They left the temple precincts with the little girl carried by her big sister, tucked inside her sari like a baby marsupial, crying, Ma, Ma the whole way down the hill. She cried in the taxi on the long trip to the airport, and through both plane rides, all the way to Kolkata. She has been crying for her mother every day and night, Buki informed me. She misses the mother she has; you can’t argue with that. They had gotten used to her crying, crying was the white noise in the House of Holy Healing, muting the screams of the slaughtered goats sacrificed instead of children in the temple of Mother Kali next door. Only recently they had noticed that the crying had died down, maybe even stopped, Buki said. They figured she simply had worn herself out and had given up. But then they made the connection that the change had coincided with my arrival in the pod. I had become her new maternal figure, bestowed on her by Rebbie-ji in his wisdom. I was Mother, the darkness of the all-encompassing and all-accepting embrace, and she was comforted.

Of all the devadasis who came and went over the next three years, leaving eighteen at the end like buboes on the wasted body of Rebbie-ji in his punishing pursuit of tikkun, the first two, Devamayi and Mahamaya, remained our favorites, our most beloved, my own and my brother’s. He called them Shakti and Shekhina, drawing on his power to encapsulate in a name the essence of the soul. Thereafter, everyone in the House of Holy Healing was expected to refer to them by their true names, which Rebbie-ji had uncovered—Shakti for the creative female cosmic energy force of the goddess in Hinduism, Shekhina for the feminine aspect of the divine presence on earth as elaborated in the Jewish mystical texts. Rebbie-ji struggled every day for world repair not only through the male–female union of the divine feminine with the masculine godhead, but also through the universal sisterhood of those sacred attributes of feminine power in the teachings of both faiths.

He would summon the two girls to his suite, or stop by the pod, simply to delight in seeing them. He would stroke their silken black hair, ask them to perform a ritual dance or song for him, then as a reward draw the younger one up onto his lap as the older one was invited to push them in his wheelchair racing at top speed all around the ashram, all three of them shrieking hilariously as if they were riding the cyclone at a carnival. It was an immense privilege to see my brother Rebbie-ji playing again as we had played when we were children, to witness him setting down even for such a brief interval the heavy burdens he bore day and night for all of us. He deserved this small pleasure, no less than Gandhi-ji who had also sacrificed his health with all that marathon fasting and walking and so much more, and who had also enjoyed the company of young girls nearby to minister to his personal care before he was assassinated, and no one begrudged him either. The girls were a great comfort to Shmelke, he told me. They reminded him of his daughters whom he had not seen for so long, over the many years of his exile and flight, his nine daughters, my nieces, several of them, so far as I knew, already proper grandmothers.