Tantrika (31 page)

Instead, I sat voiceless at the edge of my seat. The dismantling of my self was done.

In the regal office of Jacques Chirac, the president of France, the press secretary searched for the official presidential photographer.

It was getting late on Friday evening. He had gone home already. The press secretary got President Chirac's point-and-shoot camera, and he started directing her, as if he was a wedding photographer. “One with the brother,” he said, throwing his arms around Mariane and Satchi, Mariane's brother. “Now, one with the journalists,” he said, drawing John, Steve, and me into the photograph.

Somewhere, Danny was laughing, and, in this unexpected place among French antiques, I was beginning to recognize myself again. It was all
maya.

I went with Mariane to Los Angeles where Danny had grown up in the suburb of Encino. It was a rolling neighborhood where no one seemed to walk the sidewalks.

Danny's family was hosting a memorial service at the newly built Jewish Skirball Center. I sat beside Mariane and listened to the addresses. A rabbi stepped to the podium. He talked about the clash of civilizations
that Danny's murder represented. Danny's murderers made him declare, “I am a Jew,” before his slaughter, as if that was the only thing that defined him. The
Wall Street Journal
had done an amazing job of communicating the human being that made Danny a remarkable man, defined not just by race, religion, or even gender, but rather by his personality. I knew him as one who would send me postcards from his travels; one time he'd compared my profile to the Queen of Sheba. I listened and couldn't see Danny's life through the prism of a clash of civilizations.

When it was my turn to speak, I forgot to introduce myself, as if it didn't really matter who I was but rather what I had to say. I spoke my heart. “There is a lot that is said about the so-called clash of civilizations,” I started, looking at the sea of faces, many of them familiar. “I am a Muslim daughter of India. Danny was a Jewish son of Israel. We should have been the clash of civilizations. But let me tell you about our friendship. I have not even admitted this to my parents, but it was the summer that we met that Danny introduced me to beer at outings at the Big Hunt. Our friendship was about volleyball. Danny was a man who transcended his identity so that we were simply two human beings drawn together in friendship.”

Danny crossed the boundaries of his identity to cover the Muslim world but, ultimately, was murdered for his identity. The fact that his murderers severed his head was an act of horror in our world. But it was, in its own gruesome way, the symbolic representation of how he had lived his life, for in Buddhism, as with the Severed-Head Vajrayogini, to sever the head from the body meant to slice duality, ego, and the other trappings from which Danny, in fact, had freed himself during his lifetime. He didn't succumb to legitimate fears, and he gave voice to his thoughts before his murderers slit his throat. I realized it was a deep responsibility we carried when we worked to free ourselves from convention. This freedom led us into darkness, just as my Nepali friend Deepak had been warned it would do. I didn't find my darkness on cremation grounds or in Tantric temples but, rather, in realities much more gruesome—of betrayal, dishonesty, and murder.

I
STRUGGLED WITH
the question of whether or not to keep my baby.

The only answer I could find among the Islamic scholars to the question of abortion seemed to relate to pregnancies within a marriage, not outside marriage, as if
zina
never led to such realities. That wasn't helpful. I read on anyway. Early Muslim legal scholars said abortion was lawful for a variety of reasons until forty to one hundred twenty days after conception, basically the first trimester. I remembered Mariane's and my discovery of the Muslim concept of
nafh al-ruh.
I'd even asked my boyfriend, before I knew I was pregnant, to help me define this Arabic concept. We'd decided
nafh al-ruh
meant “living soul.” When did my baby's “living soul” take birth? That was the deadline I gave myself to decide.

Most Muslim scholars said that an abortion could occur only if a mother's life was significantly endangered. It was not my physical wellbeing about which I worried. It was my mental health. I knew that I could collapse under the weight of keeping the baby alone. My boyfriend sent me loving e-mails, promising to one day be with me, but I was in such a haze of trauma I couldn't understand him. I distrusted him. I wondered if I even loved him. Most of all, I didn't know how I could survive each day.

Mariane got early contractions in Washington. We spent the night at Georgetown Hospital, I lying in a chair that stretched into a bed. Before we left Karachi, I had promised Mariane I'd see her through the baby's birth. “You won't be alone,” I assured Mariane, in a thinly veiled reassurance to myself as well. At the hospital, I watched a husband pacing up and down the hall with his very pregnant wife. We returned to the Mayflower Hotel. The contractions started again. We returned to Georgetown Hospital, where the husband was still pacing the hall. I wondered if I could do this without the father of my baby.

Back at the Mayflower, I tried to talk to my boyfriend, but I was filled with loathing. “Are you sure you want to keep the baby?” he asked me.

“Do you want me to kill her?” I screamed at him. I was convinced the baby was a girl.

We couldn't communicate. I felt as if everything I had learned over almost five years of spiritual lessons had gone down the drain. I ended up in tears. My despair over my baby and my boyfriend allowed me to release my anguish over Danny's death.

A dear friend, Pam, drove me home to Morgantown for the weekend.

