Tantrika Page 12

  She sat on the same veranda where I now sat. Rashida Khala sat beside her with Anwar Mamoo. My mother admitted to them that it wasn’t easy for her with her susral, her in-laws.

  Her brother dropped his chin. It was a shame.

  As she told me the story, Khala remembered what she said back then about my mother: “She cried in her childhood. She cried after her marriage.”

  Another night, I lay on my back staring at the stars. My head burst as I felt the illness that gripped my brother here. Overhead, electric wires crisscrossed with the clothesline under the stars. The white light of a bare bulb shone in the other room. I felt naked like that bulb, as if India had stripped me of my resources of intellect and independence.

  The next day, I retreated to the Fast Business Centre to find some sanity in the cyber world, not to mention quiet time in their private booths. Over the Internet, Lucy sent me encouragement. She asked if I’d avoided the snare of relatives. I hadn’t. “Stay fresh because…holy eyes will quiver when you pass by, and skies will shiver in wondrous thought.” I tried to call her but missed her. She wrote again assuring me, “India is oppressive sometimes, well most of the time, but it is like that in the most innocent of ways. It just wants to discover all about you. Be courageous. You have truly been touched by the soul of India, entrenched in the past, present, and the future of each of us. I know your turmoil.”

  I wondered if I had made a mistake in enveloping myself in family relations. Or did I just not know how to handle such relatives? Should I go home to America and regroup? Gather my strength? Renew who I was? Should I call home to get advice? Rehan Bhai watered the plants. The sound of a saw filled the air. I awakened thinking of princesses who might have walked where I walked. I needed to go home to regroup. Make order of all these stories and impressions. Create my budget. Establish my itinerary. Get things under control. This investigation had stirred up too much emotion. I needed to center my muladhara chakra. And then return with a plan for the future.

  I’d go home, but first I’d weave explorations of Hindu culture into my remaining days in the Muslim world of Markaz-e-Adab.

  I was beginning to despair of ever finding the Tantric truths. Before Lucknow, the closest I’d come was a whiskey-soaked Vishnu Uncle and the apparently bored son of a Tantric guru. In Lucknow, the closest I got to Tantra was a carpet salesman I met in a bank. The carpet salesman said he practiced Tantra. He had had a Tantric lover. He had set her up in an apartment in Bombay. She got married and moved to Madagascar where she sold the business of Tantric black magic.

  Wasn’t he married?

  “Yes, but the Tantric texts are clear. You can’t practice with your wife.”

  That was convenient for a philanderer. I made the point that Tantra can and should be practiced with a spouse. Over the next days, I wasted my time, wandering around Lucknow as he tried to impress me with the important people he knew, police officers and government officials, some of whom he told me he was giving bribes. I didn’t learn a thing about Tantra. When I finally met his wife, he tried to joke: “I’m trying to convince her that it’s because I love her that I want to bring home a second wife to help her around the house.”

  I didn’t laugh. I was beginning to feel everyone was nuts. I read in the newspaper about a young man who had supposedly chopped off his tongue after being possessed by Kali. So, I went to the temple with Akhtarul Mulk, a veteran Lucknow journalist and friend of my uncle during the days of Markaz-e-Adab. I wanted to prove to the Hindu worshipers that I respected their religion and bowed my head to Kali. When I met the young man, I asked him to pull out his tongue. I could tell that he hadn’t chopped it off as he claimed. I could see from the stitches that it had been barely sliced.

  Even the neighborhood police inspector laughed at this man’s mockery of religion. “Everyone figures out a way to make money,” he said with a laugh.

  One practice I learned from a supposed Tantric I met with Akhtarul Uncle in his neighborhood convinced me I hadn’t yet found any secrets. That man confided a ritual to me in which I was supposed to bathe and then yell curses at the sun. Yeah, right.

  Before I left, my cousin Rakhshi brought me to her jeweler. She was the daughter of one of Rashida Khala’s daughters, and I took a special liking to her because of her open-mindedness and vision. An assistant librarian at the British Library in Hazratganj, she dreamed of opening a coffeehouse bookstore in Lucknow, an ambitious dream for anyone, let alone a woman.

