by Asra Nomani
He confirmed my thoughts. “Go to Pakistan with your dadi.”
My father’s family had come from the village Bindwal in the same Azamgarh District where my mother’s father took his last breath. My dada, my father’s father, settled his large family in the city of Hyderabad, supporting them with his law practice. My grandmother, Dadi, sold her twenty-four-karat gold wedding jewelry to pay to register my grandfather’s practice in the state’s high court system.
Born in the summer of 1935, my father as a child climbed a tree to watch Mahatma Gandhi during his noncooperation movement when Indians defied their British rulers. During his college days, my father studied with the image of the Buddha before him. He was handsome, educated, and ambitious. He graduated in the class of 1955 from Osmania University’s Agriculture College in Hyderabad with a first division rank that it was said no other student had earned in seven years. Panthers roamed the grounds of the rural experimental station in the village Rudrur where my father researched ways to stop the damage of the insect Schoenobs incertelus burrowing into the stem of rice crop, destroying the harvest. He slept on the farm to the roar of tigers outside the village. His top graduation ranking earned him a government appointment as an assistant professor at Osmania University’s Agriculture College. His marriage was quickly arranged.
Her large eyes stared out so hollow and yet so deep on her wedding day. She was a virgin bride leaving her home to enter a new home of strangers, including her husband. She was too naive even to be frightened. Her sisters clipped a gold chain in the part of her hair. A gold star hung from the end of the chain, slightly askew between her delicate brows, a ruby glittering in the middle. Her sisters lined her eyes with kajal, so the black lines met in the corner as they did centuries before on Cleopatra in a far-off kingdom on the Nile. They draped a sheer peach-colored dupatta over her head so only wisps of her hair peeked out from beneath the gold lace stitched on the edge. Her deep eyes were haunting not only because she dared to look into a camera, but also because they betrayed the promise not to reveal unspoken sadness.
She was filled with hope for a new life with security and a sense of home. She had spent her young life in the homes of relatives. Marriage gave her a home of her own, security, happiness. That’s what she thought.
It was a small wedding in Bombay at a guest house. She was led forward with a gentle touch to a future she couldn’t imagine. She pursed her lips tight and only kept her eyes downcast. My mother went to her family’s house. My father stayed at the guest house with his family. The next day, she journeyed with her new husband and his family to Hyderabad. It was a city rich with the history of Muslim nawabs who ruled over the people. When they descended at the train station, her new mother-in-law, my grandmother, stared at the black burqa in which my mother was enshrouded.
“What is this?” my grandmother said, staring at the burqa. “Take it off!” she yelled, ripping the burqa off, shocking the new bride.
My father wasn’t surprised by the move. Dadi had caused quite a stir in 1942 in Azamgarh when she’d pioneered her own woman’s movement, removing her burqa and shopping freely in the bazaar. But the liberation movement hadn’t yet touched my mother’s family. My mother felt as if she was standing naked on the railroad platform, the burqa that cloaked her now just a bundle of black fabric in her hands. Certainly, my mother had gotten into trouble for taking off her burqa when she was younger, but it was in the safety of a girls’ school. Here men—strangers—could see her. This was the first of so many shocks she endured quietly to adjust in this new home. The people were so different from her family. My grandmother spoke her mind forcefully. She ran her house with an iron fist. She cajoled all of her children, sons and daughters, to study and succeed. She didn’t listen to my mother’s protests and made her finish the high school degree that she hadn’t completed because of the burqa incident that got her pulled from school.
My mother’s first day in Hyderabad, two of my father’s aunts, his Mahjabeen Khali and Bilquis Momani, joked with him that he would consummate his wedding that night. He bet that he wouldn’t. He lost.
On their wedding night, the third night after their actual marriage, my father couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. He was a staunch Muslim, but he told his new wife about his philosophy of life, about his sympathy with the teachings of Buddha. He told her about his deep sense of spirituality and obligation to help humanity, how he wanted to alleviate suffering in the world. He saw her as his spiritual partner. She listened quietly. She just wanted to be loved. Her ideas about wedding nights came from the Barbara Cartland novels of her teen years, and Buddha was nowhere to be found.
