Throughout this ordeal, my hand was under my mother’s thigh. I could feel the weight and heat of her body in which she had lived her life, through which she had experienced her reality, I could feel what it was like to be her, the constriction of her fears, the insistence of her desires, my hand was very close to the womb that was the source of my own being. This is a very ancient form of oath taking, the hand under the thigh, biblical. It was what the patriarch Jacob required of his son Joseph when he too was on his deathbed, under the thigh, grazing the testicles, through this most intimate contact transmitting the full urgency of his final wish with regard to his own funeral arrangements, to be conveyed back to the land of Canaan to lie with his fathers in Hebron rather than to be buried in Egypt, a wish Joseph granted with an extravagant royal spectacle of mourning, though first he could not resist embalming the old man in accordance with Egyptian rites albeit in breach of Jewish ritual, probably a good idea after all, to forestall the inevitable rot and stink on the long trek through the scorching wilderness to the final destination. Jacob’s thigh under which Joseph’s hand was pressed had been wounded when he had wrestled with the angel of God until the break of day in Mahana’im. My hand under my mother’s thigh, I could feel how grievously she too had been wounded, how damaged she was.

“I’ll do it, Ma,” I said.

She startled me by opening her eyes. “Promise me.”

I promised.

Satisfied, Ma signaled to me to leave the room. She needed a few minutes of privacy, to gather herself. I am myself a great believer in respecting other people’s right to privacy as I would hope they would respect mine. After what I had just been through, and the great burden of the promise to my mother that I had just taken upon myself, I practically lurched out of Ma’s bedroom in search of my own space. The only place to go for some solitude in that apartment raucous with children was the bathroom. I staggered in, locked the door, sat down on the toilet slumped with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, like Rodin’s Thinker. What I was thinking was, Why is my mother doing this to me? How had I failed her that she was demanding this last extreme act of devotion from me? Was she creating this scenario so that I would leap into the flames of her funeral pyre? Was that why she had sent me all those pictures of the inscribed sati stones? I believe I must have drifted off into another dimension, lost touch with my reality for a brief spell on that toilet, depleted by my travels, emptied by the devastating scene I had just enacted with my mother, voided by the promise I had committed myself to that would, so to speak, put the final nail in the coffin of my alienation from my origins. I woke up shivering, agitated by a memory from my childhood—Ma always cold, piling on sweaters and shawls and scarves, blankets and quilts. She hated the cold—the cold, cold ground. It clamped her with terror. She held with those who favored fire. She must have tasted of desire, as the poet says, and I never gave her credit.