by Asra Nomani
I remembered what I learned on that rooftop in Dharamsala, and I imagined the father of my baby beside my mother and father. In that moment when I felt sadness, disappointment, abandonment, and, yes, anger, I tried to relate to him with compassion. When I was twenty-eight, like he, I was reeling from a marriage I’d entered because I wasn’t honest with myself about the person within me, a truth that kept me from being honest with others. Rebecca tapped a brass bowl with a wooden stick. She chanted prayers for our teachers, our sangha, and the Buddha within us. She tapped the brass bowl again. The ringing filled the air as we bowed our heads. We were now in prayer for those who had died. I thought of Mamoo. Bubli. The Sherpa. Nani. Danny. Dear Danny.
It was the breath of those who no longer breathed life that I could feel in the cool wind passing through the leaves outside. My baby stirred inside as if he knew his mother was doing that which we must all do in our pursuit of the divine experience: try.
I returned to Morgantown, as I have from all of my sojourns on the road, and home embraced me.
This path upon which I ventured when I left New York almost three years earlier, had taken its toll on me. It left me exhausted with my life and my identity dismantled. I didn’t even have a bed to call my own. I was living off my parents’ credit card. And I certainly didn’t have a ring on my finger, a symbol of the divine love I thought I might find with a man. I had just about nothing but my own self and the great divine gift of creation within me. I considered this journey a success. The destruction of my self freed me to begin a new life.
When I began this trip, I had jetted to the Best Western in Santa Cruz, California, to learn the secrets of sexual ecstasy. For a little over four years, I confronted dualities, and they confronted me. Hinduism versus Islam. East versus West. Male energy versus female. I had to choose the values with which I wanted to live. True spirituality versus false opportunism. True love versus lust. The traditional female versus the liberated woman. Purity versus hypocrisy. Ego versus heart. Fearlessness versus fear. Reality versus illusion.
The darkness of Danny’s murder made me confront the limitations of life on this earth if we accept the boundaries of duality. Even in death, Danny accepted neither the boundaries nor the labels others tried to thrust upon him. When his captors made him declare himself a Jew on the video that was to document his death, he did so with the nonchalance that characterized him in life.
I, too, had chosen a path in which I rejected labels and boundaries. To do so meant venturing into darkness that we could have avoided by choosing to live comfortably within the boxes assembled for us. Rejecting those boxes meant taking on great responsibilities. For Danny, the consequence was death. For me, it meant carrying a child within me, unwed. Only the fact that I did not live in a village in Pakistan or Afghanistan spared me a similar fate.
After I had returned to Morgantown, another Pakistani publication attacked me with the headline, “Who and Where Is Asra Nomani?” It was the essential question of my identity that Vishnu Uncle posed to me in Kathmandu. The lawyer defending Omar Sheikh, the man convicted of kidnapping Danny, said he planned to focus Omar’s appeal upon me, calling me an agent for RAW, India’s foreign intelligence agency, innocently named Research and Analysis Wing. The newspaper claimed I had posed as a student of mysticism in an earlier trip to Pakistan, describing the trips I had made to Sufi shrines with my grandmother. The article traced my roots back to the state of Uttar Pradesh in India and led readers straight to the address of my childhood home on Cottonwood Street, listing our home phone number, too.
Almost three years earlier, I had danced around the answer to the question of my identity. This time I knew the answer. I was more than an American journalist born a Muslim in India and raised a free thinker in West Virginia. I was an independent being and spiritual warrior who wasn’t going to be defined by labels. I knew my powers, sexual, spiritual, intellectual. I was a Tantrika. And, as I stood outside my childhood home, my belly swollen in front of me, my hand caressing the contour of my baby’s body against my own, I saw Jaz, the mother cat who taught me an early lesson in my journey about the beauty of unconditional maternal love.
I smiled and yelled out to her, “Jaz, I’m going to be a mother, just like you!”
