Tantrika Read online

  I was silent as he took my hand. I wondered what was coming next.

  “Immerse yourself in the sound,” he whispered dreamily.

  A smile crept over me in the darkness. Never heard that line before. I waited a polite moment. I withdrew my hand from his. He walked me back to my cabin.

  I went in alone.

  My next stop was Santa Cruz, California, the birthplace of many a New Age fad.

  I stepped into the dimly lit ballroom of the Best Western Seacliff and, scanning the fresh faces and eager smiles, felt as if I’d walked into an Amway convention. But we weren’t there to learn how to sell soap. We were there to learn how to create ecstasy. With fifty-six couples and thirty singles, I settled into one of the small circles as we bowed heads toward each other and gazed into each other’s eyes.

  “Feel the circuitry of love. Breathe love to your organs,” encouraged a middle-aged man, Charles Muir, sitting in the front of the ballroom in tight blue silk pants, floral Hawaiian shirt, and bare feet.

  His partner, Caroline, looked like Olivia Newton-John. She welcomed us in a singsong voice. Together, they sat yoga style with hands on their knees, facing palm up.

  “Joy is part of your inner nature,” Charles pronounced. “Tantric lovemaking is the sweetest of meditation. I am loving. I am lovable. You all are. This isn’t just about sex. It’s about loving sex.”

  Like the other women at the workshop, I was a goddess, here to be worshiped like Shiva worshiped Shakti. It’s her powerful energy that runs through women, and it’s this energy we’re supposed to harness to create “the divine feminine.” I pressed the palms of my hands together, fingers upward against my chest, in the Hindu ritual of greeting, more foreign to me as a Muslim than it was to some of these northern Californians who had learned the gesture in yoga classes.

  “Namaste,” I said, not even knowing what it meant. Charles explained, “It means, ‘I bless the divine within you.’”

  Charles continued with his instructions. “Be the little girl. Now, men, be cute. Be the little boy. Show her your Doberman eyes.” I felt a kinship with the man across from me. I hurt for his hurts. I thought of the boys in the men that I’ve known. And I thought of the little girl in me.

  “Hey, beautiful!” The shout came from the yellow school bus that had just dropped me off near my home in Piscataway, New Jersey, when I was about eight.

  I turned around.

  “Not you! The tree!” The shout turned into snickers as the bus drove away.

  I let go of this memory as Charles instructed us to draw closer to each other. I stepped toward the man across from me. Following directions, I pressed my right hand onto his chest and my left on his back, to create “a circuitry of love.” The stranger was Harrison, a California native, thirty-seven, single, seeking his soul mate. Drenched in sweat, he started weeping.

  “This is kindergarten Tantra,” said Charles, a Bronx native.

  “We all have the ability to release unlimited sexual energy, to have wave after wave of glorious, easy release,” Charles cooed.

  “Inside every woman’s vagina is a sacred spot. If a man is willing to take the time, he can learn to touch this spot in a way that will pleasure and heal his woman,” Caroline purred.

  Charles took over. “In the yoni is stored a conglomerate of mixed energies. It may feel bruised. It may feel burning. There may be emotional tensions as layers of fear and guilt come up. This is the energetic entry point that enables people to access past experiences that caused them to close down their sexual energy.”

  With a partition splitting the men and women, Charles coached the men on how to “awaken the goddess” by massaging a woman’s “sacred spot,” the mysterious G-spot that has eluded scientific confirmation since its apparent discovery. “It’s a sacred duty for you guys to awaken an energy that seems to lie dormant. This is not just for bodies. Sexual love is a sacrament that will bring you closer to your god, as well as to each other.

  “Use the third or fourth finger. Palm upward, reach into the yoni and curl the finger toward you in a kind of come-hither gesture. First, just hold the contact without movement. After one minute begin linear stroking, experimenting. Gradually proceed to all the other strokes, pulsing, tapping, vibrating, using a circular motion or going side to side. After trying all these strokes, make a dance of all of them.”

  On the other side of the wall, over tears, the women whispered tales of abuse and dejection and neglect. Rape, sexual abuse, depression, emotional walls. I thought of all my hurt through the casual and episodic relationships I’d had over the years, filled with dreams that never crystallized.

