by Tova Reich
Was this his idea of a joke? His buying into Moshe’s return was astounding, a public betrayal of the aspirations of his own son and the family’s ambitions for Shmuly as they had expressed them to us with such agitation so recently, soliciting our input and support. Besides, what if Moshe never wanted to return to Mumbai, a perfectly understandable post-traumatic reaction? Had anyone even considered that possibility? What if Moshe’le didn’t want to be a rabbi after all when he grew up? What if he wanted to be a dentist or a rock star? What if he had a sex change and became a female rabbi? What if he came back and didn’t want to play with his old toys? “Something fishy is going on here,” I said in your ear. You recoiled from my breath as if I were an alien species with a contagious terminal disease, pulling away from me and curling into your shell, and made no response. I must have unintentionally embarrassed you, speaking too loudly and too freely. You always claimed that I was missing the whispering gene and the appropriateness gene, maybe both on the same chromosome.
We took our place at the rump of the group as it exited baby Moshe’s past and future quarters, following docilely behind the museum designer and the rest of the flock lumbering down the precarious steps to the main exhibition space on the fourth floor. The sections of wall and ceiling that had been ravaged by shelling and grenade blasts and spectacularly pocked with bursts of bullet holes were already protected behind glass like precious artifacts bearing testimony. “We will leave it as we found it,” our guide informed us with suitable solemnity. The spot where the rabbi and his wife were murdered will be marked with a plaque engraved with the traditional phrase, May God Avenge Their Blood—which should not be interpreted to imply any negative Islamophobia, our guide hastened to caution. What it means is, the business of vengeance is left to God; that’s not our department. The main installation will be seven glass plinths representing the seven Noahide ethical laws incumbent on all humankind. Through the prisms of these seven plinths the sunlight will be refracted, casting a rainbowlike arc in the room, like the rainbow after the greatest of all monsoons in history that wiped out every living being on the face of the earth in the time of Noah, the rainbow that symbolized the Lord’s promise never again to destroy what He had created—Never Again! The main point, the designer elaborated, is that this museum is not only about the six Jews who were murdered here, or about Jews in general in any configuration of six, six million or whatever, or even about the 166 men and women of all faiths who were mowed down in Mumbai in this attack and whose names will be inscribed on the terrace of honor right here in this museum. This is a museum about the rainbow coalition, all of humanity in all of its diversity, in all of its victimhood, survivorship, and trauma, including Hindus, Christians, Muslims, even the terrorists themselves, if I may be so bold. The overarching message, like a rainbow, is humanistic, inclusive, universal—global morality.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” the major donor said.
“I agree with you 100 percent, Reb Meylekh,” Rabbi Mendy said. “The Rebbe himself was all the time saying to us shlukhim that just like it’s our job to reach out to all Jews to obey the 613 commandments, it is also our job to reach out to the goyim to obey the Seven Laws of the Sons of Noah—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t fool around with your sister—stuff like that, the basics. Why? Because it’s good for the Jews.”
“Seven laws, seven plints, beautiful, beautiful, a good investment, vort’ every penny.” The major donor, whose good name we now possessed, Meylekh, Hebrew for king with a Yiddish inflection confirmed by his accent—Yiddish with some other garnish, maybe a pinch of German, plus a soupcon of French—tightened his silk gartel rope belt around his belly and paused to ask a question. “So nu, apropos, I vas vundering—vhat’s a plint’?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the exit. He had heard enough.
He was from Antwerp, we learned on the drive home. Exiting Nariman House, the rebbetzin Mindy graciously invited us to join her along with Malkie and Reb Meylekh’s daughter Ella in the ladies’ limousine, the smaller and older model of the two. Four of us squeezed into the back seat, while you, still a growing girl, sat in comfort buckled up in front alongside the driver. Malkie notified us that Ella had just completed her secondary studies at an exclusive finishing school for ultra–Orthodox Jewish girls in Switzerland. With my practiced eye for female stock I took her in as she sat there wedged demurely between Malkie and me in her designer suit perfectly tailored to her trim size-zero figure, her coordinating heels, works of art worthy of being mounted on a plinth. She had majored in shopping. I probed gently. What were her plans? “Selling gay engagement rings—for same sex marriages. It’s a huge new market. Business is business.” She offered me a charming, suspiciously intimate smile. Her accent was European, refined. The rebbetzin leaned over toward me across the two girls. “I hope you see now from our visit that it’s all aboveboard. Embezzlement? Please! Everything 100 percent kosher. End of story.” I nodded, stroking the exquisite softness of the limousine’s leather interior with true appreciation. Every cent well spent, I could not have agreed more.
