The next day, at Sabbath lunch I watched in horror as you fell again. You and Malkie and a few other proper young ladies were strutting your domestic creds by helping with the serving, you were carrying out from the kitchen a tray piled high with small appetizer plates of chopped liver and gefilte fish, each mound-shaped dropping topped with a decorative swag of raw carrot. “Don’t fall, Masha,” Shmuly sang out to you. Instantly, as if he had just injected you with a brilliant idea, as if he had pressed a button to a hidden trapdoor, down you went. “I’m sorry I called you Masha,” he said, standing over you sprawled in the middle of that mess of first course on the floor that looked now before it had been consumed suspiciously like how one might imagine it would look after it had made its way through the system and come out the other end. “It’s just that when I see you, I also see Moshe, little baby Moshe’le, because you knew him personally—such a privilege! People are saying he is a miracle boy, that he is destined to come back to Mumbai on a white donkey one day to take over the Chabad house again and avenge the murder of his holy mother and father. Moshe, Masha—you can do worse than to be mixed up with that holy child, I didn’t mean to push you down the stairs, God forbid.”

On Sunday you rested, at least from falling, as far as I knew. School was closed; there would be no Chabad pit stop on your homeward route. I had given Manika the day off to visit a friend from her village who had just arrived to the Dharavi slum to work in the construction business clearing rocks, so there was no chaperone on call that day to escort you. Manika had offered to take you along to watch the slum potters squeezing their clay, she even invited me to join for “quality assurance,” but there was no way I would allow you to be exposed to such filth and pollution, and especially now while you were going through this bizarre pubescent hormonal falling stage, I didn’t even want to begin to imagine what you might sink into should you happen to take it into your head to fall in that slum with its open lakes of raw sewage and waste where the children played. We would have a nice quiet Sunday, you and I, it would be a treat. During the wet season my tour business typically slowed down almost to a standstill, and though in the past I had used the time to visit my branch offices in Jerusalem and New York for networking purposes and to catch up with administrative details, this monsoon I was obliged to stay put in Mumbai because as you know I had no responsible adult to leave you with, Geeta had abandoned us. Now I realized it was a blessing in disguise. Our Sundays would unfold slow and easy, an unforeseen gift of time to work on our relationship, focus on some mother-daughter bonding.