Zehava’s transformation was breathtaking. Manika sent me links to before-and-after photos of Golda/Zehava from an overpriced internet café meant for mommy-and-daddy-subsidized Lonely Planet travelers in the Assi Ghat area, the proprietor’s threadbare sleeping mat glimpsed on the floor through the half-drawn curtain in the rear. Before her metamorphosis, you truly might have taken her for Golda Meir’s twin sister, Golda’s reincarnation, Golda’s gilgul, Golda’s avatar—chunky build, stocky like a babushka, no-nonsense boxy clothing down to her super-sensible shoes, grizzled graying hair pulled back into a severe low knot to expose a well-scrubbed, coarse-skinned face aggressively stripped of any artifice, small shrewd eyes, bulbous nose laced with a cobweb of red vessels, dark mustache, cigarette plugged between thin dry lips. Now, in her new emanation, she was like the flawless marble statue that had been buried inside the rough stone, liberated by the sculptor, like the scullery maid transformed into the princess by the touch of the godmother’s wand. A YouTube video that Manika also sent to me features Zehava decked out in an iridescent leotard snug as a second skin and shimmering split tulle skirt, gliding smoothly in glass slippers across a polished floor with a devastatingly charming partner at least half her age twirling her to show off her tight satiny panties as the music pounds in a clip from the television show, Dancing with the Stars. Zehava is the star.

Nobody comes to India and is not in some way changed. That is the truism behind Zehava’s radical transformation. She had written a book about it, Transfiguration: The Seeker’s Path to the True You, which was a best seller in Israel, Moldova, the Upper West Side of New York City, and South Korea (where it was translated as True Jew, to tap into the vast Korean market of Talmud readers mining for the secret of alleged Jewish academic genius and financial wizardry). Now, as an exercise, Zehava had taken on my mother as her ultimate challenge. The secret of Zehava’s success was India—more precisely, Hinduism, even more to the point, the linga, the symbol of the great god Shiva, destroyer and transformer. By visiting the temples of Lord Shiva, draping an offering of flowers around the erect linga, sprinkling some holy water, and worshipping there through immersion in a state of profound meditative self-obliteration, the supplicant is in effect destroyed and then transformed. The promise of transformation—of restored youth and health and desirability—is exponentially increased the more Shiva lingas you visit. Varanasi is Shiva’s city, his stomping ground. In Varanasi, there are said to be over one hundred thousand Shiva lingas of every variety. In Varanasi, it is said, there is not a piece of ground the size of a sunflower seed that is not capable of bringing forth its own linga. The pictures that Manika sent to me from this period show Ma and Zehava smiling broadly on either side of flower-draped lingas in an astonishing range of sizes and materials and colors, thick and thin, tall and short, mud and marble, granite and gold, cream and crimson, one in particular I remember standing out for the glowing light bulb at its tip. Of course Ma knew what a linga means to people with dirty minds, she responded when I inquired tentatively. I could feel her blushing at the other end of the phone. She had had nine children after all, although it is true she had preferred not to look. “I’m sitting Shiva,” Ma commented with a dry laugh. “Why not? Why not give it a shot? What can it hurt?”