Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  “Jack Smith from America! Jack Smith from America!” the young men repeated to themselves after Jack introduced himself.

  I repeated to my friends something Lucy said during our Himalayas jaunt about the reception just about anyone gets in this country where the men especially aren’t shy about stopping and staring. “In India, everyone becomes a movie star.”

  The naga babas sat around fires surrounded by entourages of disciples and curious hangers-on. Exploring one day, I had found a popular naga baba who had his leathery arm in the air, his fingernails so long they had curled around his fingertips. He supposedly hadn’t dropped his arm for years. Somebody from his entourage had beckoned me over. I had sat down around the fire, honored.

  “Do you want to take a photo?” they had asked me, eager to please. “Chai?”

  I had been befuddled by their hospitality until one of the entourage members started negotiating. He had thought five hundred rupees was a fair gift for me to leave. Not to leave any confusion in my mind, he had said that would buy plenty of the ganja the sadhus around me were openly smoking. I hadn’t brought any money.

  “I’ll come back,” I had said, I don’t know why.

  “Okay, but remember if you don’t come back in this lifetime, you will have to return in another lifetime to repay your debt.”

  Return to support a naga baba’s drug habit? That didn’t sound right, but I had looked high and low for that campsite again with a five-hundred-rupee note ready to hand over in this act of blackmail. I searched again with Anaya, Jack, and Kevin, but I couldn’t find the arm-in-air baba again.

  We joined the parades of naga babas to the sangam. It was a peaceful procession considering the millions of pilgrims that were there. At the beachfront, the naga babas stormed down to the beach. They were a blur of dark skin in a cloud of dust. One naga baba wore a heavy wooden and brass chastity belt that locked around his waist, encasing his lingam. There was no worry this year about a stampede like the one that happened years ago. The naga babas got a special VIP bathing area.

  Anaya and I ventured out on another auspicious bathing day to dip into the Ganga.

  There were millions around us as we settled onto one spot of the beachhead. I went first. I stood in the water, my pants rolled up above my knees. I’d heard a lot about the diseases that could be gotten from these waters, where corpses often float. To die here was considered a blessing. I wondered if I would perform the ultimate act of faith and dip my face into these waters. The photos of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian daughter-in-law of India’s only woman prime minister, Indira Gandhi, showed that she didn’t when she came to the sangam just days earlier. I leaned forward and splashed water on my head. That was the most faith I could give this ritual.

  It was a cacophony of experiences here. The pandit promised us a night with the saints. Everyone in our campsite dressed up. The stage filled with babas with entourages, mobile phones, and armed guards. They spent the evening lauding the pandit, who beamed throughout the night, a larger-than-life photo of Swami Rama on the stage. Night after night, he brought us the same baba, a bearded man called Tapasvi Baba, meaning “Meditation Baba.”

  Anaya and I went in search of this baba one morning when our camp was invited to his campsite. We’d made an appointment with a camel driver to ride his camel into the main Mela campgrounds. The camel and his owner showed up late. The camel driver explained the camel ate breakfast late. You couldn’t rush a camel. We waddled happily to the Mela grounds on our camel and stopped for chai. I was questioning the pandit’s earlier advice to hide my Muslim identity among Hindus. It hadn’t mattered among the people of Himachal Pradesh. Sitting at the chai stall, a man with a thick mustache started talking to us. He described himself as an artist from the Rajput caste. I admitted to this Hindu that I was Muslim. No one banished me. No one stoned me.

  I started to reconsider my entire experience at this tented colony. Was it the camp that was a prison, or was it my mind, like so many of our minds, that restricted me because it so quickly judged and dismissed? We judge so quickly in this world, based on cynicism affirmed by sitcoms such as Seinfeld. But when we dismiss people, places, ideas, or experiences, we close our minds to the possible. I got so distracted by the barbed wire, I didn’t appreciate a secure place, far from the likes of potbelly swamis, where I could truly contemplate. I got so hung up on Panditji’s warning not to identify myself as a Muslim to Hindu teachers, I was wary of a friendly Rajput artist. I was so turned off by the messenger, Swami Rama, I rejected his message. Restrictions and restrictive personalities often so irk independent spirits like mine that we became ensnared in the human dimension instead of just staying free and focused on our own personal mission.

