by Asra Nomani
“I have another way we can try,” my new friend suggested.
He leaned toward me and brought his lips gently toward me, resting them like the gentlest flutter upon my lips. I was supposed to inhale his breath. I held my breath instead.
As I was writing my article about the secret world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Pakistan, I’d forgotten the word for “illegal sex” in Islam.
I called my new friend to ask him. “Zina,” he told me, and I scribbled the word on my notebook cover, perchance above his name.
The woman and the man
Guilty of adultery or fornication—
Flog each of them
With a hundred stripes.
QUR’AN, 24, AL NUR, “The Light”
We weren’t married, which we both knew would make our sex illegal in the eyes of Islam and the state of Pakistan. But he talked to me about getting married. “I want us to start making babies right away,” he told me. He was a man unlike any I thought I’d find and, certainly, wasn’t looking to find. He was not only dashingly handsome but also smart, navigating through balance sheets and privatization efforts, working on Karachi’s Wall Street. And when we gazed into each other’s eyes, I was reminded of something I’d learned in Hyderabad. The doors of heaven opened to a husband and wife gazing into each other’s eyes. I told him. He smiled and looked into my eyes even more deeply.
Ramadan started. We found ourselves driving through Karachi as the hour approached to break fast for the first day of Ramadan. He planned to go to his khala’s house. Unexpectedly, he invited me to join him. “Is it okay?” I asked him, my hand always seeming to stroke his arm as he shifted gears. I came from a family in Pakistan where none of my cousin-brothers could bring a woman home except as his bride.
He assured me it would be fine. I played Ping-Pong on the dining table with his young cousins and helped his khala put dishes out for ifthar, the meal with which we break fast.
I knew the meaning of zina with him for the first time on the fourth day of Ramadan in a cove that was the shore off the Arabian Sea waters where our gaze first locked.
Our legs entangled around each other. We looked into each other’s eyes. It was a coincidence, but we eased into the mystical posture encouraged by the Tantric texts. The gods and goddesses made love this way. But I didn’t think they got sand up their muladhara chakras. It was the sea breeze that clothed us, and the boulders that were our walls. The waves of the Arabian Sea crashed behind us. The stars were our canopy, as they had been mine in Latif Manzil. I was so in love with him. And he continued to gaze deeply into my eyes, writing poetry to me about his love for me.
While the world made war, we made love. U.S. planes dropped bombs just about every day over Afghanistan. I didn’t understand this war. I didn’t accept President Bush’s amorphous enemy called “al-Qaeda.” I did know that each day I fell more deeply in love with this man who pressed me against the mirrors in the Karachi Sheraton elevators to kiss me deeply. “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry!” he yelled into his phone one day, answering a phone call from a friend as we got onto the elevators.
He introduced me to a world in which it seemed my dualities could coexist. For once, I didn’t have to choose between them. He took me every night to play volleyball at Alliance Française. One night, we stopped by his house first so he could get a change of clothes. I was nervous about going inside. I would be meeting his parents for the first time. I was wearing pants and a T-shirt. And strangely enough, we were with a former girlfriend of my new boyfriend. She was thin and bouncy. He was relaxed and comfortable as the three of us walked inside. I was in shock that he so freely walked into his home with a former girlfriend and a new girlfriend, but I tried my best to be at ease. I talked to his parents with warmth, wondering all the while if I was breaking a taboo.
We started visiting his house regularly. I didn’t know if he had told his parents about our relationship, but I figured they must know. I so appreciated that we could be honest about it. I was wary about getting involved again with a Pakistani, but my boyfriend’s life didn’t seem impinged by values separate from mine. I was so touched when I saw his father sitting next to his mother, holding her hands gently.
One night his father asked me, “What do you see as your identity?”
I was taken back to that awful moment after my wedding when the father of the man I married told me my identity. I slipped back into the present moment, impressed that my boyfriend’s father was so curious about that which I had much reflected upon. “I am a Muslim born in India and raised in America. The pulse of my ancestors courses through me, but I have values of modern-day America,” I told him. I knew I hadn’t expressed myself well, but I was breathless in wonder that I had even tried to express my own identity with some clarity.
