Since her departure, though, we have not seen each other, Geeta and I, not once. She disrespected me grievously by refusing to grant me the pittance of a private audience even when I dragged myself over seven hundred miles up to Delhi to petition in your behalf, Maya. She never bothered to come down to visit you; set that as a seal upon your heart. She left us flat, not only you, but our union, hers and mine. Remember, we were married not once, but twice, rabbi and pandit, two traditional weddings with all the trimmings—a Jewish ceremony followed by a dark meat roast chicken reception in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, courtesy albeit grudging of my biological sponsors, the rabbi and rebbetzen, in a gilded mirrored catering hall owned by the mafia under the elevated tracks with the D and N trains rumbling overhead, a Hindu ceremony paid for by her clan in a mirrored gilded private room at the Taj Mahal Hotel (where else?) featuring mostly her pals from the Mumbai Bollywood scene thanks to the movies her father bankrolled and her bit parts in the dancing chorus when she was in the mood for a workout, a spectacular party.

God, she was beautiful that night at the Taj, your adoptive mother, in her blood-red silk Benares sari and gold bangles, the henna filigree intricately stained on her palms rising up along her arms like the most elegant lace evening gloves, like creeping disease, the heavy diamonds clasping her throat and suspended from her ears, her head-piece sewn with lustrous white pearls setting off her oiled black, black hair. She was playing the bride in a Bollywood film, another over-the-top Indian fantasy wedding production. Still, we were an astonishing couple in India, a two-mom household insisting on recognition, legitimization, but truth to tell, at bottom no different from any other nuclear family unit with a beloved child at the center of its solar system, interpreting your every sign like astrologers, poring over you, obsessed, like weathermen watching the skies day and night, utterly powerless to talk about anything other than you whatever the season. I did not have a family fortune like Geeta, but I had you. I gave her the ultimate gift of motherhood. You were the greatest treasure in my trove. I shared you without reservation, I gave you. I bought off your father, convinced him to give up any and all claims. I lured him away from the Singing Rabbi’s gravesite in Jerusalem with the promise of spiritual nirvana, an all-expenses-paid private deluxe tour of every ashram in India, north and south. As far as we knew then, he had never returned. The last reported sighting of the yacht we had hired for him in which he had set sail over the horizon deeper and deeper into the mysterious east after he had put his signature on the official papers—Shmiel the Holy Beggar Shapiro hereby gives up all property rights to the female Maya and so on—was coming up upon the coast of the Andaman Islands. For six years I believed he had been eaten. I erased his Shapiro from your book, Maya, and slung a hyphen like a lifeline between Geeta’s Devi and my Tabor to attach them to you. Maya Devi-Tabor. In you, East met West. Despite the postcolonialist mindset, in you the twain met. Devi-Tabor—our goddess with drums and tambourines, and all the women coming out dancing behind you.