Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  I had to hit the road to get cash. In Jaunpur, a young man at a chai shop climbed on a bike to show me the road to Benares. I followed him on my motorcycle, hypnotized by the ballooning of his shirt behind him, and I was heartened by the small gestures of kindness I found in my travels.

  It was a day so hot I could feel the heat engulf me. I remembered the mornings at Stalag 29 when I had wished for warm air and knew that was now being realized. A young idiot on a scooter played rabbit with me, as I used to play in high school cross-country. He looked respectable in a white kurta and pyjama, but he passed me, slowed down, waited for me to pass him, and then passed me again. He tried to talk to me.

  “Leave me alone!” I screamed. He zipped off.

  As I rode into Varanasi, a lanky young man on a bicycle followed me. I screamed at him. He quickly turned down another road. At an intersection, one boy asked another boy on a motorcycle, “Girl?” They flustered me. I stalled.

  In my drive back to Jaigahan, I turned into a motorcycle repair shop to replace rearview mirrors cracked when I took a frightening spill on railroad tracks so dangerously aligned with the road the workers told me the crossing claimed several lives a year. A crowd of boys and young men gathered to gawk at this woman who rode through their bazaar on a motorcycle. I knew they were a bored, aimless generation. Uttar Pradesh was one of the country’s poorest states, battling high unemployment and low literacy. A hotel manager I’d met in Himachal Pradesh said that the culture of his state wasn’t so oppressive as in states such as Uttar Pradesh because “We fear God.”

  I knew these boys needed to fear something. I threw my broken rearview mirror at one who kept staring at me. I was just sorry it didn’t hit his head. Next time a crowd gathered around me, I daydreamed that I’d tell them, “I’m studying Tantra and will cast a spell on whoever stays.”

  When I got back on the road, a guy on a scooter with shades on his face and a weirdo behind him kept playing rabbit with me.

  I caught up to him and shouted, “You want to stop? You want to stop?” swerving my bike toward them. Then I lost it. I yelled, “Bhagwan”—the Hindu word for God—“will strike you down.” I told them, “Look in my eyes. I’m giving you the evil eye.” Learning spirituality and descending into road rage. My Tantric teaching.

  The sun was setting, the earth was moving when I pulled into Latif Manzil. Death confronted me downstairs. It was a war scene in the rooms where Bluebeard had kept baby chicks in a venture to start a chicken farm. He had put a screen in the window, but only three-fourths of the way up. It seemed that a mongoose had sneaked into the rooms and slaughtered the chicks. They lay dead everywhere, many decapitated.

  I wondered why I’d endured hell to get here. When I unlocked the padlock on my door upstairs and stepped into my front room, I knew why. It was because I was going to have a glimpse of heaven. In contrast to the scene downstairs, upstairs we celebrated life. Cheenie Bhai chewed on a branch, stirring it. Cheenie’s friends were visiting, three jungli bhais and one apa, chirping and joyous. Oh! their song! It was so loving. I didn’t think it was just the grapes.

  A bird hid behind a bale branch climbing toward a jungli bhai. Her yellow beak was visible. Fly, I thought, so I can see your silhouette and know what you are. It flew. It wasn’t a bhai or apa. I watched these birds fly, glide, fly, swoop. Four flew west in a U-turn back to the bael tree. Birds in the distance hopped from one branch to the next. I heard a bhai before I saw him, singing as a man in a nearby masjid broke the air just before sunset with the magrib azan. The junglis flew away, scattering like the wind. Why?

  I wondered so many things about these mountain creatures of flight that had found Jaigahan. Would they die in the summer heat of the village plains? Would I? Would they ever learn to love? Would I?

  The voices of societal pressure spoke to me.

  Bluebeard’s wife told me it was zaruri, necessary, for a woman to get married. Yes, I thought unkindly, so I could get plump like so many women making babies for their slacker husbands. The year before, I’d let these pressures get to me. This time I simply told her that if she cared, it was her zimmeydaari, or responsibility, to find me a husband, and then I walked away. A naga baba sitting on the banks of the Ganga told me to seek shanti, or peace, from others, but if they didn’t offer it, to walk away. Another afternoon, Bluebeard’s best friend darted into my room and started rifling through the top drawers of my dressers. “Is the Qur’an here?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know if the Qur’an is here.”

