Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  I had never been motivated to cover my head in public in America. To me, it was an unnecessary symbol of modesty in a place where not wearing a halter top in the summertime seemed like an act of conservatism. The weekend before, as I’d stood near the Doritos at Wal-Mart, an Arab woman walked by me with a full covering that cloaked her body and face. All that was visible were eyes that could study price tags. Now, suddenly, I wanted to cover myself. Proclaim to the world that Muslims weren’t all terrorists. We were also good, balanced humanitarians, as my mother and father had taught me to be. I pulled out a long white cotton dupatta my dadi had sent home with my father, just returned from a trip to Pakistan. She wrote a message in the corner in Urdu, urging me to use it to do my namaz. I knotted the dupatta around me and unfurled it so only my eyes were visible.

  Did I look menacing? I checked with the only one around, nudging awake my cat Billlie. He opened his eyes to a slit, yawned, and returned to sleep.

  My inquiry into identity wasn’t complete. I plucked an American flag Samir had gotten from his Cub Scout troop, ventured outside with the scarf pulled down from over my nose so the mailman could see my face, lest he drive by, and planted the American flag in a pot of geraniums on our front porch.

  That night, a Muslim brother called my father. “It’s urgent.”

  When my father called back, he told him that the board of the Islamic Center should cancel the jummah prayer, the Friday afternoon prayer. For Muslims, Friday is what Sunday is to Christians and Saturday to Jews. I stood in the background, bobbing between my father’s phone call and Samir’s reading of Mulan, the Chinese girl warrior. “Don’t cancel!” I urged him.

  “No, we will not cancel,” my father insisted. “Why should we be afraid?”

  Two days later, I went to New York to keep my dear friend Dan Costello, a Journal colleague, company. A universe that I had known intimately had been destroyed. I used to disembark for work from the N/R subway stop in the basement of the World Trade Center. With airports shut down, the best way to get to New York was the Greyhound bus. I planned to go with my head covered. My sister-in-law’s eyes widened when she saw the dupatta wrapped over me. This was the past she had outgrown, of being wrapped in a burqa and then engulfed by a faint as she rushed to catch buses in the heat of India’s summer. Married to my brother, she was liberated from this religious expectation, maintaining her sense of modesty but wearing a new wardrobe of cotton shirts and stretch pants from the Limited.

  She was worried. She, too, had heard the reports of Muslim women under attack. She told my mother, “Write al-Hafiz in the air on her forehead,” so that I would have the protection of God. My mother took her finger to the air, staring over my left temple, and crossed my forehead with Arabic script. She blew a breath toward me, a phoonk. It was a blessing. We went to the Greyhound station. I slipped into a seat beside a woman. “Phoopu has already found a friend,” Safiyyah told her dadi, mother, and brother as she waved to me from below.

  In New York, I realized that I had a duty to return to Pakistan, to write from there and try to dismantle the misperceptions in the West about the Muslim world.

  My friend Kerry Lauerman, and editor at Salon.com, asked me to go there and write for the Internet magazine. “You have a story to tell,” he told me, giving me for the first time affirmation that I had a unique voice with which to speak. I went to the Pakistani consulate with my friend Sumita’s sleeveless kameez flowing over my black pants, a black sweater on top so I wouldn’t offend any Muslims who considered it immodest for a woman to bare her arms. I wore Dadi’s dupatta. What a goof. It was sort of like my arrival in Kathmandu revisited. The press attaché’s assistant was a Filipina veteran of the consulate since the 1960s by the name of Connie. I should have just gone in the Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants that I usually wore. Connie told me over the phone that it would take only a day to process a visa, but when I called the next day she told me the consulate wasn’t issuing visas anymore. There were too many foreign journalists in Pakistan to keep them safe. I was confused.

