He didn’t mind. She was no trouble at all, especially now with Manika attending to her with, if anything, a tenderness even more exemplary than she poured out on me, if that was possible—dribbling hydration into her mouth, washing and changing her, sticking a tissue down her throat to draw out the thick green gelatinous globs of slime blocking her passage. She could stay on as long as she liked as far as Shmelke was concerned, until there was agreement on her status, whether she could be counted among the living or the dead—“A far more complicated determination than you might imagine,” he observed.

He would give me an example from his own personal experience. Had I ever wondered about the ready acceptance that he, a proud, openly Jewish man, had enjoyed and continued to enjoy here in Kolkata, in a former Christian hospice, abutting such a volatile major Hindu temple? It would be a mistake to attribute this to Indian tolerance, which, in any case, did not exist, it was a total myth, or to the cash Charlotte and some other fat cats forked over, or to anything else of that sort. No. It was that the local Bengalis, when they had laid eyes on him with his long white beard and long white hair and long flowing white robe, were gripped with overwhelming joy that their divine poet, their Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whom they had mourned with such a massive outpouring of grief, had returned. He had come back to them, he was not dead after all, here he was, yes, it is true, confined to a wheelchair now, crippled unfortunately, but still dazzling with his white mane in his white robes as if packaged by central casting—their beloved poet possessed of such fine lofty sentiments, their prophet, their Oriental mystic, known familiarly as Rabi Thakur, Shmelke recounted, relishing the memory. And when word spread that my brother’s name was Rabbi Tabor, all doubts vanished. Thousands mobbed the House of Holy Healing to celebrate the return of Rabi Thakur, lining up to perform pranam due the elderly, and especially an honored sage of such renown and distinction, waiting patiently for the privilege of bending down to reverently touch his feet with their hands as he in turn reached out to touch their heads in blessing. He sat there in his wheelchair for a week, my brother, Shmelke, receiving pranam and giving blessings, it almost completely wiped him out, his arms felt as heavy as stones, two of his Hasidim were required to hold them up, like Aaron and Hur held up Moses’s hands so that Joshua could triumph in his battle against the Amalekites in the field below. In just this way, with his raised hands, my brother, Shmelke, defeated his Israeli pursuers and tormentors of the innocent. There was no chance they would dare try to grab him and spirit him away now. It would start a world-class riot for sure in a fiery nation possessed of nuclear capacity. He was home safe.