Tantrika (26 page)

One afternoon we answered an advertisement for a possible bride for one of Bhabi's brothers. Her parents advertised her as a twenty-two-year-old divorcee. “Her husband wasn't a man,” the prospective bride's aunt told my sister-in-law's aunt over the phone.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Nobody seemed to know for sure, but it was supposed to suggest the bride was still a virgin, although married.

We went to a house that looked auspicious. It was painted soft pink with doors the kind of blue they used everywhere on the island of Santorins in Greece. We sat in the front room. The aunt looked plain and weary. Her husband had just gotten his U.S. visitor's visa application rejected. Bhabi's aunt asked to see the girl. She walked into the room. I was shocked. She was draped in a stop-sign red sari with gold fringe, and she looked more like a weary forty-year-old than a twenty-two-year-old maybe-virgin. It was all quite sad.

One of Bhabi's sisters sat down next to her, talking to her about her studies. There was nothing virginal about this bride. Even the red told us
so. Another of Bhabi's sisters asked to see the possible bride's hair. I didn't get it. Then she asked her to stand up so she could survey her height. She tried to look under the gold border of the sari.

“Heels?” she asked.

It reminded me of a slave auction. I felt sad.

Not that I had any better alternatives. I was searching for love in a cyberworld where
are
is
r, for
is
4,
and a “Paki boy” looks for a girl from Ireland, America, or France. I was searching the Yahoo personals.

Khala often visited when I retreated upstairs to write, shuffling upstairs in sandals marked “Chips.” As I tried one morning to tug a bottle of hair oil out of her hands so I could rub the oil into her hair, I asked her, “Why not open your heart?”

She gave me a playful smile and responded, “You should keep your heart closed.”

I knew why she said this. We had to protect our hearts. The newspapers in India were filled with spiritual teachings, and one day, tucked between advice from tarot card readings, astrological horoscopes, and feng shui, I found an article that examined a book about desire by a man named J. Cornfield. He was actually Jack Kornfield, a popular Buddhist teacher in the West. He said there were two types of desire, skillful desire inspired by love, compassion, creativity, and wisdom and painful desire, which was defined by greed, grasping, inadequacy, and longing. I had painful desire down. He suggested following the advice of the shamans and Buddha and naming what we feared as a step toward gaining power over it.

Buddha had done it, saying, “I know you, Mara,” to the god of darkness.

I thought about this idea. I settled on calling the loneliness and despair that I felt and feared “Jungli Apa,” inspired by the wild parakeets of Jaigahan. I knew I wasn't alone when I read an e-mail from Kirsten, the cook at the West Virginia forest monastery who had taught me death meditation as a way of bringing reality to expectations so that, conceivably, we can love with skillful desire. She was trying to apply this strategy in her latest relationship with the man who had invited her to vacation with him almost a year earlier while I was at the monastery. She admitted that it had been a painful relationship. She cried every day for four months because the relationship with her boyfriend wasn't calm.

The year before, I thought that maybe I would take a path alone in this world, having failed to find a romance in which to safely and fully love. But this year had shown me the lone path wasn't easy. I wanted a supportive, fruitful, spiritual relationship in which I could create a family, children, an inspiration for myself and my husband. Maybe even a little Sunday sex. I was thinking, maybe, that I wanted to pursue an arranged marriage, modern style. One morning as Khala lay on her bed, I told her that I thought this world was too difficult to traverse alone. She listened quietly. I lay down on a bedroll below her, the ceiling fan whirring slowly above our heads. We both slept.

I wrote most days until 1
P.M
. when Kulsum called me for lunch. Then, it was
azan
for
zohar
prayer when supposedly anything you ask for is received. Then, a nap. I wrote for another hour, followed by
asr,
my favorite
namaz,
because it sounded so much like my name.

Khala and I walked around the block at 6
P.M
. She said prayers to keep a stray dog away from her. We were back for
magrib azan
at sunset. I sat. I wrote.
Isha azan.
Dinner. Sleep. The order was soothing. All the while, Choti Momani crocheted and Khala shuffled with her
tasbi,
pushing the beads with the edge of her fingers with every silent utterance. After a couple of weeks, I awakened at 5
A.M
. feeling so strong and so full of energy it was as if God himself had touched me. The anxieties that plagued me had dissipated in the order of this home.

