But the truth was, she was tired of forever being pressured to hold out. She had been looking forward to the liberation of death, it would finally make her breathe easier, as it were. And now this woman, my mother, who always did what was expected of her, who had never openly rebelled in her life, whose axis of influence was a lopsided triangle with three fixed retro-shtetl points, Brooklyn, Miami, Jerusalem, suddenly gets the news that it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. A grand finale was still required of her. She still had to rise from her bed and muster whatever remaining shreds of vitality she possessed to drag her 250 diseased pounds to the faraway rotting stage of Varanasi, packed with filthy bit players and reeking scenery to belt out her final full-throated aria if she wanted to achieve true liberation. A casual bystander might find it incredible that such a woman would heed such a casting call, but to my mind, it was inevitable, it made total sense.

Needless to say, I don’t want this story to be about me, but as it happens, the notion of India was not all that alien to my mother despite her super-conventional stereotypical lifestyle (viewed, of course, in the context of the overall bizarreness of rigidly observant Jewish practice). For that, I am obliged to admit, I deserve the credit, or whatever. And so it is necessary for me to make what I hope will be limited to a cameo appearance in what is, let us never forget this for a minute, my mother’s end-of-life story.

The fact is, I’m an old India hand, a Hin-Jew, a Jewbude, however you want to process it. My fascination with India began in my earliest years, thanks to my mother as it happened, who at that time knew nothing at all about the place except that its starving children were feverish to get their hands on the slabs of schnitzel that my twin brother, Shmelke, and I were taking so for granted, dragging them listlessly around our plates, swirling them like finger paint through pools of ketchup instead of eating them. The problem was enormous, insoluble. How could I get the schnitzel to the starving children of India in time to save them? It was beyond my powers, I was flooded with guilt. That was my introduction to India, a faraway land swarming with kids dying for my schnitzel.