The matter at hand that had been preoccupying the rabbi and his heir apparent concerned Moshe, little baby Moshe, a matter of great urgency for their future in Mumbai and beyond in the inner power circle of the Chabad elite. Aside from Moshe’le’s nanny, Sandra, with whom they were banned from communicating by the boy’s family and who would not talk to them in any case, you and I, they advised us, and you especially, are likely to be the only ones still around now who knew baby Moshe intimately during the first two crucially formative years of his life, when everything is determined. Was he a normal child, in both the negative and positive sense? The public had a right to know. Some said he had been irreparably damaged psychologically as a result of witnessing the butchering of his parents. Others said he possessed special powers like Moses our Teacher even as a baby—that he was born circumcised and came out of the womb talking Torah to his mother and father, and that now he continues to communicate with them every day morning and night, earth to heaven.

“Tell us everything you know,” Shmuly said in his most ominous, still soft voice, his eyes fixed on you in a concentrated focus perhaps for the first time, boring into you as if to flush out your lifeblood until your face drained white, you looked as if you might swoon. It struck me that I ought to put a stop to this inquisition at once. Why was I just sitting there paralyzed, letting them torture you like this?

“He was not even two,” you said finally, “and I was only eight.”

“Old enough to remember.”

“He used to stick his hand into the flames of his mother’s Sabbath candles,” you offered at last after a long silence. “Then he would put it in his mouth. He burned his hand and his mouth.” This was a graphic image I didn’t remember ever having myself observed, a disturbing sight you had witnessed more than once apparently but never shared with me. A daughter is supposed to confide in her mother. How had I gone wrong?

“Eh, like Moshe our Teacher when he was a little baby, when the Egyptian wise guys decided he was destined to grab away the throne from Pharaoh the king,” Rabbi Mendy interpreted. “So they put down in front of him a piece of gold the same like the crown and also a burning hot coal. Any normal kid would go for the gold—right? But the angel Gabriel, he takes little Moshe’s little hand and plops it down on the burning coal, and Moshe picks up the coal and puts it into his mouth—kids put everything in their mouths. That’s the reason for why Moshe Rabbenu was ‘heavy of speech and heavy of tongue,’ like the Torah says, why he couldn’t talk so good—because he burned out his mouth. So, did baby Moshe also have a stutter like big Moshe?” the rabbi asked you.