Tantrika Page 2

  The doors to the veranda open like the doors within my soul. Before me, the sun hits the roof of the house that used to be the home of my maternal great-grandfather, before he built this palace. It is as if they took a thousand clay pots, broke them in half, and laid the halves upon that roof across the way. The fields stretch out behind the house. The wind stirs the trees in the bamboo orchard. Everywhere, birds chirp and dart and call to each other.

  I close my eyes to remember from where I flew.

  CHAPTER 1

  Learning American Tantra

  MY SEARCH FOR TANTRA, sex, and love began with a gnarly foot wash in a forest of pine trees in the Canadian countryside.

  I washed the scaly feet of a lanky stranger, cloaking them with soft soap suds and warm water. We sat on the porch outside a sprawling log house, the sun draping itself over us like the gentle touch of a velvet glove. The scent of home cooking wafted toward us from the kitchen inside and mingled with the lavender smell of the soap that I caressed on the bottom of this stranger’s feet. I massaged each toe separately, stretching them under my fingers, pressing my thumb into the small dip where his ankle began. As I slid my hands underneath, he flinched. My touch tickled him. He giggled. I smiled politely and averted my gaze.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked myself, trying not to look at his gangly toes and smashed toenails.

  I had been living in a bird coop of an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

  I had just finished writing an article about how gorillas in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo lived in cages with more square footage than the apartment of a couple who recently moved to Manhattan. I hated my home. The windowsills were splattered with bird droppings. I was in a miserable relationship. A metal safety gate spread across the windows like an accordion, reminding me of the jahlee, or screen, through which my Muslim sisters in purdah peer when they are hidden from the outside world.

  I wasn’t hidden, but I wasn’t happy. I had been looking for love in all the wrong places, first my failed marriage, then a string of bad relationships. Now, in humiliation, I was finally letting go of this latest boyfriend when I escaped to a new apartment across the Brooklyn Bridge. When I arrived, my cat, Billluh, sat in the window, his nose twitching at the gentle waft of a summer breeze that swept into the apartment, the first fresh air he had breathed in months. I breathed in at last when my nineteen-year-old cousin-sister Lucy Ansari arrived in Newark, New Jersey, on an early morning Continental Airlines flight. In India cousins, especially first cousins, are considered brothers and sisters. All her belongings were packed into a knapsack on her back. It made me yearn for a life in which things could be so simple. She came to visit me at the tail end of her adventures around the world. Her father, who had died of a heart attack a few years before, was my mother’s eldest brother. I called him Iftikhar Mamo, and had helped me unfurl my wings. When I was a college freshman considering journalism, an unorthodox field for a child from India, he encouraged my mother to support me. At one low point in my life, he reminded me of the power within me.

  “You are creative,” he told me. “If the real world is bad, you can create a new world. Through your writing, you can create a new world.”

  Now, his doe-eyed daughter, a long-legged gazelle of a poet in flip-flops and cargo pants, brought the beauty of the world to me again. She helped me recover what the damaging relationship had obscured. Lucy cooked dal and chawal, lentils and rice, for me. She stirred me awake before work to run through the tree-lined brownstone streets of Brooklyn Heights, down the Promenade. Step by step, life began again, but I was disillusioned by romance. I wondered if I could ever find love.

  Then Ken Wells, one of our page-one editors at the Wall Street Journal, came to me with a reporting assignment. “We want you to look at the business of Tantra. Go find Mr. and Mrs. Tantra.” Ken told me Tantra was America’s hottest new fad. It was a natural assignment for me. I’d earned an informal reputation on the tenth floor among my fellow reporters as the Journal’s sex reporter, the rising incidence of “Mile High Club” sexual misconduct on airplanes among my page-one stories.

  In my cubicle at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, adjacent to the World Trade Center, I tapped www.tantra.com into the address line of my Web browser. The browser led me to steamy pictures of men and women in different sexual positions. Clicking further, I came across ancient images from the Kama Sutra of men and women in acrobatic positions of lovemaking.

