There was a great roar nearby and your eyes darted open, but then as if losing interest you turned and stared at Varda, cocking your head with such sweet curiosity, trying to make sense of her bizarre utterances. Varda cupped the back of your warm shapely head in the palm of her hand and sought to draw you close to her breast almost smothering you, but you wriggled desperately out of her clutches, squirming down barefoot to the filthy road paved with shit crying, Mama, Mama, and with both arms spread out wide you ran toward me as I squatted down in the filth opening my arms in turn so wide to receive you, and the motorcycle gunning behind me now roared in front of me slowing down just enough for Geeta to lean over and scoop you up and set you down between her and the rider in his leather goggles and Luftwaffe cap with a frill of black hair peeking out on the edges, and Geeta sang out, Let’s go for a ride, Maya, and you weren’t even wearing a helmet.

2

THE NANNY WHO SAVED YOU WAS MANIKA. True, she no longer was technically your nanny by the time Geeta dumped us; you were twelve, a woman. Had it been your fate to be born in a village somewhere in India, you would already have been squatting in your mother-in-law’s hovel picking the worms from her dal, wiping her grandson’s behind with your left hand while her son, your husband, followed his bliss building a career poking wires into tourists’ ears to trowel out the wax. But at first, when I brought Manika home from Varanasi as my mother’s legacy, she was your faithful ayah. When you no longer needed an ayah, she simply was grandmothered in as a member of our household, your companion, your duenna. She fed you with her own hands when she came to us as your nanny, you were so ethereal, so slight—Such a bad eater, my mother would have lamented. Manika shadowed you with spicy snack mixes to pique your thirst, relieved by chasers of warm cardamom milk and rich mango lassis. She never left you alone, she was your personal secret service attachment, she moved within your breath cloud. When Cathedral barred her from entering your classroom along with the other privileged little scholars, she staked a position in the schoolyard. When it banned her from the yard after she attempted to scratch out the eyes of a kid she suspected of looking at you funny, she took up her station across the road in the public domain. There she stood every day from drop-off to pick-up, her eyes burning through the stones of the fortress in which you were imprisoned lest anyone dare harm you. It made the children laugh and play to see faithful little black Manika at school—but tell me, Maya, how many of us in this life have been the repositories of such love? I said to myself, Someday you will understand and appreciate, it will become a song, a poem, a ditty, you will no longer be ashamed.