Tantrika Page 13

  The girl in the front seat said, “I just want some Sunday morning sex.”

  What did that mean?

  “Where you know each other well enough that you have sex on Sunday.” Not quite the purity of the kittens.

  Nothing had really changed in the singles culture of New York. I was relieved not to be a part of it. Sundays were claimed by a game I played in Morgantown with my family and Safiyyah and Samir, heading out for a drive where we took turns yelling “left,” “right,” or “straight” as our only directions for our day’s travels. Somehow we always found our way home.

  Another Sunday, I sat in the Morgantown High auditorium where a high school senior, Tim Maxey, had arrived with another girl after I’d enforced my no-dating rule when he asked me out and taught me one of my first lessons in dating.

  I sat now in my lipstick red kameez with its golden churidar, tight pants that bunched at the ankles, part of the jahayz, or wedding gifts, I’d received from the family into which I had married. So what if the American parents showed up in shorts and T-shirts? We were from India and proud to wear our wedding finest at any special occasion. And this was a special occasion, Safiyyah’s recital from Mindy’s School of Dance. I was too uncool to ever be a student there. Safiyyah had a visa into a world I never knew.

  These girls were a gyration of moves to songs that defied political correctness.

  “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend….”

  “…it’s raining men.”

  “Make way for Prince Ali. Show some respect.”

  A band of little girls threw themselves into handstands to the sound of a Minnie Mouse exercise song. One girl in pink remained lying down while the rest of her class moved through its routine. Her friend tapped her on the head. The girl wouldn’t join them, remaining on the floor. She clapped for herself, to the delighted laughter of the audience. I laughed at this expression of her individuality. It was something I had missed among even the children I saw in my travels on the subcontinent.

  Safiyyah’s friend Breanna danced as the words “My boyfriend’s back” filled the auditorium. Safiyyah took to the stage with her nimble body and flew through flips and somersaults with her friend Tali and the other girls from her gymnastics class.

  Tears came to my eyes.

  In the parched heat of India’s travels and troubles, I had a dream of finding a respite for myself in the lush green mountains of West Virginia.

  I told a friend of mine about this dream. She had been my friend for fourteen years since our orientation days at American University when we compared notes on the men from our new graduate school class. “Lou asked you, too, if you wanted a cup of coffee? And Larry flirted? Me, too!” It kept both of us free from internecine romance, and we had remained great friends over the years. There was a part of her that I couldn’t understand, however, in her spirituality and approach to life. It always seemed just slightly disconnected from my life. She watched my love life ride its roller-coaster with patience and guidance sprinkled just lightly. “I know it made you very sad, but you had to do it,” she told me after my failed marriage. “You have to answer these questions about yourself.”

  Long before, she had told me about a Buddhist monastery she had been attending for years, tucked in the West Virginia hills with a lily pond beside it. She used to tell me about the calm she got at this retreat house started by a monk from Sri Lanka. I always admired my friend and politely heard what she said but had never really absorbed her positive experiences with Buddhism and meditation. But now, on this quiet day in June, I found myself enrolling for a weekend workshop at the monastery she talked about.

  I felt as if I was walking on eggshells when I arrived. I didn’t know how to act at a monastery.

  The rules were spelled out. This would be a silent retreat. No talking except when absolutely necessary. A woman named Debra Jones greeted me with a beaming smile. She asked where I would like to stay. My friend had recommended the individual houses. “The kuti?” I suggested, hesitantly. The kuti was a peaceful one-room hut tucked into the woods with a single bed and a Buddha sitting on a table in a corner.

  We gathered in a cavernous meditation hall where a golden Buddha stared back at us from an altar in the front of the room. Students sat on both sides of an aisle. I sat down on the left side, realizing only later that I was on the men’s side. The monastery’s monks sat in the front rows, clad in robes. Women sat on the other side of the aisle. It didn’t surprise me that I had gravitated to the male energy. That’s what I wanted to tap within myself. I sat cross-legged, mimicking those around me, my butt resting on the edge of a pillow. The senior monk from Sri Lanka sat in front of us below the Buddha.

