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Mother India

Page 19

by Tova Reich


  I have no memory of hanging up and ending that conversation with Charlotte. I believe it continues to this day, all the things I should have said, every regret articulated. What I next recall is being startled into alertness by the constriction of my heart, a polluted gray dawn filtering in through the window, and I am still sitting in that chair at the kitchen table clutching my mobile, flakes of stinking slum excrement peeling off me and mounting in piles on the floor, continuing to shed as I make my way to your room to divine for signs of preparation for an extended absence. The same mess as always, untouched. Under the circumstances, I reasoned, it would not be a transgressive violation of your sacred privacy if I were to open your laptop to check for even a cryptic reference to plans for a demonstration at the mosque, but all of your devices were gone. Of course—you took them along with you to the slum every day in your backpack. I had failed to pay attention.

  As the hours passed, my entire self continued to fall away in flakes of dry slum shit, exposing my vital organs to every insult. Compulsively, I was checking and rechecking on my own computer on every conceivable news source site, listening to the radio and TV for bulletins and alerts, every cell of my body susceptible to the slightest reference to a takeover at Haji Ali. Nothing, not a syllable. In India a mosque, a temple, is a tinderbox; set a spark to it and the fire spreads ravenously, the whole madhouse convulses for days and days and is ravaged. It was clear to me that the powers, police, politicians, all of the main players, were ruthlessly focused on keeping the incendiary news of the takeover from leaking, bent on negotiating covertly with the occupiers, to extricate them from the premises with stealth tactics so as not to trigger yet another riot of unforgiving dimensions.

  By late afternoon the waste matter of the slum that had attached itself to me—whatever had not already seeped into my skin and permeated my inner core forever—finally washed off in the monsoon rains. I was standing soaked, holding up my wrecked umbrella, spoke-twisted and shredded, at the entrance to the causeway to Haji Ali. I could no longer bear the media silence—the state of not knowing what happened to my loved one, by all accounts so detrimental to achieving closure following a disaster according to the testimony of survivors. This situation became intolerable. In desperation I left my flat in spite of my fear that you might show up while I was gone and I would not be there to welcome you home, and came to the scene to find out for myself what was going on. My heart soared at the sight of the barricade at the causeway entrance, and the policemen hanging out under a nearby shelter, perhaps rather too casually it occurred to me, though I quickly censored the thought, and there were not as many as I would have expected or liked to see considering the provocation, nor any sign of the loved ones of the other kids demonstrating inside, a danger to themselves and others. I was the only parental figure present. Still, there was a barricade, there were armed guards with visible lathis barring access. I stood there letting myself be washed by the lashing rain, taking comfort in the thought that at least I knew where my child was tonight.

  The cops occasionally aimed a glance my way, judging me to be harmless, inconsequential, female, possibly hysterical, possibly deranged, reluctant to venture out of their snug little clubhouse to deal with this nuisance. One was finally dispatched, however, a Sikh. He approached with a plastic grocery bag over his turban, annoyed, his beard dripping into another plastic bag, the handles looped over his ears. “Madam, move on, the mosque is closed today.”

  “My daughter’s in there—you know, with the kids protesting the ban against women? I respect your need to keep this top secret because of the possibility of rioting and all that, but I had to come, I am a mother.”

  “There is no protest, madam. No one is in the mosque except the dead saint, and he is not causing any trouble at the moment. The causeway is closed due to flooding. It is underwater. Standard procedure in July and August during monsoon—unscheduled closings, weather related. You can return when the water recedes. Now madam, you must go—or I will be obliged to take action.”

  “What kind of action? Are you going to encounter me, or something? Go ahead, encounter me, I don’t care.”

  Let him shoot me, let him eliminate me like a common thug and claim self-defense, dispense with justice and law, it was so much more efficient, but then I reminded myself that one of the privileges you give up when you become a mother is the right to commit suicide. This is a rule my own mother had violated—and I have never forgiven her. At the same moment it struck me with perfect clarity, as if I had been given an unobstructed view down the kilometer stretch of the causeway through the walls of the mosque complex now rendered transparent to me, that you were not in there. I did not know where you were. I had to get home. I had to wait for you. I had to be there when you came back, to open the door and let you in.

