by Asra Nomani
One evening I sat with Lucy and Esther on the porch off our hut, my white robe half open to my silky bra and bare skin, a candle flickering in a seashell we had plucked off the beach. Inside, our home was beautiful, with turquoise saris as curtains, bells jingling at the bottom. The ceiling towered like a cone, wood beams gathering in the middle. On the porch, we talked about sex, sensuality, power, love. I remembered an Indian man we had seen the day before with his arm around his wife’s shoulder. He told us he was reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the second time. It made me wonder about the day when a man would have his arm around me like that.
In this adventure, we also became Durga, the fierce powerful goddess who rides a tiger. Our tiger happened to be TVS scooters we rented on the island, and I hadn’t yet learned about Durga’s power.
Lucy couldn’t get her scooter started. A boy came over to help her. He showed her that she hadn’t turned the ignition key on. She was edgy with him. She realized later that, unlike many others in India, he was in fact just coming over to help her. We skirted past fields of rice paddies. I felt powerful and independent.
As we sat on the dock, Esther befriended a drunken man who invited us to his house to visit his wife, Maya, and their children. Our Jungle Resort host told us the man had three young daughters and a son. He spent his money on alcohol, while his wife kept the family together. We rode our scooters to road’s edge and walked through overgrown grass to reach the house made with a special mix of cow dung, mud, and water. It had a smooth, well-swept look, beautiful in its simplicity.
Maya was a beautiful woman, slim and smooth skinned with a sari wrapped elegantly around her. She crouched over a stove, making dinner in the house’s main room. A doorway to the right led to the house’s only other room, where the two eldest girls studied by the light of a kerosene lantern. I sat beside them to help them with their homework. All the clothes the children owned hung from a string stretched over the bed and family mandir, sitting in the corner. The youngest girl scampered about the rooms dressed only in underwear like bloomers and a smile.
Maya confirmed Esther’s instincts about her. “I knew she’d be remarkable,” she said, gazing at her admiringly. Much later, I discovered maya meant “illusion” in Hindi. In this Maya’s life, it seemed, there was a clear reality to her existence. She showed us the singular strength of a woman poised against adversity.
On our porch, we imagined disappearing here to write, draw, and create, but our ancestral village was beckoning us. And for that, we had to return to the mainland.
We ventured to Pondicherry, a former French colony settled in the early eighteenth century, a bouncy car ride from Chennai across the border from into the state of Tamil Nadu. It proved that India could be run well. The streets were clean. Couples held hands. Women rode bikes. The Aurobindo Ashram was founded in 1926, named after a spiritual leader, Sri Aurobindo, who drew Westerners as well as Indians, including a woman who became his partner, Mother Meera. She ruled here until her death in 1973 at the age of ninety-seven. I wondered if Sri Aurobindo and Mother Meera shared the special union of Shiva and Shakti found in the god and goddess. He was a man. She was a woman. I could find no mention of a romance between them. Both were widely respected in India, and the idea would be blasphemous to some, but I came from the Jerry Springer talk show culture of America and wondered about that which was unsaid.
A sweet smell of jasmine lingered in the air at the Aurobindo Ashram on Marine Street. A woman bent down in front of a portrait of the Mother and showed her tall son how to pay homage to the Mother by touching the space below her feet. I loved watching belief in India. We were waiting for a relative of Nandi Uncle in Delhi. The relative’s mother had done the unorthodox, leaving Delhi to settle in Pondicherry with her children as a disciple of Mother Meera. Her husband later joined her. Their daughter, Aster Patel, arrived and, looking at Esther, Lucy, and me as we stood before her in the reception area, said, “You have beautiful eyes. You are a Shakti fortress.”
We knew what she meant because we knew the power we felt together. When we hit the road in England once, to land at a surfing beach town called Newquay, an Australian surfer traveling with his buddies watched us as we laughed and enjoyed ourselves along a bar. “I want some of whatever you girls are on,” he said to us, thinking we were tripping on Ecstasy or some other mind-altering drug. We weren’t on anything but the high of adventure.
