Tantrika Page 11

  Rabia of Basra said that when she heard voices that rang out like a distraction in prayer, they were actually fruits falling from the sweet tree of paradise. I’d be satisfied with a little grape. I tried to meditate as I had in Aunty Chawla’s mandir. Praying in Arina’s room didn’t give me that quiet. My eyes drooped. I felt a negative spirit here, a lack of acceptance unless I prayed five times a day. I wanted to phone home for comfort. But Rabia’s story explained there was the path of comfort and then there was the path of enlightenment. I had chosen enlightenment, and it was most certainly not a path of comfort.

  I saw here expressions of the religious practice that I didn’t find convincing. One day Arina ventured by and looked disapprovingly at her little sister, who was feeling ill. “You’ve got nazar,” she said, using the Urdu word for the Arabic concept of the evil eye cast sometimes by admirers but also by enemies. “You didn’t wear your ta’weez for protection.” The ta’weez, which means “the act of taking refuge” in Arabic, is a charm hung around the neck as a symbol of protection, usually with a surah from the Qur’an tucked inside.

  I asked, “Do you really believe she got sick from nazar?”

  Arina said, “Yes. Yes.” I was surprised. She was a scholar of the sciences, awarded three gold medals at Aligarh Muslim University for her accomplishments in her studies, but she believed in what amounted to superstition to me. Even the devoted Muslim believes in nazar because the Qur’an offers numerous references to the effect of “the eye,” distilling various protections in verses. But I couldn’t be judgemental. I ran away from people I thought gave me “bad energy.”

  I then noticed their brother Haseeb standing in Arina’s room, a door away. A few days earlier he had seen me praying and had come with a hand outstretched to congratulate me. “You’re so pious,” he’d told me with a beaming smile. I’d refused to accept the handshake. I didn’t consider prayer an act to be congratulated.

  Now, as I sat beside her, Ayesha vomited. Haseeb stood by watching. “You congratulate me for being pious,” I said. “Piety means standing in the other room as your little sister vomits?”

  It was a family of strict religious worship, yet the children were captivated by Western symbols of materialism. Ayesha wrote a poem in my notebook:

  Nothing refreshes like Coca Cola

  Except for Pure Magic

  I like my Birthday

  Especially when it has Coca Cola and Pure Magic

  During my visit, Haseeb, Sumi, their other brother, Arina, and I sipped Pepsi and ate biscuits called Pure Magic with delight. They all jumped up in alarm when they heard their father’s voice. Pepsi was one of the forbidden fruits.

  A man arrived. I’d never met him before. He was Nasheed Apa’s older brother, Azfar Bhai. He didn’t ask me about the project that brought me to India. At the dining table, covered with clear plastic, he sat across from me and lectured me. “You should go to see your dadi immediately,” he told me, urging me to go see my paternal grandmother in Pakistan. It wasn’t for sentimental reasons or for my research. “She will find you a husband.”

  Zafar Bhai sat to my left and agreed. “You have to get married,” he declared to me.

  Nasheed Apa concurred. “You should listen to me. I’m older than you.”

  I protested that I was receptive to being married but hadn’t found a good match yet. “You only have worldly wisdom,” Arina said. Me? The one thing I thought I lacked, flying in the clouds, was wisdom about how to live on this earth, but I certainly didn’t think people who had just been reintroduced to me after so many years apart, and one who didn’t know me at all, would judge me so freely. I was clearly offended they didn’t bother to first engage me in conversation about that which coursed through my soul, my ruh.

  They told me tales of the dangers that lurked on the roads if I continued to travel alone. Azfar Bhai offered to escort me to Benares and the other places of my journey. Zafar Bhai chimed in with horror stories of murders and robberies.

  At that moment, the phone rang. It was my mother.

  “I don’t know who this guy is, Mummy,” I wailed, “but he’s bugging me about getting married.”

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “Azfar Bhai,” I answered.

  “Stay away from him,” my mother commanded.

  Her advice affirmed what I wanted to do. I left the table, clearly upset. I talked to my mother again. She told me Azfar Bhai was a faculty member at Shibli College in the city of Azamgarh, a place I’d never visited but the conservative Muslim city of my maternal and paternal ancestors. She also told me how he had scolded my brother when he arrived in Azamgarh with long hair and a wild spirit that few, including Azfar Bhai, could understand were symptoms of an illness.

