by Tova Reich
“I’m sorry, but they don’t look Jewish to me,” Rebbie-ji concluded after a long silence, when Buki set them down still in their cages at his master’s feet.
Nevertheless, he gave his permission for the two little girls to stay on for the interim at the House of Holy Healing until a suitable home could be found for them through Charlotte’s benevolent intervention. It was an act of hessed; loving-kindness is not an exclusive commodity to be dispensed only to other Jews. He would call them Bilha and Zilpah, like the concubines of Jacob, and maybe when they got a little stronger they could help out around the ashram until their case was settled. In general, however, it would be preferable not to bring any more such unfortunates into the sanctuary of the House of Holy Healing, if Buki didn’t mind, he should not take this as a criticism.
The devadasis, on the other hand, were another matter. True, they too were not Jewish, but they represented a feminine model for union with the divine so sorely missing in Jewish practice. We need our nuns, which is why it is permissible for us to squat here in the strict Mother’s old convent still creaking with the agonies of the tortured Christian God, and we also need our devadasis. There was a great deal to be learned about divine female power from the devadasis through dance and other physical forms of worship. They are artists of spirituality. Rebbie-ji charged Buki with the task of organizing a team to buy up as many devadasis as possible. Buki would have access to unlimited funds to purchase them when their virginity went up for sale, and bring them back to the House of Holy Healing. In the meantime, Rebbie-ji gave Buki his blessings as he set out the next morning to Karnataka to keep his word and rescue the sister of the devadasi who had saved his life, like Rahab the harlot.
It was an arduous journey from Kolkata to Saundatti the next day, Buki recalled, requiring two flights each way, and the exclusive full-time service of a taxi to bring them to their destination, and to wait for them in a designated spot for a quick turnaround and getaway. But that was the least of it. It was above all the emotional wear and tear. And the truth is, it would have been far more difficult, on the face of it, almost impossible, to execute this rescue without the help of the girl, the big sister, not only because she spoke Kannada, one of the babel of languages in the Indian loony bin, but also because this was a very inside job, and she was a supreme insider, she knew the territory, its map was scored with a blade on her brain. In the future, Buki assured me, acquiring more devadasis for Rebbie-ji will be a much more routine affair. He would take along one of their Indians, Mottel Patel-Aleph or Mottel Patel-Zayin, suitably costumed for the occasion, and simply buy a devadasi when a good one went on the market in the normal course of events. Price was no object, and it made no difference to them whatsoever if the priests had fooled around with her beforehand. She only had to meet Rebbie-ji’s specifications for female spirituality insofar as they could determine this endowment from her outward appearance—and the Patel boys were true connoisseurs from their years in the motel business, sizing people up in a blink. If they found out later she wasn’t a virgin, no big deal. They would not consider themselves to have been ripped off. Even the Virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin, yet she still was good enough for the holy ghost.
When they arrived in Saundatti toward evening, the girl instructed the driver in their language to go directly to the Yellamma temple on a hill a few kilometers outside of town. Buki had offered her the opportunity to make a quick detour to say hi to her mom, but she shook off the suggestion with a shudder, as if it were a spider. It was already dark, but they could tell from a distance that some sort of ceremony was underway at the temple. Fires were burning and drums beating.
They made their way up the hill on foot. Beggars with stumps for limbs crawled around them on their bellies like worms. Women clutching naked babies turned their faces up to him, jabbing a finger into their mouths, miming hunger. Peddlers lined the path, hawking glass bangles, brass images of the goddess, peacock feathers, flower and food offerings. Every eye noted then dismissed them—a devadasi serving the goddess, leading by the hand a giant in a bizarre costume, an eccentric rich patron perhaps, or a pilgrim of no recognizable gender in a woman’s long robe afflicted with a rare disorder, coming to petition the goddess for a cure. The air was ripe with the smell of turmeric and incense. As they entered the open courtyard of the temple where the rites were being enacted by the light of the fires, to the sounds of drums and bells and conches, a creature leapt out of the dark and emptied a pail of yellow powder on them. “Hey, watch it buddy!” Buki shot out as he attempted to wipe the stuff off his best kaftan and hat, but the girl dragged him away before he could teach the perpetrator some respect.
