“Why did you leave me just like that? Who will scold the children now and push them to go to school?” Mr. Kumar wailed at the feet of his wife.
But he couldn’t afford to be entirely lost in grief yet. The body of his mother was yet to be found. He bent over to pick up his daughter for one last embrace. Bhumi wore a yellow top, and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink band.
“Let her sleep,” Nitin, Mr. Kumar’s oldest son, told him, pulling the girl away from his father to lay her back on the slab so they could continue the search.
“I don’t know when I will find my mother’s body,” he said, moving on with the search. “I want to do their last rites together.”
Mr. Kumar’s mother, Jaimanti, was the family’s matriarch. And she was its main devotee to the guru, keeping his posters at home and frequenting his sermons.
Suraj Pal, a former policeman who refashioned himself as a spiritual guru known as Narayan Sakar Hari or Bhole Baba, catered to women like her, families like hers: on the margins of India’s deep economic inequality, and at the bottom its rigid caste hierarchy.