Tantrika

by Asra Nomani

  I needed this affirmation. Throughout my pregnancy, I had struggled with shame and loneliness. With my family’s love, I had started to reconstruct myself. I vowed not to cry as I held my baby. I had shed enough tears throughout my pregnancy. To see my baby had survived my convulsions of weeping was incentive enough not to risk emotional scars of a mother’s tears upon her baby’s fresh skin.

  Shibli’s first visitor was Yusuff Aunty, who had seen me grow, as I stood at her kitchen sink first as an eleven-year-old washing dishes after dinner parties. Her husband, Yusuff Uncle, stayed downstairs so as not to intrude upon the woman’s world. She was a practicing Muslim, and the act of creating Shibli was wrong, but she told my mother when she first learned I was pregnant, “The baby has done nothing wrong.” Now, she came to admire my baby, making the first contribution toward his college fund.

  I feared going home. Would I implode into the postpartum depression that claims so many women? Would I cry and yell from the slightest of frustrations? Would Shibli feel at home? He did, and I did. We took refuge in the clouds cast upon the sheets spread across Safiyyah’s bed. My mother brought me hareera, the mix of almonds, pistachio, and warm milk that her mother used to bring her after my brother’s and my births. She washed Shibli’s clothes by hand, as her mother had washed my brother’s and my clothes.

  On Shibli’s seventh day, my parents and I bundled him up for his first venture into the world, into the arms of Dr. Indira Majumdar, the Hindu pediatrician whose children, Bobby and Misty, I had baby-sat as a child on Cottonwood Street. In my childhood, Dr. Majumdar had earned a positive reputation in the sari she traditionally wore underneath her white doctor’s coat. Before I saw her, I thought I would ask her about which goddess might be the deity of her worship. But when we arrived, her enthusiasm for Shibli’s birth bubbled over without censor. A red, white, and blue American flag pin stared back at me from her white jacket, now covering pants and a sweater.

  It didn’t matter anymore which goddess she might worship. I was just thrilled my baby had regained his birth weight and added three ounces in the week since his birth. “Shibli will call you Dr. Nani,” I told her, using the maternal honorific in Urdu for grandmother, as she beamed at his face, wide-eyed in the new environment.

  I couldn’t escape the fact that we were keeping a secret from some.

  “Has anybody told Dadi?” I asked my father one night after most of the family had gone to sleep, Shibli tucked into my arms.

  “No way!” declared my father, a kind man despite his sometimes indelicacy. “Nobody wants to give her a heart attack.”

  I looked down at my baby in slumber. How could this gentle being give anyone a heart attack, least of all a woman who had loved me since my earliest days? I felt angry again with my baby’s father for making us illegitimate in the eyes of so many. I easily could have wept. And I would have had the perfect excuse in postpartum baby blues.

  “What you say makes me very sad,” I told my father. But I swallowed hard, stiffened my spine, and reminded myself of the enduring truth that was my only sustenance. “It hurts me. But we will win. We have won. Life has won.”

  The years behind me seemed to have been lived by someone else. My blossom-headed, ring-necked parakeet, Cheenie Bhai, must have traveled the trains with another woman. Surely, it wasn’t I who rode a motorcycle through shakti piths in the Himalayan foothills. And all that they said happened to Danny couldn’t have been true. But one place remained real to me. My village.

  I planned to return to Jaigahan one day with my aunt, Rachel Momani, cousin-sisters Esther and Lucy, and my mother, not only to take her to her ancestral home again, but to give her a ride on my motorcycle, which I had left parked there, waiting for my return. I planned to distribute to families in the village meat from the two goats traditionally sacrificed for a boy’s birth. I wanted the meat also sacrificed in another place. I planned to make arrangements to distribute meat sacrificed in Shibli’s name in the Karachi neighborhoods that bred the kidnappers who turned my Islam into a vehicle of hatred.

