He pretended as much as possible to be oblivious to all of it, my father the rabbi—that was his defensive stance; he wouldn’t see it so it wasn’t there. (Like God who is also invisible? I challenged him.) He also dismissed my fixation with India, refusing to take seriously any religion reputed to be nonviolent (however mistakenly), such as Hinduism or Buddhism: not major players, harmless, pareve, neither meat nor dairy. My worship was benign, nothing that required emergency excision, certainly not in the same league as a religion with muscle, a hard-core apostasy like converting to Christianity, God forbid. So when I brought Geeta to them as my true intended, my destined one, my bashert’e, he at first made a big provincial joke out of it, claiming Geeta as one of ours, insisting that she was really just another nice Jewish girl, a Marrano, a member of the lost tribe of Menashe, she looked like such a proper balabatische Yiddish’e maidel, and wasn’t her name Geeta after all, such a respectable Yiddish name, Gitel, it means good, he had an aunt named Gitel, Tante Gitel’e, murdered in the gas chambers by the Nazi killers, may their name and memory be blotted out from the face of the earth.

But I would not back down, I refused to allow him to patronize my reality or the reality of my bride. Sorry Pop, no way Geeta is Jewish, Geeta is purebred Indian, 100 percent, top caste. It was then that my father spat into our shared air space the word “Indyk!” which means not only Indian in Yiddish but also turkey. Good, at least he’s mad now, I thought, at least it has registered finally that I’m not kidding around. Halleluah! I cried. And digging even deeper into the praise-God book of Psalms for further ammunition, I added jubilantly, Hodu laShem Ki Tov—Give Thanks to God for He is Good—because Hodu means not only thanksgiving, it is also Hebrew for India. Therefore, as I pointed out to my father the rabbi and scholar but no gentleman (what for a gentleman?), it can also be interpreted as “India is to God for it is good”—and within the godly goodness of India, I embraced my divine Geeta, my wife. The old man barked out a sharp little laugh, rejecting the seriousness of this new development as well. Such relations between women were meaningless. The Torah does not even condescend to mention them for the sake of forbidding them because they produce nothing, they’re ridiculous, the mechanics were beyond his imagination.