“How did you get your strength?” I asked Choti Momani one afternoon as she crocheted. She and another aunt, named Bari Momani, meaning “elder aunt,” had raised two generations of children, educating them with matriarchal power in Panchgani, the boys for careers from Wall Street to London and the girls for successful marriages. She looked up at me and smiled. “From all of you. From the children. From God.” She told me that she left her worries with God when she prayed. I wondered aloud about her experience when she prayed.

Khala snapped at me in her gentle way. “Stop thinking about things that happen in the mind when you pray. Just pray.”

One morning, I didn't come down for prayer. Khala said she came upstairs to check on me twice. I lay in bed, wondering how to find contentment in my love life. I hadn't yet found the answer on this journey. Khala didn't know what I was thinking about. But she knew that ruminations weren't productive. “Sit wastefully, and wasteful thoughts come to you,” Khala told me. “The devil is always there to show you the wrong path.”

I always lost my bearings after a relationship ended, the most recent being a dalliance with a man I'd met at the Maha Kumbh Mela, an American surfer living in Costa Rica. I had gone to Gujarat with him to an ashram, where I climbed great heights to a Tantric shrine in the Girnar Hills and wept at his departure, even though I actually was relieved to see him go. In my meditations at the ashram, I could feel the spirit of the women of my family and ancestry from whose destiny I was
so different because of the sexual freedom I enjoyed. My mother said I gave so much of myself up in relationships. Lucy gave me the gift of clarity in an e-mail.

“You must believe in your wings,” she wrote to me. “They will take you to beautiful places, but when the air gets stale, you must fly from those places where the currents pull you towards the rocks. Not avoidance, no, you need to leave with the winds of change. When those winds change and you have dealt with these emotions, then leave.”

Her words took me back to cliffs upon which I had stood some years earlier in a corner of the island of Oahu in the state of Hawaii. I had hit the road without any plan with two Canadian journalists I had befriended at the Asian American Journalists Association conference. We turned down a road that led us to a rocky embankment, where a group of new friends who were U.S. Marines were enjoying their day off. They were bounding from the cliffs, screaming, “Geronimo!” with each leap.

I looked down from the cliffs. It was a scary sight, the water seemed fifty yards below. Ever since an elementary school teacher made me jump off a diving board, to be engulfed in a rush of white water, I'd had a fear of the water, which I was always trying to overcome. My friend Lynn Hoverman, a California surfer girl whom I had befriended at the D.C. volleyball courts, literally held my hand one summer afternoon to teach me how to pounce into the Atlantic Ocean waves off Dewey Beach in Delaware. But one of the Marines, a woman, encouraged me and urged me to my own jumps off the cliffs. I loved the flight.

As I sat in my room, I saw myself flying above those cliffs, a choice facing me to crash into the rocks or fly free into the ocean. In my mind, I changed the direction of my flight so that I flew toward the ocean, free.

I was facing a philosophical dilemma. I had waited three months for Cheenie Bhai's feathers to grow back, but they hadn't. To continue to wait? Or to keep him caged? When I saw myself flying free, I knew that one day it was only right that he, too, should also fly free.

I'd been in Hyderabad for weeks, but I'd avoided returning to that place that stored the deepest memories for me, the house where I'd lived for the first four years of my life, before leaving it and my grandparents to go to America.

I went to the house on my last day in Hyderabad, slipping through the narrow roads of the old neighborhood. I ducked through a doorway and into a courtyard around which sat the rooms where we used to live. Everything was in ruins. A man stood on the roof with a pickax, dismantling what remained of the house. Dadi had sold the house when her sons convinced her to move to Pakistan, and now the house was being demolished. I stood in the courtyard, peeking into the dark rooms.

“This is where you used to sleep,” the woman with me told me, gently. She was Zaheda Aunty, the wife of my father's friend, Aftab Uncle, who went to the U.S. with my father, watching him read my mother's letters late into the night. He had returned to Hyderabad and remained there, unlike my father. Rubble lay crumbled inside the rooms. I stood there and realized a deep truth: this was what yesterday's difficult memories should be within me—ruins.

I returned to Jaigahan. If I needed a sign that it was right for me to return, Jungli Apa gave it to me in the morning. She arrived on the branch of the bale tree.