  Shibli’s conception forced me to choose the Islam I wished to embrace. I had learned a profound lesson in the consequence that comes with the free expression of a woman’s sexuality. It’s said the prophet Mohammad declared that married men and women who commit adultery should be stoned to death, and unmarried men and women who have sex should receive 100 lashes and one year exile. For so long, I believed the modern-day Muslim culture in which I conceived my child would have had me punished if I had dared to keep the child within its borders. This was the experience of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world from Pakistan to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, where Amina Lawal, six years younger than me at the age of thirty-one, was sentenced to death for committing zina after giving birth to a girl, Wasila. She faced a sentence of being stoned to death after her baby stopped breast-feeding. Human rights groups in Pakistan reported that as many as 80 percent of women in jail were there because of zina prosecutions. They are prosecuted under 1979 Hudood Ordinances, which President Zia ul-Haq passed as part of a wider legal and political system enacted to make Pakistan fit his idea of Islam. The ordinances made zina a crime, and women who brought charges of rape often found themselves charged with adultery or fornication, particularly when they became pregnant, a condition used as evidence of their alleged crime. In 1980, few women were imprisioned; by 2002, about 1,800 women were in prison, says the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Human rights experts figure as many as 1,440 women were alleged hudood criminals. Amid international pressure, the courts had overturned the sentencing of the mother who was to be stoned to death for zina during my return to Karachi earlier in the year. But the lives of other women and their children went unnoticed in prisons around the world.

  My spirited Greek friend Vasia arrived at my doorstep to welcome Shibli into the world. She had reflected years earlier on the fluency of making love in her native Greek language but had eschewed national boundaries to marry a French man, with whom she had spent the last several years in Morocco’s capital of Rabat. At the dining table, she told me about her experience in that Muslim country. A gifted artist, she volunteered at a women’s prison in Rabat teaching art to dozens of women, many of them imprisoned after their out-of-wedlock pregnancies were discovered. The situation was bleak and uncertain for single mothers and their children in Morocco where it is a crime to have a child out of wedlock. Mothers raised their children in their prison while they were nursing, other times handing them over to orphanages. Either way, it was difficult for children to receive the proper papers that would send them to school because their fathers had never legitimized them. Women who kept their babies were still shunned by their families and often left prison only to return for prostitution. I listened quietly with Shibli on my lap.

  It saddened me to be part of a religion that punished a woman when she had brought life into this world. In Islam, zina ranked as a major sin beside murder. That would have equated me with Danny’s killers. It’s said the Prophet Muhammad had a dream in which naked men and women were making horrible noises in an oven. These men and women were said to be adulterers. I searched for other unmarried Muslim women who had become pregnant. I found only the story of a woman from a place called Juhaina. It’s said she became pregnant after committing zina.

  She went to the Prophet Muhammad and said, “O Allah’s Prophet, I have committed something for which a prescribed punishment is due, so execute it on me.”

  The prophet supposedly told her master, “Treat her well, and when she delivers bring her to me.”

  The master did so, and the Prophet Muhammad sentenced her to be stoned to death. After she was killed, he prayed over her body. Hazrat Omar, the second caliph of Islam, said, “Do you pray over her, O Allah’s Prophet, yet she has committed fornication?”

  The prophet replied, “She has repented to such an extent that if it were divided among seventy people of al-Madina, it would be enough for them all. Have you found any rep
entance better than she having sacrificed herself for the sake of Allah the Most High?”

  There was, however, no mention of her child left without a mother. As with the father of my baby, men lived secretly with their participation in zina while the women carried the responsibilities of the choice they had made to realize their sexuality outside the prescribed hudood, or boundaries, of the religion.

  I turned to my mother that night. “Shibli chose carefully in coming into my womb. If he had entered the womb of any other Muslim woman, his life would have been so different.” Perhaps he would have grown up in a prison instead of a home with Peter Rabbit in his bassinet.

