There was internet at the ashram; this was something Rebbie-ji insisted upon and would never tolerate foregoing. But in every other respect, he was rigorous about maintaining the monastic austerities as practiced in the days when Mother Teresa had ruled this space with such righteous severity. There was still no private electrical generator to kick in during the perpetual outages. There were no large institutional appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers, and so on. We laundered our clothing by hand in tubs, slapped them against the stone walls, and hung them to dry on lines, just as the nuns in their white habits with the blue stripe (like the flag of the State of Israel, it had always struck me) had done in the days of the hospice. There was not even an elevator, though there was a shaft in which one could have been installed, and donors who had clamored to finance it. The saint had refused. Two slight nuns could carry an emaciated body up and down the steps, she had decreed, it was good for their spiritual development. But when Rebbie-ji needed to be moved from floor to floor, five muscled men known as the Bulvans were summoned, four to haul his person, since even on a vegan diet of beans and nuts and dates and tofu (which Rebbie-ji pronounced the original manna—white in color, and taking on all flavors and tastes) a human being can acquire superfluous padding amounting to many kilos, and the fifth ox to follow behind carrying the wheelchair in one hand. As a matter of principle Rebbie-ji had always refused a wheelchair upgrade to a top-of-the-line electric model, a wonder that could even bounce up and down the stairs. This self-denial was a personal form of austerity and soul affliction that he had taken upon himself, with a strictness akin to Mother Teresa’s who forbade painkillers for her sufferers before baptizing them and dispatching them to their reward. My brother’s lower body as a result continued to shrivel and waste away, its grossness appropriately nullified, while his upper body, arms and shoulders spinning the wheels that took him along his chosen path, grew more and more powerful like a god’s. His head remained untouched, its celestial brilliance shining through, illuminated even more blindingly now by the glowing whiteness of hair, beard, sidelocks that framed his face so that many of his followers dared not lift their eyes to gaze upon him if they wanted to live.