout the civilized world, which was, it seems, Varda’s latest cause.
The roof of Nariman House itself was covered with a heavy blue tarpaulin to protect it from the lashing rains that could mow down far more solid structures. The building was now completely caged in the orthodontia of scaffolding from which, here and there we spotted such festive decorative touches as tassels dangling from bars, garlands of flowers, clusters of coconuts, streamers and ribbons, shimmering gold, magenta, turquoise, like trucks on the Grand Trunk Road hurtling to an early death in Lahore. Within the scaffolding, the Nariman House facade was even more dilapidated and undistinguished than I remembered it, looking as if it could disintegrate in an instant, blotched and blackened with fungus and pollution, with the added punctuation now of the ellipses of bullet holes not yet deleted. The hard hat posted at the entrance waited smiling and uncomplaining, keeping the door sufficiently open to signal unqualified welcome as the heavily armed security personnel in the temporary porta-guardhouse, the sturdiest structure on the block, took their time checking our identification documents against the names and numbers that had been provided in advance, gravely examining the papers we had handed over to them, then riveting their eyes upon us again and again, their heads bobbing up and down to verify that the photos and our faces matched and were one and the same, nodding finally in a signal that looked like no but on the subcontinent actually means yes—yes, come in, welcome to the slaughterhouse.
The orders were to take us directly up to the fifth floor where the living quarters of the martyred rabbi and his rebbetzin had been located. The VIP delegation was already up there now on its tour under the expert guidance of the museum’s chief designer plucked from the most cutting-edge upscale New York firm. We were very late, we had almost missed the whole show and were in danger of not being seated, the hard hat reminded us with a rueful smile, making a not altogether successful effort to avoid a tone of reproach. I felt aggrieved for your sake. The good news, though, he added, is that the tour itinerary had skipped over the fourth floor with the intention of returning to it on the way down and making it the last stop since that was the highlight, the grand finale of the fireworks; after the fourth floor it was all downhill, anticlimax. That was where the madam and the sahib were executed. He put a finger up to each of his temples to illustrate—bang bang.
As we made our ascent he kept cautioning us to take care, ladies, I implore you, I am responsible. The staircase seemed to be wobbling under us as in a nightmare, there were black holes, missing risers, gaps along the banister. I grasped your hand and placed my other arm around your waist to steady and steer you, to guide where you set down your feet, anxiously conscious of the falling stage you were going through at this time in your development. The walls of every floor we passed were brutally cracked and cratered, as after an earthquake. The place seemed to be a hopeless ruin, a wreck. What was the point of trying to salvage it? Better to tear it down and start all over again from the beginning. Yet on every floor as we continued our climb we could see busy workers, building materials and tools piled in the corners, an upbeat atmosphere of industry sending out positive vibes, signs of purpose, though to what end and at what price were beyond me. What a mess! The words popped out of my mouth. “Yes ladies, today a mess, tomorrow a holy Jewish temple, covered in Kevlar—our Hebrew National in a bulletproof sheath top to bottom, protection to the maximum.”
We arrived on the fifth floor, the former residence that we, and you above all, knew so well, which, I had heard, would eventually showcase a replica of the holy family’s living quarters, including a kitchen with a talking fridge that when opened would expound on kosher laws as part of the outreach mandate to educate unsuspecting visitors. Voices were coming from the direction of little Moshe’s room, drawing us in. It was such an overwhelming experience to stand once again in that doorway surveying that familiar space now with the full knowledge of what had transpired that almost immediately you threw yourself down prostrate on the floor overcome as if on sacred ground, just as you had described it to me, as if seized by a supernatural force. Malkie and a petite girl standing opposite holding hands let
out a joint gasp, then brought their free hands simultaneously up to their mouths in horror. The rebbetzin made a sharp move forward as if to stoop to your aid, but Shmuly raised his hand like a traffic cop on duty to stop her. “Don’t try to pick her up, she’s too heavy for you. Anyways, she’s okay. She’s used to it, she’s a faller,” he added unforgivably with a little laugh. I glared at him as I was helping you to your feet. “It is a spiritual moment for Maya, like a divine visitation. Places have their power.” That was all I said. It was stunning to me that someone like Shmuly so saturated in the Hasidic tradition of uplift was still so incapable of recognizing ecstasy when it lay stretched out on the floor at his feet.
We stood against the wall, you leaning into me as if to keep yourself from falling, leaning into me as you used to do when you were a small child in a strange place, as if it were just the two of us against the whole world, and we listened as the top museum designer described the plans for this space. He was an American, a secular Jew or maybe not even Jewish at all to judge by the yarmulke rising to a peak on his head, made in China of a glossy gold synthetic and stamped with the logo Bar Mitzvah of Elvis Goldberg. He had donned this headgear out of respect for the holy site upon which we were treading and in deference to the two significant players in his audience whose goodwill was essential, Rabbi Mendy and another man, bearded, robed in a black, heavy, silk kaftan richly tailored, stretched open into a keyhole in the vicinity of his navel area across a rajah’s paunch—without doubt, the major donor.
Except for some necessary structural and cosmetic touchups, the museum designer was expatiating, the room would be restored to its original form, as it had been when baby Moshe’le had occupied it: the ornamental frieze of brightly colored Hebrew alphabet letters, the cheerful markers charting Moshe’s growth, even the furniture and toys, all of that would be recreated—“Everything the same for when baby Moshe comes back to replace his father,” Rabbi Mendy chimed in, turning to the major donor, who flipped a nod of approval.