This is where my mother sat all day for three weeks, eighteen days in total not including the Sabbath when it is forbidden to drive, and on Fridays she was delivered back to her apartment early, in time to light candles and welcome the Sabbath queen. The weather was still mild. If it grew cool as evening descended, Manika would spread a blanket across my mother’s lap, though the flames rising from the dead burning day and night were like a monstrous furnace perpetually heating this last earthly station.

On each one of those eighteen days I was sent a single picture. The central figure was always my mother in her chair on Manikarnika in a white sari with a blue stripe, like a grotesquely inflated Mother Teresa, the end draped over her head, which is tightly wrapped in a white kerchief threaded with gold, and over her shoulders a wool paisley scarf. Her eyes are blacked out by an oversized pair of sunglasses, a celebrity guarding against being recognized and mobbed by her fans.

Each photo presented another variation to ponder, like impressionistic studies by an artist in changing lights. What was not visible to me was what Ma herself was seeing, what it was that drew her to this inferno again and again; her dark glasses guarded her thoughts against betrayal, reflected nothing, nor was she forthcoming when we talked at night about what was unfolding before her day after day. In a single phone conversation only, after I had pleaded with her, in pity she opened up slightly, as I remember it, to liken the scene she was witnessing to an end-of-days landscape of altars, human sacrifices laid on top of them, burning, roasting, pluming in smoke, flaking into ash. Your body that matters so much to you in your lifetime, that is such a big deal to you, this body is basically the same like everyone else’s, Ma said, with everything in the same place more or less. You think you’re different but you’re nothing special, you start with the head, you end with the feet, arms, legs, kishkes, bowels, your shriveled and dried-up little unmentionables that give you so much aggravation and tzores in your life—who needs it? You take up so much and so much space on this earth, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but always, give or take, the length and width of an altar, that’s what you see at Marnikarnika. Most of the bodies brought here for cremation are small—very small—Ma observed, Not like my body, but it’s all the same basic model. These are so small though, most of the time you can’t tell if it’s a man or a lady stretched out there on the altar wrapped in a sheet with the face bagged like for an execution. You think they’re all women they’re so small, but they could also be shrunken old men, in death the differences are wiped out. It’s just so relaxing to sit there so warm and toasty and watch, Ma said, it’s just such a relief to finally stop fighting, to just sit back and surrender yourself to the facts of death.