Tantrika Read online

  He didn’t answer but started walking again behind the men. They reached a van, and I arrived as they all piled inside. They invited me to sit inside, and I climbed onto the edge of the seat, the lone woman with these men, Nandi the Bull, and the body of his cousin.

  We reached a gate that was the entrance to a cremation site. Women filtered out of cars. The men carried the body to an open-air expanse held up by pillars, open-air walls on three sides. Here were the pits where bodies were cremated. In Hinduism, bodies are cremated rather than buried to free the soul from the body, which, the philosophy goes, has only been a vessel for our souls in our lifetime. Fresh orange-colored flower garlands surrounded one pit, thrown by friends and family mourning a rich and powerful industrialist cremated earlier in the day. Smoke filtered from his cremation pit, the remains of his body mostly gone. The men laid the body of Nandi the Bull’s cousin into a simple pit, decorated with nothing.

  His daughter arrived with the other women and stood beside the pit. She wailed and wailed and wailed. “Papa! Papa! Don’t go!” An elder relative pulled her away. I learned later that, as in Islam, at burials it’s Hindu tradition for women to stay away from cremations for fear they’ll get too emotional.

  A young man stood beside the pit, a stoic contrast to the daughter. A white kurta flowed elegantly down over his white pyjama. A woman told me he was a nephew of the girl’s father. He was so close to his uncle, he had the duty of lighting the cremation fire, an act usually done by a son, but his uncle had had no sons. He had the facial growth of a man who hadn’t shaved in days. He uttered not a word and silently walked around the pyre, performing rituals I didn’t know but mourning with a dignity I could recognize as the effort of all of us to accept the reality of death. He shook some oil into the fire with a long-stemmed ladle. It reminded me of the dignity with which Rachel Momani, Lucy, and Esther buried my uncle when he died in Maidenhead, England, while his daughters were teenagers. They broke orthodoxy to the gentle acceptance of the British Muslim immigrant friends of my uncle, and Lucy and Esther helped carry their father’s casket, wearing the sherwanis, the long dignified jackets that were his standard wardrobe. Before the burial, they told their mother they wanted to put the plastic pigs that had been special to them in the casket with their father. Such an act would have shocked many a Muslim, for whom the pig is considered haram, Arabic for “forbidden.” But their mother laughed her gentle laugh and told her girls, “Why not?”

  At this cremation, there was soon little difference in what remained in the pits of the industrialist, decorated with garlands, and the young man’s uncle. Similar wafts of smoke emerged from both.

  Nearby, Chawla Aunty wondered where her husband might be. She hadn’t seen him at the cremation site. In the parking lot, the wife of Nandi Uncle’s brother acted secretive. She suggested we follow her to her house. We set out behind her car, only to end up in front of a hospital called Malhotra Heart Institute.

  Nandi Uncle’s brother broke the news to Aunty. “Nandi had a heart attack.”

  So that’s what happened when he stopped to catch his breath. I scanned Aunty’s face for a reaction. She didn’t cry. She didn’t lose her breath. She didn’t even flinch. She responded with stoicism.

  When she returned home from the hospital, I didn’t see her for a while. She had slipped into her alcove beneath the stairs. All I heard was the singing of her mantra filtering out, her dog, Rufus, also listening quietly nearby.

  CHAPTER 7

  My Devoted Muslim Family

  THE BLACK FABRIC covered me from head to ankle, only my eyes peering out from behind the veil.

  I slipped through the alleys of Aligarh with my two cousins, also clad in black burqas. I had decided at the last minute to visit my cousins in Aligarh, a two-hour train ride from Delhi, for our Muslim holiday of Bukreid. It was a holiday marking the Qur’anic and biblical tale of the prophet Ibrahim, “Abraham” in the Bible. Ibrahim loved Allah so much, the story went, that when he heard voices from Allah telling him to sacrifice his son for his love of God, he took a sword to his son’s head. The hand of God stopped Ibrahim before he killed his son.