  “I am here,” he told us, “to talk to you about mindfulness. It is about having control of our mind and our actions.

  “You must develop insight. Look within. Each distracting thought is a cloud that passes you by. Control the mind. Think of yourselves as charioteers and the horses as your mind. You have the choice whether to be a charioteer or simply a person holding the reins on wild horses.”

  I felt stupid. So when I was depressed, I had to escape the quicksand of my negative thoughts. It was that simple. “Banish them,” the senior monk said.

  If he knew, he probably would have also told me to turn off Country Music Network after three songs, if not sooner. I felt so much lighter.

  One afternoon, I experienced my first concentrated meditation. It felt wonderful. As part of the retreat, we had to do chores. I chose to pull weeds and couldn’t help but observe the obvious symbolic value of digging my fingers deep into the soil to ease weeds out by their roots.

  The Buddhism taught here was from a school of thought called Theravada, or Vipassana, meaning “insight.” After the Buddha died, Buddhism seeped into other parts of Asia. In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Theravadan Buddhism followed a more ascetic tradition with internal meditation at the center of the practice. Mahayana Buddhism spread through Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan with a practice that incorporated meditation on deities.

  The senior monk sat down with me so I could talk to him about my project. He listened carefully and spoke with certainty. “Research Tantra, but do not practice it. Have your own practice.”

  “Why?”

  “That would be best for you. It is a dangerous practice.”

  A young woman named Kirsten helped feed us, a volunteer cook who had quit her job to live at the monastery in her own personal retreat.

  In Buddhism, the sangha is a spiritual community from which we can learn lessons. I sat one night with Kirsten after evening meditation when we were supposed to be silent. She told me that she was a romantic, like me, but she had found a practice that helped her slay her romantic delusions. “Death meditation,” she said.

  “Meditate upon images of death,” she said, “and you’ll see the impermanence of life.”

  I’d heard about impermanence as a basic tenet of Buddhism but never quite understood what it meant. Could it free me from imagining honeymoons with men who didn’t even call back? “It reminds you that death is inevitable and that it just isn’t worth it to get caught up in obsessions.”

  Kirsten was using her practice to free herself from a crush she had developed on a monk at the monastery. She felt a deep love for him that was sincere and without expectation. Meanwhile, she was e-mailing a man in the outside world who had invited her to vacation with him and his family. She was trying to nurture a love without self-interest, a love that stemmed from only feelings of loving-kindness to the man. I knew that some of my friends would just say get on with it and jump in bed together, but I admired her aspirations. Maybe it was the romantic in me. Maybe she was kidding herself.

  I asked another senior monk who lived here about this concept of meditating upon death. He was a former hippie from the States who had wandered the Indian subcontinent. In my mind, I nicknamed him Surfer Monk. In the monastery’s small library, he pulled down a photo album from the shelves and show
ed me pictures of a cremation ceremony in India. Yes, death was a vehicle for liberation. “Recognizing the truth of death can free you in life,” he told me.

  “How did you choose the celibate path as a monk?” I asked him.

  “Nothing I experienced sexually came close to the power of my meditations. There’s nothing wrong with being alone. You don’t have to be married.”

  I wondered that night about what he told me. It was true, I realized, despite all the pressures upon me to marry. I didn’t have to marry. The bullfrog croaked in the pond, as if he agreed.

  Over the next days, I meditated upon images of death and the potential for calm in this life. I saw the image of Iftikhar Mamoo lying before me, as he did, in a peaceful, dimly lit room at the hospital where he died from a heart attack. He was the only person I had ever seen dead. I wept hard when I saw him, but now his image didn’t sadden me but rather simply showed me, yes, that concept of impermanence on earth. From the pits of darkness, I began to emerge liberated a bit from the shackles of illusory love. My loves had been filled with obsession, insecurity, and clinging. I wanted to strive toward the ideals I’d been told about, a love centered upon loving-kindness. I left the monastery with a meditation practice and a very clean minivan.