  I sat with Arina in a room away from her parents and Azfar Bhai. “Of course I would like to be married, to be united in love, but I do not want to be married for the sake of marriage. Why does everyone have to be judgmental and negative?” I rhetorically asked Arina.

  “Ignore it,” Arina told me with a wince on her face.

  Arina confided to me the scheming going on outside our room. Zafar Bhai and Azfar Bhai had this idea in their heads to arrange my marriage to a cousin, a wildlife specialist at Aligarh Muslim University. He had been married in something called a badal, or exchange, marriage. He married a woman, and his sister married her brother. It was a sacrifice brothers sometimes made, marrying ineligible women so their sisters, also ineligible because of age, looks, or other biases, could at least be wed. But these marriages had fallen apart quickly. The family rumor was something about the new mother-in-law refusing to allow her son to leave Azamgarh. I’d last heard the divorces hadn’t been finalized.

  “He’s still married!” I exclaimed.

  “But he’s getting a divorce,” Arina argued.

  Great. This man, still wed but soon to be divorced, would be perfect for this aging divorcee.

  Finally, the next morning, I pulled away from Aligarh on the train to Lucknow.

  I felt as if I was making my escape. A child with a bare bottom and a red string around his protruding belly swaggered by not far from the train tracks. A rush of rice fields swept by me. I was happy to be sitting on the train. It was so much better that I hadn’t kept my New York home. I preferred this life of detachment. I still hadn’t graduated to nonattachment.

  A child galloped along the wheat field. Acres unfolded before me dotted with trees shading a piece of farmland. This was the first moment of solitary stillness I had felt since I arrived in India. It relieved me. I had found religion in Aligarh. I had even found belief in the spiritual. But I did not find spirituality. I looked out the window as I daydreamed. A clump of women in bright saris stood outside, some shielding their faces with their sari fabrics pulled over their eyes. A tarred road lay in front of me, and I dreamed of riding a bicycle along its stretch of flat land.

  The train would have lulled me to sleep if I hadn’t had to think about protecting my luggage from theft. I didn’t like the effect that this oppression cast upon me. Thank God, my family warned me to stay away from Azamgarh. I wasn’t strong enough in my sense of self. I understood now why my brother had cursed Azamgarh. It made me sad to think of my brother in the grips of illness in this land. As if explaining my brother’s peculiarities, Azfar Bhai had told me, “He wanted to go into mandirs.”

  How could I tell him that I had gone into the mandirs of Hindus and that I planned to go into more of them? My brother and I were more like the Sufis of our ancestry, free spirits. We felt different from our family. Zafar Bhai had relayed tales of the kindness of Hindus on his train rides with surprise in his voice. Arina and I had walked through the bazaar my last night in Aligarh, passed a Hindu temple, and Arina had said, “When a cow goes to the bathroom in the morning they pray to the manure.” One of her best friends was a Hindu named Vibha, and Zafar Bhai proudly relayed how Vibha’s father considered purdah a good thing.

  I awakened from a slumber. My eyes b
atted open to be soothed to sleep again by the presence of my North Face bag. No thievery inside the train. No urban congestion outside. Stacks of manure so perfectly piled upon each other. India felt so foreign yet resonated so deeply within me. I thought of Lucy in this country. I had judged my cousin as others judged me. I hadn’t had her accompany me partly because of her pale skin and English features. Plus, she wore pants in India rather than shalwars, baggy pants, and she didn’t speak Urdu. I had wanted to see what it was like to experience this country by going native. But Lucy understood something deeper than I did. You couldn’t be something you weren’t. Now that I knew, I wished for her presence more than any other. I was also drawn to be with Dadi, to learn from her. The truth was that I had to forgive her for transgressions against my mother in order to fully embrace her, but I loved her for the mysterious parts of me that I knew spawned from her spirit.

  As I sat in my train seat, legs flew in front of me as a man climbed down from the upper bunk, his feet clad in black socks, patting his thighs contentedly once his feet were fully tucked into slippers. The smell of food in the air was delightful. The taste of an orange Arina had given me lingered deliciously in my mouth.

