Tantrika Read online

  We lived together those two years in Hyderabad. My father returned to his job as an assistant professor at the agriculture college. But he didn’t lose sight of America. It wasn’t about the lure of this new country. It was about getting a good education. The sad truth, too, was that not all of India welcomed his type. One day as he sat with a Hindu colleague, a friend, on campus, he was shocked at what he heard.

  “Ahray,” Hindi slang for “c’mon,” “Muslims should just leave and go to Pakistan.”

  It was a constant chorus that stung the heart of a boy born of India. So one day, at the airport, I sat perched in my father’s arms next to garlands of white flowers draped over his dark suit. It was a moment of celebration captured in a black-and-white photo in front of a sign for BOAC, the precursor to British Airways. Not one smile broke across the grim faces. Indians hadn’t yet learned to smile for photos.

  My father was leaving to earn his PhD at Rutgers University in America. He was part of the brain drain out of India of those seeking advanced degrees in the West. The Indian diaspora. Not long after, my mother also left to join my father. My brother and I stayed with Dadi and Dada. U.S. immigration laws and my father’s paltry student wages kept us from crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Every night for two years, my mother wept for us in a tiny apartment my father had rented at 10 Union Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey. By day, she baby-sat kids named Eda, Laura, and Kerry to eke out a tiny savings to buy my brother and me tickets for futures in America she could never imagine. One day in 1969, it was our turn to make the journey. My parents had saved the $593.60 they needed for the tickets.

  “Bhaya! Bhaya!” I called after my brother, using the honorific for older brothers in India.

  We wore outfits stitched from the same striped fabric so that we could be reunited easily if we lost each other on the TWA plane. My brother was six. I was four. We stared into the camera with the dazed look of children who didn’t understand.

  When we arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport, my brother vomited. At least that’s what he always remembered.

  I didn’t remember a thing. My mother said I looked over my shoulder for Dadi because my grandmother had told us she would be following us on the next plane. Apparently, I didn’t recognize my own mother.

  In the tradition of India, my date of birth was written incorrectly on my passport, making me a year older, so that I could go to school earlier. I was not ready.

  I came home from kindergarten every day crying. My mother was sympathetic. She let me stay home. The principal called. “Mrs. Nomani, it’s against the law to keep your children at home and not send them to school.” Back to school I went.

  I didn’t feel pretty there, where girls had lovely names like Elizabeth and Sarah.

  English was my second language at this school named after Martin Luther King Jr. in Piscataway, New Jersey. I made the new language my first. In the tradition of lonely children everywhere, I turned to books as my best friends.

  I caught fireflies with a neighbor girl, Pinky, who was also from India. We punched holes into jar lids and stuffed the bottom with grass, as if we could imitate nature for these creatures so gentle they would let us catch them so easily in our pudgy hands. I refused to answer back in anything but English when my parents talked to me in Urdu. It was a poetic language with influences from Persian. I didn’t care. I just knew it didn’t sound American. I rejected some things American, too. On my way home, I’d ditch my mother’s bologna sandwiches in an open basement window.

  “AAAAAAAAhhhhhhhsssssssssss-ruh,” sang the taunts at school in Morgantown, West Virginia, where my father took a position at West Virginia University as an assistant professor. I headed down the stairwell at Evansdale Elementary School as a sixth grader to the annoying sound of my name being abused. Our school was a squat three-story yellow brick building just across University Avenue from the faculty apartments where we lived.

  At home, it wasn’t easy for my mother, either. My father, now forty, worked long hours in his new job. English was his second language, too. Succeeding as an immigrant was harder for him than for me. One night I found my mother sobbing. She had been softly singing Indian film songs lately, often as she stood at the sink washing dishes. My brother and I usually begged her to stop.

  “They’re so depressing!” we whined.

  As my mother wept, I wrapped my arms around her to comfort her. At ten, I wondered if the women of our culture always had to quietly suffer. Finally, after midnight, my father came home. He had been at work, anxious to win tenure and job security.