Life was such suffering on so many levels. I was consumed in depression. I retreated to Safiyyah's room. A white lace valance hung from her closet. I curled up on her bed and started weeping. I didn't know who discovered me first, but within a few minutes everyone had gathered around to comfort me. My sister-in-law, Bhabi, put oil in my hair. Safiyyah rubbed my head. Mummy pressed my calves. My friend held my hand. Samir brought me water. My brother tried to comfort me.

My father started talking. He talked about the madness of violence, how U.S. foreign policy, like terrorism by Muslim
jihadis,
murdered innocents, like Danny. I had lost touch with compassion. “Kill them all!” I screamed. “They're all animals, anyway.” My father tried to argue logically with me. My mother tried to quiet him. I kept screaming. My father argued more. My mother kicked my father out of the room. I kept crying for the darkness of slaughter and sadness in which I found myself. My body convulsed with the pain and anguish I had felt but little expressed in the months since that fateful day on January 23.

I wrote to my boyfriend to encourage him to be thoughtful and reflective while confessing that I had a great trauma from which I had to heal. In the thirty days in our safe house in Karachi, we had confronted the worst of humanity and, at times of compassion, the best of humanity. It was the darkness that was my companion in the quiet of my mind.

I feared I would lose the baby in a miscarriage. The baby chose to enter my universe, and I was choosing to respect this divine creation's decision. My boyfriend made me wonder if an abortion wouldn't be an easier solution. I had only two weeks until the baby would become
nafh
al-ruh,
a living soul, after which time Muslim scholars said an abortion couldn't be performed, even to save a mother's life. I didn't want to capitulate to fear, however, and take the easy route.

My boyfriend's doubts and fears sparked within me a voice of shame and dishonor that I heard from no one but myself. I felt like a loser. A failure. I knew this was a voice that I had to simply observe and allow to dissolve, but the self-doubt buried me in discontent. To me, the father of my child did not consider me beautiful enough, young enough, acceptable enough, inspiring enough to embrace me and legitimize me in marriage and family. What did this do to me? I had to confront feelings of shame, insecurity, and failure. I had crossed these
haduds,
these boundaries, of our culture. While the society and its people could not stone me, I felt as if I was experiencing a stoning on a psychic level. It came in the form of the barbs from the Monas, Zains, and Shakirs of my boyfriend's world, his friends who judged me. They came, too, from even him in his decision not to legitimize me. I did not want my child to inherit the legacy of shame and self-hate that our society and culture inflicted upon us. I wanted to protect this child from the torment that I had endured and offer the baby, instead, affirmation and unconditional love.

Each convulsion of my body in tears sent shock waves through me about the damage I could be doing my baby. My boyfriend had asked me why I wanted to keep the baby. I knew that it was because she was created at a time of love between him and me. Ultimately, I believed in life and love, even if it didn't come with the proper rubber stamps.

When I packed my bags to return to Paris with Mariane, I searched for my other Nike running shoe. It was missing. Danny. Playing another practical joke on me. I packed the one Nike, just in case.

In Paris, I lived with Mariane in a cute pied-à-terre that Danny and she had bought in the neighborhood of Montmartre.

In Paris, the investigation continued as a trial began to prosecute four Pakistanis allegedly involved in Danny's kidnapping. I went to Karachi for the beginning of the trial. My boyfriend didn't pick me up at the airport. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” he told me when he found me. “I overslept.”

I read that day's
Dawn,
the country's largest English-language newspaper. A court had sentenced a Pakistani woman, allegedly raped by a brother-in-law, to death by stoning for
zina,
a word I knew all too well now. Prison officials had given her daughter to other female prisoners. Death for carrying life. I put my hand on my belly and sighed.

Two of our friends in Pakistani law enforcement visited me secretly. “You're not safe,” they told me. Unknown to me, the defendants' lawyers were pointing the finger at me as a possible culprit and alleged spy for India. They claimed I had disappeared without a trace. My boyfriend visited at the latest hours. He told me he had told his parents about my pregnancy, but I felt again like an illegitimate consort.

I flung myself to the bathroom floor, chanting in desperation the words that Mariane had taught me.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myohorenge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,”
I cried out, desperately trying to defeat my overwhelming sense of isolation and alienation. I left Karachi so sad.

Then, in one moment, I felt the divine love that I had been seeking.

The doctor tapped XY on the video screen. All of a sudden, all of college honors biology evaporated. “XY. Does that mean boy?”

The doctor smiled.

“A boy,” I whispered, smiling at Mariane, who was quietly documenting my reaction on a camcorder. “Mariane, a boy!”

My pregnancy doctor, Dr. Gerard Strouk, had calculated my baby's due date during my last visit. Spinning a wheel around that estimated gestation, he concluded, “October 10.”

“October 10?” I responded, my eyes widening.

“Oui.”

