Mother India

by Tova Reich

  Manika also saw to it that my brother, Shmelke, was properly cared for, especially in matters of personal hygiene pertaining to his paralyzed lower body, which he could not attend to himself but which was so crucial in preventing infection in that vulnerable area so prone to contamination, and ensuring overall health and a long life. Toward that end, and in line with her conviction that the devadasis should not be lounging around all day in idleness except for their reading lessons, she received permission to create and strictly enforce a schedule—two girls in the morning, two in the evening dispatched to Rebbie-ji to perform the needed tasks gently, respectfully, with dignity. Only the pretty ones, please, Shmelke had said with such an endearingly innocent smile. But whoever showed up, he wasn’t complaining, though he did put in a request for Shakti and Shekhina as often as possible, they were his preferred personal handlers.

  Until then this intimate service had been carried out cheerfully and competently by a Filipino convert named Jerry, short for Jericho, who had been working in Israel as a metapel, taking care of a senior citizen rabbi in Jerusalem. He had come under my brother’s influence after having had the good fortune to be in the path of Shmelke’s inner circle racing in the night to the graves of the righteous, and as if struck by the hand of God instead of a motorcycle, had become a Hasid himself after he recovered, following my brother into exile.

  The truth is, Jerry was not only stronger, but also far more adept and efficient than the devadasis in doing what was needed for Shmelke’s personal physical maintenance, but the aging of his own parents required his return to Manila in compliance with the fifth commandment of the Torah, to honor your father and mother, whose suffering I had heard was mercifully cut short when they expired soon after Jerry’s arrival, most likely from shock the instant they laid eyes on their son again after so many years in his beard and sidelocks and full Hasidic regalia. My poor afflicted brother did not seem to mind the changing of the guard however. He looked forward to the girls’ ministrations however clumsy, he tolerated with good humor their fumbling and ineptness, he gave himself permission to relax and enjoy. The girls, even the not so pretty ones, were still so young and fresh, they smelled so sweet, their hands were so soft.

  Manika is also the genius who deserves the credit for coming up with the idea of a devadasi dance program that for a period of time turned the House of Holy Healing into the go-to place on the entire subcontinent for female empowerment through movement. The girls were always practicing their intricate dance steps in the pod, and naturally Manika, who missed nothing, took note of this. In typical fashion, never wasting a thing, not a single grain of rice, not a rag, not a clump of dung, the righteous Western innovations of recycling and sustainability coded into her Indian DNA from prehistory, she pondered how to make the best and most constructive use of these unique and in truth dying skills in the interest of the community at large.

  She called me over one day to watch as a few of the girls were engaging in one of their favorite pastimes—a contest of nonstop rhythmic foot movements of infinitely subtle refinement. The winner was the one who could make the fewest jingling sounds with her anklets studded with bells. She proposed that I broach the idea with my brother of opening a dance studio at the House of Holy Healing for the sake of bringing in some income independent of donors, and not least, raising the self-esteem of the girls who would serve as the instructors, giving them a sense of pride and purpose, compensating them through this public appreciation of their gift and skills for all the ways in which they had been humiliated and discarded. The idea reminded her of the compost toilets she had emptied during her time at Ammachi’s ashram, Manika remarked—taking a thing that stinks to high heaven and turning it into something that makes the flowers bloom under the sun.

  Shmelke was receptive to the suggestion. We had several intense discussions on the matter. The biggest stumbling block for him was that most of the classic dance routines as far as he could ascertain included devotional worship of the idols, Kali, Shiva, Ganesha, Yellamma, the whole wild polytheistic gang of divine thuggees and goondas and dacoits. At first he rationalized that it was only art anyway, so it didn’t really matter. Still, it was a problem. In the end, he ruled that this glut of Hindu deities were in reality aspects of one God, like the ten kabbalistic emanations of the sefirot comprising the single God of the Jewish people. Faiths evolved, they bled into each other, they dialogued with each other, they impacted each other, they took from each other whether they realized it or not, to the enrichment of all. And as a bonus, from the practical side, the wives of his Hasidim who would also be learning these movements in the dance classes could then bring them home to their bedrooms. This could only contribute to peace on the home front, Rebbie-ji pointed out. Anything that contributed to shalom bayit may be considered to be the highest form of mitzvah.