  I sat in front of the glass showcase and explained to the jeweler that I’d come to India to learn about Tantra. There were charms with OM, the explain written upon them and swastikas, the marking of Hinduism before it was altered and captured by the Nazis as their symbol. The shop, Apurra Jewellers, was tucked in a long and narrow storefront in Hazratganj. The jeweler’s name was Girish Narayan Gupta, a devoted Hindu.

  “You were put on this earth as a Mohammedan,” he told me, “because you committed a sin in a past life. This assignment came to you for a reason. It is an examination. If you go into the mandir and feel a connection, you have passed.”

  I feared I was going to lose my mind, torn sick by the divide between Hindus and Muslims. I was confronted by the tug of two societies who hated each other. Hadn’t Hindus gotten the memo? Muslims weren’t Mohammedans. They didn’t worship the Prophet Muhammad. We prayed to Allah. Could they be any more ignorant? And Muslims could at least celebrate the fact that Hinduism teaches a spiritual discipline even if it was expressed through worship of brightly painted deities.

  “Did you know today is Ram’s birthday?” he continued, peering over the counter. I did, but I didn’t know much about its significance. “It was ordained for us to meet on this day.”

  His family arrived to go to the temple with him. As we stood outside his shop, he looked at me and said convincingly, “You will become a spiritual healer. People will come to you and you will help them. You are on the right path to find your salvation.”

  As we parted, he inflated my spiritual ego. “You will be a saint.” On my way home, I just hoped none of the juvenile young men of Lucknow would attempt a cheap grope.

  At home, I sat with Rehan Bhai amid piles of kurtas. He wore his trademark sherwani, the long suit coat of formal Muslim culture, and topi, his hat. There was a lion, he told me, that hung out with bukras, or goats. The goats bleated. The lion roared. “A lion can hang out with goats, but he can’t become a goat,” he told me. “This is the same with Hindus and Muslims.”

  I was tired of stories with absurd morals about the divide with which some people wanted us to exist. “Just because you’re a lion hanging out with goats doesn’t mean you want to be a goat,” I responded, thinking about the time I had gone to visit neighbors of Akhtarul Uncle. He had looked at me then told the girls there, “She doesn’t speak Urdu.”

  “Yes, I do,” I’d exclaimed.

  “Do you pray five times a day?” asked one of the girls, using a classic Muslim barometer of gauging piety.

  I wondered what she would think if I said I actually yelled curses at the sun.

  Just before I left Lucknow, a familiar man ascended the stairs to our home in Jahingarabad Palace. I was filled with comfort.

  He was my mother’s youngest brother, Anwar Ansari. He had persevered in a life marked by the need to grow up early, and then a tragedy. After his father died, Anwar Mamoo raised chickens in the mango orchard that filled Latif Manzil’s backyard. When Iftikhar Mamoo proved to be more a poet than a salary earner, Anwar Mamoo abandoned his passion for writing and sports and started the business of Lucknowi chikan. He built a Bombay export empire shipping intricately embroidered Lucknowi Chikarikurtas to America and the West. His second-oldest daughter, nicknamed Bubli, was on her way to his factory in Bombay when she died in a gruesome car accident, her crushed body, the word went, left for some time unceremoniously in a morgue. She was in her early twenties and beautiful.

  Anwar Mamoo was always a philosopher-athlete wrapped in a busines
s coat. In that room in which his elder brother captivated his audiences and, ultimately, his English bride, I spilled to him my frustrations with the divide and negativity in India. He shared with me his philosophies. They were the first ones I’d heard in days similar to my own. “I believe in universalism,” he said, as Khala slipped in and out of the room, making certain he was eating his lunch. “Those who awaken for puja get up at the same time as those who awaken for namaz. What is the difference?”

  To conquer India, he said, “You have to take the bull by the horns.” It was a mantra I would repeat to myself often.

  The next day, I planned to break free from the palace and accompany Mamoo on a business trip to Benares, the City of Lights. I had to take the bull by the horns. I sped to Benares with Mamoo and Rehan Bhai, a business supplier named Raju driving us on this one-day jaunt.