  I wrote the press counsellor to explain my mission, telling her that my roots were in Islam with my name coming from the seventeenth surah of the Qur’an and my ties ran deep in Pakistan, with my family’s presence there and my marriage, albeit a failed one. In America, we thought that folks from that part of the world were all basically the same. Even I, a Muslim with family throughout Pakistan and many trips there stamped into my passport, didn’t see a divide for myself with Pakistan. But that’s not what I learned as I stood outside the Pakistani consulate, the rain pouring upon me as I tried to convince the press attaché I wasn’t a threat to Pakistan just because I was born in India. She let me know that was an issue of concern, even with my Pakistani visa stamped into my passport from my ride on the Peace Bus the year before.

  I found out later from other officials that the Pakistani government had put up a red flag for Indian-born visa applicants, even if they had foreign passports, like from the U.S. She suggested I apply on a tourist visa. I was promptly rejected.

  I ended up traveling to Washington, where I met my Salon.com editor, Kerry, who escorted me as an official white guy in a suit. The press attaché at the Pakistani embassy talked to me and saw that I wasn’t going to be a threat to the state of Pakistan. He asked me in Urdu whether I was Muslim. I told him my family history with Pakistan. He cleared my visa. I talked to my mother amid the delays. She told me what we are taught as Muslims from our earliest days: “Everything happens for a reason.”

  My reason was the pause. Facing an obstacle that didn’t allow adrenaline to make my decision, I pondered whether I really wanted to go to Pakistan. It would be a psychic journey as much as physical one. I was a bit afraid. My brother tried to relax me: “Oh! Go have a vacation!” But my previous trips to Pakistan had certainly never qualified as vacations. On my return to Morgantown on the Greyhound, I sought refuge next to a woman who looked like a nun. Turned out that I, who had been searching India to meet a Tantrika, had found one on the Greyhound from Washington, D.C., to Hagerstown, Maryland. She left me with a guiding principle. She was in America to give lectures on yoga and meditation. We talked about September 11 and the hatred from which it spawned. I told her about my mission to Pakistan and my fear. She reminded me of the mandate that propelled me to stand in front of the Pakistani consulate in New York in the rain, in my effort to do work that would dismantle barriers to understanding. “We must learn to melt each other so we are just human beings before each other.”

  It took me thirty-nine hours to journey from Morgantown to Lahore, where Dadi still lived with my eldest uncle. She told me she had dropped from 110 to 92 pounds in recent months. I’d traveled across the ocean with only Lonely Planet’s Pakistan: A Travel Survival Kit, a new padded laptop backpack from Office Depot, and a JFK Airport shopping bag filled with World Trade Center key chains, New York Police Department pencils, and two New York Fire Department stuffed bears (one red, one blue) to give away as gifts. War loomed as a reality. When I’d gone to Pakistan in 1983, my gifts had been Smurf key chains.

  I was returning to Pakistan, this time with voice, not the silence I’d accepted as a young bride. I set off for Islamabad on Pakistan’s Greyhound, a luxury shuttle bus that carried me along the highway built not long before by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. I’d traveled alone for the first time in Pakistan. As I stood with Sumita’s North Face backpack and my Office Depot laptop bag, I wasn’t sure who would greet me. A svelte figure slipped toward me, and I recognized her face though her body was draped in a cream-colored fabric that descended from her head, where she had draped it tightly around her face.

  “Hello!” I yelled.

  “As-salam alaykum,” she answered, smiling.

  We had traveled on separate paths since the days when we were childhood pen pals. I’d met her when I was about twelve. She and her family had come to India from Islamabad, where her mother, my father’s sister, had settled after marriage. I loved thi
s cousin-sister of mine. She was vibrant, beautiful, and radiant. We took pictures of ourselves on my cousin’s rooftop in Bombay before it became Mumbai, throwing our hair back and laughing at the sky.

  I’d seen her six years later when I took my summer trip to visit her and my other relatives in Pakistan. That summer, she had traveled with me and other cousins on a train to the frontier land of Pakistan, Peshawar. It was the wild, wild West of Pakistan. Villages were dedicated to building weaponry. Afghan refugees were spilling over the border from the Soviet invasion of their country. And tribal feudal lords cut off the arm of the law. On that ride, a man commented loudly that I, a product of the West, kept my hair long, as Muslim girls were supposed to do, but my pen pal cousin, a homegrown Pakistani girl, had shorn off her locks. It was a turning point. In Peshawar, when I asked her to trim my hair, she went to chop it off. I spent the nights playing rummy with my boy cousins, while my pen pal cousin sat in prayer and looked disapprovingly at my freedom with the opposite sex. Over time, she became more religious, eschewing the playfulness that I had so loved in her.