It was Friday. My boyfriend got off work early for jummah namaz, Friday prayer.
He worshiped instead with me. Husbands and wives were allowed to kiss while they fasted, as long as they didn’t cross a line. “Are we allowed to do this?” I asked. First of all, we weren’t married. Second, we crossed the line.
We went on a road trip to a place where blind dolphins swim.
We crossed the Indus River to camp upon its banks, guests of one of the feudal lords of New Jatoi, a village tucked into the deep interior of the Sindh province in central Pakistan. The canopy of stars under which we fell asleep beside a gentle fire transformed the morn into a clear blue sky with petals of clouds whisking overhead. When I awakened, the Indus River flowed before me, a sleepy current of brown water washing against rocky banks. I stretched my body into a cartwheel on these shores.
My boyfriend wasn’t happy that I flew upside down in the air in front of the gunmen with Kalashnikovs who were our escorts.
“You don’t do that here.”
It was the first time he had drawn a line for me. I studied his face to see if he was serious. He was serious. I felt hurt.
I swallowed my hurt and went for a walk along the banks to reflect. The Indus River was the last place I expected to find myself but the first place that I had planned to go when I had embarked on my journey to the subcontinent of my ancestors two and a half years earlier. The mysterious Tantric practice was said to have sprung from goddess worship in the ancient Indus Valley civilization, India’s first major civilization, born on the banks of this mighty Indus River. From here, historians and archeologists say, Tantra wove its way into Hinduism and spread to Tibet, China, and other parts of Asia with Buddhism. Now, I was here at the wellspring of the civilization with the first documented presence of Tantric teachings. Along the banks of the Indus River, Tantra taught that disciplined minds could reach liberation through sexual intercourse, sensual living, and other joys that would give disciples a boundless ecstasy. For me, it was a place where I had to spend the night on a separate charpai from my love so that the guards wouldn’t be offended.
The long grass stirred around me as I walked. In their wind dance I could see my soul stir. I had flown far not only in body but also in spirit to walk along these banks. I concluded it wasn’t important for me to cling to the notion of doing a cartwheel with my body as long as I was free to do cartwheels in my mind. That was where true liberation lay, wasn’t it? I turned around with this realization, and I willed my boyfriend to walk toward me. I gazed forward, imagining his figure, imagining and imagining, until I blinked and he was actually there, pacing toward me. I ran toward him. I was so happy to see him.
“I was afraid you were angry,” he told me.
“How can I be angry? I love you.” He embraced me, relieved.
This was a land of forests and underbrush where dacoits, the hardened robbers of the Indian subcontinent, hid from the law. The gunmen armed with Kalashnikovs guarded our every move like sentries. They had ridden with us the night before in the darkness as we bounced over the rocky terrain to hunt. By day, they walked with us as we climbed into a wooden boat to cross the Indus River to the other bank. As the
boat glided through the waters, a man guiding our way with a single oar, I searched for the blind dolphins that swam here but saw only my reflection.
As we left, my boyfriend asked the driver to stop, grabbed a rifle from one of the guards, and shot a soaring white bird out of the sky. The armed guards looked at it. “It’s haram,” one said, meaning it wasn’t kosher to eat in Islam. We had to leave this beautiful white bird behind, dying. Its death haunted me, but I wasn’t sure why.
On assignment, I left my boyfriend for a few days and headed for Afghanistan. When I was in Pakistan as a teenager, I had only jumped across the border into Afghanistan. This time I wanted to venture deeper into this land from which the Sufi poet Rumi hailed.
The day after Christmas I walked into Afghanistan. Less than an hour later I walked straight out. The Afghani soldiers at the border, allied with the Northern Alliance leaders who had taken over the country, were clearly running an extortion racket.
Liberation, I discovered, came in strange forms. A volleyball streaked through the clear night sky in Karachi.
Across the net, an athletic player in spectacles and Nike shorts threw his body across the dirt court to save a hit from touching the ground. His team set the save and scored. “Bravo!” his teammates yelled to their defensive hero. “Well done!”
He wiped a layer of dirt from his shorts and shyly smiled.
