by Tova Reich
On the giant screen all the assembled to the far ends of the hall could witness Amma’s unparalleled gift of empathy in full blockbuster display, and not less impressive, they could also observe her administrative genius, they could watch with awe her brilliance as a multitasker. They could see with their own eyes how Amma could hug so full heartedly and mindfully, and, at the same time, give orders to her staff, how she could hug the next seeker in line while finishing a conversation with the one who had just been extricated, how she could carry on with her hugging without skipping a beat while talking or texting on her smartphone or checking her email, which was perhaps the most uplifting and affirming sight of all, the one-armed hug showcasing the promise of technology deployed in the service of humankind. Nobody protested or objected. Everyone knew that it was essential for a mother to be a multitasker, and Amma was mother supreme.
Amma continued to text on her mobile as Manika knelt before her, holding up as an offering a huge red carrot that she pulled out of the knot in her sari. The texting went on as Manika, so tiny and compact, curled up in the shallow saucer of Amma’s lap, resting her head against Amma’s breasts, lost in their fullness, as if pumped up with mother’s milk, talking with the intensity of one who feared any minute she might be interrupted and silenced, crying so hard the bones of her entire little body rattled and shuddered as if she might break apart in pieces. I had never seen Manika talk so much, or with such fervor, as if she were telling something she had never dared tell anyone before, dredging it all up painfully, pounding her hollow chest with both fists, and I had never seen her cry, not once, not even as she watched my mother burn.
Amma absorbed it all, this heavy word flow, she nodded and murmured, wiped away Manika’s tears, stroked her hair and cheeks, caressed her shoulders with her left hand, while she continued to text on her smartphone with her right. She held Manika locked in her embrace for five minutes at least, prioritizing a first-timer, some said, which was her policy, but it was a radically long stretch, and even after she released her and you were settled in Manika’s place against Amma’s breasts nestled within the secure loving circle of Amma’s arm, Manika went on telling her story standing there at Amma’s right as Amma texted while rocking you in the crook of her left arm, purring, My daughter, my daughter, and softly singing lullabies to you so that very soon your eyelids grew heavy and drooped, and then you were asleep.
I admit that as I witnessed all this, I could not suppress the feeling that it was one thing to multitask while hugging Manika, but when it came to my daughter, I expected Amma to give you her full, undivided attention. She owed me. I was not a connection to be slighted. I had brought Amma many valuable contacts, including Charlotte/Lakshmi Harlow croaking away up there, warning her baby sister to never do as she had done. The vibes of annoyance I must have been giving off were picked up by Shosh, the former IDF attack-dog trainer, who looked me in the eye and commanded: Sit. Down. Stay. That was when I noticed that Amma too had fallen asleep cradling you, like an exhausted mother who had been rocking her baby for ages, and now at last the baby was finally asleep. The hall was hushed. Lakshmi and the Survivors were on pause. Movement was frozen, as if a spell had been cast in a fairy-tale castle. All eyes were gripped by the holy pietà vision of Amma sleeping, with you asleep in her arms.
Suddenly Amma’s eyes shot open. She stood up, holding you in her arms extended like an offering. Her long red tongue came out, lolling down unfurled. She lifted you with ease. She was strong; as a young girl toiling in the family cowshed she was known to carry a sick cow for miles. Manika approached from the right, Monica Lewinsky from the left, little Manika and big Monica, sisters, joined by some of Amma’s closest attendants in their orange robes, as if the ritual had been rehearsed. They lifted you off the altar of Amma’s arms and stood you up wobbly on your legs, supporting you from all sides. They walked you over to the band. Charlotte herself came forward to welcome you into the circle of Lakshmi and the Survivors, drawing a white linen shift over your head as if preparing a human sacrifice. The band no longer was doing “Rising Sun,” but providing backup instead for Amma, center stage, now fully transformed into the goddess Kali your mother-protector, singing your mantra over and over again—Om Kali Kali Kali, Om Kali Kali, Ma Ma Maya, Ya Ya Maya, Ma Ya Ya Ya—swaying from side to side faster and faster, clapping her hands over her head, stamping her feet, rising higher and higher into a place of spiritual exaltation, taking along with her the entire assembly, everyone soaring, shedding their earthly mass, joyously accepting the darkness and light, creation and destruction embodied in Mother Amma Kali, leaving me behind, motherless, childless, alone, an earthbound speck with no gift for spiritual abandon, and no gift for happiness.