  A bicycle rickshaw slowed down, then zoomed off at the sight of me dripping rainwater like endless tears, raising waves in its choppy wake that drenched me even more. I sloshed on through the filthy puddles, gesticulating with thumb pointed backward for anything that moved to stop, stop in the name of heaven, give me a lift, raise me up, take me away from all this. My throat was clamped by a painful urgency—I needed to get back home at once, to be there for you. Ahead of me, the words Slum Power beckoned, glowing like a burning bush through the rain, I thought I might be dreaming. It came back to me then that the NGO’s office was in Worli, close to the Haji Ali shrine; I recalled that now from having mined the website. This is where I would have been taken after the tour, to write a fat donation check, had I not fled at the sickening sight of you shrouded in veils. Now it seemed to me a sign from heaven, reaching out to me with the promise of news of you. To ignore it, to pass it by even with the pressing mandate to be in my assigned spot at home when you returned would be an unforgivable sin of omission. I would have lost my chance.

  Other than some filthy cows that had come inside to take shelter from the rain, only one employee was in the Slum Power office at this late hour of the day, a young woman festooned with silver piercings dangling from her eyebrows and lips, and a name tag—Maya. “My daughter is Maya, too,” I informed her. “She’s an intern here. Do you know her?” Interns come and go, she observed, she never bothered with them; for her they did not exist, Maya is illusion. She added this with an insider’s smile. And even despite the tongue ring that snagged her speech, I could tell by the lilt of her studied English that she was Israeli—post-army road-trip decompression, she confirmed when I inquired in Hebrew to soften her up, tarrying in India beyond the finding-yourself grace period to the terminal distress of her parents, both of them professors of international affairs at Tel Aviv University with a specialty in Middle Eastern and Muslim studies, lingering in Mumbai on account of her Indian boyfriend, Sunny, the night manager of a dance club in Bandra. But she knew all the full-time Slum Power employees, she conceded when I probed—so did she know a guy named Samir Khan? She boomed out a coarse snort resembling a laugh, startling me. Samir Khan? Wasn’t he that idiot Pakistani American guy who got himself killed in Yemen? Deftly she did a quick Google search on the office computer. Nakhon—taken out two years ago by an American drone strike, along with another Muslim fundoo jihad propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki, a really big prize—Good job, says Mr. Barack Hussein Obama insincerely. Anyway, beineinu, Slum Power never hires Muslims, even though it calls itself equal opportunity multi-culti, blah-blah. So no way any Samir Khan ever worked here, that’s for sure. Besides, every other Muslim in Mumbai is Khan, and every other Khan is Samir. Sorry mama.

  This namesake overdose was verified when a few days later Charlotte prevailed on me to leave my apartment where I had voluntarily confined myself to faithfully await your return, and to spend the morning at the police station viewing a lineup of Samir Khans rounded up from all over the city. Finally, Charlotte was getting up off her toned little overaged bum and swinging into action. She was panicking; her benefactions and patronage on which she so prided herself, and with which she manipulated an
d controlled so many of her vassals, had backfired. It was now an established fact—you were missing, gone. This was not some delusion on my part. At last she was convinced, and on some level I believe it also penetrated her thick wall of defenses that she was to blame. At first, though, I refused to leave the apartment to go to police headquarters, despite Charlotte’s litany of persuasions, agreeing only after Manika was flown up by Krishnapuri in Amma’s private jet from the ashram to Mumbai to take over watch duty from me in case you returned during my brief absence checking out the Samir Khans of Mumbai.

