Varda’s voice breaking this news reached us when Geeta and I were already back down in my apartment. We were lying naked in bed making love with the television blaring to keep the sounds of our intimacy from assaulting your innocent ears, Maya. We stared mesmerized at the screen. OMG, did Varda really say that about the bristles? On TV? Did she actually think that what she was sending out over the airwaves about a terrorist mole at the Chabad house was good for the Jews? And how could this guy have hauled all those supplies and ammunition into Nariman as she claimed without anyone inside wising up to what was going on right under their roof? Was this an inside job? Maybe the guy with the ponytail was really a Jew after all. Maybe he was a Mossad agent setting up the operation to incite even greater hatred of Muslims in the hearts of over a billion mother-loving Indians, to stir up riots and ethnic cleansings and partitions such as the world had never seen.

Geeta turned to me and nuzzled my face with her lips. “I just love the goat hairs on your chinny-chin-chin,” she whispered. “Never tweeze them—okay?” A laugh squirted out of me, I thought she was spoofing, but she placed her long slender hand softly like a stopper over my mouth and said, “No, really—I’m serious. Promise.”

We were living those days of the siege in a bubble, abdicating the responsibility for our survival to the protectors entrusted to watch over us. Mumbai was paralyzed, schools and businesses shut down, its masses huddling in high-rises and slums and chawls as the beasts ran wild through the streets. It was an enforced vacation from daily life, from all the schedules and stresses that constricted us, and though we knew that outside our sealed door catastrophic events were unfolding, it was, I admit, a restful break for us, a time-limited reprieve, an interlude, and we let ourselves sink into it. What else could we do? We had no choice, it was out of our control. You spent the time playing quietly in your room with your same-sex parents’ paper dolls. Geeta and I passed the day in bed not even bothering to get dressed.

Toward evening we put on robes and gathered at the kitchen table for a simple vegan Thanksgiving meal of dal that Geeta shaped into a rooster of India, tarnegol hodu as they have it in the holy tongue, a tuki, decorating it with a wattle made of sweet mango pickles and setting it on a bed of basmati rice. You gave thanks for mommies, the more mommies the merrier, and you added a little prayer for baby Moshe’s mommy, may he see her again soon, amen. Geeta gave thanks for the terrorists for bringing us together, but for nothing else, thank you. I lifted my third bottle of Kingfisher and drank to that too but added, Yes, there is one more thing to thank them for: empowering me to do what every self-help guru and spiritual mentor so strongly advises but which only today, thanks to the enforced confinement imposed by the terrorists, I’ve succeeded at accomplishing—living in the moment. And mindfully.