He couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to read the sign hurled directly in his face over and over again by the Master of the Universe, Shmelke told me—that his final destination was India. It could only have been the built-up tension and pressure from being cast adrift as a wanted man, forced to run in circles like a cockroach in the beam of a searchlight that blinded him to the obvious signification of all these Mottel Patels, he thought. My antennae were going bad, the wax was drying up, I wasn’t picking up the vibes. I should have headed straight to Mother India—she was calling out to me, arms open, breasts bared, Come to me, my darling boy, suck, suck—how come I couldn’t see what was right in front of my eyes? My own mother of blessed memory was in India, her earthly remains in the form of ashes, like so many of our holy martyrs scooped with a shovel from the ovens, and you were there too, my sister, my seeker, my twin, calling to me. What was wrong with my head? India and Israel—one and the same—both equally renowned for their formidable mothers and math-genius sons and over-the-top weddings and wildly successful diaspora communities of unstoppable ambition, number one in so many realms, not only motels. Coming to India was like coming home at last, returning to the true Zion, it was as if I were dreaming. From the spiritual angle, India and Israel, both the final destination of the holy seekers of the world, from the political angle, both spitting out their British oppressors, then brutally torn asunder, partitioned in the same blink of an eye 1947–48 in the universal timeline. It was a trauma from which neither has yet recovered and never will, a violent slashing that fired up the sons of Ishmael, wild asses of men, their hands mixing it up with everyone and everyone’s hands mixing it up with them. Israel and India, together they will bring on the end of the world.

In addition to the Patels, my brother picked up other converts along the way, easily identifiable in his retinue and circulating through the ashram because, Let’s face it, didi, as he put it—he had taken to addressing me by the Bengali term for older sister, which I was, by six minutes—even with the beard and peyes and the whole getup, they don’t look Jewish, right? It was not that he sought them out like a missionary, God forbid. It was simply that coming from a place of extreme suffering and despair, the lowest depths, they were restored by Reb Breslov’s potent cocktail of ecstatic release mixed with meditative, confessional solitude, and as if born again.