  I was giving the monk that Kirsten liked plus an aspiring monk, Matt, a ride to Washington, D.C., and out of respect to them, I spent the afternoon before our departure cleaning chewing gum out of the drink cup holders, applying the concept of mindfulness. As we pulled away, I was nervous behind the wheel, not knowing how to relate to two men on the spiritual path. So what did I do? Told West Virginia jokes.

  “What’s the official state flower of West Virginia?”

  They didn’t know.

  “The satellite dish!”

  The cute monk smiled politely. When we stopped to let him duck into the post office, I swung around to appeal to Matt. “Help! I’m just blabbering, telling West Virginia jokes.”

  He looked at me through the gap in the front seats. “You know, he doesn’t expect you to say anything.”

  Relief descended upon me, spilling over me as if I’d been freed from a burden that I’d carried of my own free will for so many years. I considered this idea. I didn’t have to talk. I didn’t have to talk? I didn’t have to talk. I breathed with the relief that my breath didn’t have to be a companion to spoken word. Matthew fell asleep quickly. I felt calm now with the monk. I wanted to ask him how he managed his sexuality on this path that required him to be celibate.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-eight,” he said.

  “How do you handle the issues that most healthy twenty-eight-year-olds deal with?” He understood what I meant.

  “I had a nightmare last night.” In it, a beautiful woman had hovered over his body as he lay in his bed. He did in his dream what he did in reality. He broke her down into cells and blood and veins. She pulled her hand back. She slapped him hard against the face. He awoke from the slap. He felt a sting on his face, in reality. He admitted he has lived a nightmare since the day he was ordained. He thought his ordination would be a moment of transcendence, passing into a new life in which his spirit could soar. A magic transformation didn’t happen. When we had to say good-bye, I was convinced he would leave the monastery during this vacation away. To my surprise, he didn’t. But he did some time later.

  Matthew slipped into the front seat. He was trying out the monastery to see if he would want to be ordained as a monk there. But he didn’t like the energy at the monastery. The young monks exuded hostility, he felt, not calm, because of the way they had to handle their sexuality. It didn’t feel right to me, either. I appreciated the Tantric principle of channeling our sexual energy into our entire being, not necessarily to consummate its existence, but at least to recognize it as a legitimate part of ourselves, using its powers for the creative and intellectual ambitions of our crown chakras, that soft spot in the head where our dreams and ambitions lived.

  I made a pilgrimage to my bodhisattva friend’s serene home, tucked into the woods in Virginia. There I smeared calamine lotion on my arms. I’d gotten poison ivy pulling the weeds at the monastery. “Your body is probably releasing toxins,” my friend said, always one to see lessons in everything, even poison ivy.

  At her house, I cocked my head to study the books on a shelf in her walk-in closet. She didn’t have shelves upon shelves of reading, as I did at my home in Morgantown, many of the books unread and most of them beyond my understanding. My friend kept just a select few books she had studied carefully to know their teachings thoroughly. She told me we could all develop our powers of intuition through the purifying of our minds in meditation. “It doesn’t mean clairvoyance. It’s about intuition.” I was more certain that I had chosen well in deciding to pursue the light, not the dark, side of Tantra.

  In meditation that night, I saw the image of Iftikhar Mamoo when he lay dead in the hospital. I remembered the wrenching tears that seemed to swell up from my belly. Before the retreat, I had been writing daily to an old boyfriend, even though I never got a single reply from him. Now I no longer consumed myself with this obsession. I was free.

  Safiyyah, my princess guru, helped me turn a tiny room under the stairs into a meditation room, much like the one Chawla Aunty had under her stairs in Delhi. I told Safiyyah, “Bring your favorite things.” She brought chocolate chip cookies and a stuffed animal.

