The young rabbi and his wife and the other Jewish hostages did not come out to take their bows in that triumphant curtain call. Maybe it was simply a tactful gesture of deference to the heroes of the hour lest the victims steal the limelight. Maybe they had been whisked out a back door, maybe even on stretchers in a condition not suitable for public consumption. Was there a back door? We were dying, dying to know what happened to them, there were all kinds of speculation. They were alive when the Indian forces entered but were killed in the crossfire. They were already dead by the time the showdown began, murdered by the terrorists. They had been spirited away to Israel by the Mossad in Elijah’s chariot for a joyous reunion with little baby Moshe in his reed basket fished out of the Indian Ocean. There were rumors of barbarism and torture. The bodies had been mutilated, what looked like a fetus had been ripped from her belly, his member had been hacked off and stuffed in his mouth, two women guests at the house were bound together with wire, raped and slashed, the eyeball of a male hostage was resting on his cheek, Torah scrolls were smeared with excrement and torn in shreds, stray dogs and feral cats were roaming, licking the blood-soaked floor, it was a pogrom. The fate of the hostages was the main topic on all the screens on our rooftop in the aftermath of the final battle—along with postmortem wrap-up interviews with the commando heroes. “We went in, we did our job, and we got the hell out of there,” a beaming commando laid it out for the interviewer. “I’m not going into details. I don’t need those crazy human-rights wallahs breathing down my neck.” I turned to Geeta as one does to one’s closest dearly beloved to share the moment, but she was no longer at my side.

She was not in the apartment either. I ran down the stairs outside and there you were, Maya, in front of our building, whimpering and drooping as if you had been drugged, so small and slight in Varda’s arms. A restless mini-crowd of street regulars already bored with the main event, searching for new action in other places, menaced around you as a runt reporter who seemed to have lost his way in life, wearing a badge affiliating him with an outfit called the Hindu Orphans Press, stood there videoing Varda with his mobile phone. “I had to save the child right away,” Varda was declaiming. “There was not one minute to waste. She was no longer safe in her own home. It had been taken over by depraved criminals. She was in grave danger. I did not stop for one minute to think about myself. I grabbed her and ran.” This was one sick lady it now struck me, your soon-to-be-former nanny, Varda. How could I ever have left you alone with her? Forgive me, Maya. Her grandiose delusions were pathological. Among nannies, she was deserving of the most honor, more honor even than the great Sandra, innocent babes she snatched from the jaws of death. Her paranoid delusions were off the charts. Not a single sanctuary remained on this planet that had not been infiltrated by alien invaders. She was the savior, celebrated and feted.