  On my last day, I met the woman whose private tent I had intruded upon. It was a bright sunny day. The waters of the Ganga, as the Ganges is called in India, sparkled. She was embarrassed she had kicked me out of the tent, but she appreciated the solitude that she’d enjoyed. I had wanted to spend my month like she had done, but instead got distracted by the outside world.

  “I stayed here mostly,” she said. “It was very good for me.” Unlike me, she saw past the barbed wire and penetrated the place that was usually the spiritual prison, herself.

  CHAPTER 19

  Riding into the Village

  MY ANCESTORS called me.

  I drove my motorcycle with Anaya behind me through the rain to Jaigahan. An Ambassador with another friend, Matthew, and our belongings followed behind us as we crossed the breakers that were speed bumps at railroad tracks. We now had Cheenie Bhai with us, our blossom-headed, ring-necked parakeet, rescued outside the city of Jhansi on a road trip through the sex temples of Khajuraho and the Tantric temples of remote cities with names like Dhatia and Chitraukaut. In Khajuraho, a tour guide we dubbed Swami Eloquence spun the mystical tales of the temples filled with sculptures showing the evolution of human beings from bestiality to human expression to sublime and then divine. In Dhatia, I meditated for the first time upon the power of the energy exuded from a lingam statue and listened to men sing prayers to the mother goddess who was the main deity there, touched by their devotion and wondering if they applied the same reverence to their wives at home. In Chitraukaut, a yogi at a special mountain shrine to the god Ram pretended to teach Anaya, Matthew, and me yoga but instead used the opportunity to cop a feel. He became Copafeel Swami. Along the way, I saw the beauty and grace of India in a small town called Orchha, which entranced me with the simple splendor of a sunset behind a slow trickle of a river. Translating for Anaya and Matthew, I realized that I had a gift that I had little appreciated as a bridge between the West and the East. Or at least one of those rope contraptions I’d seen stretched over rivers in Himachal Pradesh. I could speak to both worlds and didn’t have to be claimed by just one.

  Cheenie was loose in the Ambassador, sitting at times at the window, making me giggle as I passed him at the railroad breakers.

  The rain felt glorious, and I drove slowly to make sure nothing stupid happened. Anaya rode well in the back. She didn’t jostle much and dropped her feet when I needed her help to balance when we slowed for traffic in the towns we crossed. We were going about half as fast as usual, to be safe. It was late when we hit Shahganj. We found only one hotel. It was disgusting. I wanted to vomit when I went into the bathroom. One of the hotelier boys drove my motorcycle into the restaurant. In Shahganj, I went with the hotelier to buy a gas cylinder and stove, a true act of liberation. To have my own kitchen was almost equal to having my own home in India, a place where many women in an extended family shared the kitchen.

  I figured a woman had never steered herself alone to the village, let alone on a motorcycle. The feminist manifesto from a village in India had now been declared. I felt triumphant, as if I had returned from a war. In a way, I felt as if I had won a battle to overcome the fears that paralyze us. The next morning, I guided the Ambassador from Khetasari. I knew the right turn at the Union Bank sign, past the long r
oad of fertile fields and trees lining the road. It was a clear day, cool and bright.

  I led us down the couple miles to the pile of rocks where we turned right at the chai walla stand. The road was rocky. The World Bank was apparently funding the tarring of this road as another route to Jaunpur. I veered to the right around a giant tree, kicking up dirt. The Ambassador followed. I watched carefully for the alley through which my mother was first taken away from Latif Manzil.

  We eased our way through the still-teetering gate and over the cobblestone circular driveway. I stopped in front of Latif Manzil. Bluebeard’s son and his cousin-brother came running. I took off my helmet and felt as if I had been blessed and kissed by the divine touch of life. It was glorious to be back.

  We embarked on a magical adventure of independence in the village house.

  Anaya helped me make a home of the two rooms in which Iftikhar Mamoo and Rachel Momani had loved each other. She swept and cleaned with me. We pulled out old photos of my ancestors and hung them on the wall. I was pleased to find my paternal ancestor, Shibli Nomani, the Islamic scholar, among Mamoo’s photos. We opened the trunks and unfurled cotton blankets onto the takht, a platform, to create a sitting area in the front room with pillows against the back.

