I could feel Ma’s unquiet presence vibrating there in the room, watching me as I watched over her, challenging me, testing me, loitering there to see if I possessed the spirit and life to follow through and keep my word. Already there were forces converging to obstruct me. Within the hour after Ma split, the pale gray flies that Manika had been sweeping down the drain in the bathroom started migrating into the room, forming a frothy canopy of filaments and streamers over the corpse, which had begun to emit the stench of decay, sending it forth in putrid shafts that seemed almost to glow. The rebbetzin Dassi opened the door slightly, pressing her bundled infant up against her nose. She glanced into the room, took in the situation, automatically muttered the obligatory phrase of acceptance and fatalism, Blessed is the True Judge, shoved the door closed with her shoulder, collected her brood, and rushed out of the apartment with Manika following swiftly after, as if on assignment.

Within minutes, Rabbi Assi himself showed up, striding into my mother’s bedroom without knocking or announcing himself in any way, with the entitlement of a doctor on rounds in a hospital. I was at that instant still focusing inward on how to carry out the incredibly complex and loaded task before me in strict compliance with the highly transgressive promise my mother had extracted, so I did not fully apprehend his approaching heavy tread. There was no question in my mind that I would do everything in my power to realize Ma’s last wish. She had already broken so many taboos and taken so many risks and sacrificed so much in her quest for liberation, she had rid herself of all desire in her surrender to death other than that single final request, I could not fail her now at the finish line. I was immersed in the immediate problem of how to deal with my father and siblings on the issue of cremation, which without doubt they would find irredeemably abhorrent and repugnant, when the rabbi burst into the room. I had just come to the decision to proceed with the rite as soon as possible exactly as Ma had requested and to hit the family with the news of her passing and the manner in which the remains had been disposed of after the fact—after nothing was left but some clumps of fibrous black ashes in the dark womb of Mother Ganga. There would be nothing they could have done to prevent it thanks to the gift of ignorance I will have bestowed upon them, so they would in no way be liable. I alone, already dead in their eyes, a branded defiled spirit, would be guilty.