Mother India
Page 29
The electrical power had failed again, and the entire ward was illuminated with flickering lights from the memorial candles set out that we always bought in bulk. The weight of parting pressed down on everyone assembled there that night, yet Rebbie-ji, my brother, when he spoke briefly, as if for himself alone, in a voice so quietly intimate but nevertheless audible aimed at our most vital inner cells, alluded to nothing about farewell. He chose to talk about Shakti and Shekhina. Where do they reside, these two essential cosmic female energy forces, these two goddesses, the Hindu Shakti and the Jewish Shekhina? That was the question he was asking. He had searched for them everywhere—he had sought them but he could not find them.
He was speaking discursively, my brother, with no plan, giving voice to his thoughts as they came into his head. He made reference to the complex rite of intense preparations for the entry of the high priest into the holy of holies of the holy temple in Jerusalem once a year on Yom Kippur day—and how the congregation was filled with such elation when he made it out, alive and in one piece, with a glowing countenance, unscathed by divine wrath. If the holy temple is where the Shekhina, the feminine aspect of God’s presence, dwells on earth, Rebbie-ji asked, where then is its holy of holies? He paused, then answered his own question, using the Sanskrit word. It is inside the Shekhina’s yoni, of course. It has been my burden in this life to serve as the high priest sent in to penetrate the sublimely dangerous territory of the Shekhina’s yoni, her holy of holies, every day and night for the sake of carrying out tikkun, healing the holy congregation of Israel, he began by saying—but he did not utter out loud the remainder of his thought. Instead, in the most expressive of gestures, his hand moved up, opening toward his ravaged face as if to say, Behold how I have fared, there will be no rejoicing. Then he pulled his hooded blanket down over his sacred countenance, masking its lesions and sores.
No one doubted that the fire that broke out that night in the House of Holy Healing was started by a memorial candle, though many commented later that it was a miracle that such an accident had never occurred before. It was not a subject I cared to discuss, but I knew for certain that it was far from an accident. When plague broke out in the villages of India, I had once told my brother when we were children, they cremated the dead in their hovels, burning everything to the ground along with the bodies inside. I did not know if this was true, I had only read it in a book about India, I had been fixated on India from a very early age, it was the place on my inner map filled with all the starving children I could have saved with the piece of potato kugel I was leaving uneaten on my plate. But Shmelke remembered this tale, he made reference to it over the years. Lying in his bed after his darshan that night, I could envision him flinging out his arms with clear intention—even in the womb I already bore the scars from his habit of deliberately thinking and dreaming with his hands—knocking over the candles and shattering their glass.
The flames were confined to Rebbie-ji’s suite, but the entire hospice filled with black smoke. The devadasis and whoever else was in the building were herded out by Manika. I could hear her calling my name frantically, but I stayed hidden in my corner curled up around my bag of shit and these pages that I had been writing every night by the light of a memorial candle, which I had grabbed instinctively, to fuel the fire. Now let the whole house burn down with us its dead inside, I prayed in my corner. I prayed for liberation, there was nothing I desired more than for my story to come to an end.
Let me go to Shmelke to die together with him as I was born with him, I told myself, but I was vanquished by my own weakness and did not venture out of my cave to cut through the smoke like a thick web and make my way to my brother’s side. Instead, I lay there through the night as my bag continued to fill with the story of my life. When they found Rebbie-ji the next morning he was black and charred like a piece of wood consumed in a furnace where the martyrs are cast. Buki ben Yogli and the temple girl Devamayi were found on the floor melted together in an embrace from which they could not be prized apart. The status of the old lady on the bed in the next room remained the same, perhaps somewhat more withered and shrunken to the discerning eye, but still no final determination could be made whether she was dead or alive. The devadasis along with everyone else who had inhabited the House of Holy Healing, except Manika, had fled forever. It was a demonic place, cursed and desecrated from the days of Mother Teresa and the lepers from whom she had contracted her sainthood. It could never be cleansed.
From behind a partition I addressed my brother’s Hasidim, commanding them in Rebbie-ji’s name to contact the Israel government to set in motion their master’s extradition. They had wanted him so badly, the Israelis, now they could have him, with our blessings. They were experienced professionals well versed in handling the ashes of dead Jews. Come and get him. Let them do with him as they saw fit. Wear gloves and a mask, I advised. Should they require some DNA for identification purposes, here it is. And I tossed over the partition a grotesque clump of my own hair that I had broken off—dry as straw, matted and twisted into ropes, gray like soot. I had considered offering them the gift of a bag of my excrement, now already prepackaged, since I had read somewhere in a magazine that hunted terrorists were traced by the DNA in their droppings deposited along their flight paths. But to avert the possibility of making a mockery of my brother’s memory, I opted for my hair instead, which I had let grow out in anticipation of this very hour, when no one would need me anymore and I would be free to renounce everything, close my book of life, and set out as a sannyasini.
As a sannyasini, I was as if dead. The first person no longer was present to continue my tale, and this brought it to an end. All that remained for me now was to enact my own funeral to achieve liberation. I set out walking on the Grand Trunk Road from Kolkata to make my way on foot to Varanasi. Moksha awaited me there in the lap of Mother Ganga. My only garment was an ochre-colored robe. In my right hand I carried a single staff, a sign of my penance, for surely I had sinned in the confusion of my heart.
I ask you to forgive me.
In my left hand I carried a pot with a handle that contained a cup for water, and also my bag of excrement filling constantly, proof that I was still alive, tethered to the nipple of the new stoma in my body by a long translucent tube passing through a slit in my robe. I had cut off all my ties to the world, detached myself from everything in this life, except my excrement. This I would carry with me in a bag in my pot every step of the way as I walked along the Grand Trunk Road. The pot also held a little bell that I would take out to ring like a leper, like an untouchable, whenever I saw someone approaching, to warn of oncoming defilement and pollution.
I intended to walk on the Grand Trunk Road alone and unaccompanied to the river of life and find enlightenment and liberation at last, but already at Howrah I could feel the breathing behind me, something grazing my heels, casting a black shadow, a stagnant pool into which I was sinking with every step. Had I been armed with the necessary discipline at that stage, I would not have turned around and congealed into a pillar of salt. Behind me walked Manika pushing the old lady in an ancient pram she must have found while rummaging in the black hole of Calcutta, left by the British when they absconded. Without a word I turned my back and continued walking as if I were alone.
If by the time I reached Varanasi the old lady had not yet coughed up the last of the scum blocking her liberation from the wheel of life, I would walk on to Lahore. If still she held on, I would continue walking to Peshawar. If she still refused to let go, I would walk onward over the Khyber Pass all the way to Kabul, the end of the road. There I would sit down in the midst of the dust and carnage, pry open her mouth, and root in the sludge to release her soul and deliver it in a long albuminous cord and set us free.
Tova Reich is the author of the novels One Hundred Philistine Foreskins, My Holocaust, The Jewish War, Master of the Return, and Mara. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, AGNI, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient
of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, as well as other prizes. She lives on the fringe of Washington, DC.