Mother India

by Tova Reich

  God will help, my brother, Rebbie-ji, is reported to have responded with angelic calm. A Mottel Patel will appear to give me shelter. Those girls don’t turn me on, he was immune to that type. Anyway, with all his tzores over the last seven years, his yetzer harah had dried up and shriveled to the size of a raisin, as he liked to remind his tormentors. If ever he had lusted, he lusted no more. Besides, just for their information, the State of Israel had no jurisdiction over him whatsoever. This is because the crimes he is alleged to have committed were not committed in Israel but in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, internationally contested no-man’s land; setting aside the fact that there was no crime, no one disputes the scene of the noncrime. Any charges brought against him by Israel would never stand, even in an Israeli court of law. Don’t worry so much, brothers, Rebbie-ji said. As Moses cried out when he laid eyes on the golden calf, and also Matathias the Maccabee echoing him down through the generations more than a thousand years later in the days of the idol-worshipping Hellenizers, Whoever is with Hashem, come with me! And by Hashem I mean God Almighty ruler of heaven and earth, not some Arab kid named Hashem picking his nose and flicking the snot into your hummus.

  Stirred by my brother Shmelke’s words, they followed him into the breach to Uman, their hearts overflowing with pure joy. As the buildings all around them shuddered and quaked from the marathon dancing of the pilgrims, they too danced, but in the streets, around the plastic rubbish bins they set on fire, tossing in all the Israeli flags they could lay their hands on, cremating them. When no more could be found, they improvised with blue paint on white linen or underwear, oblivious to the yellow and brown stains, and on paper, two stripes, a Star of David, a simple design, child’s play, dumping these into the auto-da-fé as well, dancing rapturously in circles as the flames shot up toward the heavens, higher and higher. Reb Breslov, meanwhile, disguised as a Ukrainian peasant, in an embroidered shirt, homespun trousers tucked into his felt boots, and a sheepskin chapka, so as not, God forbid, to go bareheaded, was pushed in a wooden cart by Sheriff Buki ben Yogli, honored for the occasion to serve as my brother’s ba’al agalah, right up to the holy grave of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. For the sake of good diplomatic relations with the host nation, the boss Hasidim in charge of the site for the holiday gave way, standing back alert, waiting to see what this goy would do, watching with eagle eyes for what would happen, their security squad ready to pounce.

  Tears streaming down his face, Reb Breslov, my brother, raised his voice and cried out in English, in an all-purpose Russian accent picked up from so many of his disciples rescued from heroin dens and jail cells. “On kholiday of repentance, I make long journey to ask forgiveness for sins against your people.” He named names, pounding his chest mightily with his fist with each recitation: Bogdan Khmelnytzki. Symon Petilura. Ivan Demjanjuk. “Remember Babi Yar!” he suddenly bellowed. “For sins we commit against Jewish people, let khassids waste Uman, please, trash khole place, it is okeydokey, we deserve, khave fun boys, welcome, welcome, khappy New Year!”

  A righteous gentile. The establishment overseers were satisfied, they relaxed.

  He pressed his forehead against the side of the holy tomb, my brother, my twin, brushed his hand over the faint remains of graffiti, Jew-hating slurs not fully wiped away, and wept, his shoulders pumping. “Tatte, Tatte,” he cried in muffled Yiddish, “I have suffered so much, I have no home, there is no place in the world for me to go. They pursue me for no reason, like a dog, they surround me all around, yet in God’s name I will cut them off, for from your commandments I have never swerved.”

  As he departed the holy gravesite with no discernible provocation or incident to mar the visit, but with agonizing regret, never knowing if he would ever again see his holy father in this life, a building to his right crumbled almost silently to the ground. To his left, a tongue of flame leapt up. Word had passed to his Hasidim as they formed a train behind him, that the holy Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav had appeared to his gilgul Reb Breslov in a vision. “Shmelke, Shmelke,” Rabbi Nahman had called out to him from the depths of his tomb. “Here I am,” my brother had replied. Rabbi Nahman spoke: “Wherever I would go during my brief span on earth, I was always going to the land of Israel. The heavenly land of Israel. Follow in my footsteps, my son. India is now the earthly Israel. Go to India. Seek there and seek there, because for now, until my return, all that there is, is there.”

  They processed away from the site, my brother and his Hasidim, past buildings collapsing on one side, on the other side, everything burning, directly to Sofia Park, where a helicopter awaited them on a clearing. Within minutes they were swooped up and carried away, “As if on eagle’s wings, like the chariot of Eliyahu the prophet,” Shmelke was telling me when I opened my eyes to find myself in Kolkata, in his House of Holy Healing—when finally I was ready to let it be known that I had emerged from the depths of self and had begun tentatively to take in the other. “As you know, didi, our sages teach that danger to life trumps the Sabbath. Also here in this country of my refuge, saving a life is considered the supreme dharma according to the Vedas and the teachings of the most learned Brahmins. I was in mortal danger. My cover was blown. The Israeli collaborators were on to me, also the Ukrainian perpetrators, also the Hasidim bystanders from other sects. Under those circumstances it was permissible to violate the prohibition against travel on the holiday. This was confirmed by the mystical appearance of the chopper on that pad. It was literally a sign from heaven, ignoring it would have been the gravest of sins, it was a positive commandment from the One Above that could not be refused, it was my duty to save my life and let myself be borne aloft, higher and higher.”