  For me, God became my refuge. In the solitude of being strangers to a new city, my mother taught me to do namaz. At the end of each prayer, I followed her instructions. I turned my head to the right to wish peace upon the angel whom my mother said sat there to jot down my good deeds.

  “As-salam-u-alakum wa-rahmatullah wa-barakatuh,” I said in Arabic, evoking, little did I know, one of the fanciest of greeting. “May the peace, the mercy, and the blessings of Allah be upon you.” I then turned my head to my left shoulder to wish peace upon the angel who sat there and noted my bad deeds. My mother didn’t tell me it was also a part of something called hatha yoga. She wouldn’t have known. Yoga. That was foreign to her. I finished my farz namaz, my mandatory prayer, the same way each time. I joined my open hands together in front of me, buried my face in my palms, and asked God for the same thing every time.

  “Allah pak hum kho suhkoon dho,” I said in Urdu. “Dear God, please give me peace of mind.” I would add, “Please give my mother, my father, my brother peace of mind.”

  One sunny afternoon a family that looked like mine stopped their Honda station wagon at the traffic light beside the WVU faculty apartments.

  The father spotted me and yelled to his family, “Look! An Indian girl!”

  A nine-year-old girl in the backseat popped her head up. Her name was Sumita. She had been reminiscing about the friends she’d left behind in Providence, Rhode Island. She wondered what kind of friends she would make in this new town. I was playing Wiffleball, focused on the game. When they pulled into the parking lot, the father called out to me.

  They needed directions to the Pierpont Apartments. It was a towering building right behind the faculty apartments. I pointed the way. And then I invited them into our house.

  My young mother stood in front of the stove and kneaded dough into balls to flatten into rotis for this family of six, the Sinhas, who had just walked into her home.

  The friendship I was to forge with the nine-year-old girl in the backseat would be an unusual bond given the post-Independence divide between Hindus and Muslims in India. Circular scars the size of nickels sat on our left upper arms, reminders of the smallpox vaccinations we had gotten as children, much like children in America. But because they seemed to scar so much more distinctly on our brown skin, we considered them markings for our gang of child immigrants from India. Our friendship started with American baseball. The Sinha children, my brother, and I challenged the neighbors—the Wolf clan of nine brothers and sisters—to baseball. Indians versus Americans. We weren’t the Americans.

  One day I came home from school with a permission slip. This one would allow us to learn to square-dance in Mrs. Gallagher’s sixth grade. I begged my mother to sign it. In orhtodox Islam, though, after the age of nine, boys and girls were barely allowed to mingle if they weren’t related. Dancing was definitely out. My mother finally relented. And I learned to square-dance with a boy named David Stitzel. This was my last close encounter with a boy until I turned nineteen.

  The next year we moved into our first house, set in the middle-class neighborhood of North Hills in Morgantown, a tract of development cut out of a mountain that sloped into a lush green valley. Our town was a classic small college town where drivers braked for college students crossing the road, townsfolk converged on High Street for the annual Christmas parade, and it made local news when the town hung plastic poinsettas on the lightposts for the holidays. />
  Two balconies with black steel railings balanced the back of our two-story house with pink aluminum siding and wall-to-wall carpeting. From the balconies, we looked into the valley and across to the swath of mountain that bordered it on the other side. We had a small community of families from India. Somehow, being thrown together in a town where everyone bought groceries at a store called Kroger, the aunties and uncles crossed geographic, religious, and caste boundaries that in India only the rebellious would touch. Baby-sitting Bobby and Misty, the children of a Hindu family named Majumdar, and walking their Pekingese dog named Pluto, I grew up not knowing these boundaries existed even though I washed my hands carefully with Ivory soap afterward. My mother had taught me the Muslim way. Dogs were dirty and haram, forbidden.