What an amazing thing. She had waited for us all these weeks that we were away? I didn't see the other birds. I didn't hear them either. She forgave the Cheenies their absence, it seemed. She didn't sit with them on their cage as she did before. Now, Cheenie Apa's cries pierced the air like the plaintive cry of a child departed from its mother. A mother departed from her child. The sweat poured down my forehead. I spent little time this stay with Bluebeard. I had exerted the energy to befriend him and now knew that he was a drain of energy. He had a destructive effect on everything around him.

I came back to the village with a stabilizer custom-made by a Hyderabad manufacturer, the wiring assembled in a factory dominated by women with ginger fingers. My salesman was a gentle man who listened carefully to all of my instructions, a convert to Christianity who broke boundaries to marry a Hindu woman. He proudly brought my stabilizer with its functioning cutoff switch just before I left Hyderabad, wrapped snugly into a box.

Shakti was finally flowing here at Latif Manzil without obstruction. I had done it.

I
MADE IT HOME
for my guru's tenth birthday. Safiyyah and Samir both took the day off school, and we explored through tall grass that led to a farm beside the new house my parents had bought. A white horse stood in a stable with rolling Appalachian hills behind him. It was beautiful to be home. Here I brought home what I had learned in the world. Here I absorbed the great lessons about life, love, and liberation.

The children were growing. Samir was eight. He remembered one day how he wanted to marry a girl in kindergarten, Shahira. “She helped me up when I fell,” Samir remembered, “and she taught me how to make
S'
s.” Life could be that complete.

One afternoon, Samir's ten-year-old friend Spencer visited my childhood home. “What do you think at night when you put your head to sleep?” I asked Spencer.

“The kittens.” He, like me, was still consumed by Jaz's litter, plus the kitten named Special. They'd been given away to families far-flung, and we missed them.

Anything else?

“Well, I knew that I liked this girl named Laurel because I started seeing her when I went to sleep at night.”

How did he know he liked her?

“She is as funny as me.” Love was as simple as that.

“I love her, and she loves me.”

I was home, peaceful in the land where shakti ran free and love was pure. I fell into the easy rhythms of Morgantown.

Tuesdays, I was Lunch Lady, collecting tickets at the North Elementary cafeteria. Tuesday, September 11, transformed reality. My mother called me at home with the news of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. I didn't believe her. Yahoo confirmed the truth.

I walked down Headlee Avenue, the sun warming me, for one of the last moments of unadulterated innocence I was to enjoy. I whispered the news to Samir and Safiyyah, as mothers and fathers swept into the building to take their children home early. When I got them home, the reports started coming in from my mother at her boutique on High Street. Ali Baba, a restaurant with mosquito netting over a booth and hummus on the menu, shut down because of a suspected bomb threat that turned out to be a vulgar phone call. Two Muslim women wearing
hijabs,
the head scarves tightly wrapped around the hair, had them ripped off their heads at the West Virginia University student union with the shouts, “We're going to get you!”

I had never been motivated to cover my head in public in America. To me, it was an unnecessary symbol of modesty in a place where not wearing a halter top in the summertime seemed like an act of conservatism. The weekend before, as I'd stood near the Doritos at Wal-Mart, an Arab woman walked by me with a full covering that cloaked her body and face. All that was visible were eyes that could study price tags. Now, suddenly, I wanted to cover myself. Proclaim to the world that Muslims weren't all terrorists. We were also good, balanced humanitarians, as my mother and father had taught me to be. I pulled out a long white cotton
dupatta
my dadi had sent home with my father, just returned from a trip to Pakistan. She wrote a message in the corner in Urdu, urging me to use it to do my
namaz.
I knotted the
dupatta
around me and unfurled it so only my eyes were visible.

Did I look menacing? I checked with the only one around, nudging awake my cat Billlie. He opened his eyes to a slit, yawned, and returned to sleep.

My inquiry into identity wasn't complete. I plucked an American flag Samir had gotten from his Cub Scout troop, ventured outside with the scarf pulled down from over my nose so the mailman could see my face, lest he drive by, and planted the American flag in a pot of geraniums on our front porch.

That night, a Muslim brother called my father. “It's urgent.”

When my father called back, he told him that the board of the Islamic Center should cancel the
jummah
prayer, the Friday afternoon prayer. For
Muslims, Friday is what Sunday is to Christians and Saturday to Jews. I stood in the background, bobbing between my father's phone call and Samir's reading of
Mulan,
the Chinese girl warrior. “Don't cancel!” I urged him.

“No, we will not cancel,” my father insisted. “Why should we be afraid?”