In my mother’s morning routine, she walked slowly to prepare chai for her husband and his parents. Her sisters-in-law scurried to school. She cleaned the dirty breakfast dishes under a hand pipe. She took a jharu, a broom made from the branches of a tree, and crouched to whisk the broom over the dirt floor of the courtyard in the center of the house. One day, one of her sisters-in-law compared her to the eldest brother’s wife. “Raunaq did it better,” she said.
It was probably true. She could admit she didn’t play the part of Cinderella very well. It was harder when she was pregnant with her first child. As she swept, she coughed dirt into her lungs. The new bride felt under siege. She wondered how her husband could worry about saving humanity when his own wife was crying herself to sleep. That’s when she made her husband put away the Buddha picture. A lingering sadness always remained with my mother, also, for she never saw her childhood home again in the village of Jaigahan, even though her mother-in-law visited there once, inspiring a story I heard of admiration about my grandmother’s persevering energy.
I saw this energy explode in front of me in Delhi as my grandmother stepped down from the train from Bombay. She was older, but I could tell she still had fire in her belly.
The back of her hair had the orange-red of the henna with which she dyed it. The hair around her face framed her in silver. Her face was creased with a lifetime that had seen imperialism, revolution, war, famine, and the extension of her family to the far corners of the world. In Pakistan, she was part of the older immigrants from India who still wrapped yards of sari around her waist, throwing the pallu over her shoulder, instead of switching to the shalwar kameezes, the tunic kurtas, harem pants, and dupattas that were the style of Pakistan. She was certainly daring compared to the chadors that shrouded the conservative Muslim women of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan in a sea of cloth. But she was an elderly woman and was allowed her fashion statement.
Since my earliest days, as my mother’s daughter, I had had a conflicted relationship with my grandmother, probably because I had grown up more like her than not. When I was in Aligarh, my cousin from Azamgarh, Azfar Bhai, lounged on the bed and regaled me with the story of how my dadi traveled fearlessly even when religious divides split Hindus and Muslims after partition, crisscrossing into Muslim areas with a dupatta over her head and then into Hindu areas with a bindhi on her forehead. She was happy to get away with always pushing the envelope, something with which I was kind of familiar. She always loved India, but her sons convinced her to sell her house in Hyderabad and settle in Pakistan, where they could take care of her.
“Mataji, sit down here,” the Indian police officers said respectfully to her the next morning before sunrise, using the Hindi term for mother, as we waited to have our luggage inspected before boarding the Peace Bus to Lahore. She chatted them up, as she chatted up just about anybody. They still confiscated my road map of Delhi, afraid it would be used against India in Pakistan, ignoring the fact that it was probably easily available online. But this bus ride was a political gamble.
The Peace Bus started as a stunt orchestrated by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to show friendlier relations between the two countries. The bus ran between the Pakistan city of Lahore and India’s New Delhi on the historic Grand Trunk Road. From the densely populated paradox
of Calcutta, the Grand Trunk Road cut through northern India, hitting the Ganges at the holy city of Varanasi before charting a course to the capital, Delhi. It proceeded north on the road Lucy, Esther, and I had taken. Twenty-six kilometers, or sixteen miles, after the dusty city of Amritsar, the road crossed the Pakistan border and headed into Pakistan’s grand center of art and culture, Lahore.
Despite ongoing tensions between the countries, the crossing usually wasn’t a problem. The road followed an arc up through the capital, over the Indus River to Peshawar. Travelers could then head to the Afghanistan border at the famous Khyber Pass. It was an adventure, as were all outings with Dadi. Armed police sat in the front and the rear of the bus. I didn’t know if they were guarding us from terrorists in India or guarding India from terrorists on the bus. Dadi didn’t care. She went about her business. She tried to arrange the marriage of the Peace Bus official working on our bus.
