India's Jewish Community

Carmit Delman travels from the US to Mumbai -- and the Himalayas-- to find them: "We spent Shabbat at one of the few synagogues that still drew a minyan, a musty wooden building with balconies painted turquoise and lazy ceiling fans that seemed to chop at the air in random bursts of will. There was a sense of bitterness that turned the day’s simple d’var Torah into a brimstone tirade, a complaint of no one to oversee it all. Resources were lacking; the leaders wore too many hats. For Kiddush, we gathered in the basement, women and men separately, and ate curry egg, rice and chicken with formality—a meal of mechanics and inertia."