But as she continued to reflect on it, she recognized that liberation was actually not in the cards in the Jewish death deal. Where you landed in the next world, heaven or hell, Gan Eden or Gehinnom, depended on your docket in this one, you were never truly liberated from the fallout from this life. And this was also true in the overcrowded Hindu cosmos, with its thirty-six million idols and getchkes. Depending on your performance evaluation on this earth, you were reborn in another form, as a starlet or a slug, to plod all over again. Only if you died in Varanasi were you guaranteed moksha regardless of your record, the holy man declared, only by dying in Varanasi in the lap of Mother Ganga would you achieve true release from the wheel of life, liberation from the grinding cycle of death and rebirth. The afterlife was this life, the one she had been living. This was a truth Ma now grasped. She had suspected it all along, it explained everything. She had been stuck in the punishment of her afterlife all these years. She had no interest in another sequel.

It was not an accident that Ma’s hand had fallen upon that magazine and that it had opened itself up like an exhaled breath to that page. It was her karma, she told me with the wicked grin of an initiate. The holy man was speaking directly to her; he was sending her a message, special delivery. It was then and there, as she spun it to me afterward, in that chemo parlor with its décor the color of viscera that she was swept up by her inspiration. She would stop all her treatments and go to Varanasi to die.