“What is a bishti?” I wondered, eyelids heavy, drifting on the waves of an incomprehensible battle as my mom perched on the side of my bed reading “Gunga Din” from a worn copy of Kipling.

I was at the West Fourth Street platform when the scent reached me before her, even before the D train hummed through the tunnels

I thought they would have gone away by now. Still, they stood on the corner, pouring in the street, screaming, chanting, waiving flags and signs.

I first learned that my father was the Messiah in 1989, just days before my 20th birthday. The two of us were in a coffee shop, not far from Tel Aviv University, where he was a professor of statistics and I, a second-year student of philosophy.