  I punched T-A-N-T-R-A into the search line on dejanews.com. A crazy world unfolded before me as I clicked from screen to screen. A man talked about introducing something called his lingam into his wife’s yoni. He held his wife still and focused on her ajna chakra and meditated. Another Tantric explained the chakra puja, where a guru picked eight couples to randomly pair up for a night of “passive copulation” in a circle around a guru and his shakti. What did shakti mean? What was a puja? And was it really something Wall Street Journal readers needed to know?

  I called my experts on India, my parents, in Morgantown, West Virginia. “Have you ever heard of Tan-trah?” They didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “You know, Tan-trah?”

  They finally figured it out. “Thun-thruh,” my mother said. They didn’t even pronounce it the same way. In India, it turned out, Tantra was considered a cult of black magic used by evil people. It was to be avoided. It had mantras that were like spells. I didn’t know any mantras. I certainly didn’t know the word was actually pronounced “mun-thruh” instead of “mahn-truh.” As a Muslim, I didn’t even know the spiritual significance of the dots Hindu women in India wear on their foreheads. I just knew I wouldn’t be caught dead with one. Little could I imagine that I would one day enter the cave where the Hindu god Ram supposedly meditated and emerge with a smear of vermilion red pasted smack in the middle of my forehead. I was an Indian Muslim who recited Arabic verses from the Qur’an but never tried the downward dog or upward dog of modern American yoga, let alone anything that ended “Om Shanti.”

  I began to think that perhaps I had too quickly dismissed the secrets of my culture because of a misjudgment in what I believed to be my destiny, my marriage to a man from the Indian subcontinent. Through trial and tribulation, my parents’ marriage had survived over thirty years, though I had never once seen them hold hands. My brother, Mustafa, had his marriage arranged to a gentle young woman named Azeem. Now, his beautiful children, Safiyyah and Samir, filled the walls in my childhood home with Crayola scribbles. Maybe I needed to learn more about the traditions of my motherland, even if they were a part of Hinduism and I was a Muslim.

  To be Muslim from India meant to be cut off from the world of yoga, meditation, and karma that were parts of Hinduism and Buddhism. Muslims believe in one God, Allah, and for that reason we shun the many deities that Hindus worship. I knew nothing about Kali’s fright, Shiva’s might, or Ganesh’s knowledge. To me, Hindu temples were a blur of bright colors on the sides of the mountain passes we rode from Bombay to our home in the hill station of Panchgani. Buddha was more a stranger to me than George Washington, whom I at least had studied in ninth-grade American history class. I wasn’t even sure whether Buddha was a real person or not.

  There was an unspoken line between Muslims and Hindus. My childhood friend Sumita told me that in her extended family she was told there would be separate plates for Hindus and Muslims. Most of my relatives snickered at all the Hindu gods. In Hyderabad, my father’s sister, Ishrat Aunty, had a friend, Vijaya, who was Hindu. It was a friendship accompanied by exclamation. Sumita and I were more united by our junior high admiration for a cute blond-haired track star named Kurt Erickson than separated by modern-day religious rancor. Maybe that was the secret of the melting pot.

  But even in America, although Muslims and Hindus intersected, we still stayed away from each other’s cultures. To Ken, I was Indian and therefore the perfect person for the assignment. But for me, pursuing the article meant I had to abandon generations of my
inherited ignorance and abhorrence for Hindu beliefs, many of which turned out to be founded in Tantra. I tried to keep an open mind. I certainly wasn’t having success as a Muslim woman in the man department. Maybe researching this article would help me find my soul mate. Gathering my hopes with my doubts, I ventured to find out.

  I raced through the countryside to make my date with other couples and singles at the Omagaki Wilderness Centre outside the sleepy town of Pembroke, an hour’s drive west of Ottawa, for a weekend workshop that promised to teach “Sacred Sex.”

  A rush of greenery whipped by me. I nosed my rental car over a stretch of bumpy dirt road and edged into a gravel lot next to a looming log building. I gingerly walked into a cavernous room with vaulted ceilings. A towering woman with a frenzy of blond hair and dark roots left a circle of men and women seated yoga style in the corner to greet me. Her gauzy shirt floated behind her. Her name was Beverly, but she went by Pala. “Welcome. Welcome!” she said in a soft voice meant to be soothing. (It was, in fact, raspy and eerie.)