I had studied Danny's documents enough to have his birthday memorized. It was October 10. I knew, then, that my baby wouldn't be born on that date, but this was Danny's not-so-gentle reminder that he'd be watching to make sure I raised my boy listening to good music, not the country music, Cher and Meatloaf, of my liking.

White puffs that I had learned long before to call “grandmother's hair” wafted down rue Yvonne Le Tac, past the red canopy in front of Le Durer restaurant, toward me. I was those white puffs. I was the sun. I
was the wind. I was the mother goddess. I realized the truth of the path I had to forge for my baby and me. I had heard more defenses of single motherhood and the baby's life from my friends who were Western liberals. “We shall forever be connected,” I told the father of my baby, “through our baby. I will honor you. I will respect your parents. I know the importance of my patrilineal heritage. I shall always strive to be good.” But I knew that I could not rely on a future with a man who couldn't give me a present that was content and secure.

“You caused me suffering,” I told him. “I chose happiness.” Even if, despite all my hopeful talk, I still imagined him on Saturday nights seducing new women.

I called that house where only women lived in Maidenhead, England, off the banks of the Thames River where I had first met Iftikhar Mamoo. I kept Rachel Momani on the phone while I talked to Lucy. When I had told momani that I was going to have a baby, she gave me the assurance that I needed to know I was making the right choice in choosing life over death. “Your Mamoo would be very happy.”

“The baby is a boy!” I told them.

My dear Lucy knew the joy of this moment.

“I feel in this one moment,” I told her, “the joy of every full moon upon which I've gazed, the raindrops that fell upon us as we rode away from Beach Number 7, the wind and the sun.”

What was the power of this unborn child within my being? Profound. When I heard the sound of Mariane's and Danny's son, Adam, as he entered this world, I understood how, in fact, life could emerge from darkness.

In the days we had awaited Adam's birth, we had gotten word that Danny's body had been found outside Karachi. We had always tried to imagine where he had been taken. Now, we know. We had been told Danny had been picked up as planned for his interview. The kidnappers had driven him around town, ending at a hut in the city's remote suburbs. We had been told his captors spoke little English, but when he thought they were going to poison him, he went on a hunger strike. They had convinced him to eat, bringing him fast food and soft drinks. He had apparently tried to escape once. Until the last moment, we had been told, his Pakistani cap
tors thought he would be set free. But three Arabs had been dispatched to the hideout to kill him. We had been told Danny was blindfolded and didn't know death was upon him. It was a small consolation. I had hidden the autopsy report when it was e-mailed to us to protect Mariane as she readied for Adam's birth. The details had sent me to the hospital in the middle of one night, my abdomen cramping in excruciating pain as I imagined the place where we had been told the kidnappers had hurt Danny.

All the while, I watched as Mariane used her chanting and spiritual discipline to free herself from the trappings of anger and fear. I, meanwhile, got irritated when our assistant didn't know where to find the scissors. But even Mariane didn't pretend to be extraordinary. “It's a constant battle.”

As only nature could confirm, a small bird sang outside the window the day of Adam's birth, reminding me of the beauty of all things divine. When Adam arrived in his new home, the buds on the fig tree had opened to create a lush canopy of leaves.

In Karachi, the defense claims against me continued, making the newspapers in Pakistan. The kind U.S. consul general in Karachi, John Bauman, said he had started calling me “Mata Hari” after the French exotic dancer executed for being a spy during World War II.

“It's so ridiculous,” he said, trying to comfort me.

A friend of Mariane's came over one day to chant. Her name was Anne Robin, a bodhisattva in Paris for me, along with Mariane's other friends. She was a journalist and happened to be doing an article about Mata Hari. She told me the story of this French woman who married a military officer, living overseas and then returning to Paris to become one of the country's leading exotic dancers. “It was never proven that she was a spy,” Anne told me.

I looked at the pictures of Mata Hari that Anne brought me. She could have been any one of us. “They executed Mata Hari because she didn't have an appropriate defense,” I told Mariane, as Adam slept nearby. “I'm not going to let that happen to me.”

“We won't,” she said. “But you're going to Pakistan over my dead body.”

 

There were butterflies on the wall in this room in which Mariane rested her head at night.

I stepped quietly into the room filled now with the voices of women slowly chanting the staccato of the Lotus Sutra in Japanese. I was staying in a house tucked into the hills outside Aubagne in the south of France. Here, bullfrogs croaked loudly every night in a pond with a lone lily flower, calling the female frogs to mate. The full moon was now waning. I rubbed my belly every night in my room, decorated with ceramic figures of creatures the French called
cigalle
climbing the walls, sitting on velvet branches on the wall behind beds with golden sheets. The closest Western creature to which Yves, the owner of the house, could find a comparison for the
cigalle
was the cricket. I was fighting tears. I had just read an e-mail from the father of my baby, wondering if he could afford to see me in both July and October. He had promised me since January that he would visit me in July. He had responded to my need for his support as a threat upon his independence, sending me virtually every day into a spiral of anguish, loneliness, and self-destructive thought.