When we arrived in Lahore, we spent our days in the house of my eldest paternal uncle, Baray Abu. Between meals and prayers and naps, Dadi told me about my ancestry and her life. My dada’s father’s name was Mohammad Isaq Nomani. His mother’s name was Saboohath. They lived in Bindwal. Shibli Nomani was my dada’s most renowned ancestor. I’d heard about him throughout my lifetime, but I’d gotten most interested in him as I tried to understand my ancestry. He was a scholar of Islam and the founder of Shibli College in Azamgarh. He was renowned for biographies he wrote of the Prophet Muhammad and Hazrat Omar, the second caliph, or leader, of Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. I wondered more about him. I felt I was carrying on his legacy, as a researcher of religion and philosophy, even if it was, yes, with quite a different twist.
Dadi estimated she was eighty-seven, born into the rural town of Hinganghat in India when the British were still colonialists. Although not fluent in English, Dadi could spell her name, Zubaida, meaning “quintessence” in Arabic. She was married at fourteen to my grandfather, Mumtaz Ahmad Nomani, who became a successful defense attorney in the old city of Hyderabad. Before that, she traveled alone with her children in 1942 to the bustling Hindu holy city of Benares from Wardha, a city where Dada had moved the family in order to build his law practice. My father grew up there, affected by the nonviolent movement of Gandhi, who himself had moved to Wardha, using it as a headquarters for his battle for India’s liberation. Their family would picnic at Gandhi’s ashram. It was a time when few women dreamed of doing such a daring thing as traveling unaccompanied by a man. But after the family moved to Hyderabad, Dadi even drove a car, learning on a racecourse, and driving until she hit a rickshaw. There were no power brakes back then. They paid off the rickshaw driver for maybe fifteen rupees, twenty rupees tops (between three and five dollars then).
“He was happy,” she insisted.
Three sons and five daughters settled in Pakistan, uprooting themselves from their lives in India in the years after India won independence from the British in 1947. She did not shun the Hindu yogic traditions that ran through the culture but instead twisted her body into the yogic postures that I’d learned at the Eastern Athletic club in Brooklyn Heights when I signed up for my first yoga class years earlier. My father learned alternate nostril breathing from his mother, something she did proudly, inhaling deeply and exhaling with great force. Dadi pressed on the spots that I learned in the Canadian hinterland as the acupressure spots of our chakras. She pressed on the dip in the back of the neck below the nape of the neck. “It opens your blood.”
One afternoon, I went with Dadi to a famous Sufi shrine in the middle of Lahore, Data Darbar, dedicated to an eleventh-century mystic, Syed Ali Hajveri, popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh. I didn’t have a discipline that allowed me to have spiritual communion. I touched my forehead to the cool marble tile and felt a light connection to the mystical world.
Dadi took me by the elbow and made way for us in the men’s section so I could take good pictures. She ignored the men who protested. To one, she said, “This is my granddaughter. She has come from America, and she wants to take a photo.” This was Dadi in action. No fear. No rules. My cousin-brother, Sohail Bhai, an engineer, worked across from the shrine that we visited. It was the red-light district, alive and prospering in this Muslim nation. Criminals, he said, kidnapped girls from the Sufi shrine. His boy was with us today, his daughter at home, but he told his wife to watch their child closely.
We went to another shrine. Sohail Bhai’s wife said, “Tawba. Tawba.” seeking forgiveness in Arabic, slapping one side of her face gently and then the other for what she saw before her: Muslims bowing their head to the shrine. To her and other Muslims, it was a sin to bow your head to anyone but God.
My uncle, Baray Abu, and his wife, Bari Ammi, represented simple devotees to me. They punched a small handheld counter with their thumbs as they recited a dua, or prayer, over and over again to earn blessings for their son’s impending marriage. Baray Abu rose before dawn to do fajr namaz. He wouldn’t take me to the masjid with him because the subcontinent culture didn’t allow women to enter anymore. When he returned home he unlocked the door from the outside. I hated this security system, because we were essentially locked inside the house when he went to do his prayer. I would wait for him to accompany him on his walk in the park as the sun rose.
