Tantrika (14 page)

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight,” he said.

“How do you handle the issues that most healthy twenty-eight-year-olds deal with?” He understood what I meant.

“I had a nightmare last night.” In it, a beautiful woman had hovered over his body as he lay in his bed. He did in his dream what he did in reality. He broke her down into cells and blood and veins. She pulled her hand back. She slapped him hard against the face. He awoke from the slap. He felt a sting on his face, in reality. He admitted he has lived a nightmare since the day he was ordained. He thought his ordination
would be a moment of transcendence, passing into a new life in which his spirit could soar. A magic transformation didn't happen. When we had to say good-bye, I was convinced he would leave the monastery during this vacation away. To my surprise, he didn't. But he did some time later.

Matthew slipped into the front seat. He was trying out the monastery to see if he would want to be ordained as a monk there. But he didn't like the energy at the monastery. The young monks exuded hostility, he felt, not calm, because of the way they had to handle their sexuality. It didn't feel right to me, either. I appreciated the Tantric principle of channeling our sexual energy into our entire being, not necessarily to consummate its existence, but at least to recognize it as a legitimate part of ourselves, using its powers for the creative and intellectual ambitions of our crown chakras, that soft spot in the head where our dreams and ambitions lived.

I made a pilgrimage to my bodhisattva friend's serene home, tucked into the woods in Virginia. There I smeared calamine lotion on my arms. I'd gotten poison ivy pulling the weeds at the monastery. “Your body is probably releasing toxins,” my friend said, always one to see lessons in everything, even poison ivy.

At her house, I cocked my head to study the books on a shelf in her walk-in closet. She didn't have shelves upon shelves of reading, as I did at my home in Morgantown, many of the books unread and most of them beyond my understanding. My friend kept just a select few books she had studied carefully to know their teachings thoroughly. She told me we could all develop our powers of intuition through the purifying of our minds in meditation. “It doesn't mean clairvoyance. It's about intuition.” I was more certain that I had chosen well in deciding to pursue the light, not the dark, side of Tantra.

In meditation that night, I saw the image of Iftikhar Mamoo when he lay dead in the hospital. I remembered the wrenching tears that seemed to swell up from my belly. Before the retreat, I had been writing daily to an old boyfriend, even though I never got a single reply from him. Now I no longer consumed myself with this obsession. I was free.

Safiyyah, my princess guru, helped me turn a tiny room under the stairs into a meditation room, much like the one Chawla Aunty had
under her stairs in Delhi. I told Safiyyah, “Bring your favorite things.” She brought chocolate chip cookies and a stuffed animal.

It was time to continue my search. The Dalai Lama was going to be leading an important Tantric Tibetan Buddhist ceremony called the Kalachakra initiation at a monastery soaring amid the clouds in northern India near its border with China. But floods had closed some of the roads to the monastery. Was it possible to get there? I searched the Internet and phoned travel agencies in India. They said it could be done. I meditated on the question of whether I should organize this trip with Lucy and Esther, who were booked to land in Bombay that week for a trip through India. Both would be on breaks from their studies in England, Lucy studying psychology and philosophy at the University of Leeds and Esther starting her studies at the prestigious Royal Academy of Art. The travel agent I'd picked up in Delhi during my first visit gave me the phone number of a man in Bombay who could buy train tickets for Lucy and Esther to Delhi. I made the arrangements from Morgantown. It didn't seem like much, but this act of independence felt huge. I didn't have to depend on anyone. I was self-reliant.

My reality check in America made me feel strong enough to avoid becoming ensnared in the expectations others had of me in India. If I lived in India as I lived in America, then I could chart my own course. My meditations on death released me from others' expectations of me. I wanted to be free in this lifetime, not shackled by being dishonest about myself to the world. For now, I recognized that I was a woman who wasn't intimidated by flying into a new city, renting a car, and hitting the road. Lucy wrote to tell me she agreed. “I feel that what is really important on this journey is us being in charge of our own destiny. The driving thing will give us that independence that you have to strive for in India.”

Lucy sent her e-mail twice “as a chant.” “It is I who am awestruck, gaping with inspiration. For even in the muted silence one can hear the echoes of the whispering souls, calling us to our own paths. Wisen our intentions and be bold in our deliberations. I'm on the path, always floating along beside you.” That was a good thing. I knew I'd need her so that I wouldn't lose my mind.

