Tantrika (25 page)

“Leave me alone!” I screamed. He zipped off.

As I rode into Varanasi, a lanky young man on a bicycle followed me. I screamed at him. He quickly turned down another road. At an intersection, one boy asked another boy on a motorcycle, “Girl?” They flustered me. I stalled.

In my drive back to Jaigahan, I turned into a motorcycle repair shop to replace rearview mirrors cracked when I took a frightening spill on railroad tracks so dangerously aligned with the road the workers told me the crossing claimed several lives a year. A crowd of boys and young men gathered to gawk at this woman who rode through their bazaar on a motorcycle. I knew they were a bored, aimless generation. Uttar Pradesh was one of the country's poorest states, battling high unemployment and low literacy. A hotel manager I'd met in Himachal Pradesh said that the culture of his state wasn't so oppressive as in states such as Uttar Pradesh because “We fear God.”

I knew these boys needed to fear something. I threw my broken rearview mirror at one who kept staring at me. I was just sorry it didn't hit his head. Next time a crowd gathered around me, I daydreamed that I'd tell them, “I'm studying Tantra and will cast a spell on whoever stays.”

When I got back on the road, a guy on a scooter with shades on his face and a weirdo behind him kept playing rabbit with me.

I caught up to him and shouted, “You want to stop? You want to stop?” swerving my bike toward them. Then I lost it. I yelled, “Bhagwan”—the Hindu word for God—“will strike you down.” I told them, “Look in my eyes. I'm giving you the evil eye.” Learning spirituality and descending into road rage. My Tantric teaching.

The sun was setting, the earth was moving when I pulled into Latif Manzil. Death confronted me downstairs. It was a war scene in the rooms where Bluebeard had kept baby chicks in a venture to start a chicken farm. He had put a screen in the window, but only three-fourths of the way up. It seemed that a mongoose had sneaked into the rooms and slaughtered the chicks. They lay dead everywhere, many decapitated.

I wondered why I'd endured hell to get here. When I unlocked the padlock on my door upstairs and stepped into my front room, I knew why. It was because I was going to have a glimpse of heaven. In contrast to the scene downstairs, upstairs we celebrated life. Cheenie Bhai chewed on a branch, stirring it. Cheenie's friends were visiting, three
jungli bhais
and one
apa,
chirping and joyous. Oh! their song! It was so loving. I didn't think it was just the grapes.

A bird hid behind a bale branch climbing toward a
jungli bhai.
Her yellow beak was visible. Fly, I thought, so I can see your silhouette and know what you are. It flew. It wasn't a
bhai
or
apa.
I watched these birds fly, glide, fly, swoop. Four flew west in a U-turn back to the bael tree. Birds in the distance hopped from one branch to the next. I heard a
bhai
before I saw him, singing as a man in a nearby
masjid
broke the air just before sunset with the
magrib azan.
The
junglis
flew away, scattering like the wind. Why?

I wondered so many things about these mountain creatures of flight that had found Jaigahan. Would they die in the summer heat of the village plains? Would I? Would they ever learn to love? Would I?

The voices of societal pressure spoke to me.

Bluebeard's wife told me it was
zaruri,
necessary, for a woman to get married. Yes, I thought unkindly, so I could get plump like so many women making babies for their slacker husbands. The year before, I'd let these pressures get to me. This time I simply told her that if she cared, it was her
zimmeydaari,
or responsibility, to find me a husband, and then I walked
away. A
naga baba
sitting on the banks of the Ganga told me to seek shanti, or peace, from others, but if they didn't offer it, to walk away. Another afternoon, Bluebeard's best friend darted into my room and started rifling through the top drawers of my dressers. “Is the Qur'an here?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I just want to know if the Qur'an is here.”

He finally told me what he was doing. I found a Kali statue that Rachel Momani had packed into one of her trunks. It was a stunning clay piece with the image of Kali stomping men, symbolizing her destruction, not of men but rather of evil and ignorance. I put it on a dresser. Bluebeard's friend worried that a Qur'an he remembered in the drawers was sitting
below
the statue, a sin to many. I tried to practice nonattachment and packed the Kali statue away, but as the days spilled into other expressions of oppressiveness, I searched for Kali again, sad that I had misplaced her.

I had a disaster when my Shyam Voltage Stabilizer from Jaunpur burned from a burst of high voltage. It didn't cut off, as the stabilizer
walla
said it would. I documented my case to Mr. Prakash, the stabilizer
walla,
and pulled out all the stops, even quoting Hindu mythology to tell him that the goddess Lakshmi wouldn't be pleased with his lack of professionalism. I remembered that five hundred rupees I owed the druggie
naga baba.
“Along with your worldly responsibility to me, you have a karmic debt to pay.”