The same yellow powder completely coated the women dancing in the center of the courtyard as if they had been rolled in it—their hair, their faces, their arms, their saris. They were dancing in a frenzied state of total abandon and ecstasy, their arms grasping upward, their eyes sealed. They reminded Buki of Hasidim in rapturous bliss, blocking out from their consciousness the whole earthly scene, soaring as if in a trance, but he had never seen women in this state, he had believed they were not capable of it. They were channeling Yellamma, letting themselves be filled up by the goddess, their lover, their bridegroom, their husband. Devotees ran up to the bewitched dancers, tugging at their saris, dusted with yellow powder, urgently petitioning, supplicating desperately for the intervention of the goddess, then stuffing something in a hand that lowered from its exaltation to snatch the baksheesh. All around them children and young teenagers, mostly girls, danced completely naked or adorned here and there with the green leaves of a neem tree, and a sprig of neem in their mouths.
She spotted her sister instantly among these children, a lithe, heartbreaking fawn with dark eyes that seemed to have puddled over most of her face. You could see the resemblance, she too might have looked something like that before she had been sold and bought, though the child was blessed with a much fairer complexion, mocha latte—a different father for sure. She charged forward, scooped up her little sister, and hauled her back toward Buki so that they could make their escape, but the child managed to slither out of her arms and ran to one of the dancing women in the center of the ring, clutching her sari from which the yellow powder rained down over her velvety bare skin, crying, Ma, Ma, Ma. “Seems our girls come from a long line of devadasis, a very yikhusdik family, distinguished lineage, a dynasty like some of our top Chabad rabbis,” Buki gave himself permission to interject; I chose not to respond. By then he was hovering over the family reunion, the huddle of devadasis, the mother devadasi and her two devadasi daughters, casting his large shadow over them, listening to their exchange though not understanding a word. The mother was raging that she no longer was receiving any money from her working-girl daughter, Buki learned afterward. The daughter announced that she had come to take the sister before the mother sold her too—or before the priests got their dirty hands on her. The mother let out a cackle, universal language that Buki comprehended, and spat out, Too late, ha ha. Her eye scanned Buki from head to toe, appraising his worth. She expected twice as much money now every month as it looked like her girls had snagged themselves a rajah, she screeched as she spread her wings and transported herself in a puff of mustard-colored smoke back into the inner circle of the goddess’s handmaids, sorceresses, and oracles.
They left the temple precincts with the little girl carried by her big sister, tucked inside her sari like a baby marsupial, crying, Ma, Ma the whole way down the hill. She cried in the taxi on the long trip to the airport, and through both plane rides, all the way to Kolkata. She has been crying for her mother every day and night, Buki informed me. She misses the mother she has; you can’t argue with that. They had gotten used to her crying, crying was the white noise in the House of Holy Healing, muting the screams of the slaughtered goats sacrificed instead of children in the temple of Mother Kali next door. Only recently they had noticed that the crying had died down, maybe even stopped, Buki said. They figured she simply
had worn herself out and had given up. But then they made the connection that the change had coincided with my arrival in the pod. I had become her new maternal figure, bestowed on her by Rebbie-ji in his wisdom. I was Mother, the darkness of the all-encompassing and all-accepting embrace, and she was comforted.