The kiss of the godmother. Instantly her kitchen cabinet swung into action. That very night, you were shipped off with Charlotte and her band back to the USA, no problem, no special interventions required. You always carried your American passport. I was meticulous about making sure that as the daughter of a US citizen born and bred sojourning in dangerous lands you had this precious, essential document, and moreover kept it in your possession at all times, insurance against the inevitability of another Holocaust.
It all happened so fast, there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was as if a boulder had been slammed down on my head. I was knocked out. The boss called me into her private office behind the former cowshed, a rare insider invitation. Multitasking as always, astride a stool with her legs spread, bare calloused feet stoutly planted on a floor carpeted with straw and manure, thick hands tugging at the teats of a cow so fat it almost entirely concealed the bilingual aide behind it so that it seemed as if the cow with her ruminating mouth was doing the translating, Amma laid out the facts on the ground. Manika would remain at the ashram, emptying the toilet compost pails, a form of penance for a sin committed most likely in a previous life from what I could surmise, a caste thing, her karma. You would depart that evening with Charlotte and her troupe on a direct flight first-class to Washington, DC, where you would be given every advantage, including a tip-top education at an elite girls’ school with the very same name as it happened as the one you were now attending, Cathedral, so hardly any adjustment would be necessary. There in the capital of the free world, looked after by a five-star team of mental health professionals, you would heal. If all went well as planned, you might be able to return home for your summer vacation—when the rains came again, in our monsoon floods. As for me, in ten minutes I would be starting my journey back to Mumbai, Amma informed me. My suitcase had already been packed courtesy of the staff and stowed in the trunk of the car. Krishnapuri was idling at the wheel right behind the cowshed. At Cochin Airport he would exchange his chauffeur’s cap for a pilot’s helmet and fly me home in Amma’s private jet.
The former milkmaid who for relaxation and nostalgic reasons it seemed still liked to keep a hand in, passed her full bucket to an aide without the faintest splatter, and wiped her palms on her white sari. Capisce? Yes, I understood. I appreciated her concern for your welfare, I said. It was probably true that you were suffering from a mild form of depression, I was ready to concede that. You had been traumatized. The last four years had been hard, bookended by your Chabad encounters, the psychological insults dealt you first by the terrorists and then through Shmuly by the double whammy of first love and betrayal, not to mention your cruel abandonment by your adoptive mother Geeta and the death and difficult disposal of my mother, your grandmother, resulting in the erosion of your self-esteem, precipitating, then exacerbated by, your unfortunate weight gain. Did I get it all right? Amma nodded her head up and down. I took that to be yes in Western terms, though side to side in India also meant yes. Maybe the Indians just didn’t know how to say no. Maybe that was their problem. Maybe that’s why there were so many of them.
I accepted it all without protest. To this day I cannot explain the extreme passivity that overcame me, as if I had been drugged. Later on, it was suggested to me by my broth
er, Shmelke, an ordained guru just like Amma, that the explanation for my strange failure to resist in any way, in manifest contradiction with my sense of myself as a proactive mother, was related to an instinctive healthy recognition of my own desperate need at that time for some relief, for a private space of my own in order to undergo my personal healing process for all the losses I too had suffered. I needed you to go away, for my sake and yours—that was Shmelke’s original interpretation, his brilliant new hidush. I needed to be alone, being alone was a delicious illicit pleasure I craved, I needed a break from you and all the burdens and worries that came with the blockage in my life that was you, my own daughter. A preposterous, horrifying notion, I said to Shmelke—I rejected it completely. What did he know of women, of the maternal instinct? I am mother. That is my main identity, the justification ultimately for my existence, my link on the great chain of being. Nothing could be more terrible for a mother than to have her child taken away from her, it is the primal fear.