  The Wall Street Journal travel agent told me that it was too late to get a reserved train seat. I thought about hiring a car but chose to risk an adventure on the train instead, despite all the warnings I’d heard about the dangers of traveling alone as a woman. My taxi pulled up to the station. Before it pulled away, a gaggle of men had swooped upon me like vultures. A rip-off artist suggested I give him money to buy me a ticket. I refused. I was flustered and near tears. Making my way to the station platform, I found a mess in the tangle of travelers, porters, and the teaselling boys yelling, “Chaichaichaichai.” I jumped into the first-class compartment on the train and slipped through a door into a private cabin. I sat down without a ticket. A fast-talking man in his thirties, a lanky Indian with crooked teeth, recited poetry, philosophies, and tales from his life in Norway all the way to Aligarh. I was the only woman in my cabin.

  When the train pulled into Aligarh, the crooked-teeth philosopher insisted I share a bicycle rickshaw with him. When we arrived at my relatives’ doorstep, he told me to stay behind in the rickshaw so I could surprise my cousin. He knocked at the door, his appearance frightening my teenage cousin-brothers. And then I heard him say, “Won’t you give me some money for dropping her off?” The gall. I bounded out of the rickshaw, spat some words at this loser, and bade him farewell.

  When I walked through the door, I realized I could be in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

  My cousin-sister, Nasheed Apa, the daughter of my mother’s older sister, Shahida, had moved her furniture from her home in suburban America to this bungalow on the campus of Aligarh Muslim University. The living room was the same as their living room in Gaithersburg. It was the same flowered cream sofa. The lamps were the same. The drapes were the same though the bells on the cords had gotten dusty here. It was the same carpet here with leaping horses woven upon the orange. Even Nasheed Apa’s oil painting hung here, as it had done in Gaithersburg. Outdoors, I saw Nasheed Apa still had an amazing green thumb with an English garden filling her front yard with bright colors and a vegetable garden off the side with herbs and plants whose Ayurvedic remedies she recited like the scientist she once had been. But there was one huge difference. I wore a burqa as a social experiment; for them, it was a way of life in which baking a Betty Crocker cake in their kitchen in American suburbia was a distant memory.

  Nasheed Apa was like an older sister to me. When I was ten years old and living in Piscataway, New Jersey, I had ventured away from my mother for the first time since we were reunited to help Nasheed Apa with the birth of her first child on April Fool’s Day. The newborn was a beautiful girl named Arina. In Gaithersburg, Arina had grown up to be a precocious girl. But as she entered her teens, her father went through a transformation. He would invite Muslim men into his basement for meetings of Tablighi Jamaat, sort of the missionary Mormons of Islam. His wife would labor late into the night, frying snacks for the men, even as she battled ill health from diabetes. He brought stricter codes of Islam into the house, banning entertainment TV, forcing Nasheed Apa and his daughter to watch General Hospital in secret and snap off the TV when they heard Zafar Bhai’s car pull into the driveway.

  We visited often. When my aunt, Shahida Khala, stayed with her daughter once for medical treatment, I massaged her feet, which were aching from diabetes. “Your hands are from heaven,” she told me in her gentle voice. Her affirmation of my healing power gave me confidence in the power of my touch. She watched quietly as she saw her daughter’s life increasingly restricted by her son-in-law’s Islam. “I’ve never seen Islam practiced this way,” she once told my mother, shaking her head.

  One day, while I was at work in the Journal’s Chicago bureau, I picked up the phone. “Zafar has kidnapped Nasheed and the children,” my mother said. “He has taken them to India and won’t let them leave.”

  The story went that Zafar B
hai took his wife, daughter, and two sons to India for a vacation, confiscating their passports once they’d arrived and telling his wife that he had made the unilateral decision to migrate back to India. I spent days gathering all their documents together so they could return, but his wife decided not to live the life of a single mother divorcee in America. Over the years, I sent Arina, her brothers, and a new sister born in India reminders of America, including Halloween cards. I bought Arina a sweet sixteen charm for her birthday but never sent it.

  Now I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into their home. How had Nasheed Apa and Arina adjusted to this life that began with a virtual kidnapping?

  Nasheed Apa greeted me with the broad smile I remembered from my childhood. It was always wide and welcoming, but it concealed dark stories she would confide to you only in the wee hours of the morning. Arina was a taller version of the cute young girl I had last seen. Zafar Bhai hadn’t changed much. He filled our meal conversation with lectures about devotion to Allah and surrender to God. He was a constant proselytizer, preaching about Islam with a smile and a grin and without a breath’s pause.

