Across from where Shmelke and I we were sitting in the great public room, high on the opposite wall, Ma’s extra-large stained damask Sabbath tablecloth given to my brother upon his marriage in the expectation that he was destined to become a rabbinical eminence presiding at the head of a great tisch was draped over a wooden cross; we could make out its menacing cruciform skeleton underneath. In the dormitory ward, the cross was concealed by a soiled moth-eaten woolen prayer shawl, our father’s wedding gift to his gifted son. Somehow, by a miracle, Shmelke had held on to these gifts throughout all his wanderings. Through the high windows pouring down beams of dust motes and malarial flies, the smell of burning flesh drifted in accompanied by the tortured screams of the goats sacrificed daily just up the road in the temple of Kali, most fabulous and savage of mothers.

Manika padded in silently and set down before us on the table two steaming glasses of tea in monkey-dish saucers, and a bowl of brown sugar cubes irregular like chunks of granite. Tea was always served in glasses at the ashram, the very same type of glasses that had been used in the home of our Brooklyn childhood—yahrzeit memorial glasses, imported from Israel and stocked at the ashram by the caseload, recycled for drinking purposes after the candle inside was consumed during the chronic power blackouts of Kali’s cruel city. Without even thinking, operating on automatic as if in the private wombspace of our twindom, Shmelke and I each positioned a sugar cube between our upper and lower teeth, poured some of the hot tea from the glass into the monkey dish, lifted the dish in both hands with pincered thumb and forefinger and winged elbows to blow on the amber pool and cool it, then tipped it with a precise motion to send the tea streaming on its passage through the sugar cube, sweetening it thoroughly as it came into our mouths and glided along our taste buds. Nice tea, bliss, so good—and exactly as we used to do it at home in Brooklyn on a late Sabbath afternoon as the sun was setting and darkness descended. The comical synchronicity of our movements and the convergence of deep memory assaulted both of us at the same moment, and we burst out in wild and tragic laughter, sending our moist sugar cubes flying like a stone from a slingshot across the room in the direction of Ma’s tablecloth to pierce it through the heart.

How did this happen? If such a story were told, it would not have been believed. How had this brother and sister, separately and apart, made this terrible journey from there to here, from Bava Kama to Kama Sutra, as if blindly burrowing like worms through the bowels of the globe, and come out blinking together now at this end, in this most alien of places?