It was a long journey that had brought me across the net from my pal Danny on a dirt court at Alliance Française in Karachi, on Saturday, December 29, the last weekend before New Year’s 2002. It happened to be the anniversary of my wedding. In the summer of my divorce, Danny had tossed me a volleyball at Modell’s Sporting Goods on L Street in Washington, D.C. I had turned the ball in my hands and seen its scarlet letter: “Made in Pakistan.”
“No way,” I’d said, hurling the ball back to Danny. “Made in Pakistan” conjured up too many memories of boundaries eschewed when I flung my Speedo bikini-clad body for a shanked pass.
Days earlier, one afternoon just before Christmas, I had found myself standing on a ridge outside the Shamshato Afghan refugee camp, looking over a dirt valley tucked between the rugged hills outside the northern Pakistani town of Peshawar. That morning, I had left a traditional Pakthun home with a dupatta, a head scarf, worn so that only my eyes would peer out as I interviewed allies of the Taliban and Northern Alliance. I stood looking down at a game of volleyball played only by Afghan refugee men. I turned back to the car, certain that I couldn’t cross this barrier. I looked toward one of my companions, a burly, bearded Pakthun Pakistani Muslim, Shaukat Ali, with two wives at home.
“I’d really like to play,” I told him.
“Let’s go,” he said in Urdu, to my shock, rolling up his sleeves.
I ran down the hill. I kicked off my sandals and walked onto the court in bare feet, crossing more than the lines drawn in the dirt.
In Karachi, my boyfriend had zipped Danny and me to the Nike store to outfit Danny in new shorts and running shoes before dropping us off at Alliance Française. Danny played according to the character that defined him off the court with the indefatigable fire and goodwill he had taught me. “Nice save!” I yelled to Danny across the net.
“Did the ball say, ‘Made in Pakistan’?” Danny asked as we walked off the court.
“I don’t know,” I said, realizing that on this path on which my great friend had taught me so many lessons, it really didn’t matter after all.
I was reminded of the superficial judgment made in this society, where people rejected others without even knowing them. My boyfriend told me one night when he visited me in my room at the Pearl-Continental that two of his former girlfriends commented disapprovingly on our age difference, not surprising in a society where a woman is most marketable as a young virgin. He was twenty-eight. I was thirty-six.
“But look at the Prophet Muhammad and his wife Khadija,” I told him. She was forty and he was twenty-five when they married.
“That’s right,” he assured me. “It doesn’t matter to me. You’re the only woman I know who can do cartwheels.”
But, sure enough, the daggers were out for me. “She looks older than you,” said the former girlfriend who had gone into his house with me.
He used our argument. “So what? The Prophet Muhammad married a woman older than he.”
“Well, you’re not the Prophet Muhammad,” came her reply.
The other former girlfriend called from Ithaca, New York, where she was studying for her master’s in business at Cornell University, angry that he sent her an e-mail that he was in love with someone else and wouldn’t spend New Year’s with her, as he’d agreed.
“She’s too old for you,” she told him. “It’s not practical.”
He hung up the phone on her. She called back to apologize.
“What does it mean my age isn’t practical?” I asked my boyfriend.
“That it’ll be difficult to have a baby. I told her, ‘I’ve been smoking since I’ve been fourteen. I’m probably the one who’s infertile.’ Anyway, we’ll adopt.”
“Really? That’s sweet.” He had confided to me once that he wanted one day to open an orphanage in Pakistan.
I draped my legs over my boyfriend and settled my head upon his chest, as he drew me closer. I thought I couldn’t have been happier.
CHAPTER 22
Parrots over a Safe House
“BOY!” the message flashed.
My Nokia handset had just beeped, breaking the quiet of an afternoon in Karachi, as my friend Danny sent me a text message from Islamabad. He and his wife, Mariane, had just emerged from having a sonogram done on the baby they were expecting.
“Ibn Pearl!” I wrote back, using the Arabic for “son of Pearl.”
A smile crossed my face. After so many years of the dating scene, Danny had found true love with Mariane. She was eclectic and a practicing Buddhist, just the right combination, it seemed, to enrapture Danny without threatening his delicate sense of space and endearing spaciness. Just three weeks before, Mariane had jetted to Karachi on New Year’s Eve, and I had spent my first time together with them since their wedding in August, 1999. I still owed them the wedding gift I was cross-stitching for them. After the wedding, I’d accidentally left it at the Parisian boutique hotel where I’d been staying up the street from their apartment in the cute Montmartre neighborhood. Danny sent it back to me with his familiar scrawl on the front.