  We rode on long stretches of highway past trees with red and white stripes painted at the bottom of the trunks like candy canes. A goat sat on bended knee. Strands of black thread were knotted and tied to the middle of the grill of a passing car. Shards of glass lined a boundary wall, like the walls in Aligarh, meant to keep intruders out. Mamoo told me that a strong will was the most important element in personal achievement. He didn’t believe in the powers of Tantric black magic. “I once said to a sadhu, ‘You can go ahead with your mantras and put a curse on me, but I have enough willpower that it won’t have any effect on me.’”

  Someone in the car quipped, “But give the sadhu some cheras,” the mixture of hashish and tobacco that sadhus in Kathmandu were smoking at Shivarathri, “and a spell will be put on them.”

  We slipped into the showroom of a Benarsi silk manufacturer, a silver-haired man with silver stubble on his face and buckteeth reddened from chewing betel in a leaf paan. We stood at his counter as he talked quietly to me, so Rehan Bhai and Mamoo couldn’t hear. They were examining silk pillows made for Mamoo’s daughter, nicknamed Cookie, who had started a business designing Western fashions with fabrics from India for chic Soho boutiques in Manhattan.

  “I don’t want you to write this because you will become Salman Rushdie, but Islam came after Hinduism. It received much from Hinduism.” I agreed with him that, from what I’d seen, the parallels between the religions were many. He gave me a name, Sita Ram Kaviraj, as someone who would be a contact for my Tantra research and identified him as the VHP president of Benares, the VHP being a Hindu fundamentalist party.

  Meanwhile, I was here to try to find an Italian scholar of Tantra recommended to me by someone in Delhi, a man named Mark Dyczkowski. I marked a spot on my Lonely Planet guide where I’d agreed to meet my uncle in a few hours. I slipped alone into a taxi and headed toward the Ganga River.

  A boatman, Kailash, named for a mountain in Tibet where Shiva lived, rowed me down the Ganga. This was supposedly a place overcrowded with pilgrims, but that afternoon it was still and calm. It was the most sedate and peaceful place I had yet found in India. I didn’t have clear directions to the scholar’s house. “There is a yantra in the front.” I didn’t even know what yantra meant. Kailash landed me at a ghat on the Ganga where steps led up, in fact, to a giant symbol on a stone floor. Only a few people were doing their laundry on the steps. An old bearded sadhu lay in front of the door where I knocked.

  A bear of a man with a thick beard and a hole in his right sleeve opened the door and welcomed me inside, ushering me into a room to the left. He left his slippers by the door and sat down with his back to the Ganga, so I could see the still river over his shoulder through the open window. There were stacks of books and papers piled in the room. I was to learn they were something called shastras. Mark was a window into intellectual Tantra. Tantra, he explained, was a substructure of yoga. It was based on an oral tradition and a written tradition of sixty-four shastras. Mark, it turned out, was a scholar of the shastras. A computer sat in the corner.

  “Do you think Tantra is magic?” he asked me.

  “I don’t think it has to be,” I told him.

  “It isn’t,” he answered definitively, citing the shastras that he studied.

  He flailed his arms. “What is Tantra? Is it the Tantrics who take away bad spells? It isn’t. Tantra is the people who study Tantra shastras.”

  “Do you practice Tantra?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “There are many paths in Tantra. I’m a householder.”

  It was a term I hadn’t heard much, but “householder” was a way of describing a man or a woman who practiced Tantra but still married and had families. It sounded like a path that appealed to me, to stay engaged in this life but aspire to a higher level of existence than mortgages, minivans, and Mickey Mouse vacations.

  What had brought him to Benares? “I came here thirty years ago to find a guru, like everyone else.” He no longer searched, yet he didn’t leave.

  In a symbol of how no space is protected in India, there were blouses and sari petticoats on the boat when I approached it to leave.

  Finally, it was time to leave India. As I slipped out of Jahingarabad Palace, sorry to leave Rashida Khala, a half moon hung over my shoulder. The Muslim call for prayer broke through the air, as Hindu mandir bells clanged. Darkness sat in the morning air.

