by Asra Nomani
She guided us through the alleys of the big house into doorways I wouldn’t have known to enter. Zaki had told her about porcupines that had raided. Latif Manzil and Khala captivated our relatives with the tale as we sat in the courtyards of their neighboring houses. Khala unknotted a corner of her dupatta into which she had tucked a porcupine needle to pull out as evidence of these creatures. They had chomped through doors throughout the house. She had never heard of such a thing happening here before.
Lucy, Esther, and I ventured out alone into the farm fields, as the village men did every day but rarely the Muslim women. As we walked through the fields, Lucy warned me, “Watch out for the shit.” It was an appropriate warning to keep us from soiling our spirits as Tantrikas as we traversed through life. A cow skull lay in the fields. We crossed into Khadnapur, the name of the village land that bordered Jaigahan.
Here we could feel the squish of the earth on our feet. A yellow butterfly danced in front of us, near white flowers. A rugged and handsome cousin of ours, Gama Bhai, led us over the land. He lived in the shadow of Latif Manzil with his wife, daughters, and son in a humble two-room house with a courtyard and open-air kitchen. His slow gait, measured speech, and the gray lining his trim hair gave him a dignified air beyond his forty-something age and his status as a small farmer in these parts. He was not a landowner, a zamindar in the tradition of our family, but plowed the land to support his family and eke out a small living. He impressed me as a stark contrast to Bluebeard.
“This is all of yours,” he said, sweeping his hands over the land.
What a thought—to have a lineage that tied us to the land. It bound my heart even deeper to this magical place. Lucy swung a blue plastic bag filled with eggplant. Esther carried a bag of tomatoes and lemons. We went to Gama Bhai’s house, where his mother, Bilkees Khala, sat in front of us. She was one of the elders of the village, a cousin to Rashida Khala, Iftikhar Mamoo, and my mother, so she became an aunt to Esther, Lucy, and me. She had lost most of her teeth so her cheeks were sunken, but, like Khala, she carried herself with grace, and beauty was chiseled into her face through a lifetime of village life. She reminded us of the essential: “This is your home.”
Esther and Lucy did consider Jaigahan and Latif Manzil their home. But there was Zaki to reckon with. He was always the black sheep of the family, leaving a string of failed business ventures in his wake and such troubled relationships with family members. Esther and Lucy remembered how our cousin-sisters called him “Yucky Zaki” when they were growing up.
Now Zaki’s wife, Shubnam, had joined him here after about two decades of living with her parents in Calcutta. They were running a school named after my great-grandfather, Latif Convent Academy. It was “English-medium,” which meant that school was taught in the English language. But it was rote just like my young cousin Shaan learned in Lucknow. The young schoolchildren lined up in their uniforms in a room off the courtyard. It should have been an inspiring scene. But it was tortured. Shubnam Momani and Zaki Mamoo barked at the children all day. Zaki carried a ruler, a “scale” in India, which he used to rap the children’s hands when he wanted to discipline them.
At 8:20 one morning, Zaki stood over the line with a ruler. At 9:08 A.M. I heard the smacking sound of the ruler hitting a child. Bluebeard was such a dark force.
Teenage girls slipped into the house in black burqas in the afternoon for “private tuition” with Shubnam Momani. She spoke an inspiring message about wanting to educate the girls so that they could be somewhat literate.
But the spirit of the house was oppressive with Zaki in it. Bilkees Khala sent food over for Khala. It was a ritual of respect accorded to Khala for her years. Zaki went crazy. “It’s a sign of disrespect to me! Isn’t my wife’s cooking good enough for you?”
Khala was horrified. She slipped out of the house.
Esther and Lucy were shocked when they went upstairs to the two rooms in which their parents had slept. Clothes their mother had carefully folded spilled out of trunks, and the rooms were in disarray. “My mother packed everything so neatly,” Esther said wistfully. “We left everything so tidy.” Her mother had also given Zaki the keys to the rooms. His family seemed to have taken over. The rooms were now a mess.