  This was Rebbie-ji’s reasoning, his responsum, and he put his stamp of approval on the dance studio, provided it be limited to women only. He called it Devadasi Yoga, and in a stunningly brief period of time it became a legendary success with a huge following, not only among the wives and daughters and occasional mothers and grandmothers of my brother’s Hasidim, but also the expat community, travelers and seekers coming through, as well as the upscale and wealthy local Bengalis, of whom there were still surprisingly quite a number, notwithstanding the general decline of the city and the tourist attraction eyesore of the wreckage of humanity sleeping and defecating in the streets. The demand was tremendous. More and more classes had to be added to accommodate applicants, everyone was clamoring to get a spot in the program, it was the hottest new thing in town. Devadasi jewelry and ornamentation became the rage, headdresses, belts, earrings, bangles and bell anklets ecumenically decorated with little gold encrusted Indian swastikas and Stars of David.

  Men were not only banned from participating in the classes, they were also forbidden to observe. This restriction did not apply to my brother, however, who was, after all, not only a rabbi, which is something like a doctor, a trained professional licensed to see it all, but he was also a martyr and saint who carried the sins of all humankind in his desiccated, out-of-commission lower quarters. As master of the domain, he asserted his rights and came out often, several times a day, to sit and watch with full entitlement. It was for me one of my most personal delights to crouch in a corner, doing my utmost to render myself invisible, and watch my brother watching. He radiated ultimate pleasure, swept up by the pure grace of the complex ritual gestures of hands and feet, the sinuous flow of the body defined by the waist like a vessel that could be grasped for pouring, the artful poses of the head, the flirtatious side-glances of the eyes. They were meant to be dancing for the gods, the devadasis, but I knew very well that Shmelke believed they were dancing for him alone. I watched him nodding his head to the beat of a small band of drummers and bamboo flute players or the a cappella of an impromptu group of devadasi singers, or to music streaming from a computer, stiffening sympathetically with the dancers as they froze into a statuesque posture, becoming once again the little boy I had grown up with as he breathlessly followed a story unfolding through dance, always a sad tale, a tale of heartache, love spurned, love forbidden, love lost, and more than once I saw tears slipping down his cheeks into his white beard.

  I looked at my brother, Shmelke, and saw the florid rash near his mouth showing through under his beard where the tears had landed. His beard, once so rich, so patriarchal, had grown sparse—when did this creep up on him? He had been put through so much, more than any single human being had ever been meant to endure, it was no wonder he was in such a weakened and vulnerable state, so susceptible to the invisible pathogens lurking in the atmosphere. He had become so thin, taking up so much less space in his wheelchair. Every few minutes he was clearing his throat of a thick mucus, or covering his mouth, trying to suppress a cough, and I could see the sores on the back of his hand. I pleaded with him to let me bring in a doctor, but he refused with unrestrained fury, so uncharacterist
ic in his dealings with me. This is the House of Holy Healing, he reminded me—and if there’s no healing, then we can always go back to hospice mode.

  A hospice for the dying, of course, that’s what this place was and that’s what in the end it would always be, contaminated by that grim reaper Mother Teresa and her lepers—it explained everything. Our living quarters were infested with plague and disease. It was Charlotte’s fault completely. So efficient, so famously in control, and yet she had never taken the obvious precautions, never bothered to have the premises checked out, fumigated, disinfected, sterilized, as if our kind were not worth the extra expenditure of mental or material resources. The great gift she had bestowed upon my brother with such fanfare and noblesse oblige was nothing but a sick building, sickening everyone who dwelt within its confines. I too was feeling unwell, contorted with bowel pain, canker sores in my mouth, my ankles swollen. Until my brother with his divine insight connected it all for me to the hospice, Charlotte’s gift, I had attributed my own physical symptoms to my unspeakable losses, aggravated by my ascetic practice.