  He had taken to visiting me once a day for the relief of unburdening to his sister, his twin, all that had happened to him during the years of our separation and his wanderings, even though in his heart he believed I must already know everything without needing to be told, just as, when we were children, I could always tell him, in case he had forgotten, what he had dreamed in the night by virtue of having shared a womb for forty weeks, and he too knew everything about me without requiring further elaboration. He would roll up in his wheelchair at unspecified times when the spirit seized him, into the room in his private suite in the House of Holy Healing that I shared in those first weeks with the old woman on the bed across from me who gave off a warm, faint fragrance like chicken soup with matzah balls, filling us both with such sweetly painful nostalgia. I had been as motionless and as uncommunicative as my roommate laid out over there when he had started coming by, he told me. But it was not the same, Shmelke insisted. I was his wombmate. Let them all think I wasn’t registering a word he was saying as he went on and on at my bedside about his ordeal of wanderings. He had no doubt I was taking it all in, not missing a single thing, I was absorbing and understanding every syllable. Besides—he flashed me with his wicked grin—there were definite advantages to talking to a woman with no chance of being interrupted, no chance she’d butt in to demand equal time to disgorge her own problems or to contradict or to argue, it is an ideal situation for good conversation.

  The old lady on the twin bed across the room had been shipped to him special delivery from Varanasi via Mumbai coinciding almost exactly with his arrival in Kolkata. She was his one-woman welcoming committee to this former hospice. It was believed she was a Jewess, a Hebrew holy woman, and therefore his department. This conclusion was reached after she was removed from her funeral pyre on the cremation ground of Manikarnika Ghat, when she sat up, opened her eyes with their singed lashes, and inquired if she was dead yet. Eventually it was determined that she must be Jewish as history and experience have shown that Jews are not flammable, like cockroaches they cannot be entirely exterminated, they stubbornly survive in some form as an entity to haunt you, to remind you for eternity of how you tried to stamp them out. She was passed off to the Jewish team at Assi Ghat because she could no longer remain among the living; she had been contaminated by death, it was mandatory th
at she be isolated from human society. From Benares she was dispatched to the Bombay emissaries, and now here she was where the powers decreed she belonged—with my fugitive brother in a former hospice for the dying right next door to the temple of Kali, the great mother goddess who fornicated among the dead on the cremation grounds, Shmelke said.

  He didn’t mind. She was no trouble at all, especially now with Manika attending to her with, if anything, a tenderness even more exemplary than she poured out on me, if that was possible—dribbling hydration into her mouth, washing and changing her, sticking a tissue down her throat to draw out the thick green gelatinous globs of slime blocking her passage. She could stay on as long as she liked as far as Shmelke was concerned, until there was agreement on her status, whether she could be counted among the living or the dead—“A far more complicated determination than you might imagine,” he observed.

  He would give me an example from his own personal experience. Had I ever wondered about the ready acceptance that he, a proud, openly Jewish man, had enjoyed and continued to enjoy here in Kolkata, in a former Christian hospice, abutting such a volatile major Hindu temple? It would be a mistake to attribute this to Indian tolerance, which, in any case, did not exist, it was a total myth, or to the cash Charlotte and some other fat cats forked over, or to anything else of that sort. No. It was that the local Bengalis, when they had laid eyes on him with his long white beard and long white hair and long flowing white robe, were gripped with overwhelming joy that their divine poet, their Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whom they had mourned with such a massive outpouring of grief, had returned. He had come back to them, he was not dead after all, here he was, yes, it is true, confined to a wheelchair now, crippled unfortunately, but still dazzling with his white mane in his white robes as if packaged by central casting—their beloved poet possessed of such fine lofty sentiments, their prophet, their Oriental mystic, known familiarly as Rabi Thakur, Shmelke recounted, relishing the memory. And when word spread that my brother’s name was Rabbi Tabor, all doubts vanished. Thousands mobbed the House of Holy Healing to celebrate the return of Rabi Thakur, lining up to perform pranam due the elderly, and especially an honored sage of such renown and distinction, waiting patiently for the privilege of bending down to reverently touch his feet with their hands as he in turn reached out to touch their heads in blessing. He sat there in his wheelchair for a week, my brother, Shmelke, receiving pranam and giving blessings, it almost completely wiped him out, his arms felt as heavy as stones, two of his Hasidim were required to hold them up, like Aaron and Hur held up Moses’s hands so that Joshua could triumph in his battle against the Amalekites in the field below. In just this way, with his raised hands, my brother, Shmelke, defeated his Israeli pursuers and tormentors of the innocent. There was no chance they would dare try to grab him and spirit him away now. It would start a world-class riot for sure in a fiery nation possessed of nuclear capacity. He was home safe.