I had read from one of my books about purification in Tantra. The room where a Tantric ritual was to take place had to be cleaned. Incense should burn there all the time. The room should be decorated with flowers. A meal would be laid out, consisting of four different ingredients, and wine decanted. Candles would burn or, better still, an oil lamp with oil that creates a special red light. Then the room and the house could be cleansed, sprinkling water and using mantras. Normally long verses of mantras were used. It was to go on so long and so thoroughly that you became completely absorbed, giving yourself seriously and without reservation to the purification.
We had no food of our own. We had no flowers. We certainly didn’t have wine. But we had to cleanse these two rooms upstairs that Lucy and Esther’s parents had called their bedroom. We cleaned like fanatics. I burned incense. I said my protection verse from the Qur’an. I twirled the incense sticks in circular motions around the room to clear it.
All the while, I learned lessons from Khala. She told me that if I had a nightmare, I should turn over on my right side to sleep and then give money to somebody poor in the morning.
Khala told me that in Islam it was said that if a husband looked at his wife with a smile then he would see the gate of heaven. Zaki Mamoo spoke loudly to his wife with not a smile to be found. His voice was full of so much anger. She and her husband had hardly lived together over the decades of years they had been married. Khala said, “The best thing is for the husband to be with the wife.”
We lived in the village as we wanted to live. I even went behind the wheel of a Mahindra jeep. On the way to Khetasari, I gave an elderly man a ride. Our usual driver, a handsome young man named Abu Saad, told me later the man was Dr. Amanula Hakim, a doctor of Eastern medicine. He had probably never had a woman drive him around before. In Khetasari, we ventured unescorted to buy steel trunks. Esther bought new locks for the doors on her parents’ rooms upstairs.
A runaway cow roamed the village. A woman stopped me in the street. I didn’t know who she was, cloaked in a black burqa. She pulled the flap up to reveal her weathered face and a smile missing many teeth. She was our driver Abu Saad’s mother. “You drove!” she said.
“What do you think of that?”
“It’s a good thing.”
To me, her affirmation far outweighed the haughtiest condemnation by the status quo.
It was the morning of September 11, 2000. How could we know how the world would be transformed a year from that day? For now, I was in this village where homes didn’t have refrigerators because there were frequent electrical shutdowns, girls went behind the veil by the time they were teenagers, and there was no such thing as an Internet connection. It was 7:41 A.M. Khala emerged with a flowered kurta with embroidery on it and a white dupatta over her head. Khala and I sat on the charpai. Khala told me porcupines were called shahee in Urdu, information no more important than the fact that it came from Khala and made me one word closer to the pulse of my ancestors.
Esther came to tell us she had discovered one of her artist brushes missing. She wasn’t angry about the brush, but its absence was symbolic of the violation she felt Zaki had made into the sacred space of her parents’ rooms. She yelled at Zaki about the missing brush. He was adamant. “None of the children would steal.”
Esther used the opportunity to tell him she didn’t like the intrusion of the school into the space of Latif Manzil as a family house. Zaki started getting rude. “I have half of this house. We will split the house in half, then.” As one of the descendants of the four brothers who shared Latif Manzil, his side of the family had a one-fourth share of the house, and he had gotten control over another quarter share by a side of the family made closer by marriage.
I joined the conve
rsation. Zaki rudely tried to cut me off. “I will only talk to her.” I didn’t let his ego ensnare me. He tried to tell Esther that he considered himself like a father to her. When Khala talked to Esther later, privately, Khala told her to be strong against darkness. “Don’t cry.”
CHAPTER 13
The Sick Man
A STORY GOES THAT Buddha’s decision to seek an end to suffering was inspired by his first deep comprehension of suffering through meeting a sick man, a beggar, a dying man, and a monk. His journey began on that day. On the streets of Lucknow, my dakini spirits Esther and Lucy transported back to their lives as students in England, I met my sick man, and he made me think, “There but for the grace of God go my brother, me, all of us.”
I saw him first in front of the Clark Hotel, a naked man standing in the middle of traffic as if he wanted to be hit. I saw him again at Hazratganj, the street of businesses with Ray-Bans and Nike. I tried to feed him water from my Bislera bottle. He lunged at me. I was not scared. I looked him straight in the eye, as if I was disciplining my cat Billlie, and said, “No!”