  Others too who spent time in this former hospice were showing signs of illness, including some of Rebbe-ji’s followers from his inner circle, which they then went home to spread to their wives. The devadasis were also presenting with all kinds of physical complaints, to lesser or greater degrees, among them a new girl who was found dead one morning on her soaked sheet. Even Buki, a giant of a man, seemed diminished—fading, shrinking, his face puffy and blotched, his eyes red and swollen, his swagger lost. We assumed these changes were due to exhaustion from his nonstop travels, his constant grueling trips across the breast of Mother India from Kolkata to Maharashtra and Karnataka and back to save devadasis, taking along with him the Patels, Aleph and Zayin, along with Devamayi/Shakti after all, because of her indispensable insider’s knowledge of the workings of the temples and the brothels, and her cleverness and boldness in negotiating them. Devamayi too we noticed was coughing continuously, she seemed unable to shake a flu of some sort, though her little sister, Mahamaya, whom Rebbie-ji called Shekhina, appeared blessedly immune to the toxins that seeped through the walls of our building, she floated like an angel above us all in pure air, possessed of a kind of divine exceptionalism. If ever she had been gripped by whatever this affliction was, she had gotten rid of it through the act of giving it to someone else, which made complete sense. Manika also was largely untouched, seamlessly adding to her daily labors the care of the sick and the sweeping up of the rats that staggered out of the walls, turned belly up on the open floor, and expired.

  Why should all this sickness surprise you? Shmelke demanded to know. Was he not the gilgul of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, and did not Rabbi Nahman also have to deal with so many health issues in his lifetime, such a weight of mortality—the death in infancy of two daughters, the death in their first years of life of his only two sons leaving him no male heir to carry on the dynasty, his first wife’s death from tuberculosis, and then his own death, also from tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-eight? Rabbi Nahman lived in a house of death too, his home was a hospice that he transformed into a house of holy healing with his divine powers, through stories and music and dance, deploying his spiritual art to erase the tears from every face.

  During this period, the darshan that Rebbie-ji gave daily to his followers seated on the floor before him in the great common ward always began with this focus on himself in his prior incarnation as Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. For that reason alone it was explosively heretical, but what he revealed about himself in his former embodiment made it even more so. I was the only woman present to hear his darshan (this is how he referred to his appearances in deference to his status among the gurus of his host country), curled up in the fetal position behind a screen, I who had spent nine months alone with him naked in the same womb, which is why I am able to transcribe his words as Rabbi Nosson of Nemirov transcribed the teachings of the original Rabbi Nahman.

  Rebbie-ji admitted that even then, more than two hundred years ago in the personification of Rabbi Nahman, he had already been a universalist, borrowing from other traditions and faiths, advocating openness and inclusiveness. His signature concepts of seeking out solitude and immersion in nature—these he had inhaled like a drug from the Romantic movement in the arts bouncing on the airwaves across Europe and Asia, from Byron to Pushkin, then down to him in the pits of Ukraine. Confession, needless to say, he stole from the Christians.

  Even more shockingly, he confirmed certain rumors about himself in his previous life as Rabbi Nahman that had been circulating for over two centuries but had never before been definitively verified. It is true, he admitted, that in his travels as Rabbi Nahman, when he had stopped in Istanbul, he had shaved off his beard and sidelocks with a razor, and yes, even removed his yarmulke and gone around bareheaded, yes, even without a head covering he had frequented the opium dens and the Turkish bordellos, where they specialized in a very rare form of sadism from which he still shamefully carried the scars, like a tattoo carved into his flesh, an ineradicable reminder of his erotic debasement. At home in Uman he would also on occasion in those days as Rabbi Nahman set out in disguise to the underworld of sin and pollution and immerse himself in the forbidden as in a ritual bath filled with black water in which the divine sparks scattered during the fall from paradise had sunk. This is why, in case any of his followers had ever wondered, he has never, as Rebbie-ji, condemned those pilgrims to his gravesite on Rosh Hashanah who may be emulating him even without full awareness, by seeking redemption through transgression. Over two centuries ago in his incarnation as Rabbi Nahman and now in the new millennium first as Reb Breslov and then as Rebbie-ji, in Israel and in exile, he had sacrificed himself, the health of his body and soul, in the performance of tikkun to bring about the messianic age by plunging to the lowest depths to retrieve the lost light of creation. But by no means were his followers to conflate his acts of sacred depravity with the corruption of such false messiahs as Shabbtai Tzvi and Jacob Frank, who were nothing but dissolute conmen and degenerate seducers, Rebbie-ji cautioned severely. “I am not the false messiah,” my brother, Shmelke, enunciated, vocally italicizing the key words. His Hasidim instantly got it, and were awestricken. From behind the screen I too was shaken, torn loose.