I was going to have a hillbilly baby born, like Safiyyah and Samir, at West Virginia University’s Ruby Memorial Hospital. My family embraced me. My father, a man who had to face so many new realities because of his daughter, had sent me a simple e-mail when my mother told him about my pregnancy: “I love you.” His fingernails were coated with paint as he finished a room that would be home to me and my boy. My mother, who once stood at a railway station shocked at losing her veil, guided me to release myself from the shame and alienation of a culture she had rejected because of its oppression of the female spirit. “You are free,” she told me. My brother, a survivor of the demons of darkness, shook my hand and said, “Asra Boo, I love you. Everything will be all right.” Bhabi walked with me in the moonlight, burdened by battles in India, trying to save a newlywed sister whose mother-in-law terrorized her, arguing with me that I didn’t abandon love by choosing to live without shame. Samir, my nephew, gave me the perspective I needed to appreciate the divine nature of the baby within me, telling me, “Babies are a little bit of heaven brought down to earth.” And Safiyyah, my guru, curled up beside me as I slept on her bed with clouds upon the sheets so I would know I wasn’t alone.
With all of the encouragement and love, I lived with a deep sadness. The father of my child had continued to live with secrecy about the baby. He had told me in the springtime that he’d told his parents about my pregnancy. Indeed, he hadn’t told them, only recently admitting the truth to his mother. After coming to Morgantown, I chose to release myself from the lies. I called his father to tell him that I was carrying his grandson. “You’re brave to tell me,” his father said. “But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going now. Bye-bye.” With a defining click, he hung up on me. Two days later, I received an e-mail from the father of the baby. “You’ve ruined everything now, Asra. I know now that I will never love you.”
I knew, though, that I had chosen to be free. “You have chosen to live honestly in a culture of such hypocrisy,” Bhabi told me as we walked in the crisp early autumn air. I had that luxury, and it would be my horror if I squandered it. The truth was that I remembered that bird shot out of the sky not far from the banks of the Indus River, and I breathed deep gratitude that I was not it. My Muslim goddess, Arina, my cousin in Aligarh, had married a man who moved her to Saudi Arabia, a fine place according to her father’s estimation. I realized that I didn’t have to wonder about the merits of another’s path compared to my own. Her path and the path of others were simply different from mine.
My mamoo who told me to take the bull by the horns to tackle India told me that he fully supported the baby and me but wondered if I should construct a story to make the baby acceptable to our conservative subcontinent society. “Maybe that he has been adopted? That the baby was born with artificial insemination? That you married the father and then divorced?”
I laughed. Maybe a better story would be that I conceived in a temporary marriage with a jihadi who became a shaheed, or martyr, fighting against the West? I was not hurt by his suggestions because I knew he didn’t feel shame. Still, I didn’t sleep well the night after our conversation. The next morning, my mamoo called me again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must simply tell everyone, ‘This is my baby.’ End of story.”
In the early morning, as I pen my final words of this journey that took me around the world but, most important, within myself, my little boy stirs within me. I have chosen to name him Shibli, the Arabic name of my ancestor who was a Muslim scholar. The name means “my lion cub,” and his second name will be Daneel, a derivation of the Hebrew name Daniel, meaning, “God is the judge.” For me, it is true. Our judgments and definitions upon this earth are capricious and arbitrary. There is a magic more sublime and divi
ne by which we can exist.
“Jaan!” I call out to him.
This is the name of affection that the living soul, the nafh al-ruh, within me deserves, for jaan is life.
Epilogue
“WHERE IS HIS heartbeat now?”
“One hundred and thirty.”
“And now?”
“One hundred and eighteen.”
“Now?”
“One hundred and ten.”