The shoe walla threw water on him to make him leave his storefront. Then he locked the door with us inside. As he gazed out the locked door, this seller of shoes told me he had gone to a Tantric to try to get back his wife who left him. About the naked man getting water thrown upon him, he said, “In India, if you are falling people will only push you down harder.”
I stood for an hour to watch the man as he crossed back and forth over the busy lanes of Hazratganj.
He was actually concerned about a scooter that hit a car. He went to the traffic cop to make sure he knew. The traffic cop hit him with a switch meant for horses. Was he mad or were we mad?
There was a psychiatric hospital nearby. It was Nur Manzil Psychiatric Centre in Lalbagh, a short rickshaw ride from Hazratganj, nur meaning “light,” manzil meaning “resting place.” I asked to see the director, a man named Dr. Arun Thacore. After waiting awhile, I was beckoned in to see a serious man behind a desk. He shook his head. He said the psychiatric hospital wouldn’t take the poor man. “He is an indigent. Try the Sisters of Charity, and return tomorrow morning for an appointment at 9 A.M.”
I headed back to Hazratganj to walk to the Sisters of Charity. I asked two women who dressed like nuns for directions. “Walk with us,” they told me.
I waited in a corridor facing a courtyard. Images of Mother Teresa were everywhere with quotes about the light that shines within us. I thought about Mother Teresa as I never had before. It was true. For her to accomplish what she did, building a charity for the poor, this force of virginal female energy in this land, she had to be Shakti incarnate. I had never seen her that way before. The sisters said, “We can’t take him because he’s pagal,” mentally ill.
I visited a tailor that night. Rishi Puri, the tailor’s son, hung around in the back of the store where his aunt took my measurements for new shalwar kameez outfits. He was a first-year commerce student. That meant he would have been a college freshman in America. He had driven by the naked man that day. He was so saddened he made himself look the other way.
His aunt had been working in the store for the last thirty years with the encouragement of her bhaya, her older brother. Her young nephew admired her. “She is very strong.”
She wore the golden image of a goddess on a tiger on her chest. It dangled on the end of a slender gold chain.
I didn’t recognize the image. “Who is that?”
“Durga.” Ah, Durga. I was still getting to know her.
In the morning, I returned to Nur Manzil.
As I waited in the reception, a young man approached me. “Are you a nurse?” he asked with a voice that matched his gentle brown eyes and smooth skin. His dark hair had silken threads of golden brown spun into it. I laughed. I was the furthest thing from a nurse, though trying to find help for one naked man. He was Lokendra Subedi from Birendranagar in the Surkhet District of Nepal, a traveler far from home, at the hospital because he had been suffering from depression.
We started talking to another man in the waiting room, Lalee Takur, an engineer with the Survey Branch Office in the city of Dhangahi in Nepal, who had also come from across the border to find help for his son, Kisore Sharma, who had epilepsy. His family had told him to take his son to a village Tantric to cure him. He got him medicine instead. But the rational mind at the hospital provided them little compassion. Both these patients had been waiting to see the hospital director, yet I was beckoned inside first. The psychiatrist was immediately interested in my position as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He was one of India’s few subscribers, he told me. Now I knew why he wanted to meet me.
I told him about my project. He told me that parents came to Nur Manzil after failing to find success with Tantrics who claimed they could cure their children of mental illnesses by ridding them of spirits and spells that had supposedly seized their minds and souls. One set of parents brought their daughter in after she was tied to a rock, beaten, and starved to remove an evil spirit from her body. It showed me the horrors of Tantra being abused in the name of healing, another reminder that I didn’t want to go down the path of learning secrets of black magic or spiritual power. I would rather be motivated by simple kindness. Despite all my intentions, however, I ended up as successful in helping the naked man as the tailor’s son who drove by and did nothing. The inclination for compassion and empathy was low in this land of so much suffering.
I returned home to Jahingarabad Palace, where Khala shook her head, listening to the story of how I’d spent my day.
CHAPTER 14
Finding New Shakti
I OFTEN RETREATED to the (not so) Fast Business Centre seeking solitude. One day, I met a physical trainer named Michael Cowasji. We started talking motorcycles.
