It was also during my time in Rebbie-ji’s ashram that I took upon myself the task of setting down this memoir in the first person, though the first person no longer mattered or even existed. I was completely detached, indifferent, merely an observer—the omniscient third person observing myself, the nonexistent first person, a work of fiction. It was simply an exercise in overcoming the limitations of the first person in the narrative of remembrance—a way of carrying forth with the me-me-meena story even when she no longer is present, a way of negating the first person by validating my witness even though I was already dead. It was a laboratory experiment, and I was the rat.

Unconsoled and inconsolable, I nevertheless sat down with my twin brother, Shmelke, at a table in one of the two great halls of his ashram that once had been packed with rows and rows of narrow cots upon which Mother Teresa’s lepers, tuberculars, malnourished, and other assorted terminally diseased had lain. This ward, which had housed the women in the days of the hard-hearted saint, now served as the common room of the House of Holy Healing—dining hall, synagogue, meeting place, the space in which my brother held audience when seized by the spirit. From hospice to hope, as Rebbie-ji liked to say—anguish to joy, mourning to holiday, like Purim, when all are obliged to turn themselves into clowns with Rebbie-ji banging his drum and gyrating in his wheelchair leading the way, like King David leaping and dancing half-naked, making a spectacle of himself as he brought home the ark of the Lord through the streets of Jerusalem.

In the second ward the men had undergone their death agonies, shards of their horned toenails hacked off by volunteer missionaries of charity still occasionally suctioned up by our bare feet as we moved about. Still visible on the walls all around us were the white numbers that had been painted over each cot once positioned there with a nameless dying body coiled up on it, sixty and more in each ward. Now the space had been converted into the ashram’s dormitory, with ropes strung across the length and width like a chessboard over which madras cloths and worn saris and old sheets and other assorted rags and even drying laundry were hung to form tiny cubicles accommodating at least four seekers stretched out in sleeping bags and on straw mats or directly on the floor in each pod, the sexes rigidly separated by a thick clothesline draped with woolen prayer shawls only slightly moth eaten to form a mekhitza bisecting the room. This is where I slept too, alongside my damaged girls, in a pod of cubicles set aside for us.