This place carried the name of the man who inspired it, Sri Aurobindo, but it felt as if the Mother ruled it today. Her image was everywhere. One night at the ashram, I met a longhaired Indian who offered to teach me how to ride a motorcycle on his Enfield Bullet. We sat at a restaurant beside the sea, the waves crashing the rock as he sang a mantra dedicated to goddesses. I considered his offer. I remembered my friend Tom Petzinger who wrote a book about the airline industry. When I suggested working on the book with him, he said he preferred to do the work alone. “Amelia Earhart flew alone,” he told me. She, of course, crashed, never to be seen again, but I thought he was right. And I thought of Durga on her tiger. “Durga didn’t ride with anyone on her tiger,” I told this weirdo, fleeing to make my 10:30 P.M. curfew at the ashram guest house where Lucy and Esther were tucked into bed behind room number 13, marked “Inspiration” on the door. I knew this was a path I ultimately had to travel alone.
On this trip, I was beginning to learn the stresses that men endure when they are economic shelters for others. I’d considered myself a host for Esther and Lucy on this trip, making train reservations, paying bills, making room reservations. I kept my thoughts to myself because I didn’t want to taint our adventure with mundane problems, but I worried about money as I lay my head to rest at night.
It was their company that brought me to places like this experimental colony called Auroville. A stretch of land was dotted with homes of foreigners who had settled there, trying to live with the rules and philosophies laid out by Sri Aurobindo and Mother Meera. Esther was horrified at how most of the Indian faces belonged to the hired laborers.
We edged close to a looming building, Matrimandir. Scaffolding covered the outside of the dome. A tour guide told us the history of Auroville.
“The Mother sees a dream,” he started. She worked with a French architect, Roger Anger, to create an experiment in international living. It opened on February 28, 1968, and included some seventy settlements now spread over about twelve miles with about twelve hundred residents.
“Mother says…” the tour guide started again, telling us the precise dimensions that Mother wanted the meditation room at the top of Matrimandir to be. We walked in circles around the mandir, “Silence” signs posted on the wall.
The way people worshiped Mother Meera made her seem more like a cult hero than a divine inspiration. It was a reflection of her power, though, that she stood out as a living saint in this country where the women revered by the citizenry were usually fictional.
Before we stepped inside the main meditation room under the dome, we were handed white socks. Inside the room, yards of white sheets spilled into each other, bathing the entire floor in a sea of white. A crystal hung from the epicenter below a sky window. A star was reflected upon the ceiling. Light danced. The crystal created a star with the shadows. We sat on white pillows. As I meditated, the energy bounced from the crystal to Lucy and Esther on the other side of the circle and then back to me.
We headed back to Chennai that night and stayed the night in a hotel across from the train station. We needed three towels. The clerk said that wasn’t possible. He could only give me one towel.
“The dhobi not come,” he said, referring to the man who washed clothes.
“Give me six sheets!” I figured we could dry ourselves with our sheets.
“Not possible. Not possible.”
The next morning at the Chennai train station, a woman lay on a bench sleeping, wrapping her turquoise sari around her body to sleep with modesty. Our train had been canceled. We went into another bui
lding to get refunds, passing men as they urinated outside.
We stood at the counter trying to get our money back. I asked a man whose train was also canceled about the schedule to Lucknow. He answered briskly. I was about to fill out our refund forms. He looked at my pen, wanting to borrow it, and snarled, “Your pen!”
I thought maybe I’d repay his albeit small effort at helping us and gave him my pen despite his rudeness. When he left, Lucy laughed at his arrogance. “Your pen! Your pen! Your pen!” she repeated.
“Your pen!” became a symbol to us of a man’s sense of entitlement.
We walked to the baggage hold. A dead body lay on the floor with a printed cotton sheet draped over it. I couldn’t tell if the body was a man or woman. The only part of the body that peeked out was mangled toes at the end of worn, dirty feet. Flies fluttered around the toes.
We had a day to kill in Chennai. I got the address for the Enfield showroom. The store was too far away, but the dream of riding my own tiger continued to germinate in my mind.