  It was my turn to divulge why I was sitting at this workshop. I returned from my daydreaming. I told them what I dared: my life started in the country where Tantra began, and though this was a reporting assignment, I was hoping to gain something from this personally for I, like everyone, was in pursuit of the things that touch our souls. There, I thought, that was enough.

  The partition slid away, the married couples retreating for “homework.” The single men assembled into a puja circle, sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed, while the single women stood inside the circle.

  Charles instructed the women to hold hands, “breathing energy” out their right hands, and told us, “Honor the goddess within you. Here are your choices. You can go home alone and experiment by yourself. Or you can say, ‘I’d like to experience sacred-spot massage, and I’m willing to trust someone to do it with me.’ If you choose to stay you will have a memorable night.”

  Over a vegetarian meal, earlier that day, one of the single men, Ben, a local with a business card that read “sexual healer,” had volunteered to give me “a sacred spot massage.” “I’m excellent,” he’d said. I stepped out of the circle. The other women paired up with the men, retreating into the night together. One woman feasted that night with a man she had just met. They drank Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers and ate coconut macaroons he bought from 7-Eleven. She solved one mystery. She discovered she had a G-spot.

  Over avocado soup, the Muirs wove the tale of their ascent in America as Mr. and Mrs. Tantra. The Muirs launched their Tantra teaching business even though neither one of them had been to India. The business enjoyed years of success. But the Muirs now carried a secret. They had separated two years earlier and gone on a “relationship sabbatical” because Charles wanted to do “research” on healing other women.

  We walked the curving sidewalk to an intersection that led the Muirs to their room. Caroline cast me a smile. “Two years ago, we would have asked you in to have sex. If I wasn’t here, Charles would ask you now.”

  I smiled politely and scurried away.

  A few months later, I experimented privately with the art of sacred spot massage behind the white lace curtains of the Grand Hotel du Nord overlooking the main plaza in Reims, France’s capital of champagne production. My boyfriend was a twenty-four-year-old French-Algerian my childhood friend Sumita had introduced me to at the corner of Montague and Henry Streets in Brooklyn Heights in front of John’s Pizza when he was visiting America and earning money scooping Italian ice out of a cart marked Italian Queen.

  “Surrender,” my Western Tantric teaching told me.

  With no instruction from me, my boyfriend did the things Charles had instructed the men to do to worship women. It was both painful and ecstatic. But my boyfriend hadn’t gone to college, he was nine years younger than I, and his father couldn’t read or write. I pressed upon my heart chakra to release my fears. No surrender could transcend doubts about a career in Italian ice.

  I returned to America for my friend Sumita’s wedding. She was marrying a Muslim friend of mine from Iran whom I’d introduced her to after meeting him on the volleyball courts on the Washington Mall. Her grandmother didn’t know she was marrying a Muslim, but it mattered little to Sumita, who always lived with a pure heart, transcending the judgmental tendencies that seeped into our immigrant culture from India. In her home,
appropriately, I experienced my first puja, not the kind I’d seen in Santa Cruz, California, where singles paired up, but a prayer to a Hindu god, Ganesh. As others used their hands to waft smoke from the fire ritual upon their faces, I hesitated. “Go ahead,” her father encouraged me. I did and breathed in my first blessing from a Hindu prayer.

  I discovered the mysticism of my roots through Sufi poetry, especially that written by the poet Jalaluddin Rumi, born in 1207 in modern-day Afghanistan, sparking even more of my experimentation with surrender to the mystical. A man of Colombian descent followed, leaving me to reread his love poetry to me while his former girlfriend visited from her native Madrid to surprise him for his birthday.

  My casualties accumulated with an intern I met when I arrived at NBC studios for an on-air interview by anchor Brian Williams. The intern called me to go out. I dreamed great thoughts about his rise on TV, my book, our future. I used my Tantric principle of surrender to release my soul to him. While I daydreamed about our future, he rose from bed. “I’ve got to get up early in the morning.”

  “How are you getting home?”