  What terrible sin had Rabi Thakur committed, and the old lady in that bed across the room, that prevented them from being set free? And I, what terrible sin had I committed in a past life to be stricken with such suffering? Cut me loose from the wheel of life, I cried. Where is my liberation? I have lost everything. I have nothing, like a sannyasi who is regarded as dead. Let me set out then like a sannyasi with nothing in my hands but a stick and a bowl to find my moksha.

  Not yet, sister, Shmelke responded.

  He needed me now. There was no one else he could trust as he could trust me, for my loyalty, my advice, my discretion. He was a wanted man, wanted in both senses, negative and positive, by enemy and devotee, all of it a burden too heavy to bear alone. He needed my help. If I loved him, I would stay. If I felt an uncontrollable need at this time to cycle into ascetic mode without delay, I could begin my austerities here in the House of Holy Healing even as I carried out my duties as his counselor and confidante—let my hair grow wild and matted, abstain from food and drink three times a week, clothe myself in rags, carry a skull for a drinking cup, sleep on a stretcher bier on the cold ground, detach myself from all comforts and pleasures, surrender desire, cease wanting. If I felt I had sinned in another life, I could undertake tikkun now through selfless service. As it happened, right at this very moment, there was an urgent need here at the House of Holy Healing for a woman to oversee the prepubescents, my brother said. He would have me moved tonight from this room in his suite to the prepubescent pod in the great ward. He would put me in charge of them, the girls they had rescued who had been sold by their mothers.

  2

  THERE WERE FOUR PREPUBESCENTS when I took over the pod in the great ward that night, ranging in age from five years old to thirteen. Two of these girls were from the very lowest of castes, from desperately impoverished families in villages in the north. They were sold by their mothers in straightforward deals for a few hundred rupees to sex traffickers specializing in servicing locals and tourists who happened to prefer pedophilia. After many sordid encounters, they were ultimately delivered, battered and sick, from Kamathipura, the red-light district in Mumbai, to Rebbie-ji’s House of Holy Healing in Kolkata, rescued by the sheriff, Buki ben Yogli.

  Buki also rescued the other two, sisters from Karnataka in the south, whose mother had unloaded each in turn at the age of five by dedicating them to the goddess Yellamma. In this way, they became temple girls or devadasis. They still wore their devadasi necklaces of red and white beads on a saffron-colored string when I met them. The older girl, Devamayi, was thirteen. She had already undergone her puberty ceremony consummating her marriage with Yellamma, following which her virginity was put up for auction to prospective patrons. From the aspect of the House of Holy Healing, therefore, she did not strictly fall into the prepubescent category. Nevertheless, a decision was made to let her stay in the pod in the spirit of family togetherness along with her eight-year-old sibling, Mahamaya. Shmelke felt very close to the sisters, he confided to me, a deep inner personal connection, he said, and not only to these two but to the whole universe of devadasis in general. When the story of my life ended three years later and I departed the shell of the House of Holy Healing, there were eighteen girls in the pod, all of them devadasis.

  Rescuing devadasis became a major element integrally tied into Rebbie-ji’s overall master plan at the House of Holy Healing. He regarded himself to be a male incarnation of a devadasi. Ich bin ein devadasi, he would introduce himself to jubilant ovations. Of course, I understood. He too had been sold to the temple, like his namesake, the prophet Samuel, who had been offered by his barren mother, Hannah, to the Lord in a deal in exchange for a child, delivered as promised to the high priest Eli in the tabernacle at Shiloh after he was weaned as part of a sacrifice package that also included three bullocks, an ephah of meal, and a bottle of wine. “I never had a choice,” Shmelke said to me, in full awareness that I of all people would get it and feel his pain. “I never was allowed to find out what else was out there in the world. You think I was handicapped by an accident as an adult? I was handicapped from before I was even born. What else could I do when I grew up but become a rabbi?”

  Devamayi and Mahamaya were the House of Holy Healing’s first devadasis. They were dedicated to Yellamma by their mother in the hope that the fertility goddess would intervene on her behalf and give her a son who would take care of her in her old age, unlike daughters who were nothing but a burden. From then on, the two girls were considered to be married to the goddess (as I was married to the goddess Geeta, a sacred gay marriage), and therefore forbidden to marry any mortal man as long as they lived. This insider connection with the goddess was a devadasi’s greatest asset even after her patron tired of her and dumped her in a brothel; it was a badge of pride and honor even in the pecking order of whores. A devadasi was not a sex slave, she was God’s slave. Yet despite these benefits, there is no question in my mind that the sisters were better off to have been evacuated from the squalor and degradation and abuse of that life. Neither girl remember
ed much from her initiation ceremony except having the pretty string of beads tied around her neck. Their duties during their novitiate included sweeping the temple, they recalled, among other chores. Sometimes they would perform ritual dances and sing traditional songs along with the other temple girls. They also would serve the priests, whenever they were summoned, day or night.