L
UCY
, E
STHER
,
AND
I were planning the absurd, something unheard of in our family, something never before dared by any in our shared Ansari ancestry.

The three of us were about to travel alone, unescorted, into the farthest reaches of India, the foothills of the Himalayas in the country's lush state of Himachal Pradesh. “Let demons run scared and courage be bold,” Lucy wrote me before setting out for India. She and Esther, in their twenties, were more than a decade younger than I, but we were sisters in spirit, connected by our love of the mystical awakened in us by their father. We were going to have a male driver, but we planned to chart the course. We were going to stay in hotels alone. And, of all shames, we weren't going to call home, except once.

“I
can't
believe the Ahn-
sah
-ri girls are here together in India!” yelled Esther, pouncing on me when I greeted her and Lucy in Delhi at Nizamuddin Railway Station, named for a great Sufi mystic. Our train ticket agent came through in Bombay, and they had made it to Delhi without any trouble.

I already had the driver who was going to take us to a place called Ki, a village in the Himalayan foothills where the Dalai Lama was going to give special teachings to an estimated twenty thousand Buddhist faithful, many of whom had trekked for days through the mountains to illegally cross into India from Tibet. It was the closest the Dalai Lama had gotten to Tibet since he fled in the 1950s when China moved to stamp out Buddhism. Lucy and Esther knew even less than I did about the Kalachakra initiation.

The truth was that I wasn't quite sure what I'd get out of this Kalachakra initiation.

Legend goes that a Tibetan king, dealing with fears over his impending death, summoned a Tantric guru, Padmasambhava, to Tibet to teach him the ancient Tantric practices meant to help overcome fear of death. Padmasambhava ditched his beautiful consort, Princess Mandarava, with whom he'd been frolicking and of course meditating. She promptly died upon his departure. No worry for Padmasambhava. He made a big name for himself with the Tibetan king, wasting no time finding himself a new consort in a Tibetan deity, Yeshe Tsogyel, given to him by the happy king. Because of the Indian guru Padmasambhava, Tibetan Buddhism became Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, the path for which the Dalai Lama was now the spiritual head.

Esther and Lucy appreciated one simple fact: Princess Mandarava got a raw deal.

Buddhist Tantra is a branch of the Mahayana school. It teaches that with intense compassion, we can all reach Buddhahood quickly. It's critical not to be defined by the everyday ego with its infinite problems. We're supposed to visualize ourselves in the images of enlightened beings. It's not a crash course, though. First, you're supposed to be experienced in the principles of Buddhist thinking, such as the nature of suffering, the impermanence of existence, compassion for all beings, and the realization of selflessness. Then you're ready to practice Tantra. I, of course, hadn't yet unpacked my boxes in my parents' garage.

The official Dalai Lama Web site on the Kalachakra told me the word
kalachakra
meant “wheels of time.” It was an entire cosmology and Buddhist system of exercises for developing awareness. The goal: enlightenment. They called it a spiritual state beyond all worries. It sounded like
sukoon
to me, the peace of mind I'd been seeking since my earliest childhood days.

The Kalachakra initiation is the largest of the Buddhist rituals, and the Dalai Lama presides over it every year. It's supposed to be about spreading peace and tolerance. It's a big deal to get initiated. It means you've been blessed to move forward on the Tantric Tibetan Buddhist path. Plus, you learn some of the practices of meditation that are supposed to make you a better person. Not everyone has to get initiated. But for
those who do, the ritual gives them a special blessing to promote peace and harmony internally and in the world.

Buddha is said to have taught many ways to transform your consciousness and attain enlightenment. Tantra's techniques of meditation and exercise are supposed to be one of the most effective. Or, at least, that's what Tantrics say. Buddhism rests on the principles of Four Noble Truths: suffering; the arising of suffering; the end of suffering; and the path toward the end of suffering. Buddhism teaches that liberation of the spirit, nirvana and the end of suffering, comes from freeing the spirit from negative elements such as greed, envy, and anger.

I was starting to understand that the teachings in Canada and Santa Cruz took students to the X, Y, and Z of Tantra in one weekend with blissful sexual union with another as the reward, but I now saw there was a lot of A, B, and C that had to come first. That's why the true Tantric discipline had to be practiced alone first to overcome greed, envy, and anger, the attaching emotions that make relationships miserable.