  In the room with the veranda, we lined a charpai near the balcony door so that at night I could gaze at the stars. It was romantic and inspiring. We had hardly settled into the house when a familiar face walked into the upstairs courtyard. It was Sean McLachlan, a journalist I’d met at the Maha Kumbh a Mela amid the naga babas. He had gotten an e-mail from me, giving him directions to Latif Manzil. A mowlana type who worked on the bus line in Jaunpur and lived in Khetasari escorted him here. When I saw Sean, I instantly embraced him in greeting, yelling, “Sean!” Zaki, who was standing nearby, later asked me incredulously, “You hugged a man who isn’t your husband?

  Every night, we cooked our own meals. I didn’t want to get caught in Bluebeard’s web and chose to live independently with my friends upstairs. We gazed at the stars. Sean taught me that the sun doesn’t actually rise or set, but we rotate away from it. “We should call it earth move instead of sunset,” I offered. We picnicked every night on the courtyard floor with the stars as our canopy and our lanterns as lighting. One day we plucked the most beautiful purple carrots from the sabzi walla in the bazaar. Anaya stirred the pot that night, stewing the carrots. Somehow, they burned, but we didn’t know it because it was so dark. Sean bit into the carrots and, somehow, we started joking about them, not realizing we we were hurting Anaya’s feelings.

  To soothe feathers the next day, we played a game Safiyyah and Samir had taught me from their days at North Elementary. “Each one of us draws a name and writes a nice thing about the person whose name you’ve drawn,” I suggested.

  I scribbled our names. Matthew. Anaya. Sean. Asra. Sean drew my name and wrote:

  Asra

  Warm, welcoming, spiritually aware,

  A firm base for any group

  The only person I know who can be sparkly and serious and silly at the same time

  How kind. Spiritually aware? Who would have thought a year ago?

  My dream of living independently came true a few weeks later. After my friends left India, I returned to my village again, alone except for the companionship of Cheenie Bhai and Cheenie Apa.

  The wind caressed my face. Crickets chirped. Song filled the night air with remembrances piped on loudspeakers to Hazrat Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad and the first imam, or leader, of the Shi’as, the minority sect of Islam. They believe the prophet Mohammad designated Ali to be his political and spiritual successor, while the Sunnis, the majority of Muslims and my family’s sect, didn’t accept this and instead elected Abu Bakr as the first caliph of Islam. In Jaigahan, the Shi’as lived for generations in a separate part of the village from Sunnis, but they always got along well. It was the holy month of Moharram for the Shi’as when they mourn the murder of Hazrat Ali’s son Husain.

  One night, the sound of a young girl lyrically reciting surahs from the Qur’an spilled through the air to me. I was lying on my bed below the gold embroidery of a sheer pink sari that meant happiness for me, the stars winking at me through the open veranda doors. How far I had come in claiming India as my own, even the ugly parts. I had come to my village to live alone, something women don’t do, let alone with a laptop that made occasional sounds as if it were breathing. I was trying to make this my home, living and writing here. In the mornings, I went to our short strip of a market to buy eggs and provisions. I bought carrots. Orange ones. I bought glass for my lantern and knew, because Bluebeard told me, that the glass costs five rupees each. I hung a brass bell I bought in Khetasari from my balcony, a purple string hanging from it so visitors could tug at the string and get my attention with the gentle tingling. It was an unusual sight in a Muslim home because it was usually used in Hindu temples. Bluebeard yelled at his son and nephew for ringing my bell in play. I got the electrician walla, who was actually a boy, to come to the house on his bicycle to wire the light switch in my rooms. The gas walla came by, too, with three keys strung on a black cord around his neck. He told me, “Call your mother,” thinking I was one of Rachel Momani’s daughters. I told him I was alone.

