I don’t want to dwell on this, but the gist is, with regard to India, having suffered rejection by the one whom naked I had embraced for nine months in the womb and all that preceded this and followed from the moment we emerged from between our mother’s legs into the night, I basically went native. My former wife, Geeta, is Indian, a stunning blue-eyed, mocha-skinned Kashmiri of the Brahmin caste, which makes her also, in a sense, for what it’s worth, a rabbi’s daughter. Together we ran a travel business in Mumbai, known in those days as M&G (Meena—that’s me, formerly Mina—and Geeta) Sati Trips. In Sanskrit sati means good wife, but it’s also the word for the outlawed (like dueling, yet also not without its legendary satisfactions) Hindu practice of the widow immolating herself in the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. For our primarily female clientele, however, we repackaged this intrinsically sexist concept in an intriguing new light with the prompt of our slogan: India Is Hot. Jump In. The message resonated phenomenally with our women seekers, predominantly from North America and Israel, who flocked to my call to ashrams and meditation sites, yoga retreats and Ayurveda healing centers in India—in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south, or, depending on the season, the good old reliables, Dharamsala and Rishikesh in the north—for periods of about two weeks.

It was a travel-intensive enterprise. Too often, I admit, I was flying madly here and there, stroking clients, dealing with our far-flung agents, fine-tuning tour schedules, handling emergencies physical and spiritual from Delhi belly to Dharma syndrome, managing drug flip-outs, the whole deal, forced by all of these pressures to delegate my daily responsibilities as a single mom for my daughter, Maya. Thank God I’d mostly been able to find decent childcare (with some painful exceptions), especially since Geeta, Maya’s adoptive mother no less and a lady with an enviably flexible schedule to say the least, proved maddeningly unreliable even in her finest hour, and Maya’s semen donor, my stab at a husband, Shmiel the schlemiel Shapiro, was out of commission, a willing exile in Jerusalem where he was known as the Holy Beggar, self-appointed caretaker of the gravesite of the celebrated Hasidic minstrel Reb Shlomo Carlebach.