We ducked into Jim Carrey’s Me, Myself, and Irene. I understood now the popularity of Bollywood in India. Even if it was an afternoon with Hollywood that gave me the realization. We bought popcorn in cones. And we escaped from the traffic, the blaring horns, the Hulk Hogan billboards advertising large-sized men’s suits. Men wolf-whistled when the Jim Carrey character went to kiss Renee what’s-her-name. That was sexual repression in India. A young man named Krishnan left as we did, introducing himself to us. He asked Esther, “Would you like to go out tomorrow?”
The next two days we passed on the train back to Lucknow, listening to the train’s catering manager tell us his Tantric meditation practice, which consisted of eschewing deity worship and embracing silent contemplation.
India. I loved it this time with Esther and Lucy. I didn’t know what I’d do without them. It was a country that had such a public face of male energy. Sometimes I was angered by it. In fact, I hated it. Yet I felt like a powerful shakti force. How much I had learned.
Rail tie workers huddled on the track parallel to us. They carried metal rods in their arms. They wore scarves around their heads like crowns and dhotis, the fabric tied around a man’s waist like pants. They rocked their bodies together against the ties to pull them up. A man with beautiful almond eyes had more cuts on the side of his torso than a workhorse. He wore baggy mustard-colored pants cuffed up to his calves. Together they chanted, led by a white-haired man in a pink-and-white-checkered shirt.
They threw their shoulders into the tie at the same time, like a serpent dancing.
We drifted away as they chanted, “Ooaaay.”
I sat on the edge of the steps of the open door. A push from behind and I would have tumbled onto the tracks below. But I wasn’t afraid. I was so enjoying the rush of the wind against my face. My hair flew so fast behind me. My toes peeked out from the sandals I propped against the edge of the stairs.
A herd of cattle grazed beside the track. The herder stood behind them with a checkered dhoti wrapped around his slender hips and a black Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt above it. He chased the cattle from track’s edge. Slivers of silver shone through the green grass of rice. Shafts of white flower thrust above the carpet of green. Drizzle fell upon my ankles and feet. The train had a music of its own. Its whistle. Its rock. Its rhythm.
I had stepped off the train momentarily when it stopped at a station. The only other woman on the platform was wrapped in a sari and stood at the train door’s edge. Otherwise, the platform was populated by the men from the AC compartment, including one with a khaki shirt and another with a golf shirt that said IBM.com. Cow dung sat piled nearby, covered with flies. It took the determination of my female energy to tuck my hands into my cargo pockets and walk from train door’s edge to platform edge. Why in this land of goddesses were women so repressed?
Now, riding the rails, I breathed in India.
Brown rocks of earth lined the track’s edge. Water sat in a field with a green grass edge. Colors blossomed everywhere. The silver lush of gravel. The bronze rush of track’s edge. The red and white rush of the platform edge. A man stood thigh high in a blue dhoti in rice paddy waters. I sat perched at the door as the train approached a bridge. I felt the rush in my stomach. But I didn’t stir. We crossed the bridge. My arm was taut against the silver handrail. The train door was painted dark blue. My feet sat on steps that had silver and black edges.
The caterer came by to visit. Later in the day I guided Lucy and Esther through the narrow corridor to the caterer’s compartment. He didn’t have enough supplies for the rest of the run. He had sent a telegram ahead for more ice, cups, and rice. Was Caterer Sahib worried? He wasn’t. “All will be solved.”
We were about to enter a town called Jhansi, and I read aloud to Lucy and Esther the tale of the Rani of Jhansi, a queen who dressed as a soldier to fight the British. In 1803 the British East India Company arrived here and took control of the state. The last of the rajahs died in 1853. Conveniently, the British had just passed a law letting them take over any princely state under their patronage if the ruler died without a male heir. They gave the rani, the queen, a pension and took full control of Jhansi.
The Rani of Jhansi wasn’t happy about the British forcing her into retirement. When the Indian freedom movement exploded four years later, she led the rebellion at Jhansi. The Indian revolutionaries massacred the British soldiers stationed there. Then, the next year, when the rebel forces were embroiled in infighting, the British took control again.