Bluebeard was back to his negative self. “The stabilizer
walla
made a fool out of you.” I told him he wasn't being supportive, calling me a fool. He responded, “But he
did
make a fool out of you.”

Thinking I was being too bold doing things on my own, I accepted Bluebeard's recommendation and bought a stabilizer from a distant relative with a shop in Khetasari. By morning, even this stabilizer turned out to be a piece of junk. They were all scam artists, these bazaar
wallas.
I sought solace from the one man I could trust, my father. “Asra
bayti,”
he told me over the phone, “don't be frustrated. You can't even buy pure milk in India. You can't even find pure red pepper.”

I left Jaighan to escort Rashida Khala from Lucknow to Hyderabad, where her daughter lived. I visited my kind cousin-aunt, Najma Khala,
and her husband one last time. They'd been a pillar of positive energy in Jaigahan, always smiling and encouraging. I couldn't stop the tears of frustration from spilling when I sat with Najma Khala. “It's so hard to do alone,” I cried, “with everyone trying to rip you off.” The other day I'd even found Bluebeard's nephew going through my wallet when he was supposed to be searching for grapes for the Cheenies. I knew he was just a boy, but the frustrations ran so deep. Najma Khala couldn't endure me crying. She wept with me. I wiped my face and returned to Latif Manzil to pack the Cheenies and my boxes of books.

As I pulled away in a Mahindra Jeep with our driver, Abu Saad, Bluebeard stated the obvious. “She is mentally upset.”

I didn't contest his assessment. I had created a calm and peaceful place for myself here, and I wondered why I'd engulfed myself in trouble and suffering. I knew it was because I had a vision. I wanted this house to be a home. If I, daring of heart, could not make it a successful home, then how could my Safiyyah and Samir? I wanted this to be a place where they could live and prosper. I wanted this to be a place where the young of heart, the old in age, the vibrant in spirit, the dejected in spirit all could prosper and enjoy the sunsets so much that they, too, would be prompted to learn that the sun didn't really set. Oh, the sun was a beacon. It was telling me that life could sustain itself. Its orange blaze announced that I could conquer. Or, yes, I could flame out.

I
T WAS SOMETHING
to be back in civilization.

The Baskin-Robbins sign greeted me as I entered Jahingarabad Palace in Lucknow again. My aunt, Rashida Khala, welcomed me in her quiet way, eager to hear my latest tales from the village. We sat at the dining table, and I told her about the railroad tracks, the birds, Bluebeard, the stabilizers, and Najma Khala's tears of empathy. Lucy called me in the night and cheered on my efforts in the village. “They haven't had a woman shake things up like this,” she told me in her singsong voice. “Go for it. Fight. Make it right. Just don't get emotional. Don't raise your voice.” She learned this traveling through Asia. “Walk with an air about you. Have a sense of arrogance.” It's just what my brother advised. Have enough arrogance so that no one pushes you around.

I needed to hear this advice as Khala and I planned our travels to Hyderabad, the city of my father, where I had lived before crossing the Atlantic for America. Before we went, I had a day of tasks. The first was getting our train tickets. Before I'd left for my first journey to India a year before, my father had spun horror stories about the hassles of buying train tickets—long lines and seats never confirmed. But Akhtarul Uncle had shown me the counter at the Lucknow station where they book tickets for foreign travelers, journalists, military soldiers, and freedom fighters, Indians who fought the British. It was a short line, plus you got priority confirmations on bookings. I got my booking, but they wouldn't confirm Khala's seat. I climbed into another bicycle rickshaw to go back to Hazratganj to the local Indian Railways headquarters. For twenty rupees, about fifty cents, the rickshaw
walla
exerted every muscle in his body to carry me more than a mile through traffic.

At the headquarters, I was told to go into an office. I found a woman behind the desk. I stood there in her office and just admired her.

She was only thirty, but she ran a department overseeing a thousand employees, virtually all of them male. From her name, I could tell she was Hindu. I asked her to whom her
mandir
was dedicated.

“Durga,” she said. She had gone to a Durga temple in Madhya Pradesh just a week earlier with her husband and child. I thought about my tears in Jaigahan.

“Do you cry?” I asked her.

She nodded her head. She cried.

“Did the goddesses cry?”

“Of course not. But we are not goddesses. We aspire to be like the goddesses, but we are human.”

That was true, wasn't it? We weren't goddesses despite all the best intentions and marketing pitches. I thought of the T-shirts for sale the year before at Gabriel Brothers, a Morgantown discount store that dressed our small town in high fashion, with “Goddess” across the chest, hanging next to the T-shirts we bought for Safiyyah and her birthday slumber party girlfriends with “Princess” across their fronts. There was all the talk about the goddess within us. She was there, to be awakened, but the truth was we were ultimately defined, too, by human frailties. It was ego and
maya,
illusion, to think anything more. We didn't have to feel guilty about crying.