Two days later, I went to New York to keep my dear friend Dan Costello, a
Journal
colleague, company. A universe that I had known intimately had been destroyed. I used to disembark for work from the N/R subway stop in the basement of the World Trade Center. With airports shut down, the best way to get to New York was the Greyhound bus. I planned to go with my head covered. My sister-in-law's eyes widened when she saw the
dupatta
wrapped over me. This was the past she had outgrown, of being wrapped in a
burqa
and then engulfed by a faint as she rushed to catch buses in the heat of India's summer. Married to my brother, she was liberated from this religious expectation, maintaining her sense of modesty but wearing a new wardrobe of cotton shirts and stretch pants from the Limited.

She was worried. She, too, had heard the reports of Muslim women under attack. She told my mother, “Write
al-Hafiz
in the air on her forehead,” so that I would have the protection of God. My mother took her finger to the air, staring over my left temple, and crossed my forehead with Arabic script. She blew a breath toward me, a
phoonk.
It was a blessing. We went to the Greyhound station. I slipped into a seat beside a woman. “Phoopu has already found a friend,” Safiyyah told her dadi, mother, and brother as she waved to me from below.

In New York, I realized that I had a duty to return to Pakistan, to write from there and try to dismantle the misperceptions in the West about the Muslim world.

My friend Kerry Lauerman, and editor at Salon.com, asked me to go there and write for the Internet magazine. “You have a story to tell,” he told me, giving me for the first time affirmation that I had a unique voice with which to speak. I went to the Pakistani consulate with my friend Sumita's sleeveless
kameez
flowing over my black pants, a black sweater on top so I wouldn't offend any Muslims who considered it immodest for a woman to bare her arms. I wore Dadi's
dupatta.
What a goof. It was sort
of like my arrival in Kathmandu revisited. The press attaché's assistant was a Filipina veteran of the consulate since the 1960s by the name of Connie. I should have just gone in the Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants that I usually wore. Connie told me over the phone that it would take only a day to process a visa, but when I called the next day she told me the consulate wasn't issuing visas anymore. There were too many foreign journalists in Pakistan to keep them safe. I was confused.

I wrote the press counsellor to explain my mission, telling her that my roots were in Islam with my name coming from the seventeenth surah of the Qur'an and my ties ran deep in Pakistan, with my family's presence there and my marriage, albeit a failed one. In America, we thought that folks from that part of the world were all basically the same. Even I, a Muslim with family throughout Pakistan and many trips there stamped into my passport, didn't see a divide for myself with Pakistan. But that's not what I learned as I stood outside the Pakistani consulate, the rain pouring upon me as I tried to convince the press attaché I wasn't a threat to Pakistan just because I was born in India. She let me know that was an issue of concern, even with my Pakistani visa stamped into my passport from my ride on the Peace Bus the year before.

I found out later from other officials that the Pakistani government had put up a red flag for Indian-born visa applicants, even if they had foreign passports, like from the U.S. She suggested I apply on a tourist visa. I was promptly rejected.

I ended up traveling to Washington, where I met my Salon.com editor, Kerry, who escorted me as an official white guy in a suit. The press attaché at the Pakistani embassy talked to me and saw that I wasn't going to be a threat to the state of Pakistan. He asked me in Urdu whether I was Muslim. I told him my family history with Pakistan. He cleared my visa. I talked to my mother amid the delays. She told me what we are taught as Muslims from our earliest days: “Everything happens for a reason.”

My reason was the pause. Facing an obstacle that didn't allow adrenaline to make my decision, I pondered whether I really wanted to go to Pakistan. It would be a psychic journey as much as physical one. I was a bit afraid. My brother tried to relax me: “Oh! Go have a vacation!” But
my previous trips to Pakistan had certainly never qualified as vacations. On my return to Morgantown on the Greyhound, I sought refuge next to a woman who looked like a nun. Turned out that I, who had been searching India to meet a Tantrika, had found one on the Greyhound from Washington, D.C., to Hagerstown, Maryland. She left me with a guiding principle. She was in America to give lectures on yoga and meditation. We talked about September 11 and the hatred from which it spawned. I told her about my mission to Pakistan and my fear. She reminded me of the mandate that propelled me to stand in front of the Pakistani consulate in New York in the rain, in my effort to do work that would dismantle barriers to understanding. “We must learn to melt each other so we are just human beings before each other.”

