Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  I didn’t know who she was. The Tibetan patients didn’t know who she was. The nurse told me later that she was Princess Diana’s sister-in-law. That made her Fergie, the dethroned Duchess of York. She turned her head toward her male companions, looking slightly thrown off guard by my question, as if searching for the answer.

  She answered, “Why am I here?”

  Clearly, she was just another one of us.

  CHAPTER 17

  Morgantown

  AN MRI SCAN of my knee in Delhi revealed that I had ripped my medial meniscus cartilage in my game of volleyball with the young Tantric Tibetan Buddhists.

  I had parked my tiger for the winter at the Tibetan guest house and had taken an excruciating jeep ride down from Dharamsala. I went home to the States, straight onto the operating table in Morgantown, and was grounded for a month.

  This is what I seemed to do, wear myself out on the road and come home to heal. Each trip back to Morgantown meant bringing home the lessons I’d learned in the world. This time, I felt as if I had conquered India on the merit of simply being true to myself, doing that which I wanted to do. I also carried back with me the magic of the village, figuratively and literally. When I arrived, I pulled out for my mother a stone piece of the veranda that had gotten dislodged from Latif Manzil. I wanted her to touch the home that she’d had to leave as a child. I was my mother’s proxy in reclaiming our land. My home in Morgantown was where I was tested to the core of my being when my absentminded professor of a father said, “Hahn?” Urdu for “What?” when I talked to him. It was where I saw if I could distill in relation to my family, the people most important to me, the great wisdom I’d gathered on the road.

  I tried to be of selfless service to my family. I redecorated my mother’s store based on principles of feng shui, espoused by “the Black Hat Tantric” school, of all things, turning the love corner into Safiyyah’s corner and the children and creativity section into Samir’s responsibility. Samir painted a Buddha meditating in the corner where spirituality was supposed to be activated. “Ommmmm,” Buddha said in the drawing. Together, my mother and I learned the differences between the Tibetan deities drawn on lampshades she sold. She called one day asking me to identify one. I thought it was the goddess Tara. We saw later a label that said he was Manjushri, Lord of Wisdom. Whoops. We thought he was a she.

  Islam’s pious month of Ramadan arrived, and my father awakened me every morning before sunset for a meal meant to shore up our reserves for the day of abstinence from food and drink.

  It was a special time I shared with my father. I ate raisin bran cereal. My father ate salad with homemade hummus salad dressing for research he was doing into the merits of different diets for fasting during Ramadan. He had carved a niche in Ramadan fasting research as his specialty as a professor of nutrition, even starting a International Journal of Ramadan Fasting Research on the Internet. What I appreciated about his work was that he was looking at a world close to home, as I was doing. I read that a Kashmiri princess named Biksundi Lakshmi taught a Buddhist Tantric fasting practice, using the image of Avalokitesvara, a deity statue I had once coincidentally gotten during a trip to China, as a point of meditation.

  The princess had taught that the fasting practice relied on abstaining from food and drink and including prostrations, prayers, and the recital of mantras in a discipline that usually ran from two days to four days but sometimes also stretched into a period of several months. Disciples also had to shave their heads, walk barefoot, and eschew leather, ending the fasting ritual with a feast.

  The last morning of Ramadan, my father and I went to our local Morgantown mosque for the morning fajr namaz. I slipped behind a curtain drawn to make a women’s section. My father was faculty adviser to the Muslim Students Association. For years, starting in 1981, they had prayed in the basement of a building with the Needle Barn, a knitting and needlework store, upstairs and the Monongalia County Jail across the street. The association had collected enough money to buy a house to use as a mosque. I told my father, “You can’t have women slip into the masjid from the back. You have to give them a front entrance.” And he did.

  I stared at the fake wood planks on the wall, meditating. The light was out. A shelf of Qur’ans and Arabic books lined the wall to my left. I was the only woman. Men were reading parts of the Qur’an over the loudspeaker and getting corrected. Crackles of laughter interrupted the recitations with each correction. A voice broke through, trembling. “Please don’t laugh.” I recognized it as my father’s voice. “Reading the Qur’an is like a prayer to God for me. Please don’t laugh.”

