The pictures that stand out from that period focused on her evolving look. In one, Ma is wearing the long tunic and ballooning pants of a salwar kameez, to my eyes, on my mother a costume utterly shocking, completely mind-blowing. When I mentioned it during our daily telephone conversation (yes, I called my mother every day, religiously, I’m such a good girl) adding that all of us—not only I but also her daughter-in-law Geeta and her granddaughter Maya—thought she looked absolutely gorgeous, that it suited her perfectly, Ma reflected that she had never worn pants in her life, not counting her underpants, she had never thought she would live to see the day when she would be wearing pants publicly on the outside, she should say a She’hekhiyanu that she had been kept alive and sustained to reach this season. The only pants she had ever expected to wear other than her personal oversized pink bloomers, her long turn-off granny gatkes, she went on to make a point of informing me, were the breeches that would form a part of her white linen gender-neutral burial shroud, which of course she would not be alive to see, no one would see them other than the pious ladies of the holy society who washed and purified and dressed her body for the grave, and the worms and maggots who devoured her.

In another photo from this period, Ma’s head is tightly bound in a glossy magenta kerchief streaked with gold tinsel. She’s sitting on her porch with Fetter Feivish, her fancy Sabbath wig plopped askew on his head. With tweezered fingers, the monkey seems to be picking nits out of her everyday wig, which is perched atop the egg-shaped Styrofoam wig stand propped on the table. “Yes, darling,” Ma said, automatically slipping into her role as reinforcer of my self-esteem by complimenting me on my keen powers of observation, “that’s what he’s doing, Fetter. He loves lice, they’re for him a delicacy, like for us chopped liver.”

This was my mother, the same woman who had passed on to me her fear of animals, which still resides in me on a subliminal level but which on the surface I manage to give the appearance of having overcome, a Jewish mother who true to the boilerplate would do anything for her children, turn herself into a doormat and beg them to tread upon her, but at best could only bring herself to satisfy our entreaties for a pet by offering a doomed goldfish swimming in deep depression in a plastic bag, which she had won in a synagogue raffle—and now her best friend was a beast, a monkey, this son of Hanuman. As for her wig, I never saw it on her again. She kept her head covered with a succession of brilliant silk scarves wrapped like a turban over the downy white fuzz of her hair, which was beginning to sprout back like a tender lawn. And I never again saw her dressed in the long skirt and loose long-sleeved blouse or sweater or jacket that is the Orthodox ladies’ official uniform for public appearances or the housecoat for at-home leisure wear, but always either in a salwar kameez or on special occasions, a Benares silk sari, and of course, topping it all, a shawl. Even with her mass of natural built-in padding and insulation, even before she had been consumed by malignancy, Ma was always cold. Our task as children had always been to run and fetch her a sweater or a blanket. When we would reach up for her hand, we always found a tissue there, crumpled for warmth, as if enclosing an ember rescued from the flames.