I secured Khala's seat, and I also got the order sent from a railway official to fix the train track outside my village that had caused me to topple. I felt a great sense of accomplishment, and, having forgotten to eat lunch and having run myself ragged all day, I promptly went back to Jahingarabad Palace to do what I had permission to do: cry.

Khala and I boarded our train to Hyderabad, along with the Cheenies. Together, we made the one-night journey to Hyderabad and settled into a cabin, where Khala slept elegantly with a Lucknowi
chikan dupatta
turned into a bed sheet. In lower berth number 19, I read Indian news magazines and trash magazines to discover that there was a sex life to India, even if I was too shy to talk to anyone about it.
Savvy,
a women's magazine, told the tales of Barmy Swami, who taught Tantra in Delhi with his wife, like the Mr. and Mrs. Tantra of America whom I'd met in Santa Cruz, having sex with people to heal them.
The Week,
a
newsweekly, told me about Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's love lives chronicled in a sexy new novel by a Calcutta novelist who was candid about sexuality in a way I hadn't read about before in India:

The Week
also had an interview with Sudhir Kakar, described as India's “best known psychoanalyst,” who had just released
Ecstasy,
a novel that examined the mystical experience woven loosely through the lives of Indian yogis Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda. He said, “There are only two subjects worth writing about: God and sex.”

India was a place where sexuality spilled out of the breasts of women whose sari blouses embraced them like the skin that peels so easily off ripe mangos, but yet we pretended they didn't and looked the other way, after digesting an eyeful.

 

Hyderabad was an oasis like I hadn't yet experienced in India.

Khala's daughter, Nafees Apa, lived in a sprawling two-story house on a quiet road in Banjara Hills with her husband, Munna Bhai, a businessman. The postal code was 500034. Like Beverly Hills 90210, life there could be out of episodes from
Banjara Hills 500034.
The city had gotten new money with its rise as “Cyberabad,” the high-tech capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Former President Clinton had stopped there in his stint through India the year before, the local government folks sweeping beggars off the street for his visit. One of Nafees Apa's daughters lived in London, wed in an arranged marriage to a rich investment banker. The other divided her time between the U.S. and Calcutta, wed in an arranged marriage to the son of a tea plantation tycoon. Her son worked as an investment banker in Manhattan. Inside, Bally shoes sat by a doorway, Shakespeare lined a bookshelf, along with translations of the Qur'an, and a wide-screen TV dominated an upstairs sitting area.

Nafees Apa decorated her house with the gentle touches of Ikebana, a style of Japanese flower arranging she studied in courses in Hyderabad, although she would not show up for her organization's photo shoot with the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, so strict was she about purdah. But she was also a modern Muslim woman and ran a boutique out of her house, for which I created a Web site.

Munna Bhai named his house here at Banjara Hills 500034 after his mother, calling it Tahira Manzil, Tahira meaning pure,
manzil,
also meaning “a resting place.” Instead of an ashram, I found my own
madrassa,
a Muslim place of learning, here with a lush tropical garden in the backyard.

Our day started with the
azan,
or call, for the morning's
fajr
prayer from a clock marked “Made in Taiwan.” It was barely 5
A.M
. The sun hadn't yet risen. The curtains were drawn closed. It was quiet in the house. I laid my
janamaz,
my prayer rug, next to Khala, a bundle of white, praying as she did seated on her
janamaz,
her joints too worn for her to prostrate from a standing position. When she touched her forehead to the ground she was the image of a white kitten curled up before God.

Our prayers done, Choti Momani, Munna Bhai's mother, drew the curtains open. She was known as “small aunt” to me because she was the younger matriarch ruling the roost in our family hill station house of Panchgani. I went outside and laid a cloth and did yoga, as Khala walked slowly around the garden, moving her lips silently as she did
zikr
on her
tasbi,
her fingers methodically moving her prayer beads with each utterance. I bathed and wrote till breakfast at 9
A.M
., when we gathered to eat together at the dining table.

All around me in Hyderabad I saw reminders of how a girl's life can be so different from the one that I'd had.

One morning, I read the
Deccan Chronicle
to Khala. Andhra Pradesh villagers were selling their newborn daughters to an adoption agency who resold the girls to Westerners. One doctor allegedly removed a girl's cornea to make her a more sympathetic adoption and presumably make money off the cornea, too.

“Tawba. Tawba,”
said Khala disapprovingly, using the Arabic word from the Qur'an for seeking forgiveness. She quoted from another part of the Qur'an where it states that baby girls are to be valued. She wasn't
amused at the antics of the woman who ran the ring that bought baby girls and sold them. “Stupid. Doesn't she know? Women are made from girls.”