  My father moved me.

  I tried to decide whether to go to Lahore from Morgantown to attend a cousin’s wedding. For months, his parents had been reciting prayers to extract extra blessings for the wedding.

  The cousin was being wed in an arranged marriage to a woman he had met just a few times, but they were getting to know each other the new millennium way, on the Internet. Sexuality expressed itself differently in that culture. He told me he asked her over the Internet to go to her room and look at her own breasts. She did. To them, that was a big deal. He was a big talker, but, faced with his own wedding night, he was afraid he would have premature ejaculation, something that had happened to one of our other cousins. The advice he got was to masturbate before he was alone with his wife.

  Safiyyah meditated with me on the dining table over this question of whether to go to Pakistan or not before heading back to India. I would have had to scramble, overnighting my visa application and passport to the Pakistani Embassy. Safiyyah stared and meditated so close to the candle she singed her bangs.

  “Don’t go,” she concluded.

  “Why?”

  “You shouldn’t do things that’ll damage your head.”

  Spoken like a true child spiritual genius.

  I ditched my North Face pack to get an army surplus knapsack that was discounted because its military green was faded from sitting in the window.

  It was after 10 P.M., and I was going through the racks at Wal-Mart, hunting for white buttons. I had an idea for using buttons to help schoolchildren connect to my travels and learn about the world. I was trying to learn how to be more giving, abandoning the self-centeredness of single life. I didn’t have my own children to inspire. In my own work, maybe I could inspire a lot of children.

  I sent notes to Safiyyah’s fourth-grade teacher at North Elementary, Mrs. Virginia Hammock, and Samir’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Jeanne DeVincent. I told them I wanted to bring mascots to their classes who would go on my travels with me, sending photos and messages back to the children. I plucked a unicorn and a parrot out of the top bunk in Safiyyah and Samir’s room.

  In Safiyyah’s class, I told the children, “Close your eyes. Fly away with me.” And I took the kids on an imagination ride with their unicorn, including the minivan ride to Pittsburgh and the airplane connection in Chicago. But first the unicorn needed a name. “Murph” won. Wait. No, I’d heard wrong.

  “Merve!” cried out Sam Walker, a little boy who had interviewed a classmate for other people’s secrets when he was in Mrs. DeVincent’s second grade with Safiyyah and I had taught the children about journalism.

  I passed the Wal-Mart white buttons around and instructed the children to pick two buttons that they liked and to write their names on both of them. I’d sew one button on Merve. “A part of you will also be flying across the ocean with him.” The other button they’d keep at home as their lucky wish button.

  The winning vote in Samir’s class for the name of the parrot was Blink 182, after a popular band. I figured we could settle the trademark infringement issues later. I had the traveling members of my sangha, my spiritual community, for my next adventure.

  Samir took me to the Morgantown Mall. We meandered toward a kiosk in the middle of the mall where Samir pointed toward a Pokémon card tucked into the glass showcase. “That one, please.”

  The saleswoman pulled out a hol
ogram Pokémon card protected with a plastic cover. It was Charzard, a fire-breathing dragon. It was thirty dollars. I converted the price in my mind into rupees. Thirty times fifty. That was fifteen hundred rupees. A night at the Residency, the guest house where I stayed in Delhi. A month’s wages for a servant.

  “Do you really want it?” I asked Samir.

  “Yeah,” he said, quietly but without shame. I had to give him credit for his tenacity.

  “Okay, we’ll take it,” I told the saleswoman.

  I wrote to Lucy about this disconnect between the worlds in which we traveled. She wrote back to me with her wisdom. “It’s all relative. It’s always relative. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, you have to take it in the context. Beauty and truth lie in the most hideous of forms. But taken in the sunsets and sunrises of life, the gray concrete of the pavement acts like shot silk basking in white light. That was the Pokémon doubt cast in the light of the all.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Thirty Days in a Spiritual Prison Camp

  THE BARBED WIRE stared at me like a divide between the real world and the spiritual prison camp in which I found myself. I’d traveled a distance greater than miles from Morgantown.