  CHAPTER 8

  Implosion

  THE HONEYSUCKLE BLOSSOMS captured my imagination. They draped over a roof sheltering the stairs leading up to my family alcove in a place called Jahingarabad Palace. They were like flowers handed to us by angels.

  They were white tinged with a pink not worn by the honeysuckle climbing the wall outside my bedroom at 208 Bevier Road in New Jersey. But their beauty was universal, and like a chord ringing through time it brought my childhood into my present. I was excited to be here in Lucknow. It was a town of great culture where Muslim nawabs once lived in palaces with the finest in art, music, and consorts. The nawabs in Islam were the rajahs of Hinduism. Lucy, Esther, and my mother advised me to make Lucknow my base because of an aunt, Rashida Khala, who ruled the roost here. I didn’t know her, but I was here to give their suggestion a try. I planned to stay only a few days and then travel back to Kathmandu, just across the border, or venture to the many Hindu holy cities just a few hours’ drive away. I came to Lucknow awakened to the boundaries between Hinduism and Islam.

  I didn’t even remember, until I saw photographs later, that I had been here before. That was long before the rajah of the palace rented a wing out to Baskin-Robbins so that its familiar pink-and-white sign was the first thing I noticed when I crossed the gate into the palace. In another space sat a breast enlargement center.

  Long before, my uncle Iftikhar Mamoo had lived here for years and named the terrace apartment Markaz-e-Adab, meaning “Center of Learning” with adab meaning “learning.” The palace sat at the foot of a neighborhood in a wide avenue of shops in a neighborhood called Hazratganj, where merchants today sold Ray-Ban sunglasses and Swiss Army knives. In his day, it was a bustling but quiet street. Two rooms sat off the top of the stairs. Pastel-colored fabrics filled the one on the right, and a man by the open door sat at a sewing machine, stitching yet another piece in the Lucknowi chikan business of intricately embroidered kurtas that my cousin Rehan Bhai and his older brother ran out of the apartment. To the left, a door led into the room where Rehan Bhai slept with his wife, my cousin-sister Baby Apa, and their son, Shaan. Here, on this bed, Mamoo’s friends—poets, philosophers, academics, ruffians—had gathered and debated into the night. This was where Rachel Kennedy came as a porcelain-faced twenty-year-old from the hamlet of Maidenhead on the Thames River. She was in Lucknow to study about the Avadhs, the rich Muslims, called nawabs, who financed a high society of poetry, prose, and dance. Two sisters came with her. One of them took a liking to Mamoo. The other didn’t take a liking to that. Mamoo took a liking to neither. He fell in love with the young woman with a gentle smile and big brown eyes. He had already been married, but his wife, a scholar of Arabic, had moved to Pakistan. He didn’t want to leave his India. He had done the unthinkable and they were getting a divorce.

  Mamoo took this British girl to his village, Jaigahan, and there they were married in raw simplicity that captivated the hearts of the villagers.

  As I reached the top of the stairs at our home in Jahingarabad Palace, Rashida Khala approached me with a slow shuffle of a walk.

  In Urdu, khala means “sister of mother.” Rashida Khala was my mother’s eldest sister. She was slender and smaller than I, immaculate in a white shalwar kameez, her gray hair tied neatly into a braid. She sat me down immediately to eat and then sent me off to take a bath to cleanse myself from my travels. She didn’t know her age because they never recorded it back then, but she was thought to be born in 1922, making her an estimated eighteen years older than my mother, who was the youngest child. She always dressed in immaculately washed and ironed white shalwar kameezes. She braided her silver hair over her right shoulder and tied the thin ends with the bow of a white ribbon like the kind schoolgirls wore in their hair. Her face was lined and weathered and beautiful. Unlike the roar with which Zafar Bhai and his sons stormed through the house to get to the mosque before sunset, she awakened for the predawn fajr namaz without me hearing her, though I lay asleep right beside her.

