(Page 3 of 7)
“I have connections here it would take years to build,” Levi claimed. “I have the BMC [Mumbai’s municipal authority] on my payroll. Anything I do around here, I’m above the law. Three days ago a cop asked me, ‘Where’s your passport.’ I tell him, I’m a free man. I don’t wanna walk with it. He’s starting to chase me. He asks my name, and I tell him, check in the newspaper if you want my name.”
He talked about his close relationship with a man he called “the chief of police,” whom I later learned was actually a lieutenant. “The chief loves me. He’ll say, ‘Can you sing me a Hindi song?’ I know all the Hindi songs. We walk hand in hand together, you know the way they do here? It makes me sick to touch another man’s hand, and when I get home I wash it, but nothing can remove the smell. But who cares? It’s a connection. He likes my sunglasses, so I bought a pair and gave them to him.”
The taxi dropped us where Colaba Causeway meets Hormusji Street, a dusky track twenty feet wide. We walked up the lane and everyone—the women with their packs, the children half-naked or in school uniforms, the toothless man at the little shop selling sweets and telephone SIM cards—saluted Levi, laughing as if they’d seen a blessed madman. The cops saluted, and the old man who stood watch over Nariman House saluted, dropping the crude barricade of lashed bamboo that separated the lane from the pile of rubble in the building’s courtyard. Then Levi realized that he’d lost or forgotten his key, so I waited outside while he climbed through a hole in the wall blasted by a rocket-propelled grenade.
The building was five stories high, perched above the open courtyard on concrete pillars. Its color was like Jerusalem stone, marked with strange blooms of soot from the blasts of the assault, and its façade had a slight curvilinear wave to it, as if the wind had blown during construction. The windows were empty boxes, their glass and curtains destroyed by gunfire. Across the lane, the dun-colored wall of a bakery was pocked with 179 scabs from the terrorists’ rifle shots, each one circled in red by the building’s owner. One of those bullets killed a twenty-five-year-old call-center worker named Harish Gohil, a neighbor who poked his head out to see what was happening.
After a few minutes, Levi reappeared with a canister of sesame paste, a bag of tin to-go pans, two cans of stewed tomatoes, and a bottle of vinegar—but no mayo. We returned to the Sabbath hotel, where time was running out: Mendel and Menachem needed to depart and prepare for services.
The very commandments that brought Sputz and Kessler to Mumbai gave their lives a farcical cast, as if they were trying to impose the rules of basketball on a game of cricket. Realizing that he had mayonnaise in his hotel room, Mendy Kessler hatched a plan to bring one of the Indian cooks back to fetch the mayo while he and Menachem went to synagogue—but again, there were no taxis in sight.
Levi had disappeared by then, for he rarely attended services, but Kessler didn’t have the same touch with the cops. He sent the cook to get a cab, and the man disappeared. Kessler himself went to stand by the side of the road, surrounded by taxis that would not move, waving his arms at passing drivers who would not stop or even acknowledge the strange figure flailing in the road.
Then a horse-drawn carriage clopped past, its chassis scrolled with faux silver rococo designs, its driver wearing a dirty orange T-shirt. We hopped inside, and Mendy stood up, scanning the road for Menachem Sputz and the missing cook. He called Menachem’s cell phone, but there was no response. The horse was getting anxious, so the driver stepped down to soothe it. The horse stamped its feet. The driver struck the animal once in the throat, backhanded, but then fed it a handful of leafy greens. The horse munched on them slowly, as if in deep thought. Then Mendy Kessler’s phone rang; it was Menachem Sputz.
“We’re here, in the carriage! Bring that guy,” Mendy Kessler said. “One of the Indians who works for us, how many of them are there! I’m gonna give him the mayonnaise to bring back. Mayo! Mayo, damn it! Okay. Around the corner.” Finally Menachem Sputz and the cook trotted around the corner and leapt into the carriage. The sun glinted off the silver, and the animal behaved. They’d make it to services on time, and then return for a shabbos meal swimming in mayonnaise. More small problems solved.
—
The services took place in Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue. With quaint wooden balustrades around the pulpit, a triptych of stained glass over the ark of the Torah scroll, and a second-floor gallery for women only, Keneseth Eliyahoo was a fine example of classic orthodox synagogue architecture, except for the robin’s-egg blue paint job, inside and out, which gave it the atmosphere of a Gothic kindergarten.
The service was attended by about thirty local Jews and a handful of foreigners. India’s largest Jewish community is called the Bene Israel, and its membership numbers perhaps four thousand. Their traditions say they’re descended from ancient Hebrews who fled persecution in Galilee around 200 bce, then shipwrecked on the coast of Maharashtra, lost to the Jewish world outside India. They maintained the most basic Jewish customs—avoiding certain non-kosher foods, observing the Sabbath, and practicing monotheism. They eschewed intermarriage, though some mixing must have occurred, for the Bene Israel look much like the Hindus around them.
In the British colonial period, Jewish traders recognized the Bene Israel as Jews. They have their own traditions, but the outsiders had the Torah, the scholarship of the rabbis, and the relatively greater wealth that Westerners enjoy, and so the Bene Israel adopted rules from outside. Many emigrate to Israel, though they sometimes face difficulties in having their official Jewish status recognized by authorities there.
The Bene Israel have long lived peacefully alongside their Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh neighbors, free from the anti-Semitism of Europe and the Arab countries. In India, Muslims and Sikhs have been the vulnerable minorities. But when I visited that week in January, the Jews felt newly exposed. Besides the November attacks, there was the war in Gaza. After months of rocket strikes that turned southern Israeli cities into ghost towns while residents cowered in bomb shelters, Israeli forces had attacked the Gaza Strip, and by that time on that particular Friday evening, perhaps seven hundred Palestinians had died, many of them civilians.
At the end of the services, a local community leader named Solomon Sopher made an announcement. “I just want everyone to know,” he said from the pulpit, “that it was observed in the Muslim area near Byculla that there are banners declaring Israel a terrorist state, and that if you kill a Jew, you will go straight to heaven. We told the authorities and they took them down, but really, what can be done?” He gestured towards the entrance of the synagogue, where, down on the ground floor, three slack-limbed police officers were seated at the foot of the steps, hunched over their rotten-looking rifles.
After the attacks, there was an increased security presence all over Mumbai, but that didn’t mean the place felt safe. At the central train station, where the terrorists had picked off travelers while the ill-trained cops found cover, the entrances were framed by newly installed metal detectors that beeped angrily at passersthrough. Yet the officers in charge rarely stopped traffic to investigate the beeping. Outside the Leopold Café, a popular tourist destination on the Colaba Causeway where ten diners ate their last meals in November, a few skinny guards held double-barreled shotguns, their wooden stocks bound together with pieces of string and tape.