He was from an old Bombay Bene Israel family, low-caste untouchable oil pressers swollen to moguls in the spice business. But what truly set him apart from most of the other youth of his tribe was that after full-body exposure to the bounty of America at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, preparation H all the way down, he did not gleefully jump into the marching ranks of the international Indian diaspora conspiracy but packed his bags and came home to the tinderbox of India, an occurrence noteworthy for its rarity. The intoxicating rot of Jewishness smothered in all the perfumes of Harvard—for Geeta, what could be sexier? I ask you. It is common knowledge that her father acquired him for a stratospheric sum. The old gangster made him a partner in the business, that’s on the record, invited him to join the noble enterprise of polluting the subcontinent from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, with shopping centers rising like mushroom clouds on leveled slums, an offer, by the way, that he had never seen fit to extend to me, not that I would have done anything other than stand on principle and refuse. Samson was the man she was with that cosmically auspicious night I met her. I recognize now that she had been cheating on me all along with Samson Elijah with his gelled black ringlets almost shoulder length, his wet-look hair scrunched on either side of a too-wide middle part, coifed to hide something suspiciously male patterned. With this prize specimen and who knows what other hijra of indeterminate gender she had been deceiving me, discounting me those years of our doomed marriage in which she had never for a minute believed.

I was alone as usual the night I met her, in my spot on the balcony of the Leopold Café overlooking the scene below, my pitcher of beer in front of me placed on the table by Pasha the waiter as soon as I sat down, without any superfluous exchange between us other than the coded nod of recognition. It was a Wednesday in late November. In the US, it was the eve of Thanksgiving, and as I brooded over my beer that night I was clutched by the pangs of exile. You were too young to comfort me, or to ease my loneliness at the time, Maya, only eight years old, born at an apocalyptic hour in the land of Armageddon at the turn of the millennium. Thank God, you were safe at home that night, guarded by your ayah, Varda, in the apartment we were renting during that stage of our journey after I unloaded your father the Holy Beggar and we moved our spiritual epicenter from Israel the land of the Messiah syndrome, to India the land of the swami syndrome, to the buzzing corrupt super-metropolis of Mumbai sinking under the weight of its overpopulation on its soggy landfill, to set up a sister branch of my tour operation business, known in those days as Seekers International.