Abstract
Early on in my days in the West Bengali village of Mangaldihi, I met a woman called Mejo Ma, or “Middle Mother,” sitting in the dusty lane in front of her home. She could not stop complaining about clinging. She worried that her ties to her children, to her grandchildren, to her own body, to the pleasures of this life were so strong that they would keep her soul shackled to her world beyond the appropriate time for moving on and dying. “How will I cut my ties to all these kids and things and go?” she lamented. The oldest