  One afternoon, I cut through the narrow alleys of Jaigahan with a woman in a big red bindi who lived next door to Najma Khala, my mother’s kind and smiling cousin-sister. A woman with sagging breasts and a sole tooth hanging from the top of her mouth was visiting in Najma Khala’s courtyard at the same time. She told me she was looking for a wife for her doctor grandson living in Australia. The woman threw her hand behind her hips, not far from her sagging breasts, and said she wanted a modern girl who walked the modern walk. “I know the perfect girl,” I told her enthusiastically. I thought of one of Rashida Khala’s granddaughters, whose parents were looking for a match, worried that she was getting too old although she was only in her twenties. The woman was excited about the prospect. When she left, gentle and kind Najma Khala made a face and reproached me that my cousin could never marry into the woman’s family. “You are Sheikhs,’’ she said, referring to the family name of my maternal grandmother, a revered name. “They’re low-caste Muslims.” So much for modern.

  Esther had taught me how to take the long broom to water to sweep away gurd, the dirt that was always a fixture on the floors at Latif Manzil. Despite all the work and frustrations of a modern-day pioneer, I felt so happy to be in the village. I hired an errand walla, who didn’t show up one morning by 8 A.M. as he said he would. The lukree mistri, the woodworker, didn’t show up another morning as he said he would. He told me the next morning, “I forgot.” Still, I felt a calm being in Latif Manzil. I felt joy in sitting alone, eating my plate of sliced red tomatoes and orange carrots under the night sky.

  The most serious problem I was facing was, literally, finding energy in my village house.

  Shakti had mostly been of symbolic importance for me as I traversed India. But, in the village, it was something that I needed so I could write on my laptop. We got electricity for only a few hours in the late afternoon and another few hours in the late night. When it came, it sometimes surged so powerfully it threatened to fry whatever was plugged into the socket. It was a fate I preferred not to see my laptop face. I asked around. I got confusing electrical advice from a brother of our neighbor, a college student who couldn’t speak English even though he had read Shakespeare. It was so frustrating trying to make sense of his instructions that I started crying. I didn’t know whom to trust, and I felt obliged to be nice to everyone. It seemed that I needed something called a voltage stabilizer that would cut off the electrical supply to my laptop if the current ran too high.

  The biggest city close to us with a big market was Jaunpur. One morning, I climbed onto my Splendor to head to Jaunpur to buy my stabilizer. In Jaunpur, a stabilizer walla insisted he had just what I needed. He seemed trustworthy. Back home, I plugged my electrical fan into my
stabilizer. I couldn’t believe I was wired at Latif Manzil.

  The joys in our village home were simple but plentiful.

  I awoke most mornings before dawn with the sound of azan, the call for prayer. One day, the full moon sat over my left shoulder like a celestial fruit hung atop a magical tree. Cheenie Bhai and Cheenie Apa stirred awake. I found one of Cheenie Bhai’s long green feathers and one of Cheenie Apa’s short gray feathers.

  My mandir bell rang. It was Anis, who worked for Rashida Khala in Lucknow, delivering, of all things, a Federal Express package my father had sent from Morgantown with an extra battery for my laptop. He walked straight out of a Fed Ex commercial. He wouldn’t stay. He hated Bluebeard. One time, he recalled, he had rested on a charpai after a long day of work, and Zaki had yelled at him for sleeping on his charpai. “We all come into this life. We all go,” said Anis. “Everyone is human whether you are poor or whether you are a crorepati,” a multimillionaire.

  I went with Anis to visit our neighbor behind Latif Manzil. Khala’s friend, an elderly cousin-aunt of mine, told me how her life had paralleled Khala’s life. She had married twice, like Khala, and both of her husbands also had left her a widow. Tears came to her eyes. It was a lonely life.

  I awakened with the sound of azan just after five. The kitchen bulb was lit. The electricity ran. I inserted the extra battery my father had sent in my laptop to recharge my source of shakti. It was ultimately in the parakeets that I found so much innocent joy. I prepared breakfast for them, carefully tucking half pieces of grape between the silver wires of the Cheenies’ cage, the juicy middle a temptation they couldn’t resist. The wild ones came like clockwork, that morning at 6:14 A.M. Five minutes later, a bee, big and loud, flew nearby. A squirrel darted onto the balcony railing, swiping a grape. This menagerie of parakeets and other creatures stayed active until the first hint arrived that the morning’s cool weather would be consumed by the day’s heat. Then they all fluttered away.