He had taken to visiting me once a day for the relief of unburdening to his sister, his twin, all that had happened to him during the years of our separation and his wanderings, even though in his heart he believed I must already know everything without needing to be told, just as, when we were children, I could always tell him, in case he had forgotten, what he had dreamed in the night by virtue of having shared a womb for forty weeks, and he too knew everything about me without requiring further elaboration. He would roll up in his wheelchair at unspecified times when the spirit seized him, into the room in his private suite in the House of Holy Healing that I shared in those first weeks with the old woman on the bed across from me who gave off a warm, faint fragrance like chicken soup with matzah balls, filling us both with such sweetly painful nostalgia. I had been as motionless and as uncommunicative as my roommate laid out over there when he had started coming by, he told me. But it was not the same, Shmelke insisted. I was his wombmate. Let them all think I wasn’t registering a word he was saying as he went on and on at my bedside about his ordeal of wanderings. He had no doubt I was taking it all in, not missing a single thing, I was absorbing and understanding every syllable. Besides—he flashed me with his wicked grin—there were definite advantages to talking to a woman with no chance of being interrupted, no chance she’d butt in to demand equal time to disgorge her own problems or to contradict or to argue, it is an ideal situation for good conversation.

The old lady on the twin bed across the room had been shipped to him special delivery from Varanasi via Mumbai coinciding almost exactly with his arrival in Kolkata. She was his one-woman welcoming committee to this former hospice. It was believed she was a Jewess, a Hebrew holy woman, and therefore his department. This conclusion was reached after she was removed from her funeral pyre on the cremation ground of Manikarnika Ghat, when she sat up, opened her eyes with their singed lashes, and inquired if she was dead yet. Eventually it was determined that she must be Jewish as history and experience have shown that Jews are not flammable, like cockroaches they cannot be entirely exterminated, they stubbornly survive in some form as an entity to haunt you, to remind you for eternity of how you tried to stamp them out. She was passed off to the Jewish team at Assi Ghat because she could no longer remain among the living; she had been contaminated by death, it was mandatory that she be isolated from human society. From Benares she was dispatched to the Bombay emissaries, and now here she was where the powers decreed she belonged—with my fugitive brother in a former hospice for the dying right next door to the temple of Kali, the great mother goddess who fornicated among the dead on the cremation grounds, Shmelke said.