The rani fled to a city called Gwalior and, in a brave last stand, rode out against the British disguised as a man. She was killed. Her stand, though, earned her status as the Joan of Arc of India and a role as the heroine of the Indian independence movement.
Her tale inspired us, and I was happy to find a model for a real Tantrika in Indian history, even if she had failed.
We arrived in Lucknow. Rashida Khala was as immaculate and caring as ever. Esther and Lucy, the two dakinis, argued with a men’s tailor in Hazratganj who didn’t believe they actually wanted their pants stitched at a men’s tailor, something women here didn’t do. “We do want our clothes tailored here,” Lucy insisted.
I didn’t know why I mentioned to Rehan Bhai my idea of riding a motorcycle. He was all against it. He told me about the highway bandits who made a motorcyclist pull over, stealing his motorcycle at gunpoint. I told Azfar Bhai and Rehan Bhai, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m not interested in your negativity.”
Azfar Bhai still wasn’t ready to talk about ideas or vision. “Let me get you ice cream,” he told Esther and me. We were grown women. I wasn’t much younger than he was, but he still treated us like little girls. We dutifully walked down Hazratganj, the shopping corridor outside Jahingarabad Palace, with him always a few steps away from us. It was at least worth a good laugh.
For Lucy’s birthday, we walked down Hazratganj, arms swinging, feeling powerful. A Shakti fortress. Most other women were escorted by men. It was so insane this town. During one of our walks, a man riding as a passenger on a motorcycle pushed me as Esther and I walked in front of our palace home. Another time in Haszratganj, a man tried to feel Esther’s breasts. I caught up to him, gave him a swift shove, and screamed at him.
How could a town live with itself when its women lived in fear? Where were the parents? What were they teaching their boys? They were expecting to marry them into beautiful homes after a young adulthood of indecent behavior. It was warped. Sick.
Evening came. The motorcycle dealership was closing, but I had an appointment to learn how to ride one. I took a lesson on a Bajaj motorcycle with a Mohammad something sitting behind me. I drove, riding on the road beside the stadium where schoolgirls played volleyball. I felt the power of independence and possibility.
I enlisted Parvez in my quest. Parvez was Khala’s handsome young servant whom she had raised from childhood with his brother, Anis. Parvez was a male not threatened by my ambitions.
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One day at dawn I awakened Parvez and Anis to accompany me to the grounds to learn to ride the downstairs Hindu neighbor’s Kawasaki single engine. At the grounds, girls sat on scooters, learning to steer. A brother sat behind one, a girl behind another. I started the engine of the Kawasaki and skirted cow dung and cows lounging in the open field. A beautiful energy coursed through me. A boy sat behind his mother. Another girl practiced alone. She fell over and picked up her scooter herself. Two mowlana types, orthodox Muslims with long beards, sat on an Enfield Bullet. It must be the chariot of Tablighi, men who belong to the conservative Tablighi Jamaat organization of my cousin from Aligarh; Rehan Bhai rode one.
I was the only woman on a motorcycle, not a scooter. I felt powerful. I did crazy eights sleeping cows, like the kind of crazy eights I used to run on the West Virginia University Medical Center hill when I was in high school cross-country.
I invited Akhtarul Mulk, Iftikhar Mamoo’s friend, over to meet Esther and Lucy. They’d never spent time with him. He now carried a business card, “Chief Editor,” Area of Darkness, an English weekly he had started. He gave me a card he had prepared with my name on it as a correspondent for Area of Darkness, marked PRESS in big red letters.
We were on a takht, the wooden platform, on the veranda. Akhtarul Uncle sat on a chair and leaned toward Esther and Lucy. “I knew your father. Your father was unhappy in England. He wasn’t happy being away from India. He always had a longing for India.”
Esther tried to speak up. Akhtarul Uncle tried to continue. Esther persisted: “No, let me finish. This is very important to me. Of course, my father missed India. But he was where he wanted to be. He was in love,” she screamed. “He and my mother were in love. They were deeply in love.”