The holy man said, “Whosoever dies in Varanasi will achieve liberation, even a cockroach.”
It was the boldface pullout quote in a magazine my mother opened at random during chemotherapy at her local medical centre in Brooklyn. Lounging on the salmon-colored leatherette recliner as the toxic infusion dripped into her veins, Ma read every single word of the article. She had been looking forward to death as liberation was how she justified it to me later – so what was this business now of having to schlep all the way to Varanasi, India, nearly eight thousand miles away on the backside of the earth?
But as she continued to reflect on it, she recognised that liberation was actually not in the cards in the Jewish death deal. Where you landed in the next world, heaven or hell, Gan Eden or Gehinnom, depended on your docket in this one, you were never truly liberated from the fallout from this life. And this was also true in the overcrowded Hindu cosmos, with its thirty-six million idols and getchkes. Depending on your performance evaluation on this earth, you were reborn in another form, as a starlet or a slug, to plod all over again.
Only if you died in Varanasi were you guaranteed moksha regardless of your record, the holy man declared, only by dying in Varanasi in the lap of Mother Ganga would you achieve true release from the wheel of life, liberation from the grinding cycle of death and rebirth. The afterlife was this life, the one she had been living. This was a truth Ma now grasped. She had suspected it all along, it explained everything. She had been stuck in the punishment of her afterlife all these years. She had no interest in another sequel.
It was not an accident that Ma’s hand had fallen upon that magazine and that it had opened itself up like an exhaled breath to that page. It was her karma, she told me with the wicked grin of an initiate.
The holy man was speaking directly to her; he was sending her a message, special delivery. It was then and there, as she spun it to me afterward, in that chemo parlour with its décor the colour of viscera that she was swept up by her inspiration. She would stop all her treatments and go to Varanasi to die.
Anyone who had ever laid eyes on my mother or scanned a few bullet points of her résumé (if she ever had a résumé, which certainly she did not) would find it absurdly farfetched to believe she could be capable of gestating such a heretical desire, much less summon up the energy and nerve to actually carry it to term. We’re talking here about an ultra–Orthodox Jewish woman closing in on the finish line of her eighth decade in a lifespan traditionally calculated at three score and ten, hanging on past the statute of limitations, living on borrowed time – the wife of a rabbi, a rebbetzin, mother of nine, grandmother to many. How many? Don’t ask. That’s a question she would have never answered.
Jews do not count their own; god does not take kindly to that, it can be fatal. On top of that, she was stricken with stage four breast cancer, an Ashkenazi Jewish specialty like gefilte fish; it had occupied all her territory, though you might never have guessed it by eyeballing her. As a proper religious matron, she had always worn a wig, well before she lost all her hair from the chemo, and she still weighed in at close to 250 pounds. “Finally, a diet that would do the trick,” Ma said, recalling an inappropriate thought that had shot through her brain when she had gotten her diagnosis – a secondary benefit of illness. “But nothing doing.” And she waved a hand in resignation down over the mass of her stubborn flesh.
The other deviant thought that had flashed with the news of her death sentence, Ma admitted to me later, was that now, finally, she had been given permission to make her exit, following, of course, the ritual sadistic formalities for the sake of family, of pretending to fight for her life, pulling out all the stops, pushing to the limit of cutting edge medical technology no matter how agonising or pitiful or futile or costly, no matter how much everyone in her orbit secretly wanted to close her file.
A longtime fan of obituaries, Ma’s first thought as she pored over those case-closed mug shots every morning was invariably, It’s over, Lucky you, No one will bother you anymore, don’t worry, you’re not missing a thing.
Still, suicide, it goes without saying, was not an option. First of all, it’s a sin. Second, it’s hard, it’s messy, it requires a lot of initiative and motivation; you need to be a self-starter. But above all, it is not considerate, it would inflict too much pain and guilt on your loved ones, not to mention how boiling mad they would be at her for doing this to them, how unforgiving and lacking in understanding or sympathy.
But the truth was, she was tired of forever being pressured to hold out. She had been looking forward to the liberation of death, it would finally make her breathe easier, as it were. And now this woman, my mother, who always did what was expected of her, who had never openly rebelled in her life, whose axis of influence was a lopsided triangle with three fixed retro-shtetl points, Brooklyn, Miami, Jerusalem, suddenly gets the news that it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.
A grand finale was still required of her. She still had to rise from her bed and muster whatever remaining shreds of vitality she possessed to drag her 250 diseased pounds to the faraway rotting stage of Varanasi, packed with filthy bit players and reeking scenery to belt out her final full-throated aria if she wanted to achieve true liberation. A casual bystander might find it incredible that such a woman would heed such a casting call, but to my mind, it was inevitable, it made total sense.