  Shibli’s father phoned when he was a week old on a six-minute call he booked through Pakistan’s telephone operators. I could count the number of phone calls he made to me over the year on just one hand, but at that moment I didn’t care. I had Shibli in my arms. Life had won. For the first time I understood equanimity toward my baby’s father. I felt neither love nor hatred. I was content to share with him the growling sounds that made Shibli’s name as a lion cub appropriate. He called two days later on Friday night as I waited for Mariane’s arrival from New York, amazing myself with Safiyyah, Samir, and their friends over how cute Shibli looked in a ladybug outfit.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he told me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  His call never came. I heard from his sister, a TV personality on an Asian programming channel based in London. She wanted me to marry her brother. I told her that her brother had left me no alternative but to choose to be a single mother. I felt comfortable until we parted. As we ended the conversation, she said, “I was just calling to claim ownership over Shibli.”

  At that moment I remembered the last day of the Kalachakra initiation by the Dalai Lama in the Himalayan monastery of Ki. After Lucy, Esther, and I had settled into a space under a tree, a Tibetan man had stood in front of us and yelled, “This is my space!”

  Lucy had looked calmly up at the man and responded, “There is no ownership over space.”

  As I absorbed the words of a woman who had known of my pregnancy from the start but had done nothing for the life within me, I took inspiration in Lucy. “There is no ownership with love,” I told my baby’s aunt. It was a cliché, perhaps, out of my Chicken Soup for the Soul day timer, but I believed what I said. “I don’t believe in boundaries.”

  If she wanted to love the baby, she was free to do so. Receiving silence from the baby’s father, I had grown stronger. But with utterances from him, I was daydreaming again, calculating ten hours ahead to Karachi to imagine what he might be doing. I phoned the baby’s father, wishing to answer the questions that now consumed me as I nursed Shibli at my breast. He spoke promises again. This time, he said he would be applying for MBA schools in the U.S. His constraint was money, he said, but he would make his efforts alone. “I have to prove myself to you.” He did. It wasn’t enough to be humble, though. He wanted to give Shibli a middle name. I told him that he had a middle name in Daneel. “How about Ali?” he asked. I was firm, and I was angry at his entitlement after having done nothing for the baby.

  If I needed any reminder that I was no goddess, it came a few days later when Shibli’s father wrote to tell me that he was upset that I wouldn’t consider Ali as Shibli’s middle name. He wrote, “I think I’ll just call him Ali. So can you please send me some pics of Ali, I’m dying to see him.”

  I knew my bodhisattva friend would tell me to ignore this intrusion, even though she saw the arrogance in his claim. But I couldn’t accept this sense of entitlement. I called him. “What have you done for the baby that you think you can make such a claim?” I asked furiously. Except for a Subway tunafish sandwich he had brought me on my return sojourn to Karachi for the trial of Danny’s kidnappers, he had done nothing toward the baby’s health. “You haven’t even sent him one outfit to wear.”

  “Why do I have to do something so symbolic?”

  I couldn’t believe his audacity. “What are you doing for us?” I screamed.

  “You want daily reports?” he screamed back. “I’m not going to give you daily reports.”

  “Just one report will do,” I yelled. “Tell me!”

  He swore at me.

  He was tormenting me again. I was allowing him to torment me. I had lost control. I was screaming into the phone. My mother swept into the room. “Why are you calling him?” she screamed.

  “He’s driving me crazy!” I wept, sobbing as I had done so many nights in Paris during my pregnancy.

  “Hang up!” she shouted. “Hang up!”

  I hung up, weeping in the embrace of my bhabi, my sister-in-law, and my mother. Shibli lay fast asleep all the while.

  Two days after Shibli’s one-month birthday, I called his father to apologize and make peace for my utterances of the week before. Accidentally, I dialed 911. The phone rang, breaking the quiet of the night. “Hello?”

  “I’m the dispatcher at the West Virginia State Police. You dialed 911 and hung up. Is everything okay?” a woman asked. I explained my mistake. “Is someone holding a gun to your head?” the woman asked.

