The pain and joy of being an Indian Jew
Shula, the girl with crimped hair gets up giggling from a wooden chair and a Star of David in its backrest becomes visible. Her father Ezekiel Isaac Malekar calls her to the altar. Her head is not covered like the others in the congregation where everyone has a scarf or skull cap on.
Malekar has always emphasised unorthodox attitudes and equality of the sexes in the four walls of "my temple", as he calls the Hyam Judah synagogue in Humayun Road in Delhi. He puts his small hands on Shula's head and gibbers a prayer. This twenty something girl is small like her dad, a priest for a shrivelling congregation.
Those present are reading from books with pages light as onion skin lettered with calligraphic Hebrew. A 9-year old in front of me is frequently asked to stand up and read which pleases everyone, but makes a hunched and very little old lady in a frock smile rather toothily each time.
He reads without faltering but in a delight-less monotone. They sing, or make a musical rumble, that sadly does not amount to singing, although one Russian in the front row is making a loud and impressive yodel of it as he rocks back and forth, and an equally heartfelt solo later.
On Fridays at sunset, worshippers assemble here at this 52-year-old establishment that has seen better days - the lawns are unkempt, the Chanukah lamp outside, rusty. The place may have enjoyed more popularity back in the 40s and 50s when a census said there were "35,000" Jews in the country.
But now only a handful remains, "four or five thousand", though this figure is slightly inflated. Rabbi-like protectiveness, seeking safety in numbers, for his flock, as it were maybe? His "microscopic minority", as he affectionately refers to the seven-eight families which remain in the capital.
Exactly three years ago to the day, in the "26/11 attacks" as the violence came to be known, militants running amok made their way to Nariman House in Mumbai, a Jewish synagogue and hostel to kill residents there, none of whom were Indian.
As a precaution now, Judah Hyam is permanently guarded by a functioning Delhi Police patrol car, and rather listless looking armed CRPF jawans peeping from behind sacks of sand. Malekar does not feel under threat. Never has. Protestors usually choose to go the Israeli Embassy, he says. "God is a great guardian," he says.
"There are ten synagogues in Mumbai, some in Muslim areas but there has never been an anti-semitic incident," he says. Malekar's ancient forebears got as far as the Maharashtrian coast while trying to escape Israel two-and-a-half millennia ago.
They believe, with polite conviction, that they belong to the ancient Lost Tribes of Israel, banished by the Neo-Assyrian empire circa 722 BC. Many groups around the world claim this, and not all of them can be right. Some were "discovered" in south India, an anthropological detection by an observant Anglicised Jew and intergrated with the wealthy Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai who built the David Sasson Library and Museum which are still historically rich landmarks of that city.
Some in the Northeast were confirmed Jewish with the aid of DNA tests. But all of this happened over two and a half long millennia, an immemorably long time.
But this ancient lot of Indian Jews are purer in a sense: innocent of the cycle of tragedies that their brethren have lived through, this "other" history of banishments, disenfranchisement, persecution and holocaust. Israel may be now somewhat vindicated - if such a thing were possible - by getting themselves a nation state, geo-political influence and a formidable standing army.
Bene Israel, or the "sons of Israel," the group that Malekar belongs to has the distinction of having lasted all these years without anti-semitic hate and sometimes being mistaken for Christians or Parsis by uncomprehending gentile.
This record of survival for Jewish settlers anywhere in the world is rare - a notion Malekar sanctions with pride and relief. Jews the world over try to retain their identity even if they are not overtly religious. They have built their day to day life here and try to live like they would in a "god-promised land," says Malekar.
Simon Schama, a Jewish British historian too says, the salient feature of the people - when the markers and the supporters of territory, army and institutions of a state are ripped from them, who are always at risk from some monstrous catastrophe around the corner - they created a portable narrative that consists of history part myth, part fable, part, accurate.
Reuben Israel - a Maharashtrian Jew who "feels deeply Jewish". But he does not observe ritualistic Judaism. He was having his daughter married 'by chance' not design to an American Jew whom she met in the US.
The American parents wished to hold the inter-faith wedding at the Judah Hyam. They were initially refused permission as Reuben's wife is Punjabi - Judaism is matrilineal. However, Malekar rescinded his "orthodoxy" for the sake of a rare feast - it would have been the first wedding in several decades at the synagogue.
The good rabbi asked if the community strangers to the Israels could celebrate with them, but this would be a Punjabi-sized wedding already and the 80-seater synagogue would barely cover their own guests.
This compromise on the part of devout Jews seems minuscule when viewed against the one which may Indians who moved to Israel are facing in that country.
There are 80,000 Indian Jews - much more than remain in India - who face their dystopia anew.
They immigrated to Israel between the '50s and '70s and live in its southern part, "bearing the brunt of Hamas attacks", as an Indian national broadsheet said this July when anti-Israel and anti-semite sentiment, besides, was rife all over the world.
"The ongoing battle between Israeli forces and Hamas may seem like a distant battle in a distant land to which India has no connection. In fact, most of these projectiles are landing in what is effectively mini-India."
Southern Israeli towns of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Dimona and Bersheva, are the so called "development towns" or ghettos undergoing gentrification - where immigrant Indians were asked to settle.
Most have been unable to move out, an anthropologist and researcher at Hebrew University, Whalva Weil, has said. There are still "very few Indians" living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, India's Banaras and Bombay.
"Israelis are lazy" - as a Mizo friend put it, who is seeing a Jewish community grow in his state, "why else would they tempt foreigners to come and do their dirty jobs", is his reasoning.
Of course, a large population of immigrant Indians, like in the rest of West Asia and the world, work in Israel's service sector, while a few - those educated or cosmopolitan - hold professional jobs, and live in white suburbia.
Malekar does not allow conversions, he says. The phone rings often and Malekar never takes long to answer to wish someone "happy budday, happy budday" and "shabbat shalom, shabbat shalom" and that prayers were said the previous evening for so and so.
I take in the decor during these interruptions of this squarish, high ceilinged, white-lit with energy-saving bulbs, long floor length cheap-looking drapes, and a minimum of Talmudic kitsch, our conversation interrupted by a ringtone which is a tinny Jewish tune opening with loud noisy horns that rise in pitch and tempo to a crescendo of maddening happiness repeatedly.