  My family floated between the Hindus and Muslims, and I could see the contrasts in the two cultures. I dashed freely in relay races one Saturday night with Indian girls, my new friend Sumita among them, during a celebration of the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali. We arm-wrestled and waited eagerly during a raffle for three twenty-dollar J. C. Penney gift certificates. None of us won them. A J. C. Penney executive actually won one. We didn’t like the food, but freedom burned in our lungs with the yelping we did during our Diwali hall Olympics.

  The next night I entered another world. We rode down Riddle Avenue to the Medical Center Apartments for a Muslim Student Association dinner for our holiday, Bukreid. A bearded man directed my mother and me upstairs to a tiny one-room apartment packed with Arab women in head scarves and robes. The men carried food to our room in casserole dishes. We weren’t allowed downstairs, where the men were gathered with the main spread. My head hurt from the foreign sounds of Arabic echoing in my ear. I felt as if we were in a jail. My mother and I were both relieved to leave.

  When the Majumdars, Sinhas, and Yusuffs, another Muslim immigrant family in town, came to dine at our house, the men sat in the living room and the women settled in the kitchen. There were no public displays of affection. I never saw my parents kiss, let alone hold hands. The couples arrived and left in the same cars, but, mostly wed in arranged marriages, they skirted nimbly around each other as if they had conceived their children through divine intervention. My mother invited the men first to the spread she had placed on our Montgomery Ward dining table. Chicken biryani, flat hand-kneaded roti, and plates of other steaming dishes. The women filled their plates after the men cleared out. Women and men intermingled only when they went for seconds.

  In America, symbols of my religion expressed themselves in the strangest of places.

  “What’s this?” Miss Lafever, my phys ed student teacher, asked me one afternoon at Suncrest Junior High School as I curled my body into stretches. She pointed to three squiggles I had made on the top of my health quiz.

  It was the Arabic numerological shorthand, 786, for the first line of the Qur’an: “Bismillah ir-rahman ir-raheem.” I was supposed to recite it before I ate, before I ran the mile race, before I did anything. Okay, I didn’t know what it meant in English.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked my mother at home that evening.

  “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,” my mother told me.

  I vowed to tell Miss Lafever the next day, if I could remember during eighth-grade Grubby Day.

  Whatever the limits, or because of the limits, my religion gave me a personal discipline. I wasn’t tempted to date, party, or even wear skirts. I wore pants over my legs. I read Go Ask Alice, the tale of a teenage girl who beat drugs only to die anyway. I was grateful to have been born a Muslim. I saw it as a privilege. Whenever I was faced with a dilemma, I asked myself whether my choice would comply with the Qur’an. I was grateful to faithfully do namaz for the relief it gave me. I knew better than to ask permission to go to the Drummond Chapel dances where girls like the McCroskey twins sealed their popularity.

  I always knew when I had broken one of the rules. Once, when I was thirteen, I went out with Minh, my best friend Karen’s adopted sister from Vietnam. Her mother only let her see her boyfriend on double dates. I joined her, set up with a blind date. When my date called me afterward at home, I was flattered, even if his face was pocketed with pimples.

  My brother picked up the other phone line, listened in, and swore at my teenage suitor. “Don’t ever call here again!” He never did.

  We had our cultural breakthroughs. My mother layered slices of pasta carefully above cheese, tomato sauce, and halal, or Islamically kosher, ground beef for our first lasagna. We made our first turkey dinner when I was thirteen. My visiting cousin-sister, Ruby Apa, promptly vomited. A young Indian daughter of my parents’ friend disco-danced surreptitiously in the hallway for Ruby Apa and me when we visited her family for dinner.

  “That’s great!” I shouted.

  “Shhh!” she whispered. “My father doesn’t let me.”

  I wondered what it felt like to know love. Did my parents really love each other? I didn’t know. I didn’t think so. What were the chances of finding love in an arranged marriage? What about harmony?

  I wondered if maybe I should find religion again. I had stopped lifting myself from bed to pray my nighttime Isha namaz before sleeping. I now appealed to God to help me with the struggles being waged inside me. When my mother taught me Islam, she would tell me, “It is the right path.”