  Back in India, it was barely 4 A.M. and dark. I was supposed to meet a Tantric swami who told me the predawn hours were the most auspicious for meditation. But the gates to this tented ashram colony where I was staying were locked so that I was stuck behind the chain-link fence that surrounded us on all sides. Along with about three hundred other Westerners, I’d paid the Himalayan Institute some five thousand dollars to stay one month in the luxury of these tents colony on the banks of the holy Ganges River, a package that gave us ID tags and a regular newsletter. We were here during the Maha Kumbh a Mela, a celebrated pilgrimage that drew millions of devotees to bathe in the river waters. This pilgrimage was particularly special because the position of the stars and planets made it a holy alignment that was last seen 144 years before.

  It was a last-minute decision that got me to jet back to India to experience the Maha Kumbh a Mela. The year before I had been at the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where I’d spent the weekend with my father learning to breathe. Its pandit, Rajmani Tigunaut, had set me on the path of identifying myself to my Rajput ancestor of thirteen generations ago. I thought maybe I could learn more about authentic Tantra from the pandit here where he was conducting the retreat. For now, I just tried to figure out one thing.

  “How am I supposed to get out of here?” I whispered to myself.

  Our registration fee amounted to about four years of salary for the guard who was supposed to wake up early to unlock the gate. Needless to say, he didn’t wake up. I scanned the fence to see if there was a hole in the dirt through which I could shimmy to escape. I couldn’t find any way out. I settled cross-legged in one of the thatched huts made with hay and gazed toward the slow-moving Ganga that flowed before me. On the narrow strip of beach a band of sadhus walked toward the main encampments of the Kumbh a Mela. They had a freedom we’d surrendered for the luxury of these Swiss Army tents, chai breaks, and a store with goods for sale from mala beads to shalwar kameezes and an Ayurvedic medicine called Elixir 29. The guards locked the gates between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. The breakfast buffet included porridge every day, for which we created special recipes, adding sugar one day, bananas another, honey and peanut butter yet another. At dinner one night, we compared this camp to the prison camp in the World War II TV program Hogan’s Heroes. We tried to remember the camp’s name.

  “Stalag something,” I said.

  Someone played off Elixir 29 for our new name for this camp: “Stalag 29.”

  Stalag 29 sat outside the city of Allahabad, a town my mother remembered from her girlhood train rides from Bombay to Lucknow. A thrill would buzz through her compartment as everyone awoke from slumber to throw coins into the Ganga for good luck.

  On my father’s side, my dada earned his law degree at Allahabad University before moving the family to Hyderabad. In Aryan times, Allahabad was called Prayag, and many Hindu nationalists still called it by that name rather than evoke mention of Allah through its Muslim name, meaning “the city of Allah.” It’s a sprawling city today with a train station where a cousin of my father’s worked. He brought me to our campsite on his scooter, standing outside with me at a massive gate where the security guards wouldn’t allow entry without proper authorization. As we drove through the tent colony on roads that workers swept with brooms, he shook his head at this place created for foreigners. “They’re making a fool out of people.” I happened to be one of them, the fools.

  Every morning and every night, the pandit sat on a stage in a large open-air tent, holding lectures that were supposed to be a smart spiritualist’s guide to the Vedic principles behind Hinduism. Several rows of Americans sat cross-legged on mats in front of the stage, dozens of rows of folding chairs filled with more attendees behind them. At every lecture, a cameraman stood in the middle of the tent, filming the pandit to sell him on videotape later.

  The Ganga and the Yamuna Rivers were real bodies of water, but the Saraswati was an imaginary river that was said to intersect with them in Allahabad, although it had run dry. Figuratively, it was the symbolic channel of wisdom within us. The three rivers were said to run, figuratively, through our seven chakras and, literally, through a place called the sangam here in Allahabad, a special area where pilgrims bathed by the millions. These bathing rites were a joke not only to my Muslim relations but many Hindus as well, who considered it the construction of pandits and other religious leaders trying to exact money from the faithful on the basis of ritual. Hindus hardly cornered the market in this regard. I’d already seen Muslims who backbit while praying five times a day and a Buddhist pilgrimage where a Sherpa died in a stampede to see a sand mandala.