  He finally told me what he was doing. I found a Kali statue that Rachel Momani had packed into one of her trunks. It was a stunning clay piece with the image of Kali stomping men, symbolizing her destruction, not of men but rather of evil and ignorance. I put it on a dresser. Bluebeard’s friend worried that a Qur’an he remembered in the drawers was sitting below the statue, a sin to many. I tried to practice nonattachment and packed the Kali statue away, but as the days spilled into other expressions of oppressiveness, I searched for Kali again, sad that I had misplaced her.

  I had a disaster when my Shyam Voltage Stabilizer from Jaunpur burned from a burst of high voltage. It didn’t cut off, as the stabilizer walla said it would. I documented my case to Mr. Prakash, the stabilizer walla, and pulled out all the stops, even quoting Hindu mythology to tell him that the goddess Lakshmi wouldn’t be pleased with his lack of professionalism. I remembered that five hundred rupees I owed the druggie naga baba. “Along with your worldly responsibility to me, you have a karmic debt to pay.”

  Bluebeard was back to his negative self. “The stabilizer walla made a fool out of you.” I told him he wasn’t being supportive, calling me a fool. He responded, “But he did make a fool out of you.”

  Thinking I was being too bold doing things on my own, I accepted Bluebeard’s recommendation and bought a stabilizer from a distant relative with a shop in Khetasari. By morning, even this stabilizer turned out to be a piece of junk. They were all scam artists, these bazaar wallas. I sought solace from the one man I could trust, my father. “Asra bayti,” he told me over the phone, “don’t be frustrated. You can’t even buy pure milk in India. You can’t even find pure red pepper.”

  I left Jaighan to escort Rashida Khala from Lucknow to Hyderabad, where her daughter lived. I visited my kind cousin-aunt, Najma Khala, and her husband one last time. They’d been a pillar of positive energy in Jaigahan, always smiling and encouraging. I couldn’t stop the tears of frustration from spilling when I sat with Najma Khala. “It’s so hard to do alone,” I cried, “with everyone trying to rip you off.” The other day I’d even found Bluebeard’s nephew going through my wallet when he was supposed to be searching for grapes for the Cheenies. I knew he was just a boy, but the frustrations ran so deep. Najma Khala couldn’t endure me crying. She wept with me. I wiped my face and returned to Latif Manzil to pack the Cheenies and my boxes of books.

  As I pulled away in a Mahindra Jeep with our driver, Abu Saad, Bluebeard stated the obvious. “She is mentally upset.”

  I didn’t contest his assessment. I had created a calm and peaceful place for myself here, and I wondered why I’d engulfed myself in trouble and suffering. I knew it was because I had a vision. I wanted this house to be a home. If I, daring of heart, could not make it a successful home, then how could my Safiyyah and Samir? I wanted this to be a place where they could live and prosper. I wanted this to be a place where the young of heart, the old in age, the vibrant in spirit, the dejected in spirit all could prosper and enjoy the sunsets so much that they, too, would be prompted to learn that the sun didn’t really set. Oh, the sun was a beacon. It was telling me that life could sustain itself. Its orange blaze announced that I could conquer. Or, yes, I could flame out.

  CHAPTER 20

  Wannabe Goddesses Cry

  IT WAS SOMETHING to be back in civilization.

  The Baskin-Robbins sign greeted me as I entered Jahingarabad Palace in Lucknow again. My aunt, Ra
shida Khala, welcomed me in her quiet way, eager to hear my latest tales from the village. We sat at the dining table, and I told her about the railroad tracks, the birds, Bluebeard, the stabilizers, and Najma Khala’s tears of empathy. Lucy called me in the night and cheered on my efforts in the village. “They haven’t had a woman shake things up like this,” she told me in her singsong voice. “Go for it. Fight. Make it right. Just don’t get emotional. Don’t raise your voice.” She learned this traveling through Asia. “Walk with an air about you. Have a sense of arrogance.” It’s just what my brother advised. Have enough arrogance so that no one pushes you around.