  Was someone holding a gun to my head? I sat in the dim light of a small lamp, amazed at the truth of her question. Somebody was holding a gun to my head, and she was me. I was the only one pulling myself back to this city thousands of miles away where my dear friend had been slaughtered and my baby’s life had been conceived. I knew this to be true. Still, I punched the buttons to that mobile phone whose ringing had caused me so much torment.

  “Hello?” Shibli’s father seemed different. “I wanted to call you but I was too afraid.”

  “Oh.” Each of us had to overcome our own fears on our own.

  “I had a long talk with my mother yesterday about everything,” he said. “I showed her Shibli’s picture. My mother says we should get married right away. What do you think?”

  I was stunned. I was getting a marriage proposal from the mother of my baby’s father. He wasn’t even committing to it himself.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I want to live with the baby. I think the baby should be with his mother.” It was as if I didn’t matter. I wasn’t about to lose my temper again and resuscitate the cycle of apologies, but I couldn’t participate in this delusion any more. Why hadn’t he had this conversation with his mother months ago? “I’ve been avoiding her. She’s been going through menopause. Hormones causing depression.” Hormones. Depression. They were both something I knew a little bit about. But the baby’s father and his family wanted to associate with me only to claim the baby. I saw clearly the choice I was going to make. I would raise my baby alone, welcoming any emotional expression Shibli’s father and his family wanted to make but allowing nothing more. I wouldn’t marry his father and risk losing the life I had fought to bring into the world. I had put a gun to my head fighting for a legitimacy that would only tie me to a person and family that I neither respected nor trusted. I couldn’t be defined by a society that punished a mother for choosing life.

  A phone call broke a rare Saturday afternoon when I was alone in the house with only Shibli. “As-salam alaykum.” It was the Muslim greeting, “Peace be upon you.”

  “Wa’laykum salam,” I said, not even still knowing the greeting is properly said, “Wa’alaykum as-salam.” “And peace be upon you.”

  The man on the other end introduced himself with a Muslim name and asked for my father. “He’s not here.”

  He asked for me.

  “This is she.” I was slightly suspicious, wondering if he was a Muslim who read the Pakistani newspaper article with my home phone number, but he had an American accent. He said he had read a personal advertisement that I had written and figured out who I was from my Salon articles he had also read. I figured it out. He had come across one of the advertisements I had written the year before in one of my efforts to make a conscious effort at finding a good match.

  “A little something has chang
ed since I wrote that ad,” I said, glancing at Shibli sleeping calmly in my lap. Except for Shibli’s birth, the stranger knew the tale of my year. He understood when I told him that I wasn’t yet ready for new romance. I had the little business of again centering my muladhara chakra, my base chakra, representing stability and roots. But his phone call was fortuitous in my effort to know the being that was my true self. An Islamic scholar, he provided me just the intellectual gems I needed to bring me the clarity I was seeking.

  “Through all of your experiences,” he said, “you have known surrender. And a child learns surrender from his mother. It doesn’t have to mean doing what your emotions say. If you just follow your emotions, you don’t mature. You’re a victim of your emotions. When you develop the ability to relate to an emotion, it enters into your consciousness without you having to act upon it. It can pass through you like a cloud.” This was Tantra. It was Sufism. It was the Vipassana meditation I’d learned in a Buddhist forest monastery.

  My son crystallized so much for me. Through this stranger, I learned that Shibli was the name, not just of my ancestor, but also of a renowned Sufi saint of the tenth century from Baghdad. This saint believed, as I had concluded, that the rituals of religion were mere vehicles for spirituality that transcends dogmas and rites. It’s said that he ran the streets carrying flaming coals proclaiming he was going to set fire to the Ka’aba, the most sacred place in Islam to which Muslims pray. The truest Ka’aba, he and other Sufi saints argued, lay within the heart of a devotee.

  Another Sufi tale about Shibli underscored to me the true nature of goodness. The tale recounted how Shibli the Sufi after his death appeared to someone in a dream. In this dream God asked Shibli whether he knew why God had chosen to show him forgiveness. Shibli listed all of his prayers and good deeds. “But the Lord told me, ‘Not for all this have I forgiven you!’”