Needless to say, I don’t want this story to be about me, but as it happens, the notion of India was not all that alien to my mother despite her super-conventional stereotypical lifestyle (viewed, of course, in the context of the overall bizarreness of rigidly observant Jewish practice). For that, I am obliged to admit, I deserve the credit, or whatever. And so it is necessary for me to make what I hope will be limited to a cameo appearance in what is, let us never forget this for a minute, my mother’s end-of-life story.
The fact is, I’m an old India hand, a Hin-Jew, a Jewbude, however you want to process it.
My fascination with India began in my earliest years, thanks to my mother as it happened, who at that time knew nothing at all about the place except that its starving children were feverish to get their hands on the slabs of schnitzel that my twin brother, Shmelke, and I were taking so for granted, dragging them listlessly around our plates, swirling them like finger paint through pools of ketchup instead of eating them.
The problem was enormous, insoluble. How could I get the schnitzel to the starving children of India in time to save them? It was beyond my powers, I was flooded with guilt. That was my introduction to India, a faraway land swarming with kids dying for my schnitzel.
Then, when Shmelke and I were maybe five years old, before we were torn apart yet again and sentenced to separate bedrooms, I happened to find in a garbage pail set out for pickup on the curb of our Brooklyn street a picture book sodden with coffee grinds and potato peels, about Hindu gods and goddesses, an object I instinctively assumed to have been confiscated from some kid in our neighbourhood who had gone off the rails, God alone knows at what station she ended up. Shmelke and I read this contraband every night, not including the Sabbath, under the covers with a flashlight, we knew all the stories by heart – by heart!
I was particularly blown away by the tale of the twin brother and sister, Yama and Yami, the first mortals on earth. Like Yami, I begged my Yama, my twin brother, Shmelke, to marry me. Why not? Why should this not be possible? How could there be closeness tighter than that of twins, so spiritually conjoined? Only an arrogant fool would presume to insert himself between two so bound up together even from the womb and attempt to split them apart.
Hadn’t Cain and Abel, according to legend, married their twin sisters – for how else other than through the implicit existence of twin sisters could all that begetting have gotten its kick start, since no mention needless to say is made of female births in the first family? Yet Shmelke turned me down, a rejection that still throbs in memory to this day, like a savagely amputated limb. It was against the laws of the Torah, he pronounced sagely: The nakedness of your sister you may not uncover, Leviticus chapter eighteen verse nine. Already he was a prodigy, an ilui, a category applied only to boys, with a royal career mapped out before him by our father and his hand-picked team of tutors and groomers.
I don’t want to dwell on this, but the gist is, with regard to India, having suffered rejection by the one whom naked I had embraced for nine months in the womb and all that preceded this and followed from the moment we emerged from between our mother’s legs into the night, I basically went native.
My former wife, Geeta, is Indian, a stunning blue-eyed, mocha-skinned Kashmiri of the Brahmin caste, which makes her also, in a sense, for what it’s worth, a rabbi’s daughter. Together we ran a travel business in Mumbai, known in those days as M&G (Meena – that’s me, formerly Mina – and Geeta) Sati Trips. In Sanskrit sati means good wife, but it’s also the word for the outlawed (like dueling, yet also not without its legendary satisfactions) Hindu practice of the widow immolating herself in the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre.
For our primarily female clientele, however, we repackaged this intrinsically sexist concept in an intriguing new light with the prompt of our slogan: India Is Hot. Jump In. The message resonated phenomenally with our women seekers, predominantly from North America and Israel, who flocked to my call to ashrams and meditation sites, yoga retreats and Ayurveda healing centres in India – in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south, or, depending on the season, the good old reliables, Dharamsala and Rishikesh in the north – for periods of about two weeks.
It was a travel-intensive enterprise. Too often, I admit, I was flying madly here and there, stroking clients, dealing with our far-flung agents, fine-tuning tour schedules, handling emergencies physical and spiritual from Delhi belly to Dharma syndrome, managing drug flipouts, the whole deal, forced by all of these pressures to delegate my daily responsibilities as a single mom for my daughter, Maya.
Thank god I’d mostly been able to find decent childcare (with some painful exceptions), especially since Geeta, Maya’s adoptive mother no less and a lady with an enviably flexible schedule to say the least, proved maddeningly unreliable even in her finest hour, and Maya’s semen donor, my stab at a husband, Shmiel the schlemiel Shapiro, was out of commission, a willing exile in Jerusalem where he was known as the Holy Beggar, self-appointed caretaker of the gravesite of the celebrated Hasidic minstrel Reb Shlomo Carlebach.
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 ha Menukhot 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 singalong, 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.
Excerpted with permission from Mother India: A Novel, Tova Reich, Macmillan.