She burned for more than twelve hours, through the day and into the night. In the darkness stray dogs gathered around and stretched out on the ground to sleep, warming themselves by the hearth. What I would not have given to lie down beside them and rest, just another dog among the dogs. But I never moved from my place, never turned my eyes away, I kept faithful vigil into the night since that was my duty. One by one our entire mixed multitude, including our inner core of eunuchs and Bulbul and Fetter Feivish, crept away. Manika, alone at her post overlooking the inferno, and I, in the ninth circle in the pit down below, were left standing in the dark, my little Virgil priest still joined to me at the hip, paid by the hour.

The body laid out on top of the altar had been reduced to pulverized white bone dust and ash that the Doms would collect and dump into the river. Only the skull remained, resting with unseeing eyes in its place as on a pillow. In accordance with my duty as mourner in chief and eldest son, I accepted the bamboo stick from the hands of the priest in order to perform the last rite. I smashed it down on the skull, cracking it open and liberating the soul.

Ma, Ma, she sobbed.

But I scuttled away and never looked back.

Maya

Maya

1

O MY DAUGHTER, Maya, my daughter, my daughter, Maya—twice you fell in love, at twelve and at thirteen, both times in Bombay under the lashing rains of the monsoon, most dangerous of seasons, the nighttime of the gods. The gods of the East understood the demonic power of the rains to seed wild growth and release passion and calamity. That is why the gods go to sleep during the monsoon, and holy men are forbidden to travel. But you Maya, child of water and illusion, you went out.

Geeta hated my gods-of-the-East, holy-men mantras in all their boring, predictable variations, as she never held back from reminding me. This was one of the running themes in our arguments, which reached a crescendo that scorching May she left us, as the dark clouds gathered for the monsoon season. Forgive me, Maya, I know how much you suffered from our fights, the screaming in the night, the crying, the doors slamming. Geeta loathed my romanticization of India, as she characterized it over and over again in case it had slipped my mind. How could I be so softheaded on India when I was so ruthlessly sharp and unforgiving about my own lost Jewish faith? That’s what she wanted to know. India was nothing but a filthy, backward, pitiless sewer, she informed me with all the condescension of a born insider enlightening a clueless alien—a ticking time bomb with a moronic religion, vulgar god dolls, infantile superstitious worship practices, nutcases parading around in diapers muttering drivel. So deep, wow! Nothing but a holy scam, a con job, I should have known better, born into the business as I was, a rabbi’s daughter. (Don’t go there, I would caution myself when she would plunge into these rants, control yourself. Above all do not bring up now her sweet little Ganesha shrine in the corner of our bedroom illuminated at night by the flat-screen TV, her personal four-armed potbellied elephant god comforting her all her years like a beloved stuffed animal, big Dumbo ears, long swinging linga of a trunk. I was the mouse at the foot of the elephant watching her perform her puja. To me it was all so dear, so dear.)