The photograph of the day, on the other hand, communicated far more information. And, I should note, it was a testament to how my mother came to be regarded that these pictures even existed in the first place. As every tourist is forewarned, it is forbidden to take pictures at the cremation ghats, out of respect for this most personal of religious rituals, never mind that it is so transparently enacted in public, and in deference to the mourners, who in any event, seem strangely detached and almost indifferent, like the dead themselves, they do not scream and yell openly, to wail and tear your hair is considered bad form, inauspicious for the dead poised in this delicate space of transition. Self-appointed guardians of the faith prowling the burning ghat on the lookout for any violators of the no-photos rule will pounce on alleged flouters, but not one of them ever dared to mess with my mother or her support staff. She was protected by her eunuchs, their long red lacquered fingernails curled like talons to rip them to pieces, lurid lipstick-smeared mouths quivering in readiness to open and let out a hideous harpy shriek.

In the first of these eighteen pictures, Ma is captured with her eunuchs robed in luminescent saris in shades of red, two eunuchs on each side, all leaning in toward my mother enthroned in her chair shrouded in widow white, flanking her with crimson lips pursed into a Cupid’s bow and heads fetchingly posed in a flirtatious tilt. In another of these earlier pictures Ma is not even making eye contact with the camera. She is engrossed in sharing her lunch with her gray monkey, Fetter Feivish; Ma is eating a banana, Fetter is sipping from a can of diet soda through a straw. There are a few more photos of Ma with other snacking animals in this open-air death processing factory—one surrounded by seven emaciated black cows, dung caked all over their flanks and tails, grazing on the discarded marigold wreaths that had decorated the litters of the dead, another with a goat, the upper portion of its body clad in a torn striped polo shirt, to whom Ma is feeding a piece of saffron-colored cloth laced with silver ribbon that had been used to cover a corpse, another showing Ma with two wild dogs in front of her gnawing on a human foot.