Strumming out of tune the only three chords in a minor key that he managed to halfway master, Shmiel could be found every day except the Sabbath up at the Har haMenukhot cemetery, parked under a marquee emblazoned with the epitaph, “Mamesh a Gevalt the Sweetest of the Sweet,” his cardboard guitar case open at his feet filling up with coins and bills deposited by the stream of pilgrims and lost souls and borderline cases trudging up the mountain to join the sing-along, to weep and spill out their hearts like water at the holy grave. The good news was, for the first time in his life my loser ex was making a halfway decent living. Far be it for me to have begrudged him, yet it might be worth noting the obvious here, of which I am perfectly aware, if only to justify why against my nature I ever hooked up with a man in the first place other than to fulfill the predestined birth of Maya. His name is one of the diminutives for Shmuel, Samuel, like the name of my brother, Shmelke. All my life I have been searching for my lost inner Sam, the holy man might have said.

With regard to my mother, though, the main point is, that thanks to me, not only India, but also the possibility of rebellion was not so foreign to her, not in the heavens but on the near horizon, close at hand. Ma had me as a model, my lifelong career as a free radical, its early onset in my adolescent acting out—black hair wild to the waist, diamond stud in the cleft of my nostril, lotus tattoo like a locket at the base of my throat, the full original presentation of my identity politics—and these were just some of the external manifestations that she and my father the rabbi and the entire neighborhood and the whole congregation of Israel could actually witness and testify to.