It took me thirty-nine hours to journey from Morgantown to Lahore, where Dadi still lived with my eldest uncle. She told me she had dropped from 110 to 92 pounds in recent months. I'd traveled across the ocean with only Lonely Planet's
Pakistan: A Travel Survival Kit,
a new padded laptop backpack from Office Depot, and a JFK Airport shopping bag filled with World Trade Center key chains, New York Police Department pencils, and two New York Fire Department stuffed bears (one red, one blue) to give away as gifts. War loomed as a reality. When I'd gone to Pakistan in 1983, my gifts had been Smurf key chains.

I was returning to Pakistan, this time with voice, not the silence I'd accepted as a young bride. I set off for Islamabad on Pakistan's Greyhound, a luxury shuttle bus that carried me along the highway built not long before by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. I'd traveled alone for the first time in Pakistan. As I stood with Sumita's North Face backpack and my Office Depot laptop bag, I wasn't sure who would greet me. A svelte figure slipped toward me, and I recognized her face though her body was draped in a cream-colored fabric that descended from her head, where she had draped it tightly around her face.

“Hello!” I yelled.

“As-salam alaykum,”
she answered, smiling.

We had traveled on separate paths since the days when we were childhood pen pals. I'd met her when I was about twelve. She and her family had come to India from Islamabad, where her mother, my father's sister,
had settled after marriage. I loved this cousin-sister of mine. She was vibrant, beautiful, and radiant. We took pictures of ourselves on my cousin's rooftop in Bombay before it became Mumbai, throwing our hair back and laughing at the sky.

I'd seen her six years later when I took my summer trip to visit her and my other relatives in Pakistan. That summer, she had traveled with me and other cousins on a train to the frontier land of Pakistan, Peshawar. It was the wild, wild West of Pakistan. Villages were dedicated to building weaponry. Afghan refugees were spilling over the border from the Soviet invasion of their country. And tribal feudal lords cut off the arm of the law. On that ride, a man commented loudly that I, a product of the West, kept my hair long, as Muslim girls were supposed to do, but my pen pal cousin, a homegrown Pakistani girl, had shorn off her locks. It was a turning point. In Peshawar, when I asked her to trim my hair, she went to chop it off. I spent the nights playing rummy with my boy cousins, while my pen pal cousin sat in prayer and looked disapprovingly at my freedom with the opposite sex. Over time, she became more religious, eschewing the playfulness that I had so loved in her.

Now, she stood before me at the busy bus terminal in Islamabad, wearing a broad smile as she stepped toward me, a young girl in tow. “This is Khadijah,” she said. It was her young daughter.

She got behind the steering wheel of her car and drove me to the house of her mother; this was my phuppi, with whom I had traveled with Dadi on the Peace Bus from Delhi. She also covered her hair. Her younger daughter came home just about then from her job as an architect. Her hair swung freely and uncovered. Gap lotion sat in her bathroom.

I revisited the Pakistan of my past, returning to the Marriott Islamabad, not as a bride but as a veteran journalist this time. I even passed the Margala Motel, where I had walked stutter steps on my wedding day. I immersed myself in a conservative Muslim world that I'd never known so intimately. I spent hours in the Qur'an study groups of my Islamabad phuppi's friends. I sipped green tea with the Taliban's
deputy ambassador to Pakistan and his two wives, the younger one a fan of Bollywood actor Salman Khan.

I had as a model of orthodox Islam a nephew-cousin of my mother, whom I called Bhai Sahib. He lived in Bombay, but I'd last seen him when our paths crossed in Lucknow earlier in the year. He had sleepy eyes and a gray beard. Although he and I lived differently, Bhai Sahib always gave me a sense of calm. When I was a child he had told my brother and me that food tasted better when you eat it with your hands. I reminded him of this lesson that I'd followed—in appropriate company—ever since. He'd told me on our last visit that an elder had taught him that it was best also to wash your hands with just water, not soap, because the aroma and oils of the food are absorbed into your hand. After that, I sometimes didn't wash my hands with soap after dinner. When he left, Bhai Sahib and I walked along the train tracks. He was a slow and gentle walker. I wanted to know more about his spiritual practice. “What do you use as your point of focus in meditation?” I could hardly believe I would ask such a bizarre question. And earnestly. He answered with earnestness. His point of meditation: “The divine presence of God in all things.”