As the plan for this seemingly unnatural separation was being laid out before me, I had reassured myself that it was after all coming from none other than Amma herself, the paradigmatic archetypal mother. Amma was the generative force behind it, the mother who was making it happen. It was a mother’s idea, which by definition can only be for the good of the child. I remember how this thought seeped like a painkiller through my veins as I stood—yes, stood—there in that shed undergoing your amputation from me, listening as Amma unpacked the intricate logistics of the plot through what seemed like the chewing organ of a talking cow. If Amma is proposing this, then it must be right, I told myself. Save the child, that was the bottom line. The child was at risk—accident prone, susceptible to all kinds of harmful influences, in danger of being seriously derailed, and now here was supermom Amma swooping down to perform a classic rescue—transporting the kid to an exclusive boarding school to keep her on track, a solution, I had to admit to myself, that was essentially in tune with my own child-rearing philosophy, especially as it applied to preteens and teenagers, with their hormonal big bangs. Granted, the kid is going through a stage, and you as the mother must allow it to play itself out for the sake of her mental health, her growth and adjustment, but you must also do everything in your power to prevent her from destroying herself in the process. The exclusive prep-school education that Amma was prescribing along with all the other perks was the obvious way to keep you with the program—that was my thought even then as I was losing you on the floor of that cowshed. No matter how badly you screwed yourself up during this admittedly normal, age-appropriate stage that supposedly would pass—it would pass as all life cycle disruptions pass—the entitlements that would become your portion would still land you in some prestigious fortress of higher education, you would be wearing protection, you would be kept on course with no significant long-term damage or fallout, everything would be okay.
In less than ten minutes I was going to be carted away. I would not even be granted a moment to say goodbye to you, to give you an embrace that would keep an ember of mother’s warmth stored within you through the winter of our separation. A fast break—that was deemed to be the wisest course, always the least painful option in a situation universally acknowledged to be right up there at the top of the human suffering charts—the ripping of a mother from her child. In any case, Amma assured me you were doing fine, I could see for myself. She whipped out her phone from among the folds of her nine-yard sari and swiftly accessed the app for the video camera streaming in a room presumably somewhere in the ashram where I could observe you surrounded by Charlotte’s band of survivors, unwrapping presents, one high-tech toy after another. You were laughing uninhibitedly, with childish carefree abandon as I had not seen you laugh for ages.
Were there cameras everywhere in the ashram? I must have spurted that question aloud, without full consciousness. Amma barked a seasoned laugh. “Amma does not need cameras,” she said through the grinding lips of the talking cow. “Amma sees all with her third eye.” She pointed to the bindi on her forehead above her eyebrows, the white circle of purity with the red kumkum dot inside it signifying the sixth chakra center, the zone of insight, rich with the deepest wisdom—so so deep, the deepest of the deep, as your ex-father Shmiel the Holy Beggar used to intone. I recognized then that what was now happening had all been determined, as if from above. This is how it would be and not otherwise. I was helpless.
“Maya, Maya—when will I ever see you again?” I cried out.
You stopped playing with your devices and turned around sharply as if you had heard me, staring directly at me with unseeing eyes, without registering. There you were facing me as if from a planet far away on the screen of Amma’s smartphone. It was a setup that reminded me of the baby monitor I had once installed to keep you in my sights, but vastly updated, with no material barriers in the ether. But now in this new age I could not only see you and hear you, I could even talk to you and sing to you from my end from wherever I was in the world, no matter how far away. I should have seized the moment to sing “Die Gedanken sind frei” the Pete Seeger version, your favorite lullaby, to remind you of your basic human rights—who you are and where you came from—but convulsed with grief, I was levitated off the ground by two Amma controllers and borne away to the waiting Black Maria.