To get admitted into Tantra, you're supposed to get initiated. This happens in a ritual blessing of body, speech, and spirit by a teacher who is connected to the meditation Buddha. At the Kalachakra, that would be none other than the Dalai Lama. The teacher initiates students into special forms of meditation that are supposed to become a part of daily practice.

One thing I liked about the Dalai Lama's thoughts on this concept was that he said we should study our possible gurus for twelve years before deciding whether to go under their wings. My friendship with my bodhisattva friend began in the summer of 1986, and I figured it took that many years for me to watch her and recognize the wisdom in her guidance. Before I had departed for India a second time, my friend gave me a nugget of wisdom that stuck with me whenever I doubted a decision I'd made. “Don't question reality,” she told me. To accept reality meant living in the present moment without flashbacks wondering why the past had turned out the way it had.

Lucy and Esther and I drove on, hitting the Grand Trunk Road built hundreds of years ago linking the Indian subcontinent over sixteen hundred miles, from Calcutta in India's east through Delhi to Amritsar in northern India and into Pakistan and Afghanistan. I didn't know yet that
I would embark on this same route three times, each time with a different teacher, each time with different lessons.

Seventeenth-century European travelers used to call it the Long Walk. Sher Shah Suri, a sixteenth-century ruler of the Indian subcontinent, engineered the construction of this bold highway project to link trade and communication across his empire. In 1947, it was the path of escape for millions on both sides of the subcontinent's new dividing line. For us, it was a crowded highway with blaring lorries, the trucks of the subcontinent, painted bright colors. We passed the Parakeet Tourist Complex, a funny name that lodged in my mind. Lucy looked out the window and remarked, “Oh, there's an elephant.” It was no surprise in India. We were following the trail of Rudyard Kipling, who set much of his novel
Kim
on the road, calling it “such a river of life as exists nowhere else in the world.” Without fear, we told our driver to pull into a
dhaba,
as roadside restaurants were called, places where lorry drivers, not three Western women on a road trip with a Sikh driver, could rest. But we were modern Tantrikas, aspiring to be
dakinis,
with more than Swiss Army knives. Lucy pulled out a traveling Clinique soap dish whenever we stopped at a
dhaba
for our staple
chawal
and
dal,
rice and lentils. Esther carried a Scooby Doo soap holder.

It was a blur of new driving etiquette on the road, marked by signs that commanded, “Blow Horn.” That was how drivers signaled they were about to pass, even though there were turn indicators in vehicles. “Use Dipper at Night.” High beams were “dippers,” and drivers were supposed to flash them before passing. Forget the turn indicators. As we passed through the city of Chandigarh, our driver pulled over so we could appreciate the Rose Garden. “The Rose Garden. Very nice.” Our
Lonely Planet
told us it was Asia's largest rose garden, stretching over twenty-seven acres with more than seventeen thousand plants and sixteen hundred types of roses. We walked about a half acre, soaking in a long landscape of terrace, before it started to rain. We ducked under an awning next to a juice
walla.
Three portly middle-aged Indian women sat in the back, sipping their juice, also avoiding the rain. They could have been us, just born into different incarnations. One of the women studied my face as I talked to them about my inquiries into Tantra. She told her
friends, “You can see the Kundalini in her eyes.” The Kundalini was the serpent introduced to me in Canada that lay coiled in our sexual chakra, ready to unwind and unleash its energy throughout our systems. Of course, my eyes were probably just bloodshot from wearing my contact lenses too long. Our juice sister said she practiced breathing techniques to uncoil her Kundalini.

“What kind of shakti does it give you?”

“It gives me the power to run my family,” she said.

Not so convinced about the Kundalini uncoiled within me, the driver let me drive barely ten minutes before taking the wheel again. I didn't like him much. We wound around curves as we climbed into the Himalayas. With the sunset a couple of hours behind us, the driver pulled into the parking lot of a place called the Hotel Hilltop outside the town of Bilaspur in District Swarghat. It was a government lodge run by the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation Ltd., the type of two-star hotels my childhood friend Sumita had advised me to trust. My love affair with Indian government tourism lodges and their role in the liberation of the lone female traveler started here at the Hotel Hilltop.