  My introduction to this tent world hadn’t been inspiring. I had slipped into the tent assigned to me when a voice, clearly irritated, had sprung from the darkness. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Asra. I’ve been assigned this tent.”

  The voice had answered, “This is supposed to be a private tent!”

  Oh. I learned later that the woman behind the voice had been negotiating with the Himalayan Institute organizers for weeks to pay extra to get a private tent where she could hold her own personal retreat. I found myself, instead, in another tent with a Seattle couple and their young blond daughter, Shanti, meaning “peace.” Instead of sharing the main tent space with the family, I made a bedroom for myself in a front area, laying hay in one corner and sleeping atop the pile with woolen blankets bundled on me for the cold nights. I walked to the sangam the first morning with the pandit’s family, most of them settled, like him, in the U.S. One of his sisters married a very American Indian whose brother led our march in a North Face jacket and constant reminders to his niece and nephew to pull out their water bottles: “Drink more water!” The tents stretched for miles and miles and were packed with pilgrims and sadhus who had traveled from all over India to be here. The part of the sangam we found was a beachfront lined with the faithful watching each other’s belongings as they dipped in the holy waters. I didn’t go in, this time.

  When we walked back, I gazed upon the rows of tents stretched along the banks of the Ganga, a glorious sunset silhouetting them in a haze of orange and red.

  “What do you see?” I asked the pandit’s brother-in-law.

  “Maya,” he said.

  “Maya?”

  “You don’t know maya? Maya is illusion.”

  I peered out at the sunset and tents again. After my retreat at the Buddhist monastery in West Virginia, I explored the illusion that was within me. Now, I looked outside myself and tried to examine the maya outside me. The pandit, with all his philosophical teachings, had turned the pilgrimage into quite a business operation. Excitedly, one night, he announced that we could invest in the future of this enterprise. “We will have timeshare on meditation retreat huts wher
e you can stay in the blessed ambiance of what we have created here.” For a $5,000 donation, I could be “a founding patron.” I passed.

  I finally got out the gate to join my Tantric, Swami Yogi Prakash, a man with a business card advertising his talents: “Astrologer, Yoga Expert, Tantrist, Counseller, Healer & Naturopath.” I entrusted myself to him somewhat because he was the resident swami at a camp run by a respected author and journalist I’d met in Delhi by the name of Bhaskar Bhattacharyye. He was a bespectacled, bearded man who wrote a book, The Mystic Lover, about the Tantric songs of a nomadic people called the Bauls of Bengal.

  When I first met him, the swami had hugged me, breathing deep into his gut so his potbelly rose on my flat stomach. “Feel something?” he had asked.

  How could I not feel his big fat stomach? He had tried to kiss me. I had averted my face so he couldn’t kiss my lips. I returned to his tent this time because I was still just a little bit curious. This time, he fed me by hand from his thali, a plate with an assortment of vegetarian dishes.

  “You must surrender to your teacher,” he told me, between bites. “I will be teaching you out of love.”

  “I don’t even know you,” I told him. But I did. He was a loser, Swami Slime, showing me, after my experience with Sufi Slime, that lechery crossed all boundaries.

  The most attention at the Maha Kumbh a Mela went to the naga babas.

  In search of these naga babas, a group of hashish-infused ascetics who renounced clothing, families and jobs—everything but their drug habits—I swept through the dusty Mela grounds with a band of new American friends from the Himalayan Institute camp. Jack was a big, barrel-chested scientist with a wry sense of humor. Anaya’s real name was Deborah, a recently separated forty-something Jewish-American whose mother still hadn’t forgiven her for not marrying a Jewish man. She came to India to meet a Hare Krishna boyfriend who ditched her at the last minute, stranding her with an airline ticket she decided to use anyway. Anaya now had a crush on Kevin, a doctor who joined us as we went in search of the naga babas on an auspicious bathing day. Jack’s stature made him a magnet for curious Indians, and he became a mini-celebrity shaking hands with more good humor than I could ever muster for eager young Indian men who wanted to practice their English.