  She was married as a young teenager, like most women of her time. Her husband died tragically after the birth of their daughter, Zareena. In the custom still practiced today, her in-laws arranged for her to marry her husband’s younger brother. With him, she had three more daughters. She was happy with him. But when I asked her to talk about this part of her life she always said, “Chordo.” Let it go.

  She taught me lessons without uttering a word of lecture or advice. All day, she stayed busy. When I awakened she was chopping onions or shelling peas for breakfast. She chased after Rehan Bhai’s son, Shaan, to make him drink milk. Throughout the afternoon, she guided Anis and Parvez, the young men she had raised from boyhood, through chores. They were called servants, but she treated them like family. At night, they slept on mats even though Khala bought them mattresses. We slept on cots pulled outside on the veranda. It was a magical space with the stars above in this place where royalty once slept. The moon ascended before me and moved over my right shoulder in the wee hours of the night when I opened my eyes for just a moment to see it above me. I could feel Iftikhar Mamoo gazing down upon me.

  One afternoon, Rehan Bhai sat against the bed mats and told me he had turned to religion a few months before, the result of conversations with Thabligi Jamaat men who attended his mosque. They belonged to a conservative Muslim organization. Followers grew their beards, as Rehan Bhai had, and men went to the mosque for their five daily prayers, easily influenced by the imam, or religious leader, of the mosque who lectured them about how to practice Islam.

  I wanted to explore Lucknow, but Rehan Bhai set out warnings. I felt imprisoned on the grounds of the palace, and I didn’t know how to break free. I was getting frustrated. The newspaper was filled with horror stories that reinforced his fears. The Hindustan Times wrote about a fifteen-year-old Dalit girl, the new politically correct term for the lowest “untouchable” class, whose gang-rape charge against men in her village went uninvestigated.

  I didn’t even know how to call home. The phone at the house didn’t make international phone calls. Too much illegal splicing of telephone wiring, so neighbors charged their international calls to your phone. I piled onto Rehan Bhai’s Enfield motorcycle. I rode Western in Kathmandu. Now, I rode sidesaddle as the women did here, and we set out just around the corner for a business setup with phone booths inside for local and international calls. I had to wait a few minutes for the connection. I wandered outside. Rehan Bhai waved to me from the masjid veranda across the street. He gestured for me to go back inside. He might have been worried about the sun overheating me, but it was just another signal of the repression I felt here.

  When I finally got through, Bhabi answered. “Hello?”

  My frustration silenced me.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  I sta
rted to sob, the tears ensnaring my words. Finally, I stuttered through my sobs, “It’s so hard.”

  In her gentle way, Bhabi said, “Asra baji, you’re so brave. You’re so strong. Asra baji, everything will be fine.”

  My mother rushed to the phone. “What happened?”

  I wanted to assure her I hadn’t been raped, stabbed, or murdered. I could barely get the words out for my sobs. “Nuh-thing. Nuh-thing.” I gulped. “It’s just so hard.” I sobbed hard. I complained about how I didn’t feel as if I could leave the house. I wasn’t free. A proposed marriage to a man already married. The lectures. The hatred for Hindus. The supremacy of Islam. My mother wanted me to give the phone to Rehan Bhai, to explain to him to give me freedom.

  “No, I’ll deal with it,” I insisted.

  My father got on the phone. “Bayti,” he said, using the endearment of all moments of trouble, “dear daughter, you learn lessons everywhere.”

  I told my father I had learned that being religious meant a devotion to God over humanity. My mother got back on the phone. “Come home,” she pleaded with me. “You can always go back.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. Would I have failed if I returned?

  This was the long, dark night, as I succumbed to the tensions pressing in on me. I was here with saaf neeath, meaning “clear intentions” in Urdu, to explore worlds foreign to me. But I was dragged down by expectations others had for me as a thirty-something single woman. My parents had broken free of those expectations and had released me from them. But the Indian culture around me had clipped my wings, and I was allowing it to ground me.

  Ghosts haunted me. Rashida Khala sat on the charpai, cot, across from me on the veranda and told me about a night much like the clear one in which we were wrapped. My mother had come to Lucknow from Hyderabad to Jahingarabad Palace to give birth to her first child. Little could she have imagined then the demons that would rise in this city for her son, newly born, and daughter yet unborn.