Do you remember Varda Aunty? To give credit where it’s due, despite all her shortcomings, her deceitfulness, her deviousness, and so on, had it not been for Varda coming so fortuitously into our life at that time, I would not have been relieved enough of childcare burdens to carry on full steam with my business, put food on the table for you and a roof over our heads, fork up the scandalous baksheesh required to get you into Cathedral, not to mention the tuition and all the essential extras for that most posh of feeder schools to the world’s most elite universities so crucial for your future, or, for that matter, to treat myself to a few hours at the Leopold a couple of nights a week to ruminate over a pitcher of beer for some necessary restorative inner peace. All in all, I still maintain that in retrospect we were incredibly lucky to have come upon her on the very first day we moved into our building on Hormusji Street in Colaba, down the narrow teeming lane from the Mumbai Chabad center, and best of all, a short stroll from the Leopold. Clad only in her bra and panties with her varicose veins pulsing and bulging like one of those light-up tourist street maps, she was standing on her head on the landing outside her door when we arrived, going native like all those Indians carrying out their most private personal maintenance activities in public spaces, out of sight of their core inner world whose opinion matters, but under the eyes of millions of strangers who are meaningless to them and don’t know who they are. We took each other’s measure immediately, she scrutinizing upward, I down, recognizing at once a fellow member of the tribe, the Israeli oldies floating on the airwaves from her flat, triggering nostalgic synapses unnecessary for identification purposes but serving as gratifying confirmation, sealing our instant relatedness.

She had come to India to find her son Golan who had, in her opinion, dropped out too long in Manali in the North on his post-traumatic post-army rite of passage travel flip-out. Within a week of running into his mother as he was closing a deal on some stash with the local Hebrew-speaking Indian hashish wallah, the boy turned around and headed straight back to Israel, morphing in due time into a life insurance salesman, an amusing anomaly in the land of Gog and Magog teetering on the brink of extermination. Varda, meanwhile, settled in Mumbai where she went native, trading her senior citizen hair dye from Israeli burgundy to Indian henna orange. My second thought after laying eyes on her perpetrating her daily exercise routine in our faces, after classifying her intuitively and definitively as a fellow wandering Jew, was, Bingo! Maya’s metapelet. For someone messed up in my particular way, a Jewish mother is a known quantity, ideal nanny material. I could handle the damage control, no problem.