  She handed me a folder with a blazing headline: “It’s all about Sacred Sex. Lovers in Mind, Body, and Spirit.”

  “Thank you,” I muttered. “But I’ll be watching. I won’t really be participating.”

  “Oh, no! You’ll get a lot out of this for yourself.”

  Just then, her husband bounded over in a bleached-blond Mohawk, bouncing his head enthusiastically with the energy of an anxious puppy. “I’m Al!” Together Pala, and Al Copeland promised to reveal to me the ancient secrets for finding romantic, spiritual, and sexual fulfillment.

  Tantra.com had told me that Tantra is a quasi-religion that dates back some six thousand years. Its first texts were in Sanskrit. Its original adherents practiced ritual copulation—essentially, for them, a form of yoga meant to achieve an arrest of all mental processes en route to a mystical bond with the “oneness of the universe.”

  It was believed that by retaining their semen, men would reach higher states of ecstasy and live longer. Men and women trained themselves to move their sexual energy through seven energy centers, called chakras, to bring themselves to higher states of intellectual, creative, and spiritual expression. As part of those beliefs, women were goddesses meant to be worshiped by men on the path to mutual cosmic bliss, just like the mythical god Shiva worshiped the goddess Shakti. It was in their love story that Tantra was rooted.

  Shiva was a great god living in the jungles of India as a yogi. He had transcended all worldly passions and existed in a constant state of meditation. His hair was uncombed. He went naked except for a piece of animal skin covering his loins. His skin had a bluish gray tint from the sacrificial ashes he had used during his sacred meditation. He became Lord of the Universe because his advanced yogic practices made him a symbol of transcendence.

  The Mother of Creation, the goddess Devi, looked at Shiva and decided it was time to bring him down to earth. Time to get him to hurt like the rest of us. But first he had to love. She sent Sati, a beautiful woman with long shiny black hair and large brown eyes. Shiva saw Sati. He fell in love. They married, living in bliss on the sacred Mount Kailash.

  One day, Sati died. Shiva was grief-stricken, wandering aimlessly. This was what Devi wanted. She wanted Shiva to feel human sorrow and absorb Sati in the deepest caverns of his soul. Shiva believed love had to be wed with meditation and contemplation to create a blissful union. The other gods took pity on Shiva and reincarnated Sati as Shakti, an even more enticing woman. When they met, Shiva and Shakti united in bliss and marriage. Shakti’s name came from shak, the Sanskrit word meaning “power,” for she was a great yogi herself. The great source of her power came from her yoni, her “secret garden.” Shakti epitomized the female energy of creation. The story went that both Shiva and Shakti knew they were nothing without each other. They needed each other’s energy to awaken themselves.

  Shakti accepted Shiva as her guru. The marriage of their energies liberated both of them. They became spiritual partners and soul mates. Shakti taught Shiva to temporarily let go of asceticism, to weave the art of love and sexual union into his spiritual meditation. They began the path of yoga that became known as Tantra, the yoga of divine love.

  Shiva and Shakti learned new ways to channel their orgasmic powers through the pathways of their energy centers, their chakras. They incorporated music, astrology, massage, painting, dance, poetry, visualization, ecstatic ritual, and meditation. The teachings spread through scriptures called Tantras, taught through a conversation between Shiva and Shakti. The message of the Tantras was that by loving and worshiping each other as Shivas and Shaktis, all men and women could live in blissful union.

  “Look upon a woman as a goddess whose special energy she is, and honor her in that state,” wrote the early Tantra texts.

  I didn’t feel quite ready to be a goddess. I still thought my butt was too big.

  Three couples sat before me on the edges of their chairs, next to three single men, one of them handsome. “We’re going to learn how to move your sexual energy through your body,” Al said.