You made no gesture to join me in the back after the rebbetzin got out with the two girls alongside the tank at the fortress they called home, and with a pointed smile in my direction sealing our collusion, ordered the chauffeur to deliver us to our door on Malabar Hill. We were not invited to dinner. “I’m never going back to Chabad again in my life,” you announced from the front seat as soon as the driver put the engine in gear, the first words you uttered since we had entered baby Moshe’le’s room. You were facing forward like a stone in the passenger seat, not deigning to turn around.
In spite of your stated resolve, however, Chabad came to us. Its latest bulletins continued to prance along the internet; I at least had not unsubscribed. Three weeks after our visit to the museum concept in progress, the online Chabad personals prominently featured the announcement of the engagement of the young man, Mr. Shmuly Schlissel, may his candle shed light, of Mumbai, India, to the chosen one of his heart, the bride, the virgin, Miss Ella Goldwasser, may she live, of Antwerp, Belgium. The entire Jewish community of Mumbai was invited to the gala vort, to be celebrated in the grand ballroom of the Taj. The wedding itself would take place at the end of August in Antwerp, where the young couple would reside, and where, I learned later, Malkie would also be settling after her marriage, so inseparable had she become from her future sister-in-law. Shmuly would be joining his future father-in-law’s diamond business, with Malkie’s husband as his chief of staff. No young man was better prepared than Shmuly to lead the campaign against the main threat to the survival of the ancient and venerable Antwerp Jewish diamond establishment—the rogue Indian diamond traders descending in their hordes with their goats and monkeys and painted idols, the international Indian conspiracy. Shmuly straddled both worlds. The silk road to heaven where this match was made was paved with diamonds.
The rains began to subside around the time you cut loose from Chabad. Still the ground was saturated, everything that once was hidden had been heaved up and exposed on the surface. Pigeons perched on our windowsill bearing tampon applicators in their bills. We came out of the dark blinking and went back to planting our vineyards full time. I prepared for our move to a flat I had found back in Colaba and focused intensely now on the coming tourist season, which due to personal circumstances I had seriously neglected—excusable maybe, but still, the workload had piled up, I was swamped, the stress level was intense. You set off to school every morning with Manika trotting behind you, chanting, Enjoy the rest of your day. In the evening you came straight home, no longer stopping for your spiritual fix at Chabad. You ate your meal, went into your room and closed the door. You were remote, into yourself, normal for an adolescent, but overall you seemed calm, at peace. The good news was you had stopped falling. I gave you your space.
The day Shmuly’s engagement was announced, I did not mention it at the dinner table. You gave no sign that you were aware of it. That night a
s I was lying in my bed in the dark with my eyes open, weeping as I remembered Geeta, you came into my room to comfort me. You curled up beside me, burrowing into me as you had done so often when you were a small child before Geeta had invaded our lives. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. You buried your face in my neck, the passage of years shrank to nothing. I placed an arm around your shoulder drawing you even closer. You babbled into my body. It was not your fault, Malkie had told you, you were only a child, it was the fault of others, adults. It was not something you had done, it was something that had been done to you, against your will. Still, even though you were innocent, you were required to do teshuvah, Malkie had said, though even the most severe repentance could never fully erase the damage and renew you, it would never be possible for a boy like her brother to marry a girl like you at any age because you are spoiled.