No sparks flew, so it was easy to go with him when he offered to show me motorcycles. I sat sidesaddle behind him on his LML scooter as we wove through Lucknow traffic to the Suzuki, LML, and Honda dealerships. On the ride, he told me that some years back in Delhi he had married a Hindu woman although her family didn’t approve because he was Christian. They had lived together peacefully, but then she started visiting her family without him because he wasn’t welcome in their house. She would return from every visit disheartened by him. She finally left him to stay with her family.
In Delhi the year before, he had gone to a Hindu Tantric who told him to feed a black dog a roti, a type of bread, with the wife’s name tucked inside on a piece of paper. He searched through the night until he found a black dog. The dog wouldn’t eat the roti. He chased after him until finally he ate the roti. Then he had to slaughter a certain-sized lamb. He realized that the Tantric had a scam going when he became displeased that Michael had brought his own lamb and didn’t spend three thousand rupees on the lamb the Tantric wanted to sell him. Even though the dog ate the roti, Michael’s wife never returned.
At the Suzuki dealership, I learned about a team of Indian army doctors set to start an expedition through the Himalayan foothills to Kargil in Kashmir on a new Suzuki launch, the Fiero. The sales and marketing men for TVS-Suzuki Limited encouraged me to sit on it. They took me seriously. They didn’t ask why I wanted to ride a motorcycle. They just wanted to know which one I wanted. The bike felt sleek and powerful and sweet. Would this be my tiger? It was symbolically right. The banner showed a man in a leather jacket hunched low upon the Fiero, a blaze of fire behind him. Except for a sales consultant, Runita, I was the only woman in the showroom. She, too, encouraged me. A singer, she told me she sang to Shiva in front of an image of a lingam. “It keeps me calm.”
On this trip, I somehow stumbled upon a real estate agent I had met once before. He ran into me as I scurried down Hazratganj. He told me he needed help. He hadn’t been able to have an erection since a girlfriend left him ten years before. “What was your relationship like with your mother?” I asked, trying to test my theory of psychological male castration by overbearing mothers. I,
obviously, still didn’t appreciate the difficult task of raising a child, let alone a son. His mother gave his brother presents on his birthday when he was growing up, an explanation he gave for his impotence. I was dodging shoulders as I listened to him. “You have to unblock your chakras.”
“Help me.”
I looked over at him to see if he was serious.
“I’m impotent. I won’t be a danger.” We stopped at a building down the alley from the Fast Business Centre. He suggested I give him a lesson in his apartment upstairs. “Don’t worry. We won’t be alone. My servant will be there.”
I remembered my promise to two friends in San Francisco before I left for the first leg of my journey, never to meet a man alone to talk about Tantra. I told him to masturbate pressing his heart chakra. I headed home—as fast as I could.
Over the phone, I talked to Dadi, my grandmother, visiting a daughter in Bombay, and she told me that she was headed back to Pakistan on a bus from Delhi.
I was wondering whether I should join her when I wandered into Ram Advani Bookstore on Hazratganj, a quiet and sophisticated enterprise with the latest in titles. Ram Advani was a gentleman scholar with a full-headed tuft of white hair and a silver beard to match. When I first came here, I had tried to speak to him in Hindi. He had responded to me in English. I wondered aloud to him whether to go to Pakistan with my dadi. He helped me make my decision by telling me his story. Before India’s independence, his family had a bookstore empire in what was now Pakistan. A well-read British officer told Ram’s family that they could have a warehouse in Lahore if they used it for only one purpose—to sell books. They took the warehouse and turned it into a sprawling bookstore. In Lahore, he fell in love with a Muslim girl, Sara, pronounced the Indian way, “Sah-rhuh.” Then, the partition happened. The Hindus were fleeing Pakistan. His family sold the bookstore to a Muslim family, who renamed it Feroze Sons. He fled, too, leaving Sara behind. He settled in Lucknow and fell in love with an academic researcher with a PhD. He showed me a book his son, a former editor at Oxford Press, had just published, The Indus Civilization. The heart of the Indus civilization was in Pakistan, not far west from Lahore, where Dadi was headed.