  It was surely through Amma’s interventions, too, with Charlotte oiling her strings, that I received such exemplary VIP treatment. An unmarked black Ambassador drew up at the door of my building, the driver darting out flapping two rubber mats, which he set down before me one in front of the other, bending over again and again after I stepped upon the first mat to reposition it ahead of the second, unrolling a dry pathway for me in this way to the car door so that for the first time in days I was spared wading through puddles of fetid water. Policemen unfolded from their slouches as I was escorted into the station, rising to greet me with a cordial dip of the head and a respectful, Namaste, madam. I was ushered to a plush seat as if in a theater in front of a one-way viewing window screen as the Samir Khans of Mumbai with numbers on their chests were rolled out one by one for my inspection, smacked under the chin to provide a full-face view, slapped hard into right profile, another hard slap to spin the head into left profile, all of these visuals to the background static of, Stand up straight, maderchod, open your bhenchod eyes, gaandu, or I’ll cut off your golis—then dragged offscreen as if with a cane by the shirt collar like a bad act in a burlesque that the audience hisses and boos out of its sight as I shook my head, no, no. It felt as if hundreds of Samir Khans were passed in front of me, from slum urchins, to enraged teenagers, to the newly radicalized with full black pubic beards, to skullcapped merchants, to imams in white-robed splendor, to the aged with wiry beards hennaed bright orange. My eyes blurred over, all pity was leached out of me for these mothers’ sons, each of whom surely had sinned in some fashion to deserve such treatment, I reasoned, but the sinner I was seeking was not among them—the Samir Khan who had stolen you from me.

  Most apologetically for the failure of this exercise, with an exaggerated show of solicitousness, a senior official approached to suggest that under the circumstances, since I was already out of the house, I allow myself to be conveyed to the city morgue to view the remains of unidentified female missing persons—a painful experience, yes, but necessary, and one that he and his staff would do their very best to facilitate with utmost sensitivity. I allowed myself to be taken into the stone edifice of the morgue, through the autopsy chamber where naked bodies were laid out on the tables constructed of stone like altars, torsos split open into two flaps folded back as in an anatomy textbook, scalps lifted off like the stem of an aubergine, then onward to the cold room to view the corpses already processed but unclaimed. At the entrance I was offered a mask against the stench, which I rejected with a proud dismissive brush of my hand, exactly as I would refuse a blindfold on the road to my own execution.

  Inside, we pushed against the density of the stink even in that purportedly subzero environment. The floor tiles were slick with body fluids and fat leaking out and liquefied chemicals. Racks of naked men were stacked against the wall. Across the room, as if on the other side of the partition in my father’s synagogue, the naked bodies of the women were piled in a haphazard mound, a mass grave, reeking of atrocity, evoking the death camp imagery we would pore over when we were children, so horrifying and yet so pornographically gripping. Workers with long poles were already stationed there, untangling rigid limbs and flipping corpses to expose drained waxen faces for my inspection and deflated bodies stitched closed down the middle with coarse black thread. Thank God, thank God, I kept muttering to myself, you were not there, no child of mine would ever be found in such a place, in this obscene heap of the disposable and discarded.

  After that I remained at home waiting for you, except for the occasional summons back to the morgue when a potential candidate was delivered, generally either an unidentified female accident victim or a foiled terrorist or suicide bomber loosely fitting your specs, and once even a sex-trafficked juvenile mutilated to the point that it was no longer possible to suppress my nausea, my gut heaved and I vomited on the floor, contributing to the laminate of bodily fluids. Manika stayed at the apartment the entire time, sacrificing her berth at Amma’s ashram, giving up her grand call-center ambitions, just to be available for those periods when I might be whisked away for one of these grim viewings; otherwise there is no way I would have agreed to go and leave the house empty, I had no idea if you had the key. All day Manika squatted on her haunches in the corner, she could have been mistaken for a footstool, head lowered, the pallu of her sari drawn up across the lower portion of her face. Now and then she would get up to bring me a glass of chai, or a bowl of rice and lentils and some naan, or to urge me to lie down and get some sleep. Why do you do it? I once asked her. For Mama, she responded. Was she referring to Amma, or to my own late mama whom she had tended in her last days, or could she possibly have meant me? I too was a mama, wasn’t I? Your mama. But I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. What difference did it make? She stayed, that was all that mattered, she didn’t budge from her mission, condemned in this life to be forever invisible and forever on call.