Of all the devadasis who came and went over the next three years, leaving eighteen at the end like buboes on the wasted body of Rebbie-ji in his punishing pursuit of tikkun, the first two, Devamayi and Mahamaya, remained our favorites, our most beloved, my own and my brother’s. He called them Shakti and Shekhina, drawing on his power to encapsulate in a name the essence of the soul. Thereafter, everyone in the House of Holy Healing was expected to refer to them by their true names, which Rebbie-ji had uncovered—Shakti for the creative female cosmic energy force of the goddess in Hinduism, Shekhina for the feminine aspect of the divine presence on earth as elaborated in the Jewish mystical texts. Rebbie-ji struggled every day for world repair not only through the male–female union of the divine feminine with the masculine godhead, but also through the universal sisterhood of those sacred attributes of feminine power in the teachings of both faiths.
He would summon the two girls to his suite, or stop by the pod, simply to delight in seeing them. He would stroke their silken black hair, ask them to perform a ritual dance or song for him, then as a reward draw the younger one up onto his lap as the older one was invited to push them in his wheelchair racing at top speed all around the ashram, all three of them shrieking hilariously as if they were riding the cyclone at a carnival. It was an immense privilege to see my brother Rebbie-ji playing again as we had played when we were children, to witness him setting down even for such a brief interval the heavy burdens he bore day and night for all of us. He deserved this small pleasure, no less than Gandhi-ji who had also sacrificed his health with all that marathon fasting and walking and so much more, and who had also enjoyed the company of young girls nearby to minister to his personal care before he was assassinated, and no one begrudged him either. The girls were a great comfort to Shmelke, he told me. They reminded him of his daughters whom he had not seen for so long, over the many years of his exile and flight, his nine daughters, my nieces, several of them, so far as I knew, already proper grandmothers.
Let us not invoke daughters. I implore you, Shmelke.
For my part, though, these two, our first best beloved devadasis, would always remain Devamayi and Mahamaya, and, whenever possible (preferably out of the hearing of others so as not to give the appearance of flouting my brother’s ukase), I would call them by their true names—Devamayi, Mahamaya—in order not to traumatize them even more by cutting them off so radically from their roots, discarding even ownership of their given names.
But the truth is, my daily involvement with them and the pod was limited, my responsibilities did not permit me to interact with the devadasis full time or to keep on top of every detail of their lives. Sleeping in the pod was not for me a caregiving assignment. It was in reality another aspect of the austerities along with fasting, chanting, meditation and additional practices that I had taken upon myself in anticipation of the day when my brother no longer would need me and I could be released to set out as a sannyasini, emptying my life totally. My main duties were above all as Rebbie-ji’s counselor and confidante, his chief of staff as it were. There was no one on earth he could trust more than me, his sister, his twin, his didi—his feminine emanation.
With regard to the prepubescent pod, I along with Rebbie-ji were of course the two major players in the making of the big decisions but not hands on in implementing them. That was left to Manika, she was the one who made things happen. It was she who managed its day-to-day operations, with the assistance of other low-caste Indians to carry out the menial work, sorely needed since the devadasi population at HHH was not only growing exponentially thanks to Buki’s shopping sprees, but also turning over constantly. New girls were arriving all the time, old ones disappearing. One even gave birth at the ashram not long after she had been purchased, an eleven year old, though within a few weeks the baby swelled up, stopped feeding, and died. Three of the devadasis also sickened and died during the first year alone soon after they arrived, an unfortunate event that at the time some of us attributed to the occasional gifts of surplus prepackaged frozen kosher meals in compartmentalized aluminum foil trays shipped to us in trucks from the Goa Chabad.
It also became obvious as the pod took shape that the term prepubescent had become a misnomer, applicable in reality only to the divine nymph Mahamaya, whom Rebbie-ji called Shekhina. All the other girls were acquired post the curse of their first period, which is what put them on the block in the first place where they caught Buki’s eye—and all without exception were illiterate. Manika came to us one day to make the case that the girls be taught how to read without delay, while the window of opportunity was still open, when the mind is still malleable and can still absorb new skills. It did not escape me that she was flattering herself while petitioning us, as she had picked up her reading skills in several languages in no time even at an advanced age. She threw me a complicit glance as she bent down to touch Shmelke’s feet, muttering that the reading lessons I had arranged for her were the best gift she had ever received, there was no way she could ever repay me. “And your mouth is full of teeth,” Rebbie-ji in his wisdom pronounced cryptically, in this way reminding her of another gift I had given her and what else she owed me while at the same time gently indicating that he appreciated the fox-like cunning of her manipulations since they were clearly meant to benefit the girls—and promptly he put her in charge of organizing the reading program.
