The surging throng pushed me out of its path, to a corner near the opening to the chamber where the goats were sacrificed. Someone ran past me with Mahamaya under one arm, he was kidnapping her. Her legs were flailing, her arms fluttering, she was howling. He entered the sacrificial space, set the girl down between the two posts planted in the ground where the goats were positioned, and clamped her head in place. Laughing hideously, he raised a sword to bring it down in a single stroke on her outstretched neck—loosening everything inside me. I was spurting out vomit in great painful heaves. Emptied, hollowed—and then I must have passed out.

When I opened my eyes again in a strange white cell, I did not know how many hours or days or years later, Manika was sitting on her haunches against the wall opposite my bed, her chin propped on her knees, the end of her sari drawn forward over her head like a cowl. Geeta saved her, she said. Geeta came down from Delhi to take the child away to her exclusive orphanage.

I did not probe. She had contacted Geeta, she had sold her again.

I inspected my body. There were needles in my arm attached to plastic tubes hanging from a metal pole on wheels. From between my legs a tube extended, ending in a clear plastic bag filled with yellow liquid. Another plastic bag ballooning with what looked like a thick brown lentil soup was lying on the floor nearly bursting, attached to a tube that came out of a hole slightly northwest of my umbilicus that had once attached me to my mother.

It is an autoimmune disease, a medical attendant in a white sari with a blue stripe informed me, inflammatory bowel, Cohn’s disease, a notably Jewish affliction, she added, looking at me meaningfully, Ashkenazi Jewish, like my mother’s gefilte-fish cancer. My intestines were destroyed, nonfunctional, rotted away. That is why I was vomiting—my mouth was my only outlet. They had been forced to perform emergency surgery on me to create a bypass. Henceforth my waste matter will be detoured through the hole they had created at my midriff, it will come out of the tail of my small intestine now sticking out of that hole with lips hardening into an alternative anus and collect in a bag that will fit very neatly in the space under my sari blouse.

Ma, see what you have done to me!

So that is what has been going around in the House of Holy Healing. Everything was clarified—a plumbing backup, sickening everyone.

No, she said, those patients have been infected with something else. Your punishment is autoimmune, you did it to yourself, it is your own fault entirely, you have been peeling off the lining of your own gut and squeezing it out into the toilet, you have been eating yourself up alive. The other inmates at the hospice for the dying have a different disease, contracted from mixing their fluids with the libations of the temple girls, the devadasis are all positive.