Ma is wearing a deep-green silk sari embroidered with gold thread and embedded with mirror chips and a pale pashmina dupatta, in one of the first of the series of pictures showing her venturing out of her Varanasi apartment, seated in the carriage of a rickshaw, the driver, malnourished, his brown face cratered by a childhood disease he could not have recovered from too long before, half-straddling his beat-up bicycle, beaming jubilantly. “That’s Bulbul, my personal chauffeur,” Ma explained. “Don’t worry so much, Meena’le. He maybe looks like a ninety-pound weakling, but he’s strong like an ox, he can pedal like nobody’s business. He calls me Mama and tells me I’m light like smoke, the little tukhes licker, even though my own personal tukhes is hanging the whole time over the bench from the rickshaw because it’s a bench not made for zaftig old ladies like me, it’s made for Indians with no meat on their behinds. But I’ll tell you something, Meena’le, I love that boy, I turn my pocketbook upside down and shake it out in his hands, all my rupees I give to that little no-goodnik, my last red cent.” Another image in that series shows Ma enthroned in the rickshaw carriage with Manika tucked in beside her, like a tiny doll from which most of the stuffing had leaked out, a favorite, beloved doll the child refuses to leave home without. Bulbul must have shot that one.

There then follow a series of photographs in which, in addition to her personal staff consisting of Manika and Bulbul, Ma is also shown accompanied by a strikingly glamorous woman young enough to be her daughter, on the wrong side of forty-five by my estimate, though others less experienced in sizing up women would have pegged her as much younger. This newcomer on the scene is always impeccably groomed and made up, dazzling white teeth showcasing dentistry at its most state of the art, nose job, face-lift, silky platinum hair, trendy bling, tight tank top, studded leather jacket, designer jeans, stiletto-heeled boots, the works, a masterpiece of maintenance—Zehava, Ma said, my life coach. She pronounced it koi’akh, like the Yiddish for strength. In her former life, Zehava had been a stratospherically high-placed minister in the Israeli government, with a portfolio in finance or the military, not something soft and womanish such as health or education, a paragon of feminist achievement—a big shot, according to my mother, a very important hoo-ha in the kitchen cabinet of the Knesset. Her name used to be Golda in those days, and she really did in her previous incarnation look uncannily like the legendary Golda Meir. But then she quit everything and changed her life—had an extreme makeover and turned into the Zehava, who, it seemed, had adopted my mother as her pet project.