I wept through the entire flight from Cochin back to Mumbai. I’m telling you this Maya not to make you feel guilty but just to let you know how I ached for you, my forehead pressed against the window seeing nothing outside, only a black hole of sorrow sucking everything in. My sole consolation was that you would be wired head to toe, I had seen your loot. We could communicate online, I was assured before I left the ashram, once you were settled into your posh new quarters and habituated to your new life and the mental health dominatrices gave the green light for the resumption of our normal mother-daughter intercourse.
And we did communicate during that time of separation—by Skype, in chat rooms, instant messaging, texting, email, Facebook, and so on, but only you were allowed to initiate, that was one of the ground rules. The other rule was, you would not allow yourself to be seen. Those were your wishes. I needed to respect your wishes, I was advised.
I accepted it all. I was on call full time, perpetually psyched to receive your summons no matter how else I might at that moment have been otherwise occupied, and I also resigned myself to the blocking of the camera, to the banning of your image on my screen. Even when I was in Washington, DC, on business in cherry-blossom April around the time of your thirteenth birthday, the despots decreed it would be in your best interest if we did not actually meet face to face. I was half a block away from you, having coffee with Charlotte Harlow, your keeper. You and I touched base by phone.
I described to Charlotte how I pictured you possessed of your former heartbreaking beauty once again. You wanted to surprise me with your metamorphosis when we were finally reunited, I said—in that way I comforted myself for your allegedly self-imposed purdah. I imagined you shedding all that baby fat inside of which you were hiding, and emerging in dazzling glory like a butterfly ready to be seen. You were on the school lacrosse team, Charlotte informed me, you were involved in other fitness activities too; you were doing well in your studies, you were in the top group in math; you were participating in extracurriculars, you had played the black witch Tituba in the school production of The Crucible, raising the dead and going mad in a jail cell in Salem, Massachusetts; you led a healthy social life, you were close to Charlotte’s other survivors and had made some new friends in school, an anorexic and a recovering bulimic, or maybe it was a recovering bully, you even had a boyfriend, a Princeton-bound senior at St. Albans, Charlotte mentioned his name but it slips my mind—it ended in junior, or maybe with a roman numeral III. Charlotte was my source. An investigator must stroke the source, make nice to the source in order to keep the line open, and especially in this case, because you were so reticent in our conversations, so unforthcoming and private, though always p
roperly polite, waiting for me to pull the plug and sign off. But at least you were doing everything right from what I could ferret out. You were squarely on track, exactly as I had hoped.
4
AND JUST AS I HAD HOPED, when the heavens caved in and the monsoon rains came crashing down at the end of June and I went to meet you at Shivaji International, I almost did not recognize you, you had slimmed down so radically. You were a stunning young woman ready to step out for all to gaze upon, any mother would have trembled with terrifying pride.
You had come to Mumbai for your summer vacation to do volunteer work in the Dharavi slum within shooting distance of the airport in which we greeted each other. Your plane had just flown low over the basti as it came in for landing, raising a mini-tsunami in the open brown sewage lakes, drowning out the sound on all the satellite TVs, the only source of light in every hovel. Dharavi had the distinction of being one of the largest slums on the planet. Community service in Dharavi was a highly coveted internship for prep school students with Ivy aspirations. There were summer camps for super-rich kids that for a fee exceeding the lifetime earnings of many slum dwellers put together offered two weeks in Dharavi sorting through the mountains of garbage scavenging for recyclables. But you were the real thing, any good admissions official could spot that in an instant. You had competed through the regular channels for the internship offered by a local nonprofit called Slum Power, you had no legacy, no affirmative action, no special protectzia, and you were chosen. It would look really great on your college application in three or four years’ time.