  It was time to continue my search. The Dalai Lama was going to be leading an important Tantric Tibetan Buddhist ceremony called the Kalachakra initiation at a monastery soaring amid the clouds in northern India near its border with China. But floods had closed some of the roads to the monastery. Was it possible to get there? I searched the Internet and phoned travel agencies in India. They said it could be done. I meditated on the question of whether I should organize this trip with Lucy and Esther, who were booked to land in Bombay that week for a trip through India. Both would be on breaks from their studies in England, Lucy studying psychology and philosophy at the University of Leeds and Esther starting her studies at the prestigious Royal Academy of Art. The travel agent I’d picked up in Delhi during my first visit gave me the phone number of a man in Bombay who could buy train tickets for Lucy and Esther to Delhi. I made the arrangements from Morgantown. It didn’t seem like much, but this act of independence felt huge. I didn’t have to depend on anyone. I was self-reliant.

  My reality check in America made me feel strong enough to avoid becoming ensnared in the expectations others had of me in India. If I lived in India as I lived in America, then I could chart my own course. My meditations on death released me from others’ expectations of me. I wanted to be free in this lifetime, not shackled by being dishonest about myself to the world. For now, I recognized that I was a woman who wasn’t intimidated by flying into a new city, renting a car, and hitting the road. Lucy wrote to tell me she agreed. “I feel that what is really important on this journey is us being in charge of our own destiny. The driving thing will give us that independence that you have to strive for in India.”

  Lucy sent her e-mail twice “as a chant.” “It is I who am awestruck, gaping with inspiration. For even in the muted silence one can hear the echoes of the whispering souls, calling us to our own paths. Wisen our intentions and be bold in our deliberations. I’m on the path, always floating along beside you.” That was a good thing. I knew I’d need her so that I wouldn’t lose my mind.

  CHAPTER 10

  Pilgrimage to the Himalayas

  LUCY, ESTHER, AND I were planning the absurd, something unheard of in our family, something never before dared by any in our shared Ansari ancestry.

  The three of us were about to travel alone, unescorted, into the farthest reaches of India, the foothills of the Himalayas in the country’s lush state of Himachal Pradesh. “Let demons run scared and courage be bold,” Lucy wrote me before setting out for India. She and Esther, in their twenties, were more than a decade younger than I, but
we were sisters in spirit, connected by our love of the mystical awakened in us by their father. We were going to have a male driver, but we planned to chart the course. We were going to stay in hotels alone. And, of all shames, we weren’t going to call home, except once.

  “I can’t believe the Ahn-sah-ri girls are here together in India!” yelled Esther, pouncing on me when I greeted her and Lucy in Delhi at Nizamuddin Railway Station, named for a great Sufi mystic. Our train ticket agent came through in Bombay, and they had made it to Delhi without any trouble.

  I already had the driver who was going to take us to a place called Ki, a village in the Himalayan foothills where the Dalai Lama was going to give special teachings to an estimated twenty thousand Buddhist faithful, many of whom had trekked for days through the mountains to illegally cross into India from Tibet. It was the closest the Dalai Lama had gotten to Tibet since he fled in the 1950s when China moved to stamp out Buddhism. Lucy and Esther knew even less than I did about the Kalachakra initiation.

  The truth was that I wasn’t quite sure what I’d get out of this Kalachakra initiation.

  Legend goes that a Tibetan king, dealing with fears over his impending death, summoned a Tantric guru, Padmasambhava, to Tibet to teach him the ancient Tantric practices meant to help overcome fear of death. Padmasambhava ditched his beautiful consort, Princess Mandarava, with whom he’d been frolicking and of course meditating. She promptly died upon his departure. No worry for Padmasambhava. He made a big name for himself with the Tibetan king, wasting no time finding himself a new consort in a Tibetan deity, Yeshe Tsogyel, given to him by the happy king. Because of the Indian guru Padmasambhava, Tibetan Buddhism became Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, the path for which the Dalai Lama was now the spiritual head.