  Zafar Bhai enforced strict purdah in his house. No men outside the immediate family were allowed to see Nasheed Apa’s and Arina’s faces. When they walked out the door, it was only cloaked in black. Twenty years earlier, Nasheed Apa had moved freely in Gaithersburg, nosing her family car from the grocery store to her job as a researcher in a scientific laboratory. She had eventually abandoned the job but always did her own grocery shopping, dropping her favorite cake mixes into her shopping cart.

  As we readied ourselves to visit families for Eid ul-Adha, or Bukreid, as we call it in India, I decided to cloak myself in a burqa. I wanted to know the existence that my mother had once lived. Now it was Arina’s turn, her wide eyes and angular face always hidden from public viewing. I allowed my eyes to be exposed to the world.

  We slipped from house to house, through dusty alleys and narrow doorways, eating the traditional sweets of Bukreid. Our long dark shadows stretched anonymously out on the street in front of us. What I discovered was that the cloak didn’t disguise my true nature. I still had my curiosity and intellect. But it was true that cloaked I had to ask myself who I was on the inside when the outside no longer defined me.

  We were joined in our excursions to the homes of relatives by the daughter that Nasheed Apa had had after settling in India. There was talk that Zafar Bhai had wanted to marry a second wife upon his return to India—to help, the argument went, a poor Muslim woman. Nasheed Apa, to her credit, didn’t buy it. When her daughter was born, they gave her the name Ayesha, after the young wife who became the Prophet Muhammad’s last wife and supposedly his favorite. Whenever we climbed into a rickshaw, her mother instructed her to recite a dua, or prayer, to protect us during our travel. Ayesha did so promptly. It struck me as no different from the mantras that Hindus chanted for protection, dismissed by many Muslims as superstitious.

  I learned the secrets of Aligarh as we wandered. Lesbianism, homosexuality, love triangles, second wives, illegitimate children. When a friend of Arina’s got a Kinetic Honda scooter, so did the daughter of her father’s second wife. He made sure he was always fair, as Islam said a man had to be when he married more than one wife. Even the young women in burqas lived surreptitious lives of romance, one of them keeping a list of the several dozen young men who had made overtures to her or her family. A boy who left cards was “Mail Man.” He’d left a poem in which he said he never thought he’d know love until he saw her. She had cut out the boy’s name lest her father should find it.

  My days in Aligarh among my devotional relatives made me wonder about the way I wanted to practice religion. The rituals weren’t as important to me as they were vital to Zafar Bhai, for example. For him, missing a prayer was unthinkable. For me, it was usual. It wasn’t my place to judge, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the strict code meant the loss of free thinking and even compassion. I left for Delhi, and when I returned to Aligarh a second time, I called to see if someone would pick me up from the train station. Zafar Bhai told me that the call for prayer, azan, had rung through the air. He assumed I was carrying the few bags of my first trip. He told me, “Get a rickshaw and come home.”

  Four strangers, who I could tell by their names were Hindu, helped me pile my baggage onto the rickshaw. When we arrived, I waited for the rickshaw walla to pull my bags off the seat. He took this opportunity to brush his hand between my legs and finger me. “Did he mean to do that?” I wondered, shocked. I was too flustered to even refuse to pay him. I handed him his ten rupees. This was the confusion of these men called “Eve teasers.”

  I had arrived for Arina’s birthday, but certain Muslim interpretations said that birthdays shouldn’t be celebrated, so we couldn’t even acknowledge the occasion. Instead, over dinner, Zafar Bhai talked about the soul. In Islam, I learned the soul was called ruh. He said that a person’s ruh disappears after death. To me, it was just like the atama, or Hindu concept of soul, I’d learned departs at the time of cremation.

  He read from a book about how the Sufis considered it the most auspicious time to recite zikr, or remembrances of Allah, after the morning fajr prayer and after the sunset maghrib prayer. I was intrigued by this concept of zikr. I remembered the recitations Ishrat Aunty had taught me during my summer vacation as a child in Hyderabad, showing me how to count using my fingers. It dawned on me that zikr wasn’t that different from the mantras that Hindus recited for the same purposes of concentration and remembrances of divinity.