  As if all of this were not mind-blowing enough, my brother, Rebbie-ji, then proceeded to come out with perhaps an even more stunning revelation. Between his incarnation as Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and his present embodiment as Rebbie-ji, he informed us, he had also appeared for fifty years on this earth as the Bengali Brahmin mystic Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa of India. He was not only Nahman’s gilgul, he was also Ramakrishna’s gilgul. This revelation illuminated many hitherto hidden mysteries, including why Rebbie-ji’s feet, so to speak, led him back to Kolkata as if on their own, without regard to his personal free will. Everything now became clear. And as in the days when he had walked the earth as Ramakrishna, now as Rebbie-ji he was again following the painfully difficult path of left-handed tantric teachings, breaking down all the barriers between the sacred and the profane in every realm, including forbidden carnal temptations, food, drink, sex, all of the base appetites in order to transcend them, to see the face of the goddess in all things and realize the exaltation of the cosmic mother. Just as in his Ramakrishna incarnation he had embraced Shakti, the primal female energy source, the active principle, the root of all creation and creativity, now as Rebbie-ji he opened his arms even wider to also include in his embrace Shekhina, the feminine aspect of the divine presence on earth, as a child embraces his mother. His openness as Rebbie-ji to the wisdom and sacredness of all faiths was no different now than in the days when as Ramakrishna he had made his devotions not only as a Hindu, but also as a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, with the difference that as Rebbie-ji, he also worshipped as a Jew.

  When I walked the earth as Sri Ramakrishna, I had lost contact with my prior life, my roots as the Jew Rabbi Nahman, Rebbie-ji revealed. As Ramakrish
na I would perform the tantra discipline of sitting for hours meditating on Mother Kali, the chant, Om Kali Ma, fusing with my breathing. I would sit in the cremation grounds and see her ferocious image with tongue lolling down and her bloody garland of fifty severed heads. I would sit on the banks of the Ganges and see her emerge from the river, open her legs and give birth to me, lift me in her arms and nurse me so tenderly at her blue-black breast. Then she opened her mouth and ate me. Brokenhearted and weeping, plunged into darkness, I despaired that I would never see the face of my mother again. Only then, when I had reached the lowest depths, did she take pity on me and spit me out. Mother, I cried, my good mother—stay. She was the divine mother, absolute consciousness. I knew only joy then, I did not know from Jews. How delicious it was to be rid of this Jewish burden for just one lifetime, a reprieve, but it could not last forever, something would rise up from the depths to engulf me or drop down on my head from the heights to crush me, and I would be forced back again to my place in the world.

  Now as Rebbie-ji, his journey had taken him back Kolkata, to the territory of his past life as Ramakrishna, to this former Christian hospice of the saint Mother Teresa alongside the Hindu temple of the goddess Mother Kali (the two witches, as he called them, but privately, for my ears only). It was all for a purpose: to restore the Jew into the mix where we rightfully belong. Our numbers may not be many, but our voices are loud, we give the impression that there are a lot more of us than actually swarm on the earth. We Jews are the kundalini of faiths, coiled up at the root like a snake waiting for the awakening of all the chakra centers, when all will bow down and acknowledge us as the source. Thanks to our ministrations, our devadasi dancers within these walls have now absorbed all religions, Rebbie-ji declared, our devadasis are the fusion of faiths—Hindu girls sold to Muslims rescued by Jews sheltered in a former Christian hospice, and so on, with other assorted pluralistic variations on the theme flowing from their diverse individual stories.