Geeta hated my gods-of-the-East, holy-men mantras in all their boring, predictable variations, as she never held back from reminding me. This was one of the running themes in our arguments, which reached a crescendo that scorching May she left us, as the dark clouds gathered for the monsoon season. Forgive me, Maya, I know how much you suffered from our fights, the screaming in the night, the crying, the doors slamming. Geeta loathed my romanticization of India, as she characterized it over and over again in case it had slipped my mind. How could I be so softheaded on India when I was so ruthlessly sharp and unforgiving about my own lost Jewish faith? That’s what she wanted to know. India was nothing but a filthy, backward, pitiless sewer, she informed me with all the condescension of a born insider enlightening a clueless alien—a ticking time bomb with a moronic religion, vulgar god dolls, infantile superstitious worship practices, nutcases parading around in diapers muttering drivel. So deep, wow! Nothing but a holy scam, a con job, I should have known better, born into the business as I was, a rabbi’s daughter. (Don’t go there, I would caution myself when she would plunge into these rants, control yourself. Above all do not bring up now her sweet little Ganesha shrine in the corner of our bedroom illuminated at night by the flat-screen TV, her personal four-armed potbellied elephant god comforting her all her years like a beloved stuffed animal, big Dumbo ears, long swinging linga of a trunk. I was the mouse at the foot of the elephant watching her perform her puja. To me it was all so dear, so dear.)

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.