You were zoning in and out of sleep—shuddering from the static of your sobs. I put my face into your hair to breathe in the scent of freshness that had always moved me with such tenderness, but tonight your smell was humid, gamy—female. What do you mean spoiled? I never spoiled you. Who said you were spoiled? It was a childish crush, nothing more. Your innocent heart had been ensnared by a snake who seduced you for your baby Moshe’le connection, then dumped you for blood diamonds. You are blameless, pure. What is this spoiled garbage? Time to move on. Get past it, Maya. Tomorrow the rains will end. Even with my schedule so overloaded I was nearly choking, I made the decision then and there that for your sake, tomorrow we would set out to Kerala, to Amritapuri, to visit our guru, the divine mother Amma, and receive her darshan. It has been too long that we have not seen her. Amma will look at you and instantly understand everything, I said as your breathing grew calmer and you rested at last. Amma devi will give you her healing hug and set you firmly back on course.
3
WORKING WITH AMMA’S TEAM was always a pleasure. I had been dealing with her outfit over the years in connection with my tour business, providing a steady stream of clients for shorter and longer stays at her ashram, some of them serious potential major donor material, many morphing in time into significant supporters and contributors, all of them committed shoppers, snatching up Amma dolls and jewelry and rose-scented soap and bits of cloth that Amma had sat upon with her buttocks comfortably splayed and other assorted Amma tchotchkes and holy relics. At a certain point we had even embarked on preliminary discussions revolving around setting up an Amma satellite ashram in Israel in the desert on the brink of the great Ramon crater, not far from the maximum security prison where Yigal Amir, the assassin of the sainted Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was being held for life, within shooting distance of the cell in which his conjugal visits with his mad Russian took place as the press massed outside, straining to hear their post-coital whispers as they lay spent side by side in his prison bed sharing their grand dreams for the fledgling messiah she would bear from his wild seed.
These plans fizzled out eventually, but this did not in any way diminish my faith in the incredible efficiency of Amma’s operation, which was borne out in every interaction directly connected with my business. This unparalleled competence and responsiveness was due to the fact that their guru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, known as Amma, was above all the ultimate mother figure. When your mother tells you to do something, you’d better listen if you know what’s good for you.
As a mother in India, Amma was a far more formidable figure than Indira-mama ever was, to take just one example, because unlike the lady prime minister and all mothers by definition with the purported exception of the Virgin Mary, Amma had never been forced to undergo the indignity of being literally fucked to the best of anyone’s knowledge, slander to the contrary about wild orgies with her cutest swamis notwithstanding, and she never had to deal with the day-to-day of actual children. All of humanity were her children, a much more manageable situation. Mrs. Gandhi could declare a state of emergency, but whatever its duration, it inevitably would have a beginning and end. Amma’s state of emergency was a built-in permanent fact of life, giving her unlimited authority forever, which she would never abuse in a tyrannical or dictatorial way because she was Mother, and Mother is good. While governments stalled, twisted up like pretzels, hopelessly incapable of getting their acts together, totally inept in the heat of such crises as tsunamis and earthquakes, Amma waded waist-deep through the foul water and floating turds on her own two bare thick-ankled peasant feet at the head of her army of devotees and got the job done, rescuing thousands, putting up shelters, homes, hospitals, universities, pouring crores of rupees into the relief operation. Amma gave the orders, she made things happen. She was not content like so many others, the pope, imams, rabbis, and sundry similar type makhers to just stand there grinning smugly for the cameras mouthing platitudes about the worldwide blight of human trafficking and slavery, to take just one of her causes. No, that was not Amma’s way. She said, Let all my little children who have been violated and exploited and discarded come to me—and she opened her arms wide and rushed them into her orphanages and schools that had sprung up overnight at her command.
Truly, despite unsubstantiated reports of temper tantrums, slappings, scratchings, bitings for even the smallest mistakes especially in the public relations department, as far as I was concerned, Amma was perfection. Every encounter I had with her or her staff was an unalloyed positive experience, but though I believed with full faith in Amma’s gift of spiritual energy and insight, and though whatever she might have demanded of me I would have obeyed without hesitation, between us it had always remained strictly business. Whenever I came into her presence anew, I bowed down to the ground to touch her feet giving the homage due a mother who sits for twenty-two hours straight without a toilet break (wearing adult diapers, according to her detractors, Huggies of course), hugging one stranger after another, making eye contact that seemed to bore right down into the very depths of an afflicted soul as if to pump in an infusion of love, offering comfort and solace, breaking the Guinness world record for total number of body hugs dished out with feeling.