  The subway, he said. I figured it would be too dangerous at that late hour. He said he was out of money. I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty for him to get a taxi. I remembered another twenty-something I’d dated in Washington. We’d rendezvoused in front of the Lincoln Memorial. We were breaking up. I cried. He cried. When we parted, he asked me if he could borrow a twenty to get home. As I gave the bill to this NBC intern, he turned away from the doors with the words, “I’ll call you.” I never got a call.

  I still believed in love. Though I wept over these men, I was grateful to them for teaching me lessons of dharma, what Buddhists call “knowledge.” They crystallized for me a realization that I had been approaching for some time now. This path upon which I was treading was not the one I wanted for myself. Every few months I met a man with whom I thought I could start a relationship. But, sure enough, each time my judgment was wrong. American Tantra taught surrender, but the philosophy of surrender as I understood it was foolish and filled with suffering.

  I was ready to leave this life. I had departed from family tradition as a woman. I had moved away from home alone at the age of twenty-one, earned my master’s degree, and then pursued a prestigious journalism career at the country’s largest newspaper. I’d set up homes for myself in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and finally New York, crisscrossing the country, jetting into strange cities for assignments, renting cars and navigating my way for everything from interviews in a Minnesota maximum security prison to the crash site of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. While I had broken new frontiers, my life of single abandon had left me with a longing for home and a sense of belonging. I needed the emotional support of my family.

  I called my mother. “I’m coming home.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Leaving My Old Life

  I DRAPED SILKEN SARIS over my curtain rods. My wedding dupatta went over the sofa. I pushed my mattresses into my walk-in closet, clearing the bedroom floor for my Tantra going-away party.

  I bought dozens of Catholic religious candles from the grocery store emblazoned with the images of Jesus and the Holy Mother. I scored a keg and poured Jell-O mixed with vodka into Dixie paper cups for Jell-O shots. A man on the Internet claiming to teach Tantra came by the office so we could meet beforehand. He didn’t seem to know very much, to tell the truth. I asked him to teach PG-rated Tantra since the guests were mostly friends from work. Little did I realize they’d appreciate an R-rated lesson.

  The party was a wild mix of jokes with Larry Ingrassia, the Journal’s handsome third-section editor, and his beautiful wife, Vicki, cuddling during the Tantra workshop. I wrote the invitation with a Tantric pun: The last to come would get a special door prize.

  On a cold winter day after Christmas, my father arrived in our blue Chrysler minivan to help me escape New York single life.

  Samsara is the Buddhist concept of worldly attachments. Although I left many of these behind when my father and I packed our rented U-Haul truck, somehow the truck was still packed with boxes filled with the symbolic representations of samsara.

  This was the beginning of my lesson in nonattachment, a word I didn’t even know yet. To me, Buddhism taught detachment. My father told me Buddha was detached when, as Prince Siddhartha, he left his wife and newborn son in his kingdom so he could wander and find the answer to relieving suffering.

  “It’s not detachment,” a dear friend of mine, a student of Buddhism, told me gently but firmly. “It’s nonattachment.” I thought she was just being a highbrowed stickler for words, but my departure from New York was my first step in understanding this principle by which I could exist engaged with the world but not obsessed, possessed, or consumed, a tall order for a woman in a culture where every other friend, including herself seemed, to be battling OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  Tantra says that the base chakra, called the root chakra, is located at the bottom of the spine. Its Sanskrit name is the muladhara chakra. It’s supposed to be the force that empowers us by grounding us to the energies of the earth. Its color is supposed to be red. The organs associated with the muladhara chakra are the body’s physical support, the base of the spine, the legs, bones, the feet, the rectum, and the immune system. The mental and emotional issues associated with the muladhara chakra are safety and security, kinesthetic feelings, movement, and the ability to provide for life’s necessities. Not paying my Time-Warner cable bill on time meant, I figured, I’d failed on this account.

  The other emotional issues include the ability to stand up for yourself, feeling at home, feeling a sense of belonging, emotional support, survival, self-esteem, social order, familial conditioning and beliefs, superstitions, loyalty, instincts, and physical pleasure and pain. I struggled with most of these emotional issues and knew that it was in Morgantown, my hometown, where I could start to bolster my muladhara chakra. The physical dysfunctions associated with this chakra are chronic lower back pain, sciatica, varicose veins, rectal tumors and cancers, immune disorders, and depression. Depression. That one I knew well.

