Everything—I gave her everything. There was nothing I held back. Who can fault me then, when a month after she dumped us I trekked up to Delhi and stationed myself a barefoot supplicant outside the gate of her family’s compound under the eyes of the uniformed guards swinging their lathis, the monkeys screeching and baring their teeth on top of the stone walls. My demand was not negotiable: child support, full throated and open handed, or no-holds-barred disclosure in all the media of the scandalous, shameful decadence of the tiny elite of the indecently rich and sinful in this seething land of unspeakable need and injustice—enough to ignite mayhem between the factions of resentment that would have recast the memory of the riots between Hindus and Muslims of the last decade of the millennium into a trance party. Reparations—she owed me, she owed you. Yes, for you Maya I debased myself, and it paid off. They paid us off—coldly, impersonally, mechanically, but they paid, like good Germans. There was nothing to do but set pride aside and shame, and to take it. The checks arrived like clockwork. You would never be hungry, you would never squat in the gutter, a beggar’s bowl raised between your palms, you would continue to live with all the comforts and opportunities that were your entitlement. This was Geeta’s buyout from us at no personal cost to her, no penalty other than payout for what she had done to me, to you. She never had to face me and see the rapid rise and fall of my chest and the ripple of the quiver I struggled to suppress in the unnaturally wide-open eyes of she who had been slapped.

Within half a year after our separation, when you were already at boarding school in the US, she married again without having the decency to even pretend to go through the motions of filing for divorce. Face it, girl, I tell myself, she never really took our marriage seriously. It was not real, it had no binding meaning, it was nothing but liberal slumming, sexual experimentation, she could afford it. The minute she wanted out, all her same-sex hoo-ha turned into vapor. She could move on as if what had been formalized between us were disposable—no truth, no consequences, no need for a legal mop-up. For sure that was the counsel she had been given by her family’s top lawyer, Samson Elijah, the man she left me for—You don’t have to bother going through the hassle of a divorce, baby, that marriage was a joke, not even a starter marriage, just two little girls playing house, you be the daddy I’ll be the mommy. Whatever small comfort I could derive from seeing her stuck with a Jew again for her sins was hollow. Something about us must turn her on, some baseless myth or idea, something primitive but powerful enough to overcome her Aryan Brahmin alarm sensor against untouchables, the flipside of whatever dangerous and incendiary delusions about us Jews that have turned others off over the centuries, with such catastrophic consequences.