He talked about selfless generosity to family. He made me think that I hadn’t given enough to my own family. Living alone had made me selfish even if I had good intentions. Late into the night, I talked to Baray Abu. Somehow the subject turned to the Kama Sutra. He admitted that he read it. He didn’t approve of its teachings. “It allows for immoral activity. It says it is okay to sleep with the wife of your enemy.”
He had found religion again. He said it was a personal violation for him to hear anyone question the Qur’an. Faith amounted to belief in the sanctity of each word of the Qur’an, he said. He had a mowlana, or Muslim teacher, who came every day at 3 P.M. to teach him how to properly read the Qur’an in Arabic.
In her room, Dadi taught me that shakti can be expressed in many forms. In Hindu mythology, female energy manifests itself through the fierce Kali, the protective Durga, the knowledgeable Saraswati, and the monetarily successful Lakshmi. I wondered how to understand Dadi’s special brand of shakti.
On the one hand, she was pioneering, aggressive, inspiring. After all, she drove a car and traveled alone in the 1950s when few women did. “I never had any problems. All men were my brothers.”
On the other hand, she was aggressive and offensive. She made my innocent mother’s life a living hell when my mother moved into my father’s extended family house in Hyderabad. For a decade after she left for America, my mother had nightmares about my grandmother. I sat across the dining table from Dadi, and I was brazen enough to ask her that question that Rashida Khala had warned me would be impolite. “Do you like my mother?” I asked, trying to reconcile the shakti forces within my life.
She didn’t bat an eye. She wasn’t surprised by the question. She defended herself. Of course she liked my mother, but somehow my mother got the wrong idea because my grandmother asked her to help wash the clothes. “We all washed each other’s clothes.”
I was dumbfounded. How to continue this conversation after it turned to dirty laundry? Somehow that was a good way of understanding what we were talking about.
Ready to change the subject, too, Dadi told me the tale of our mystical Sufi ancestry.
She said her great-grandfather was a Sufi who isolated himself in a nearby jungle to pray. He married at his mother’s request but returned to the jungle. When his mother asked him to bear children with his wife, he took a leaf and chewed it. He gave the chewed leaf to his wife to eat, and she became pregnant.
I knew this was controversial territory. Sufism was to Islam much like Tantra was to Hinduism. It was shunned and whispered about quietly as a fringe culture that deviated from the main religion. Many Sufi philosophies mirrored Tantra: the transcendental meditative oneness with the universe, the sense o
f divinity in all people, and the renunciation of things material.
Dadi told me about her devotion in Hyderabad to a Sufi pir, a healing saint. My brother accompanied her on those visits. She didn’t call herself a Sufi, but she took up the practices of Sufis. She fell asleep reciting zikr, remembrances of God, on her tuz’bi, her prayer beads, after doing her namaz. She kept duas, prayers, by her pillow, waking up in the middle of the night to recite them. When Baray Abu got something in his eye, Dadi said a dua, pulled the eyelashes aggressively, blew into the eye, and cured him.
My uncle called a friend who belonged to a Sufi family. The man suggested I meet his sister. I talked to her and agreed to join her for a women’s gathering to discuss the Qur’an.
She told me she hadn’t missed a single of her five daily prayers in her entire lifetime. At our women’s session, she told the story of helping even an ant by giving it sugar, at the same moment that I, not very absorbed in her lecture, happened to give an ant some sugar.
I met her brother. He was an elderly man, serious and pious. He told me he couldn’t teach me unless I was a good Muslim, praying five times a day. “Do you pray five times a day?”
I knew this was no time to lie. I admitted that I didn’t.
“I cannot teach you unless you pray five times a day.”
We continued talking anyway. He told me he went to a camp for mujahadeen fighters in Kashmir. “They had a glow on their faces as if they were angels.” His sister went, too. She was beaming, remembering the light that she said shone from these jihadis, fighting a “holy war” against India for Kashmir.