But above all she was delighted with the small terrace situated off the living room with its white molded plastic porch furniture. During her first weeks in Varanasi, her period of adjustment, she would sit there almost every day for as long as there was light with a can of diet soda on the table beside her or an unglazed clay cup of lemon tea, which she sipped to its dregs through a sugar cube wedged between her dentures, then thrillingly threw on the stone-tiled floor smashing it to pieces, ecologically recycling it back to the dust whence it had come. With her edematous feet propped up on a stool, she took in the uproar, the perpetual frenzy of the swarming street as if on stage before her, streaked with color, pulsing with sound—ox carts, bicycle rickshaws, autorickshaws rumbling by, horns bleating in desperation nonstop, children running wild, weaving through the throngs, picking pockets, squatting to defecate on the ground with one arm extended for alms, naked sadhus smeared in white ash with matted hair, beggars with missing limbs, women pounding on car windows, opening and closing their mouths like marionettes to mimic hunger, deformed children harnessed to mutilated babies, goats, cows, water buffalos, stray dogs, monkeys, now and then a boar, once an elephant, several times a day a dead body covered in saffron-colored cloth, bedecked with garlands of orange and yellow marigolds, borne through the streets on a bamboo stretcher followed by chanting mourners on the way to the cremation ghats of Harishchandra or Manikarnika along the banks of the Ganges.

When things quieted down, toward evening, she would continue to sit there leafing through magazines, talking on the cell phone I had given her, feeding pieces of challah and matzah to the silver-gray monkey that had befriended her whom she called Fetter Feivish, since he reminded her both in expression and the habit of casually manipulating his privates of her long-dead Uncle Feivel, or simply leaning back with her head resting against a cushion and her eyes closed, her face turned up to receive the last rays of the sun.

The weather was still warm and comfortable when I settled my mother into her Varanasi apartment. The crushing heat had not yet arrived to stupefy the brain and bring on the annual epidemic of sluggishness and madness. The monsoon season was still months away with its drenching rains that would flood holy Mother Ganga and send her waters choked with the ashes and bones and unburned body parts of the dead and the rotting carcasses of lepers and pregnant women, children and cattle rising up the steps of the ghats and lapping like a prehistoric monster through the streets of the city.