  “It’s the passion pump,” Pala guided us. “Close your eyes. Squeeze your butt. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Inhale through your nose. Breathe in deep into your belly. Keep the rest of your body real relaxed. Move the energy up your spine to your head. Clench your teeth. Press the flat of your tongue against the middle of your palate and the tip of your tongue where your lower front teeth and gums meet. Push your chin slightly backward. Look up and roll your eyes to the top of your head. Now, breathe out.”

  She lost me somewhere between my teeth and my tongue.

  “Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze,” she began.

  It wasn’t enough to move the sexual energy with breath. Al slipped a cassette into the tape player as we cleared the wide floor. We were to use the blindfolds we’d been told to bring. I had forgotten. I borrowed one and immersed myself in darkness as a gentle sound spilled into the cavernous room. We danced blindfolded to something called Kundalini music. I crashed into a chair.

  We assembled again on the floor.

  “The thought of surrender is terrifying to a lot of people,” Pala told us. “But to enjoy sacred sex, you have to open your hearts. Write a word on a piece of paper. Tuck it under your pillow.”

  Why not try? In my cabin, by the light of a flashlight, I scrawled one word, Surrender, and slipped the paper under my pillow.

  I wondered if I could surrender. Was it possible to release my heart? Maybe it was I, not the men I chose, who feared intimacy. It didn’t take much past Psychology 101 to realize that I wasn’t choosing good mates. My twenty-nine-year-old who couldn’t discuss his virginity wasn’t quite material for a spiritual love connection.

  One activity spilled after another in the weekend training schedule. Blindfolded, we ate food fed to us by our foot-washing partner. My partner was kind. He spared me the Tabasco sauce.

  Blindfolded again, we thrashed coiled towels against the floor to unleash our anger. I thrashed and thrashed. We gazed into the eyes of the stranger next to us. My partner had gentle eyes that lingered. John Travolta taught us how to thrust delicately in a movie clip from Saturday Night Fever. This was a trick for men to keep themselves from ejaculating. Thrust, pause, thrust again. Men could do the Kegel exercises, too, we were told. Like women, all they had to do was tighten the muscles that stretch like a hammock from the base of the spine to the pubic bone, supporting the sexual organs, the urethra, and the rectum. Al called the exercise “push-ups for the penis.”

  We moved to a grassy lawn beside our log cabin retreat center. We were about to learn one of the most critical parts of Tantra, how to release and move the energy through our body through the seven chakra centers. They were the chakras Shiva and Shakti used in their lovemaking. I wasn’t a believer. I sat on the edge of my seat as another Tantra student, Robert, pressed a finger into the soft of my skull.

  “This is your crown chakra,” Al told us. “Hold the pressure. Hold it. Hold it. Hold i
t.”

  How strange. I felt myself relaxing. Maybe this actually worked.

  Robert moved his finger then to a dip at the base of the back of my head, the “Wind Mansion.” Then, he moved to the dips of my shoulders, “Heavenly Rejuvenation.” Then, right below my clavicle bones. I could feel my entire being release. It worked. I was a convert. The energy flowed down through me as if by some magical force of nature. My head collapsed. I could barely bring myself to pay attention. I pressed my own finger into the dip below my sternum, between my breasts. This was “The Sea of Intimacy,” the heart chakra.

  “Press here to overcome your fears. To open your heart,” said Al.

  We lay on mats on the grassy field. The teachers told us to put our hands on our waists and press our fingers into the dips there, “The Sea of Vitality.”

  We slipped our hands behind our lower backs so that our knuckles pressed into the dip right above our butts, at “The Sacral Point.” Pressing on it was supposed to release raw energy. Naked energy. Lust. The idea was to unleash our energy so that it brought us to higher levels of ecstasy.

  After a candlelight dinner together, we saw the sky had filled with bright stars. I walked down to the dock with Robert and the handsome weekend student, Frederic. Darkness had descended upon this lake, leaving glints of light on the water like sparkle dust cast from the skies. Robert breathed in deep and then left. The crickets chirped. A cloud floated over a star.

  Frederic and I studied the white flashes in the woods to figure out if they could be lightning bugs. It was quiet except for the sound of chirping and our breathing.

  “May I?” Frederic asked, reaching for my hand.