For me, though, it was a personal point of honor never to allow myself to be pushed by the saint’s facilitators against her ample breasts to become the beneficiary of what by all accounts was a mind-blowing transformative maternal embrace. I had a mother of my own, thank you very much; dead or alive, one mother was as much as I could handle. Through her interpreter I struggled to explain that my reluctance to join the legions of hugged did not signify anything personal about Amma. For example, it had nothing to do with whatever might have rubbed off on her white sari or hefty arms or plump face in the way of deadly bacteria, say, or human body odors, or other dreck and schmutz and contagion and disease from her hours of hugging the unwashed masses, including lepers whose sores she licked, according to apocryphal lore. It was simply that I was allergic to hugs from either the giving or receiving end. I attributed this aversion to PTSD stemming from the discrimination and suffering endured by my twin brother, Shmelke, the Jewish guru, who was famous for hugging every living creature who crossed his path regardless of status or phenotype. He was an equal opportunity hugger—and what was his reward? Driven out of the Holy Land with his followers, ejected from one place after another in search of a resting place for the soles of his feet. It seemed that when it came to hug therapy, female providers benefitted from affirmative action in their favor because bottom line, they were judged harmless, the hug was not an opening move, it was the climax, punitive measures therefore were never taken against them. That’s just the way it was, there was no point fighting the inherent sexism in it. Amma listened to my explanation regarding my hug phobia; it’s hard to know how much she took in, it involved such a Western mindset and concepts. When I was through with my spiel, she waggled her finger at me, and with a sly gleam in her eyes declared in Malayalam through her translator, “On the day you come for my hug to save your life, I will be sitting here waiting for you.” I chose to accept this as a blessing.
/> You, on the other hand, at those times I was compelled to take you along with a group to Amritapuri, typically when Geeta finked out on her parenting responsibilities and I had no one to oversee your care, would climb joyfully into Ammachi’s lap for your hug. There you would curl up, your beautiful lithe young girl’s body going limp and relaxed as Amma hugged you to herself with all her might, tickling you playfully, stroking your back clucking, MaMaMa, bringing her face down into your silken hair to breathe in your heavenly fragrance, holding on to you far longer than was practical for the continuous efficient flow of the conveyor belt of the masses of aspiring hugees awaiting their assigned turn, to the unconcealed agitation of her inner circle of enforcers conferring tensely on the stage in their bright orange robes. Yet not a single one of her closest attendants would ever have presumed to interrupt this prolonged communion no matter how seriously it disrupted the schedule because it was believed that you were among the rare souls with the power to inspire Amma to reveal her true identity as the incarnation of the goddess. This conviction grew out of an astonishing event that occurred during one of your early hug encounters, when, pressed against Amma’s bosom, you told her through a translator that you had just been to the Kali temple on the ashram grounds. “Kali is very scary,” you confided to Amma—not an unreasonable reaction. With her garland of skulls and girdle of severed arms and earrings of dead fetuses, her tongue sticking out of her mouth lolling down like an obscene red flap on her blue-black face with its eyes crazed with bloodlust, a detached head dripping blood held up by the hair in one of her four arms, her warlike stance, foot stamped down on the body of lord Shiva her husband, who seemed to be either dead or just relaxing and enjoying himself, Kali was a child’s nightmare. Amma rocked you like a baby who had woken up in the dark screaming. “Do not be afraid of Mother Kali, my child. Do not be deceived by her terrible exterior. Kali is the warrior-mother, destroyer and creator, punisher and rewarder, nothing can stop her from doing her will, she is the force, she is Mother Nature, she is the greatest of all mothers, love her, respect her, obey her—or else!”