My eleven-year-old niece, Safiyyah, calmly read my baby’s descending heart rate off the monitor beside me as I propped my body on my arms and feet, my eyes staring straight ahead, my belly still swollen from the life within me. The doctors had just warned me that my delivery was now considered a high risk. My baby’s heartbeat had dropped to dangerous levels with each of my contractions. I needed to keep it up. I was practicing every secret I’d learned over my years of Tantric journey. I inhaled deep, drawing my breath into me, filling my belly with oxygen and channeling this breath through me into a complete exhalation. It was the passion pump that I had learned in Canada with American Tantra. I was unleashing the Kundalini serpent of Tantric yoga. I was being mindful in the Buddhist tradition. I was doing whatever I could to protect my baby’s life. I reached into my Sufi tradition to sink me into the cloud upon which I needed to float in order to rise to this occasion.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” I recited over and over again, drawing upon the zikr, the remembrance of God that my aunt taught me when I was a young girl on summer vacation in Hyderabad. I counted each utterance on my fingers, inhaling the entirety and emptiness that is divine with each utterance of Allah and exhaling into the world the divine within me with each expression of hu. Could each remembrance of the divine bring new breath to my child? I turned to the chant that I learned beside Mariane as we prayed for Danny’s safe return. Perhaps its memory in my baby’s psyche and its vibration within me would matter even just a beat.
I couldn’t panic. I was breathing for my baby. In my mind, each breath I denied my baby could cost him his life. I had worried that I would be distracted by the horrors I had experienced this year. But in this moment of life and death, there was no distraction. Omar, Danny’s kidnapper, didn’t loom before me. My troubles with my baby’s father didn’t matter.
I had spent the night before walking through our house, easing my body through the contractions that pierced my lower abdomen, lighting my path with a Martha Stewart cinnamon spice candle I held in my hands. For company, I kept near me Billluh, my gentle black-and-white cat with a mask like Zorro.
Outside, raindrops that resembled jewels twinkled in the dim light cast from inside our house. They took me back to a time when I rode with Lucy behind me on a scooter from a magical place called Beach Number 7. I saw those jewels as heaven sent by her father, my uncle. So were these. It was a crisp autumn day with reminders of the divine all around. The Appalachian mountains of our backyards and the trees of our front yards were enflamed with the colors of Starbursts candy, bright oranges and reds exploding all around.
As the sun began to rise, my family arose from slumber. Samir donned a tie printed with the image of the Three Stooges. I had bought it for one of Danny’s birthdays in Washington but had never given it to him. It had landed in my father’s tie collection, and for this occasion, my father tied it around Samir so he could resemble a TV reporter doing broadcasts of my baby’s birth on our home video camera. Safiyyah wore the outfit she had set aside days ago for this special day and tucked butterfly clips into my hair after I had slipped into a flowing white dress. “I want to look pretty for my son,” I told her.
Minutes slipped into hours in Room 601 as I practiced what a friend had recommended days earlier. Observe the experience. It felt as if my baby had invited fifty of his angel friends into the womb from heaven, handed them each a staple gun, and every six minutes told them, “Okay, now!” and they all stapled. I didn’t scream but, ultimately, relinquished to an epidural. “You don’t have to suffer,” Mariane had advised me. Her words made me reflect on so many choices I had made in my life in which I brought suffering upon myself. This time, relief came to me, but my contractions weren’t sufficiently widening my baby’s passageway into this world, and my baby’s heart rate was dropping with each contraction. The doctors were visibly worried. A gentle nurse named Stephanie soothed me. Bhabi, my white Tara, stroked my hands. Safiyyah, my young guru, started reading my baby’s heart rate to me. The first warning that my baby was in trouble came from a Muslim doctor educated at Karachi’s Aga Khan University, where the father of my baby had failed to retrieve my first blood results. The baby’s heart rate kept dropping. Nurses rushed inside to wheel me into the operating room for an emergency cesarean section. I trembled as they lifted me onto the operating table. A part of me wanted to weep from fear. But I knew that to weep would be to deny my baby vital oxygen. I rejected fear. A mask floated onto my face, and I was disappeared into the ether.
In Room 602, my mother, my Vajrayogini, cried for the first time, a mother hoping to see her daughter into motherhood. “If something happens to the baby, it will be the end of Asra,” she wept. My father pulled out his janamaz, his prayer rug, to pray for us.
