My Nine Lives Read Free Page A

I really don’t know why my PhD advisers were so sceptical about her except that she had been dead only ten and not five hundred years. But that was what attracted me to her—that I felt I could put out my hand and almost touch her.
    I was taken to the house where she had lived with her family—they were still there, at the end of an alley, across a courtyard, in a tenement not so different from Somnath’s. I was shown the corner where she used to sit, singing and combing her white hair—which was long, for though a widow she refused to let it be cut off, wanting to be beautiful for when the Friend at last would come. I saw a photograph of her taken at a granddaughter’s wedding, where she didn’t look very different from other widowed grandmothers, skinny and wizened and already a ghost in the shroud of her white cotton sari. I also traveled to the places she had run away to: these were never well-known pilgrim spots but deserted, inaccessible sites outside anonymous villages, ruined piles of brick hidden in overgrown thickets of shrubsor exposed on barren land under a burning sky of white heat. Since my long vacations came in the summer, my visits always coincided with the hottest time of the year; but heat never really bothered me, maybe because I had ancestors who had wandered forty years in the desert. At noon I would cool my head under a wet handkerchief knotted at the corners, which probably made me look as mad as everyone thought she had been.
    My parents considered India an unsuitable, dangerous place. Otto even had firsthand reports from relatives who in the 1930s had emigrated to Bombay, that being the only place where they could get an entrance permit. Although they had done well there, establishing a successful confectionery business, they never got used to the alien atmosphere. In long letters to their relatives—all the family wrote long letters to each other, it was a characteristic of the Diaspora, going right back to the Levy who had been sent to Smyrna to check up on the Messiah—they reported on conditions of squalor and ignorance that made the country completely impossible for cultured Europeans like themselves (after the war, they sold the confectionery business and returned to Germany). I could never convince my parents of my own, very different experience. Anyway, almost every time I was in India, there was an emergency that made it necessary for me to return home. Once it was because of Otto’s heart attack, which Susie declared was brought on by worry about me; another time Nina took pills that Susie said I should have been there to hide from her. Even when the emergency was over, I couldn’t return to India because they needed me in New York, their nerves having been shattered by the crisis and my absence. Susie’s nerves were shattered the most—she was psychologically frailer than Otto and Nina; and physically too, she appeared frailer, for unlike Nina, who was dark and heavy,Susie was pale, sandy, and so slight that it seemed any breeze might blow her away.
    Then one year Nina said she wanted to go with me to India, to see for herself what it was all about. Otto opposed the idea—he said it was absolutely impossible and that he would definitely put his foot down. In their confrontations, he was always putting his foot down, and when he said it, he looked stern and strong, though perfectly aware that Nina would always do what she wanted. But this time, for her trip to India, she needed Otto’s cooperation, in the form of financial assistance. My own visits to India didn’t cost much, but she could not be expected to travel or live there the way I did. She sent me off to explain this to Otto—“Be nice to him,” she told me, as always when something had to be wheedled out of him. I knew from experience that he found it hard to refuse her anything, especially money, with which he was so generous to her that Susie often warned