She set to work at once, recruiting as teachers foreign volunteers, mostly women seekers passing through for longer or shorter stays. A gratifying number of these souls were soon caught up in Rebbie-ji’s irresistibly powerful mystical aura, some returning to the faith if they were already Jewish, others going to even greater extremes and converting if they were not, after which they were quickly married off to one of his eligible detoxed Hasidim, horrifying their families back home who were convinced they had been brainwashed by a cult. Yet others, Jews and non-Jews, used their community service and internships as reading tutors to the devadasis as the topic of their college admission essays or for other applications, with nearly universal acceptance even to the most competitive schools and programs. Not a single one of them emerged unchanged in some way, inwardly or externally, from their exposure to my brother, Shmelke.
English, naturally, was the chosen tongue for the reading lessons. It was in any case the lingua franca of most of the travelers and even as it happened of many of the devadasis, who came to us already possessing a selective English vocabulary, limited mostly to sex and prices for services. Whatever the language, though, knowing how to read could only benefit our devadasis in the long term, Shmelke and I concluded. Even if they chose ultimately to return to a career in prostitution, which we accepted as their inalienable right, at the very least they could parlay their literacy to become effective spokespersons for the rights of sex workers.
Our gem, our Manika, as I knew so well from my own personal experience, was simply a natural born manager, a quality that Shmelke had also very quickly picked up on even before I awoke to find myself in the House of Holy Healing crying out from the depths, despairing beyond words that I was still in this world. Within a few weeks she was supervising the entire HHH infrastructure, not only the care of the devadasis and their literacy program, but also the kitchen and all the services, including the hospitality end, accommodations for seekers and pilgrims and so on, and overseeing the dark-skinned workers, Bengalis, as well as Bangladeshi and Tibetan and Nepali refugees, along with the fair-skinned wives of Rebbie-ji’s Hasidim who were responsible for the cooking and meal preparation to guarantee the kashrut level. Even they set aside their pride and sense of entitlement, and deferred to Manika’s executive authority. She was in charge of the laundry and cleaning staff, the maintenanc
e of the entire macro-enterprise, heat and light, but under no circumstances did she neglect the micro side either. With exceptional tenderness, she looked after the old lady shriveling up in the bed in Rebbie-ji’s suite, neither living or dead, flipping her over like a latke several times a day to prevent bedsores, dribbling sugar water into her ulcerated mouth with a teaspoon, extracting long green strings of gunk from her throat. She also took exemplary care of my brother and me, if for no other reason than to honor our mother, whom she loved beyond measure, and whose picture she kept in her room, the centerpiece of a small altar shrine decorated with garlands of marigolds and votive candles, doing puja there every day with offerings of flowers and the sweets so hard to find in India that she knew Ma could never resist, chocolate kisses and licorice twists.
The suffering of my soul had spread to my body. The fasting I had taken on three days a week as a form of ascetic practice was eating me up. My appetite for nourishment as for everything else in this life forsook me. Finally I was as skinny as I had ached to be all my years, but there was no satisfaction in it now. My stomach twisted in pain, I sat on the toilet and poured out my guts like water against the face of the Lord before whose seat of glory every orifice is open. Manika herself administered ayurvedic panchakarma therapy to detoxify and purify me, massaging, oiling, brewing, cleansing with herbal remedies, nagging me until I submitted. I had not properly metabolized my sorrow and sadness, she said, it had spread to my entire system and poisoned it, I was completely out of balance, body and soul.