  I sat at the kitchen table, my laptop open in front of me, my cell phone juiced within easy reach awaiting the call. Even now I cannot say how long I sat; I never inquired, and no one has come forward. The shades were drawn, there was no day, no night, no passage of the season. My tour business no longer interested me; I left it to die of mismanagement in the hands of my associates. I was entirely consumed with searching the internet for even the slightest reference to girls who had vanished into the black hole of the Muslim universe never to be heard from again except for the occasional rare smudge of their existence preserved in the ether like a bloodstain on a sheet, or who emerged for one final spectacular big bang of martyrdom, taking along with them the children of other mothers. Whether they were swallowed up out of love or conviction, or dragged away by the hair flailing and screaming, whether they went actively or were taken passively, whether they set forth as jihadi brides to anoint the fighters with the lubricant of their bodies, or as mujahid mothers or black widows bent on revenge, whether they drew their kitchen knives out from under their burqas to plunge into the flesh of strangers or implanted explosives in their breasts or bellies feigning pregnancy to expiate the violation of their honor perpetrated deliberately to turn them into living bombs, whether they detonated themselves by their own agency or were triggered by remote control in the hands of a man standing watch in the distance—all of this that had happened and was still happening, and so much more, I followed obsessively online, hoarding every possible detail about how a girl could throw herself away in that world until I felt that I had covered every inch of the territory. I had exhausted all the possibilities and could not find you. Among such girls who had thrown themselves away there was no sign of you. Wherever you were, you were not there.

  My cell phone connecting me to the world within easy reach faceup on the table had an app to alert me with bulletins of terrorist acts worldwide, zeroing in on those featuring Muslims in India and Pakistan either as perpetrators or victims. The alert sound was customized from a siren to something less heart-stopping since it went off so frequently as if malfunctioning, seeming to shudder in place like a spoiled child on the verge of a tantrum, demanding immediate attention. Most of the alerts were not relevant to your case, but now and then the deadly silence in the room where Manika and I sat waiting for you was broken by an alarm that conceivably could apply. Then, my heart pounding, I would call my friends at the police station to check out the situation if they had not already contacted me first, and more than once, with Manika on duty on
the home front, the black Ambassador was dispatched to collect me for yet another gruesome viewing on the stone altars of the morgue—but the good angel always appeared right on cue, crying, Stop, let another living creature be sacrificed instead, this time it will not be you.

  Except for contacting the cops on those occasions, I almost never used my mobile to call out. I did receive some calls, though, quite regularly from Charlotte, to assure me that she was here for me—I’m here for you, Meena darling, she said—stressing that she was speaking also on behalf of Ammachi, who had made special offerings to mother Kali to find you among her lost children. The rebbetzin Mindy also got in touch, expressing regret that she was unable to carry out the mitzvah of coming by in person to sit with me, taking for granted that I was already in mourning because you had run off with a goy, may the merciful one spare us. She was calling me from Antwerp, she said, where she had gone to help out with her two new grandchildren, born to Shmuly and to Malkie in the same week, they looked like twins, two boys no less, so handsome, the greatest blessing, grandchildren, she had gotten in touch with the Ayin haRah Lady to make sure that any evil eye cast upon these precious babies by the envious and the bitter whose children did not turn out so well and did not produce grandchildren in the normal course of events be rendered null and void at once. The Ayin haRah Lady cost an arm and a leg, by the way, but never mind, she delivered her money’s worth. She poured the molten lead into a pot of cold water and chanted the powerful holy words as the bubbles swelled and burst, and now the babies are safe, 100 percent safe, thank God. Maybe someone had given you the evil eye, the rebbetzin speculated, maybe that was the explanation for your disappearance, and I had never bothered to spend some money on the Ayin haRah Lady to neutralize it. You were such an intelligent girl, with such a pretty face, the rebbetzin reminisced, if only you had kept to the path. You were making such good progress for a while under Malkie’s influence, you were Malkie’s personal special pet project. She recalled how Malkie had instructed and guided you with the visual aids of the paper dolls. But you were always falling, that was your problem, falling, falling, such a pity, and now you have truly fallen into the lowest depths, into the abyss, it shouldn’t happen to us. What can you do? Blessed is the True Judge, the rebbetzin pronounced, May you be comforted among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

 

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