“Hi, I was so curious but I ‘restrained’ myself from looking.”
Danny had come into Karachi a few days before New Year’s for our volleyball game, and he was intent on finding Mariane the perfect New Year’s gift as we meandered through Park Towers, a mall right out of Americana except for the drivers outside waiting for their elite lady bosses to emerge with their shopping.
“I don’t know,” Danny had said, studying a smooth-toned silver choker he’d spread out on a glass counter. “It looks crooked. What do you think?”
I had studied the choker. “Looks okay.”
“I don’t know…” Danny had said, trailing off.
I had studied the choker some more He had been right. It was crooked.
Mariane had arrived with her belly full with their unborn baby and socks with a colorful animation at the ankles, part of her New Year’s gift for Danny. He had pulled them on right away and danced on his toes in their hotel room. “I love them!”
We had returned together to the mall. I had known Danny had great tales to weave from his travels. “You’ve got to write them all down!” I had told him as he, Mariane, and I had plucked three spiral notebooks off the shelves at an office supply store.
We had all tumbled into my boyfriend’s car for New Year’s. The last time I had spent New Year’s with Danny he was a foreign correspondent in the Journal’s London bureau, traipsing through the Arab world, interviewing kings and revolutionaries, but never forgetting to send me additions to the barf bags I’d been collecting for years for an article I never wrot
e. My cousin-sisters Lucy and Esther had come in from Maidenhead to meet us at a London club to see a band called Egg, and I had helped Danny throw a New Year’s breakfast party at his apartment in a London mew. At the stove, Danny had respected his and my religious ban on pork, frying sausages made from everything but pork, even pulling vegetarian sausages out of his fridge.
“Voilà!” he had proclaimed, spinning in his kitchen, using the little French he knew until he met Mariane.
It was a different scene in Pakistan. For the first time in that country, I had worn a dress, a sleek long number I had borrowed from Mariane, a funny “Save The Queen” label at the nape of my neck. We had thrown shawls over our dresses.
“There could be trouble,” my boyfriend had said, behind the wheel of his Honda. Islamic fundamentalist groups didn’t think highly of the alcohol and dancing at the parties of the elite. Danny had tucked into his pocket a business card from an official at the conservative Islamic group Jamaat-e-Islami just in case we needed a friend. Indeed, the ringing of Danny’s mobile phone had broken our chatter as we drove through town to go from one party to another. A bomb had gone off at a bowling alley, Area 51. I’d bowled there with my boyfriend during Ramadan when it was open all night, whipping Brunswick bowling balls down a lane, wearing a T-shirt with “PAKISTAN” across my chest.
“Don’t get close,” Danny had warned me as we’d stepped out of the car. “They often plant two bombs, one to go off after the other.”
Subdued, we’d continued jotting notes along the way. On the way, my boyfriend had gotten directions from a woman friend.
“Okay, jaan!” he had yelled into his mobile to his friend.
Jaan? My ears had prickled as I sat beside him. Jaan was the term of endearment my boyfriend had taught me. It literally meant life. I thought it was a term we’d reserved only for each other. I had become sensitive. The realities of having a Western relationship in an Eastern world had started to catch up with us. My boyfriend had started cutting short his visits to me to get home for dinner with his parents. “I don’t want them to hate you,” he had tried to explain to me. So why, since I’d met them, couldn’t I join him? I didn’t understand. He’d had many girlfriends. He had taken me to his house. I’d spent time with his parents. Since I moved out of my childhood home and into a rental with a lopsided floor, I’d spent nights freely with my boyfriends. It was a different existence here, I knew. This was a world where I’d discovered all things of the West happened. Men and women played strip poker, frolicked in ménage à trois bedroom scenes, danced at a nightclub called Equinox, and freely smoked hashish, but boyfriends and girlfriends often met on the sly. They rarely spent nights together even if they were having sex. Our Saturday nights at French Beach were a luxury. But now he was calling someone else jaan.