In the parking lot, our driver told us he could keep driving if we wanted. “Whatever you wish,” he said.

We conferred. “Yes, we'd like to drive through the night,” I told him.

He started listing all the reasons he shouldn't drive through the night. There wouldn't be another hotel for many miles. It was too dark and dangerous. So, in fact, we really didn't have a choice. Classic. I liked him even less. We then performed our huge act of liberation. We checked into a hotel. We were on the road in India without a male chaperone. In the mind-set of many a family on the subcontinent, the driver could have been a rapist. If not him, surely someone would turn out to be a rapist, because that was what happened to women who stayed alone in hotels.

Our Bible on this journey was a book,
Passionate Enlightenment,
by a University of Virginia academic, Miranda Shaw, who chronicled the philosophies of
dakinis,
the magical goddesses of Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, also known as sky dancers because they are free of the conventions and restrictions of worldly existence. Lucy and I looked at each
other as I read. We hated to be conceited, but we acknowledged what we were both thinking. “That's us,” I scribbled in the margins.

The next morning, not raped, we continued on, escaping an avalanche of rocks on the road in Mandi, at the junction of the Kullu and Kangra Valleys. I saw a beautiful India I'd hardly seen except for a glimpse on our rides to our family hill station house in Panchgani outside Bombay. We climbed into mountains whose lush green was occasionally broken by gushes of waterfalls spilling down as if from the heavens. A rope bridge crossed a river beside the road. I wanted to walk on this rope bridge, but we were three
dakinis
on a mission. It was a virtual entertainment show on the road. A truck, marked “Highly Inflammable,” blew dark diesel smoke onto our Tata Sumo, something like a sport utility vehicle. A woman walked on the side of the road with her
dupatta
tied around her forehead.

“Rambo style,” Lucy quipped, just before we passed a road safety sign that proclaimed: “Darling I want you but not so Fast.”

We started passing the first of many storefronts marked English Wine Shop, a commodity we couldn't figure out, no matter how hard we tried. As we climbed into the mountains, it felt as if we were headed to a place where the clouds met the earth. It was fitting that, on this road trip, I learned the Urdu word for clouds,
badal.
A Holiday Inn in the tourist town of Manali fell along this journey to the heavens.

The terrain began to change as we entered a treacherous stretch of road called the Rohtang Pass. By winter, it was virtually impossible to travel through here. Boulders became the flowers. We saw a sign for “Rohtang Chinese fast food and veg chow mein.” Road workers stacked rocks into beautiful square piles. This was a place that inspired reflections upon clouds. We stared out our windows at one formation.

“It's an elephant,” I said.

“I think it might be a pig,” said Esther. I deferred to the artist in Esther.

Somehow, we hadn't gotten an accurate sense of how long this trip would take. It was time for another layover when we found ourselves in a virtual ghost town of a village that could have been a scene out of the moonscape of Star Wars, only this one with businessmen who banged on the door guest house door we locked.
“Baji, baji,”
meaning “sister, sister,”
one of them pleaded, asking us to open the door. “No worry. We're Indian businessmen.”

We were in Koksar, a tiny village at a height of eleven thousand feet. It was a gateway to Lahaul and Spiti, the largest district in Himachal Pradesh, an expanse of high mountains and slender valleys surrounded by Ladakh and Tibet to the north, the village of Kinnaur to the east, and the Kullu Valley, which we'd just left, to the south. Villagers used the frozen river, covered with snow, during winters for mule traffic. We were in awe of the alpine flowers and herds of sheep and goats grazing nearby. A pretty woman with a pretty baby in pink was beating clothes with a broom.

Lucy had taught me how to wrap my
dupatta
so that only my eyes would be visible, a symbol of a devout Muslim girl, but her trick wasn't for the sake of modesty but because of the dust storms that swirled around us as we continued our climb on razor's edge through the rocky mountain passes. It was a virtual geography and geology lesson on the road. There was Chandra Tal Lake before us, “the lake of the moon” in Hindi, the Himalayas towering over it from the north, a magical place created by the depression of a glacier probably at the end of the last ice age. We rode through treacherous mountain passes and rivers with names like Pagal Nali, “Crazy River.”