Not her fault? My head spun, I was barely holding myself together, and now it felt as if I might not be able to go on after all, I would just fall apart, collapse. Whose fault did she think it was if not hers? Did she imagine for one minute that it’s a small thing to be abandoned by your mother? She was your mother exactly as I was, we had always regarded it that way, we had never discriminated between biological and adoptive or whatever, that was how we conducted our life together, yet she just picked herself up one day and walked off without looking back. You were traumatized, your self-esteem plummeted to ground zero, everything that happened to you happened after she walked out on us—your two sad little crushes, first on Shmuly, then on Samir, one and the same—hopeless, doomed monsoon crushes, which you fixated on subconsciously to court rejection, to confirm that you were essentially unlovable. After all, how could anyone ever love a girl whose own mother had abandoned her? The most basic human right, a mother’s love, and even that you couldn’t count on, even that had been withdrawn from you. How dare she claim it was not her fault? Of course it was her fault, she was entirely to blame for everything that had transpired after she walked out, including the smashed hopes and endless depression of the monsoons, and now your disappearance. There was no way I was going to stoop to ask for her help—nicely or otherwise, thank you very much. Fortunately, I did not need it. For cash and connections I had Charlotte and Amma, with resources in and out of India that sufficiently matched Geeta’s to get the job done. And for the human touch, for tenderness and sympathy, I had my twin brother the guru, Shmelke, known worldwide as Reb Breslov Tabor, safe at last in the asylum of India, venerated now as Rebbie-ji, who somehow, I believe through his own rare mystical powers and the unbreakable connection formed between us in the pools of amniotic fluid in which we had floated side by side during our gestation, discovered what was going on and reached out to me.