But as for the internet, Rebbie-ji regarded it as indispensable to his mission of spiritual outreach. Like Ammachi, he was never without his smartphone, except of course on the Sabbath and holidays when it is not permitted. The smartphone had evolved into essential guru gear it seemed. In his notoriety, my twin brother often was lumped in the mind of the public with the whole gang of indistinguishable ultra-Orthodox fanatics, including those who railed against the internet on posters and fliers, their polemical texts delivered to the printers as attachments to emails, declaiming that the internet is the cause of drought, cancer, diseases of the base organs, and the next Holocaust—Shoah: The Sequel—and so on and so forth. But Rebbie-ji declared the internet to be a mighty-blessed force of creation, like the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters, omnipresent, omniscient, a glimpse of the divine consciousness, containing within it for those who truly knew how to seek for it, the answer to every question.

Yet though I was toiling by night in the first person to extract the larger picture of the trajectory of the first two stages of my life’s strange journey, with regard to the immediate question—how I got from that morgue in Mumbai to this hospice in Kolkata, as if risen from the dead—I simply had no recollection. It was a blank. I had blocked it out in classic trauma mode. Nor did I choose to inquire—a personal preference that those who surrounded me were considerate enough to respect. Manika was the first person I saw when I emerged from the blackest of pits to this false earthly reality. She was crouching like a tumor attached to the wall in a corner of a cell I was sharing at that initial phase in my brother’s private suite. My roommate laid out on the other bed, I eventually learned, was an exceptionally venerated woman whose worshippers could not agree whether she was alive or dead, she seemed still to be mutating through the stages of life; her fate was to lie there unburied, skin flaking down to the bone. Where was I? In Kolkata, Manika told me, in the Christian Kali’s hospice. Good, I thought, hospice means I’m certified dying. But then my brother rolled in and reminded me that he had taken over the site from that severe little Christian saint, asserting his squatter rights, as it was abandoned and vacant except for my roommate, who had been delivered just before his anticipated arrival and whom he allowed to remain because she reminded him of where he had come from and where he was going, and he had transformed it from a place of certain imminent death to a house of holy healing.