And don’t get me started on the caste system, Geeta would push on, an obscenity perpetrated by the rich and powerful to justify their entitlement, to squelch every charitable instinct since it follows that however wretched your life, you deserved what you got based on your conduct in your previous incarnation. Even more cynically, if you hoped to improve your status in your future birth, your suffering in this life was mandatory; any effort by misguided do-gooders to relieve your misery was counterproductive. The starving children of India were monsters in their past lives. Don’t even bother feeling sorry for them, much less finishing all the food on your plate.

She would know. Because when she finally got it together to leave us in the middle of that sweltering June, on your first day back at school after your two-month summer break, her billionaire father dispatched a black Mercedes down from Delhi with a driver in livery followed by a fleet of gleaming white Tata vans, her dear old ayah coming along as part of the entourage to wipe her nose and hold her hand through the separation anxiety. Thank God you were spared this sight, it was sickening, but you remember surely that she was in a wheelchair then, from having burned her feet firewalking. She had been threatening to leave, nothing new, but this time unlike all the others she had actually taken the extreme measure of doing the groundwork, flying up to Delhi to line up a job as vice president in charge of human relations for an NGO chain of orphanages for abused girls. In case you’ve ever wondered, her declared human relations specialty was the culture of bullying, so harmful to a young girl’s self-esteem. Well excuse me, but in the context of rape, so-called honor killings, mutilations, child marriages, forced sex enslavement, trafficking, beatings, acid burnings, starvation, and shitting in the street, to mention just the short list, a focus on bullying, to put it mildly, is quite an indulgence. Of course, thanks to her family’s influence, landing the job was a foregone conclusion. Still, there was one point on which that slimy nonprofit with its eye on the prize (Nobel, Peace) could not budge if it had any hope of maintaining a good working relationship with the Hindu cosmos, earthly and divine: the rite of passage hazing to propitiate the combustible female principle as manifested in the savagely powerful mother goddess, Kali—the requirement that each new top management recruit walk on a bed of burning coals, like a stupefied fakir, levitating above it all. Holy men say there’s a method to carrying this off without suffering any collateral damage, but the divine mother Kali, creator and punisher, engorged with all that hot female energy, would not be deceived. The pink soles of our poor Geeta’s aristocratic feet that I had so often taken into my mouth and adored were tandooried, turned scarlet like a baboon’s behind, ulcerated and blistered, the skin hanging in shreds.