  As I saw the last bit of the Manhattan skyline in the rearview mirror, I thought back to the world from which my family and I had catapulted into this reality.

  It was 1962, and my mother and father stood on a railway platform in Hyderabad waiting for the train that would take my father to Bombay to catch a plane to America. Garlands of jasmine flowers lay over my mother’s arms like a shield in front of her belly swollen with her unborn first child. My father had won a fellowship from the U.S. Agency for International Development to study at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. His teachers at Osmania University’s Agriculture College in Hyderabad had earned their PhDs at universities from Ithaca, New York, to Wales, United Kingdom. Kansas State University had a partnership with the college to transform it into a land grant university in the spirit of American universities in which the government gives land for research.

  Images of pink flamingos danced in my father’s head as he embarked for America. One day when he had gone to class as a student at Osmania University, his professor had showed the class slides from America. Pink flamingos perched on their skinny legs filled one slide. Another showed a long bridge on the Overseas Highway, U.S. 1, connecting the mainland to thirty-four islands in the Gulf of Mexico, ending with Key West, Florida.

  He had stared at the bridge, surrounded on both sides by clear water, and marveled at the manmade creation. Many years later, we ventured to Key West on a family vacation, and my father asked eagerly, “Where are the flamingos?” We didn’t find them.

  For now, at night in Kansas, he read his wife’s letters into the night on the top bunk in the room he shared with his best friend from Hyderabad. Aftab Ahmed watched him curiously from below. “Go to sleep, Zafar,” he said before rolling away from the light.

  My older brother was born during my father’s absence.
My father returned to India after a year in America. I was born two years later just before the monsoon on June 7, 1965, at Noor Hospital on Mohamed Ali Road in Bombay, the “hospital of light,” bundled into a red-and-white checkered outfit. I belonged to India’s first generation born after independence. What was I to learn about freedom?

  In the tradition of new mothers returning to their maternal home, my mother took me to Bella Vista in the hill station of Panchgani a few hours outside Bombay. An elder cousin, my Choti Momani, “small aunt,” who had raised her, greeted her with a cold glass of hareera, a mix of buffalo milk, pistachio, and almonds.

  My mother’s first cousin, whom I grew to know as Baray Mamoo, “big uncle,” gave me an Arabic name rarely chosen: Quratulain. Ain meant “eye.” Quratulain meant “coolness of the eye,” a description of calm. My most famous namesake was a legendary Urdu novelist named Qurratulain Hyder, who wrote poetically about identity, spirituality, and India. The ritual in Islam is to recite the first verse of the Qur’an and slaughter two goats for the new name of a boy at an aqeeqa, a welcoming and naming ceremony. One goat for a girl. Two goats were slaughtered at my aqeeqa. But I discovered years later that only one was dedicated to my name. The second was for food because there were so many guests in the house.

  We returned south to my father’s house in Hyderabad. My maternal grandmother, Dadi, didn’t like my name. She changed it to Asra, meaning “to travel by night,” guided by the divine hand of God. Pronounced “Us-ruh,” it is mentioned in the first verse of surah Isra, the seventeenth chapter of the Qur’an. It told the story of a mystical journey by the Prophet Muhammad from the Sacred Mosque in Mecca to the Farthest Mosque in Jerusalem, where today al-Aqsa Mosque sits next to the Dome of the Rock. I’d always heard that it was so timeless a journey Prophet Muhammad’s bed was still warm and his doorknob still shaking when he returned. Prophet Muhammad first flew to the seat of the earlier revelations in Jerusalem, then through the seven heavens, even to the Sublime Throne, where he was initiated into the spiritual mysteries of the human soul struggling in space and time. It’s said that this great mystical story of the ascension, al-Mi’raj, reflected the journey of the human soul in its spiritual growth in life. A Spanish scholar, Miguel Asin Palacios, credited this tale with inspiring the medieval writer Dante to create The Divine Comedy, the wonderous human journey through the netherworlds.