  Now, she stood before me at the busy bus terminal in Islamabad, wearing a broad smile as she stepped toward me, a young girl in tow. “This is Khadijah,” she said. It was her young daughter.

  She got behind the steering wheel of her car and drove me to the house of her mother; this was my phuppi, with whom I had traveled with Dadi on the Peace Bus from Delhi. She also covered her hair. Her younger daughter came home just about then from her job as an architect. Her hair swung freely and uncovered. Gap lotion sat in her bathroom.

  I revisited the Pakistan of my past, returning to the Marriott Islamabad, not as a bride but as a veteran journalist this time. I even passed the Margala Motel, where I had walked stutter steps on my wedding day. I immersed myself in a conservative Muslim world that I’d never known so intimately. I spent hours in the Qur’an study groups of my Islamabad phuppi’s friends. I sipped green tea with the Taliban’s deputy ambassador to Pakistan and his two wives, the younger one a fan of Bollywood actor Salman Khan.

  I had as a model of orthodox Islam a nephew-cousin of my mother, whom I called Bhai Sahib. He lived in Bombay, but I’d last seen him when our paths crossed in Lucknow earlier in the year. He had sleepy eyes and a gray beard. Although he and I lived differently, Bhai Sahib always gave me a sense of calm. When I was a child he had told my brother and me that food tasted better when you eat it with your hands. I reminded him of this lesson that I’d followed—in appropriate company—ever since. He’d told me on our last visit that an elder had taught him that it was best also to wash your hands with just water, not soap, because the aroma and oils of the food are absorbed into your hand. After that, I sometimes didn’t wash my hands with soap after dinner. When he left, Bhai Sahib and I walked along the train tracks. He was a slow and gentle walker. I wanted to know more about his spiritual practice. “What do you use as your point of focus in meditation?” I could hardly believe I would ask such a bizarre question. And earnestly. He answered with earnestness. His point of meditation: “The divine presence of God in all things.”

  Hatred had never spewed from his mouth or from that of my father. Both were religious Muslims, rational and fair men. Now, in the midst of this war that America was launching in retaliation for the World Trade Center attacks, I heard the voice of hatred coming from other circles of devout Muslims. And they weren’t strangers. They were my relatives and their friends, preaching about the virtues of Islam and the fraternity and sorority of Muslims. One morning, about a hundred women gathered in a two-story house off a neat lane. They wore head scarves and sat cross-legged, listening to a woman guiding them through a translation of a Qur’anic surah. Inside a small room off to the side, about a dozen organizers of this Islamic educational organization sat on the floor, listening to a woman sitting on a bed. They were impassioned, like others, about the U.S. decision to bomb Afghanistan. They too prayed duas against the enemy in time of war.

  One of them grabbed my elbow. “You must write about the Jewish conspiracy,” she pleaded. “They are evil. They want to destroy us.” I furrowed my brows and grimaced, for the first time shedding my journalistic tolerance and getting visibly irritated at this rhetoric of hatred.

  I went to Karachi, where I got a window into the bifurcated society that was Pakistan. Karachi was a crowded metropolis where I reported on the culture of hopelessness and helplessness that was driving record numbers of Pakistanis to suicide, even though the Qur’an warned the act was a one-way ticket to hell. The family of the man I married had called me crazy because of the depression I suffered after my marriage. I saw the irony in the fact that I was now slipping in and out of psych wards in the country of my wedding, very much empowered and not ashamed of an illness that should be treated, not judged.