  Zafar Bhai continued to read, about a state of existence that was like a union with God. I asked him if he had reached that state of existence. He said that the recitations of Qur’anic verses in salat, or the Arabic word for prayer, took him close. “I become a ray of light. I see light. I am one with Allah.”

  “Are you a Sufi?” I asked. “Have you reached a higher state of existence with God?”

  He responded, “I am nobody. I’m just dirt.”

  Although I hated to admit it, because my views were so divergent from Zafar Bhai’s dogmatism, his was the answer of the truly spiritual.

  In this household, everyone but Ayesha prayed the five daily prayers. She was still too young to be required to fulfill this requirement of Muslims.

  “What happened to your prayers?” Zafar Bhai asked me one day.

  How could I tell him that I was turned off by the hypocrisy of Muslims who prayed five times a day but mistreated their wives, sisters, and daughter or acted unkindly toward close relatives? I wasn’t convinced that prayers made for a good human being. Every time I bowed my head, I confronted the realities of Muslim culture that clashed with my vision of a compassionate society. Zafar Bhai was always dashing off to the mosque a stone’s throw from our front yard, but he seemed to preach with so much loathing toward America for its foreign policy and social values and toward Jews for their wealth and power.

  I asked him, “Are you tolerant?” I thought I knew the answer.

  He responded, “That’s a predictable question.” I didn’t tell him I found his nonanswer also predictable because dogmatism meant to me an absence of honest self-criticism.

  Because I’d begun to think so much about the concept of goddesses in Hinduism, I started wondering about the divine feminine within Islam.

  Arina was a good window. She was a young woman who lived amid the modern furniture, slipping adult novels under her mattress. She borrowed a novel about a Japanese-American woman who solves a murder outside Tokyo. The love scenes didn’t impress her. “They don’t say enough.”

  She was protected from the outside world. Not a man outside the house had seen her face. Yet she told me tales of intrigue in which boys left cards at her doorstep and pursued her clandestinely, one even sending his mother to follow Arina around campus for just a glimpse of her. Her father grilled prospective suitors to see if they were interested in Arina’s U.S. citizenship as a ticket to the United States. He refuse
d any proposal if the suitor might be interested in taking his daughter to the U.S. Word was that he would only entertain meetings with dahree wallas, men with beards, which symbolized their piety.

  One afternoon, a boy came with his family to explore a match with Arina. Arina’s brother, Haseeb, ran into her room, laughing, “Nerd! Nerd!” The boy wore glasses. He was short. His father wore a baseball cap on his head, above his beard. Arina hid in her room, her dark blue dupatta framing her beaming eyes. Beckoned by the prospective in-laws, Arina emerged from hiding. The mother had hennaed hair, and she studied Arina, who was her uninhibited self. The mother said not a word. Her black chador hung around her shoulders. We heard the azan for magrib namaz. The mother asked for a chair because her stiff joints made it too difficult for her to prostrate from a standing position. Arina didn’t connect with the mother.

  Later, we sat on her childhood bed, and Arina wrote a matrimonial ad for me to run in the Times of India newspaper. “I am a 34-year-old Sunni Muslim attractive and outgoing journalist working around the world and based in U.S. Seeking a companion who’s caring and remembers the last time he saw the full moon.”

  We crossed out a part I dictated about wanting a companion who played volleyball. We also crossed out a part Arina wrote, seeking a “religious” companion. I told Arina the qualities that I wanted in a man. Inspiring. Visionary. Compassionate. The ad left out all my confusion.

  Meanwhile, I saw the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane. Ants raced beside me. A dog ventured through the yard. Nasheed Apa’s flowers were blooming. I read The Children’s Stories of the Sufi Saints to Ayesha, who always seemed to have a tuft of bed hair. I wanted her to know something about the accomplishments of women in Islam. I read her the tale of Rabia of Basra, one of the few women Sufi saints who rose to wide recognition in a circle of men. It was said she was a slave but she transcended her physical condition through an intense devotion to God that liberated her spirit. Her master freed her because he saw she could not be a captive.