  I needed to hear this advice as Khala and I planned our travels to Hyderabad, the city of my father, where I had lived before crossing the Atlantic for America. Before we went, I had a day of tasks. The first was getting our train tickets. Before I’d left for my first journey to India a year before, my father had spun horror stories about the hassles of buying train tickets—long lines and seats never confirmed. But Akhtarul Uncle had shown me the counter at the Lucknow station where they book tickets for foreign travelers, journalists, military soldiers, and freedom fighters, Indians who fought the British. It was a short line, plus you got priority confirmations on bookings. I got my booking, but they wouldn’t confirm Khala’s seat. I climbed into another bicycle rickshaw to go back to Hazratganj to the local Indian Railways headquarters. For twenty rupees, about fifty cents, the rickshaw walla exerted every muscle in his body to carry me more than a mile through traffic.

  At the headquarters, I was told to go into an office. I found a woman behind the desk. I stood there in her office and just admired her.

  She was only thirty, but she ran a department overseeing a thousand employees, virtually all of them male. From her name, I could tell she was Hindu. I asked her to whom her mandir was dedicated.

  “Durga,” she said. She had gone to a Durga temple in Madhya Pradesh just a week earlier with her husband and child. I thought about my tears in Jaigahan.

  “Do you cry?” I asked her.

  She nodded her head. She cried.

  “Did the goddesses cry?”

  “Of course not. But we are not goddesses. We aspire to be like the goddesses, but we are human.”

  That was true, wasn’t it? We weren’t goddesses despite all the best intentions and marketing pitches. I thought of the T-shirts for sale the year before at Gabriel Brothers, a Morgantown discount store that dressed our small town in high fashion, with “Goddess” across the chest, hanging next to the T-shirts we bought for Safiyyah and her birthday slumber party girlfriends with “Princess” across their fronts. There was all the talk about the goddess within us. She was there, to be awakened, but the truth was we were ultimately defined, too, by human frailties. It was ego and maya, illusion, to think anything more. We didn’t have to feel guilty about crying.

  I secured Khala’s seat, and I also got the order sent from a railway official to fix the train track outside my village that had caused me to topple. I felt a great sense of accomplishment, and, having forgotten to eat lunch and having run myself ragged all day, I promptly went back to Jahingarabad Palace to do what I had permission to do: cry.

  Khala and I boarded our train to Hyderabad, along with the Cheenies. Together, we made the one-night journey to Hyderabad and settled into a cabin, where Khala slept elegantly with a Lucknowi chikan dupatta turned into a bed sheet. In lower berth number 19, I read Indian news magazines and trash magazines to discover that there was a sex life to India, even if I was too shy to talk to anyone about it. Savvy, a women’s magazine, told the tales of Barmy Swami, who taught Tantra in Delhi with his wife, like the Mr. and Mrs. Tantra of America whom I’d met in Santa Cruz, having sex with people to heal them. The Week, a newsweekly, told me about Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s love lives chronicled in a sexy new novel by a Calcutta novelist who was candid about sexuality in a way I hadn’t read about before in India:

  I hate pretensions in the sexual context. I am aware of the Indian ethos that always tries to suppress all these things as if it is filthy. But I have no hesitation in mentioning in my autobiography that I have gone to brothels. Rabindranath was a normal human being, with all his instincts and urges intact till he breathed his last.

  The Week also had an interview with Sudhir Kakar, described as India’s “best known psychoanalyst,” who had just released Ecstasy, a novel that examined the mystical experience woven loosely through the lives of Indian yogis Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda. He said, “There are only two subjects worth writing about: God and sex.”

  India was a place where sexuality spilled out of the breasts of women whose sari blouses embraced them like the skin that peels so easily off ripe mangos, but yet we pretended they didn’t and looked the other way, after digesting an eyeful.

  Hyderabad was an oasis like I hadn’t yet experienced in India.