  But what was my path? Even when I ran, training for cross-country, I skirted the way trod by others and found my own.

  I started at West Virginia University because my parents didn’t believe a daughter should leave home even for studies. I remained an obedient daughter, but one night during my freshman year I challenged our understood order without even intending to do so.

  It was just after 2 A.M. on a Friday night when I turned our purple Pinto station wagon into our driveway off Cottonwood Street, bouncing as the car rolled over the gutter. My brother bound out the front door and down the steps to meet me in front of the car in his white kurta and pyjama, flailing his arms in the air.

  “Where the fuck were you?” he screamed as he lunged to open the passenger-side door and slammed it shut. He followed me into the house with a string of profanities. “You could have been raped!”

  I tried to hold my ground. “I just went to a party.”

  My father picked up the phone. “I just reported my daughter missing. She has come home now.” My first party, and my father called the police.

  My mother sighed loudly in the living room. I heard the sighs from my bedroom.

  “We should return to India,” my father said.

  My mother agreed.

  As the clock neared 3 A.M., I heard my brother cough. He was still awake. My mother sniffled. She was still awake. I tried to sleep off the pain vibrating inside me from the reception I’d received when I got home. Maybe my brother knew something I didn’t know. Later he told me he was just scared something had happened to me.

  In the fall semester of my sophomore year, I arrived late one morning to my class, Women in Technological Development. The lights were out for a movie. I slipped into a seat next to a stranger and whispered to the darkened figure next to me, “Did it just start?”

  A twist of fate that would uproot centuries of ancestry sat me there that day. When the professor switched on the lights, I saw I was seated next to a blue-eyed man with dirty-blond hair, a very American name, Michael, and a can of Coke on his desk. He spit Skoal chewing tobacco into it. He was in my Arabic class, too. He was a Special Forces medic in the Army Reserves, a Green Beret, who wanted to run covert operations in the Middle East while I wanted to work in the region as a journalist.

  The temptations of the West overtook my family’s shelter. Michael became Mike. He was the son of an engineer who worked with the Trident submarine. He started giving me rides home in his two-door Celica with a spotty gray paint job. I had him stop a block away from my house at the intersection of Headlee and Briarwood Avenues, where the McCroskey twins once challenged me to a race.
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br />   “Drop me off here,” I told him.

  I was too afraid to go closer in case my parents or the Majumdars saw me emerge alone from a man’s car.

  He slowly initiated me into my first touches of intimacy with a man. “Ki ’tab,” we mouthed to each other behind adjoining carrels at Colson Library, practicing the Arabic word for book. He slipped his shoes off and played with my bare toes. I crossed a line I’d never dared before.

  One night I studied with him in his room at the Pierpont Apartments, to where I had once directed the Sinhas. Pierpont was one of Morgantown’s tallest buildings, with its nine floors spread like three spokes from a center. He massaged my shoulders. He massaged my feet. He led me to the lower mattress of a bunk bed. My feet hung over the edge. He leaned over me. I closed my eyes to his face closing in on me. He kissed me. It was sloppy, but it was my first kiss. I was nineteen.

  My junior-year fall semester began. Mike wanted a more physical relationship. I didn’t. He told me, “I think we should break up.”

  I couldn’t let that happen. I’d kissed him. I’d made a commitment. I relented. One night we dined at Wings & Things, a local Mexican fast-food restaurant. I didn’t want to leave him. We returned to the trailer he shared with a friend from his Army Reserves Special Forces unit to watch Hill Street Blues. During a commercial, the axis of my life took a turn. He led me to his bedroom. I could see the white circle on his Levi’s pocket left by his can of Skoal chewing tobacco.

  I told him, “Turn off the light.”

  I pressed one of my hands against the thin cardboard wall of faux paneling that separated the bedroom from the living room. It was a far cry from the cherished wedding night when I was supposed to lose my virginity. I was two years younger than my mother was when she first looked into my father’s eyes. The closest I got to silk was his polyester camouflage blanket. Still, afterward, he said, “I love you.”