  Even now, though, I was being judged. I wrote a profile about Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, expressing my admiration for a man who dared to challenge traditional Islam by photographing himself with his pet dogs and drinking alcohol, both of which were deemed haram, or illegal, in Muslim culture. I got an angry missive from the cousin, now settled in America, who had told me not to ride a bicycle when I was eighteen years old. “Everyone in Pakistan knows about Musharraf’s drinking, but even Islam also says to cover up things like that, as it is between Allah and him.” He had already attacked me once for taking one of my adult cousins with me for my tea with the Taliban. “You don’t mix with these kinds of people if you want to live in peace in Pakistan.” He was arguing for hypocrisy over truth and fear over action. Yet his argument hit an emotional chord within me because I knew all too intimately the path of deception this society would prefer over the truth about itself. I sat quietly in my hotel room at the Karachi Sheraton Hotel and Towers and wept over the lies and cowardice that defined this culture in which I was rooted.

  I saw the other side of Karachi when I reported on the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in this Muslim land. I saw a side to Pakistan and the Muslim world that I didn’t know existed, and I felt connected to it because it so resembled the world I had come to know in the West, traipsing through Eighteenth Street bars, dance clubs, and restaurants in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood and zipping around in yellow cabs in Manhattan. A nineteen-year-old Casanova told me about getting busted by local police when he took a girlfriend to a hut at a place called French Beach. A friend of a relative suggested that I talk to his twenty-something son to find out more. I met the son, and he invited me to join him and his friends at French Beach. I knew a beach existed in Karachi. During the trip of 1983, I had plunged into the waters off Karachi with my relatives, but only to my knees, to where I had rolled up my shalwar.

  On a late Sunday morning, I hired a Eurocar for the trek to this place called French Beach. We drove out of Karachi past the port on a busy road crowded with stalls and traffic until we got to the hut, not far from a nuclear power plant down the beach. I saw two figures in the water below a cascade of boulders. I climbed over the boulders, kicking off my black sandals. I approached the water and saw that it was my new friend, along with a man I hadn’t yet met, both wading carefree in the water. I turned back to tell the driver he could go and waded into the Arabian Sea fully clad in my mother’s black pants and her gray sweater. The water enveloped me, and a smile broke out over my face. When I looked at the stranger before me, I felt something remarkable. Whenever I turned toward him and gazed into his eyes, a smile crept across not only my face, but also my heart. I wondered about this recognition that transpired between us. The Tantric teachings said that contact between the sexes was experienced in so many ways from the glance of an eye to intimacy. Everything preceding intimacy was dedicated to raising consciousness and relieving tensions. Consciousness was definitely raised, as we spent the afternoon together.

  The next day, my friend Danny flew into town for a day of reporting. It had been so long since I’d seen him, almost two years, although we had continued to e-mail
to each other about the bizarre nature of our travels. He had become the Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief, politely asking me if I was interested in the job before raising his hand. I never visited him and his wife, Mariane, in Bombay, however, because the city was such a congested and depressing memory from my childhood days.

  The days were over when I would travel to parties with an entourage. So, even though my new friend from the day before had invited me over to his house with other friends, I made plans to go to dinner with Danny at a restaurant called Haveli, the Urdu word for a large house like our Latif Manzil in Jaigahan. When Danny arrived at the Sheraton, we were so happy to see each other, embracing in the hugs of friends who had scraped their knees on the same playground. We talked through dinner of the possibilities for books that he could write. Mariane called from Paris during dinner, and Danny spoke with uninterrupted affection to her. I told Danny we could get together with a friend I’d just met.

  “A guuuuuuuy?” Danny knew me too well.

  The stranger whom I had met the day before had told me to call him if I was free. I called him now to see what he might be doing. He said he could pick us up from the restaurant in ten minutes. Danny smiled. Looked like he would be my chaperone for the night. “Okay, what’ll be our sign for me to go?” he asked.

  “I’ll go like this,” I showed him, running my fingers through my hair.

  The three of us returned to my room at the Sheraton, where I pulled out a water bottle of Scotch that my friend’s friend had brought me, thinking I actually drank hard liquor.

  “Well, I think I’ll be going,” Danny said awhile later, stretching his legs.

  I was relieved to see my new friend didn’t move.

  We were alone. I suggested that we try again to see if I could inhale a cigarette, something we had practiced the day before. We sat on the floor across from each other. I could feel a magnetic pull bringing us closer together.