  Khala’s daughter, Nafees Apa, lived in a sprawling two-story house on a quiet road in Banjara Hills with her husband, Munna Bhai, a businessman. The postal code was 500034. Like Beverly Hills 90210, life there could be out of episodes from Banjara Hills 500034. The city had gotten new money with its rise as “Cyberabad,” the high-tech capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Former President Clinton had stopped there in his stint through India the year before, the local government folks sweeping beggars off the street for his visit. One of Nafees Apa’s daughters lived in London, wed in an arranged marriage to a rich investment banker. The other divided her time between the U.S. and Calcutta, wed in an arranged marriage to the son of a tea plantation tycoon. Her son worked as an investment banker in Manhattan. Inside, Bally shoes sat by a doorway, Shakespeare lined a bookshelf, along with translations of the Qur’an, and a wide-screen TV dominated an upstairs sitting area.

  Nafees Apa decorated her house with the gentle touches of Ikebana, a style of Japanese flower arranging she studied in courses in Hyderabad, although she would not show up for her organization’s photo shoot with the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, so strict was she about purdah. But she was also a modern Muslim woman and ran a boutique out of her house, for which I created a Web site.

  Munna Bhai named his house here at Banjara Hills 500034 after his mother, calling it Tahira Manzil, Tahira meaning pure, manzil, also meaning “a resting place.” Instead of an ashram, I found my own madrassa, a Muslim place of learning, here with a lush tropical garden in the backyard.

  Our day started with the azan, or call, for the morning’s fajr prayer from a clock marked “Made in Taiwan.” It was barely 5 A.M. The sun hadn’t yet risen. The curtains were drawn closed. It was quiet in the house. I laid my janamaz, my prayer rug, next to Khala, a bundle of white, praying as she did seated on her janamaz, her joints too worn for her to prostrate from a standing position. When she touched her forehead to the ground she was the image of a white kitten curled up before God.

  Our prayers done, Choti Momani, Munna Bhai’s mother, drew the curtains open. She was known as “small aunt” to me because she was the younger matriarch ruling the roost in our family hill station house of Panchgani. I went outside and laid a cloth and did yoga, as Khala walked slowly around the garden, moving her lips silently as she did zikr on her tasbi, her fingers methodically moving her prayer beads with each utterance. I bathed and wrote till breakfast at 9 A.M., when we gathered to eat together at the dining table.

  All around me in Hyderabad I saw reminders of how a girl’s life can be so different from the one that I’d had.

  One morning, I read the Deccan Chronicle to Khala. Andhra Pradesh villagers were selling their newborn daughters to an adoption agency who resold the girls to Westerners. One doctor allegedly removed a girl’s cornea to make her a more sympathetic adoption and presumably make money off the cornea, too.

  “Tawba. Tawba,” said Khala disapprovingly, using the Arabic word from the Qur’an for seeking forgiveness. She quoted from another part of the Qur’an where it states that baby girls are to be valued.
She wasn’t amused at the antics of the woman who ran the ring that bought baby girls and sold them. “Stupid. Doesn’t she know? Women are made from girls.”

  Khala had never borne the son so valued in traditional Indian culture. “What did you feel about having all girls?”

  “I didn’t think anything. I just prayed to God that they become responsible and good.”

  Did she want sons?

  “I thought of every son as my son.”

  Another day, the newspaper told us about a Pakistani-born woman in the United States who divorced her husband and won Working Woman’s annual award as a single mother juggling her job as a scientist and her care for her young daughter. Khala smirked listening to the story. “In America, they give women awards. In India, they destroy even their jhopris,” makeshift homes made of cardboard and tin.

  She reminded me of a woman I met in Jahingarabad Palace. She was sitting on the terrace in a black burqa, a widow who embroidered Lucknowi chikan for Rehan Bhai, despite fingers bent awkwardly from a birth deformity. She was a single mother supporting herself and her three sons because she refused to accept the condition from her husband’s brother that she live in the village if she wanted support from his family. Her boys wouldn’t get an education there. Alas, as it was, they were all under the age of twelve and working. She was constantly harassed, her jhopri of a home regularly destroyed because it was built illegally.