Inside, we pushed against the density of the stink even in that purportedly subzero environment. The floor tiles were slick with body fluids and fat leaking out and liquefied chemicals. Racks of naked men were stacked against the wall. Across the room, as if on the other side of the partition in my father’s synagogue, the naked bodies of the women were piled in a haphazard mound, a mass grave, reeking of atrocity, evoking the death camp imagery we would pore over when we were children, so horrifying and yet so pornographically gripping. Workers with long poles were already stationed there, untangling rigid limbs and flipping corpses to expose drained waxen faces for my inspection and deflated bodies stitched closed down the middle with coarse black thread. Thank God, thank God, I kept muttering to myself, you were not there, no child of mine would ever be found in such a place, in this obscene heap of the disposable and discarded.

After that I remained at home waiting for you, except for the occasional summons back to the morgue when a potential candidate was delivered, generally either an unidentified female accident victim or a foiled terrorist or suicide bomber loosely fitting your specs, and once even a sex-trafficked juvenile mutilated to the point that it was no longer possible to suppress my nausea, my gut heaved and I vomited on the floor, contributing to the laminate of bodily fluids. Manika stayed at the apartment the entire time, sacrificing her berth at Amma’s ashram, giving up her grand call-center ambitions, just to be available for those periods when I might be whisked away for one of these grim viewings; otherwise there is no way I would have agreed to go and leave the house empty, I had no idea if you had the key. All day Manika squatted on her haunches in the corner, she could have been mistaken for a footstool, head lowered, the pallu of her sari drawn up across the lower portion of her face. Now and then she would get up to bring me a glass of chai, or a bowl of rice and lentils and some naan, or to urge me to lie down and get some sleep. Why do you do it? I once asked her. For Mama, she responded. Was she referring to Amma, or to my own late mama whom she had tended in her last days, or could she possibly have meant me? I too was a mama, wasn’t I? Your mama. But I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. What difference did it make? She stayed, that was all that mattered, she didn’t budge from her mission, condemned in this life to be forever invisible and forever on call.