Shibli Daneel Nomani emerged at 8:20 that night. He slipped first into the arms of those who were closest to heaven’s touch, Safiyyah and then Samir, and then floated from arm to arm of my bhabi, mother, father, and brother, to finally rest in my arms when I emerged from the confused haze of anesthesia. As I gazed upon this creation, seven pounds and six ounces of good health swaddled into a blanket, my eyes confirmed what my niece and nephew had told me. “You’re right. He is beautiful,” I whispered.
Long lashes fanned toward me. His eyes so elegantly swept toward his brows it was no cliché to say his eyes resembled almonds. The turn of his lips beckoned me closer. The immaculate construction of each of his toes made me forget whether the correct count was four or five for each foot. In the coming nights, I felt his breath upon me with such awe. I gazed at the lines upon the palms of his hands so impressed. To have helped bring breath and life lines into this world was to know something more divine than I could have ever imagined. The moonlight bathed us in his beams one night. I tucked Shibli against my breasts, rested my cheek upon the warmth of his head, and sank into a place of content like none I’d known before.
The importance of Shibli’s good health overtook the expectations I’d had about his birth. He was the greatest lesson in living in the present and not questioning reality. I’d had images of pulling my baby out from within me, as they allowed at the hospital, and gazing into his eyes for the first time as he lay upon my breasts. Instead, I wasn’t even conscious when he emerged. On the eve of Shibli’s fifth day, I sat with my breasts filling with the milk that takes a few days to be made. I imagined nourishing Shibli with the flow of milk from my breasts. I remembered the image that had moved me most in the temples of sexual images in Khajuraho, a statue of a baby nursing at his mother’s breasts. The pain, however, became excruciating though in my breasts as my baby remained in slumber, unable to suckle the milk from me. I remembered the Saturday after Adam’s birth when I imploded from the weight of all that I had carried to help see Adam successfully into this life. I wept my first tears since my baby’s birth on this Saturday night. The nurse on duty wheeled in an electric breast-feeding machine, and my first milk flowed not into my baby’s eager lips but into clear bottles. Little did it matter.
Bringing Shibli into the world was an experience like none I could have imagined. I wondered how many men, but those who go into battle, experience anything close to the trauma of childbirth. The first time I walked from my bed, I left a trail of blood behind me. Every time I nudged my body even the slightest, pain shot through this sacred place in my belly where my baby once thrived. I no longer knew the luxury of sleeping in the dark, let alone sleeping long enough to dream. A smiling resident appeared one morning to cheerfully ask, “Ready to get your staples out?” Indee
d, Shibli and his pals had stapled me shut once he’d successfully emerged.
Lying in my hospital gown, wishing I had the strength to lift my own child from his bassinet at the foot of my bed, I fully appreciated the hadith, the saying of the Prophet Muhammad, that the woman in Islamabad had told me about women being mujahadeen, freedom fighters, on a jihad, a holy struggle, when they became mothers.
When Mariane called, I was aghast that I could have been witness to her delivery and afterbirth but not known the terrific pains of childbirth. Her voice was ecstatic when I talked to her. But I had to ask her, “How could you do this? How could you keep this a secret from me? I’ve been to hell and back.”
She giggled.
The affirmations for Shibli’s new life spilled into Room 616. Phone calls from New York to Paris, Hong Kong, and even Tajikistan arrived. My father had sent personalized e-mails to all the friends I’d gathered together for a mailing list, signing his message, “Proud Grandpa.” Shibli wasn’t born on Danny’s birthday, as I had known, but he arrived on Mariane’s brother’s birthday.
“Bisou!” Satchi told me from Paris, elated to share the birthday with my newborn. “Kiss!”
A nurse brought in a vase of a dozen red roses from my friend Nancy in Portland. “This is only the second time in my life I’ve gotten a dozen red roses,” I told Nancy. The first time had been from my beautiful boyfriend in Chicago. “If not when you’ve had a baby, then when?” Nancy asked. She was right. Bursts of color from Laurie, my friend in Washington who had let me stay in her basement room after Omar walked away from our marriage. My childhood friend, Sumita, and her husband, Dariush, sent a basket of goodies, Goldfish crackers tucked inside.