Khala had never borne the son so valued in traditional Indian culture. “What did you feel about having all girls?”

“I didn't think anything. I just prayed to God that they become responsible and good.”

Did she want sons?

“I thought of every son as my son.”

Another day, the newspaper told us about a Pakistani-born woman in the United States who divorced her husband and won
Working Woman'
s annual award as a single mother juggling her job as a scientist and her care for her young daughter. Khala smirked listening to the story. “In America, they give women awards. In India, they destroy even their
jhopris,”
makeshift homes made of cardboard and tin.

She reminded me of a woman I met in Jahingarabad Palace. She was sitting on the terrace in a black
burqa,
a widow who embroidered Lucknowi
chikan
for Rehan Bhai, despite fingers bent awkwardly from a birth deformity. She was a single mother supporting herself and her three sons because she refused to accept the condition from her husband's brother that she live in the village if she wanted support from his family. Her boys wouldn't get an education there. Alas, as it was, they were all under the age of twelve and working. She was constantly harassed, her
jhopri
of a home regularly destroyed because it was built illegally.

Many mornings, a fifteen-year-old girl named Kulsum lingered when she came to sweep the floor in my bedroom. Nafees Apa had raised her since she was young, training her for her job as a maidservant and trying, as best she could, to teach her how to read and write. Kulsum was bright enough to say phrases like, “You are stupid!” to the
bua,
an elderly woman servent, in the kitchen and curious enough to follow me as I found photos of her favorite Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan, on the Internet. She had a fiery spirit not found in a lot of girls. One day she told me about her visits back to her village in the state of Karnataka, just across the border, where girls started to wear saris at the age of ten. She pranced around in
shalwar kameezes
and dared to ride her younger brother's bike and talked with the quick yap that she had learned in the big city.

“Is she a girl or a boy?” villagers asked about her. I'd heard that before, said about me.

Another morning I read another story about a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl, Fareeda, whose parents sold her to a broker for five hundred rupees, about ten dollars, and the promise of a house, to be married to a Saudi. They thought her husband might be a Saudi sheikh. These sales were usually rackets for one-night stands where men from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States wed women in “temporary marriages.”

I ventured into the narrow alleys of old Hyderabad to meet this girl with a local Muslim woman, Rehana Sultana, who was an attorney and advocate for Muslim girls and women. The lawyer ran a school trying to educate the local girls. She said the story of this bridal sale was common among families who saw no option other than making an income from their daughters. The fifteen-year-old girl lived in one room with her parents and eight brothers and sisters. Her father was feeble with tuberculosis and sat in the corner, keeping to himself. I talked to her about her journey to Bombay. She giggled about all the firsts she did—riding the train, watching TV, and eating food cooked for her.

A Saudi saw her but rejected her. She was too dark skinned. Police raided the operation and returned her home.

There were sacrifices of the female in so many forms. On the road the year before, I had read in the newspaper about a tigress named Saki who had lived in captivity in the Hyderabad zoo. One night culprits sneaked in and slaughtered her, some said for her blood, others said as part of a Tantric ritual. I went to the zoo one day to pay my respects. The Safari Park bus slipped through a gate that sat beside the cage where Saki had lived and died. The gate closed behind us. It reminded me of the maximum-security prison I'd visited in Minnesota to interview murderers who belonged to a bonsai club where they twisted and turned plants into the creations they wanted. Seeing how Saki was a captive in life and death made me sad, for such a fate could meet any one of our wild spirits if evil came our way.

I had last visited Hyderabad for my brother's wedding. There, I'd met for the first time the glorious blend of innocence, smiles, and kindness that made up my sister-in-law's family.

Her family still lived in the same narrow apartment flat above the Life Café that her father ran in a neighborhood of Hyderabad, Dilsukhnagr, which had become a busy bazaar with a rush of traffic outside. Sadly, Bhabi's father had died suddenly earlier in the year from a stroke, leaving behind his widow and nine children, six daughters and three sons. The married daughters converged on the apartment when I visited, and I was engulfed in their sincerity, her brother dashing off to bring me back Cokes, her mother cooking my favorite foods,
tamatar
chutney, a tomato chutney, and kebab, and her sisters dressing me up as a bride to take photos on the roof. They were facing struggles to survive as a family after the death of their patriarch. As in most traditional families, Bhabi's married sisters lived at their husbands' houses with their in-laws. One of Bhabi's sisters tearfully told me the tale of her domineering in-laws and rushed to watch a soap opera to try to learn how to assert herself at her husband's house. Their father ran their house as an orthodox Muslim home, the girls and women behind a literal purdah, or curtain, through which they had to sneak peeks of the street downstairs. One night I taught one of Bhabi's sisters how to use the Internet. She was smart enough to set up a Yahoo chat ID as “Sony,” not her real name.