  It was a moment of quiet contemplation for me on the train ride to Delhi for my connection to Bangkok, my first layover. What a journey upon which I’d embarked! I’d learned about the place of souls, Allah, goddesses, prayer, and spirits in Islam and Hinduism. Before leaving Lucknow, I had sat upon the raw wood takht whose base Khala had fortified with bricks and strips of white packaging fabric. I had heard her voice near the kitchen. It had reminded me of the gentle singsong voice of my nani, my maternal grandmother. I’d learned Khala’s wisdom. I’d asked her the day before what she did to get sukoon, peace of mind, when there is much gurbur, or tension, in her mind. Her answer: dua, prayer. Five times a day she prayed quietly on the janamaz upon the bed.

  On the train, a young student started to quietly tell me his story. “You look so peaceful,” he said. Dazed could certainly pass for peaceful.

  He’d started an affair awhile back with a married woman liberated, ironically, through her marriage to mix more freely with single men. Before he left to take an exam in Delhi, she told him she would kill herself if he didn’t return. He knew there was no future with this woman, but he was frustrated in a society where his future was dark in a sea of corruption, bias, favoritism, and prejudice. “India is bankrupt,” he said sadly.

  I stared out the window at the blur of fields. He echoed my feelings.

  CHAPTER 9

  Finding Freedom Again

  WHEN I ARRIVED HOME from my travels, I hated India. I relished the beauty of Morgantown. Flowers were in bloom in North Hills. I breathed in the fresh air and knew deep within me why West Virginia’s license plates read, “Almost Heaven.”

  As I pulled the Jeep out of the driveway one rainy morning to zip to North Elementary to volunteer for Safiyyah’s third-grade phys ed class with Mrs. Garten, I stopped. There was Jaz, the wild calico cat who ate the food we put out for her but hissed and never came close. She stood with her legs wide apart with a black creature that resembled a rat underneath her belly. I stepped out of the Jeep to look closely. Jaz was using her body as an umbrella to protect a creature from the rain. “Why would Jaz be protecting a rat?”

  I followed Jaz’s path to the neighbor’s driveway. I shimmied on my belly to look below a pile of logs where Jaz had gone. Kittens. There were kittens here. Jaz ran away. I scooped the kittens into a box and put them in our garage.

  The kittens were the celebrity guests at Safiyyah’s birthday slumber party. It was like the weekend from the Tantra workshop in Canada without the foot washes and explicit material. Al and Pala had told us that play was an important part of Tantra. Through the gift of my niece and nephew, my return to Morgantown was very much about play. Tantra is about being a child well. We dressed up. We threw a dance party. Stella, Bhabi’s friend from Ghana, dan
ced a traditional African dance. The girls were riveted by her mesmerizing swaying. Safiyyah’s friend Breanna glided to “Genie in a Bottle.” It was a kirtan à la Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

  Late into the night, the girls lay belly down, and I lifted the heels of their feet to the sky and swung their legs together. “You’re flying,” I told them, just as I had learned to do at an R-rated dakini workshop in Los Angeles in which I learned the fine art of Tantric massage, only the intention here was strictly G-rated.

  On Safiyyah’s actual birthday on May 30, I enforced my rule that we never worked on our birthdays, and Safiyyah’s mother let her stay home from school. We heard a mew that came from under our neighbor’s deck. We crawled under it to inspect further. Indeed, it was another kitten. He teetered out to a bowl of milk we had. He couldn’t be from Jaz’s litter. He couldn’t have survived all these days without her.

  “What shall we call him?” I asked Safiyyah.

  “‘Special’ because we found him on my birthday.”

  We dropped Special into Jaz’s litter and stepped back to watch our wild, stray mother cat. Safiyyah and I looked at each other in amazement as Jaz started licking Special as if he were her own. She let him suckle freely at her nipples. Jaz was a lesson in unconditional maternal love, an untamed creature who accepted a stray as if her own. To me, she was my first Tantrika, free from labels, showing this love and compassion whether she was his mother or not. The kittens became Tantric teachers, showing me nonjudgmental love, playfulness, and innocence.

  A few days later, I returned to Manhattan, one of four single women in a VW Bug headed to a wedding shower. From them, I heard about the six-minute date, the theme of an Upper West Side bar that hosted a night where men and women mingled for six-minute interviews with each other before moving onto another six-minute interview.