Tantrika Page 6

  He stirred. What sweet words would come from him?

  “I think I’ll jump in the shower.”

  My heart fell to the pit of my stomach as he rolled away from me.

  I wrapped my drinking glasses in the New York Times Sunday newspaper and tucked them into juice boxes I picked up from Jewel, my neighborhood grocery store. I was turning my life upside down in one month’s time. I had just left my sweet blond boyfriend. I had gotten engaged to another man. I was about to leave my dream apartment in a 1920s building off Chicago’s Lake Michigan and move into my fiancé’s apartment in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on the fifteenth floor of Highland House West, opposite a Jewish community center. It was the kind of sterile high-rise apartment building I had told my Chicago real estate agent never to show me. I went shopping for the first time at the professional woman’s store, Ann Taylor, to buy a dress to interview for a new job that I got in the Wall Street Journal Washington bureau.

  I went through with a traditional engagement ceremony on the new wooden deck built onto my childhood home. Bhabi wrapped my girlfriends in her and my mother’s silk wedding saris. My girlfriends were worldly adventurers, Vasia from Greece, Chiyo from Japan, Pam from Seattle, Nancy from Birmingham, Alabama, and Sumita from Morgantown via her ancestral in Bihar, India. I centered paste-on paisleys, called bindhis, my mother brought from her store, Ain’s, on their foreheads, between their eyes. I had no idea what these markings meant, but my friends looked like exotic princesses.

  “You put one on, too!” Sumita coaxed me.

  “Nooooo! That’s okay.” I was a Muslim girl. We didn’t wear bindhis.

  When my fiancé put the engagement ring on my finger, my friends and family applauded. We were bold. Traditionally, the boy’s mother put the engagement ring on the girl, since the bride and the groom saw each other for the first time on their wedding day.

  Bhabi was returning to India for the first time. She would take Safiyyah, her and my brother’s first child. Safiyyah crawled on the ground and tried to eat the cat food. She was to be parted for the first time from her dada, dadi, and father. She cried and refused to sleep. I consciously knew for the first time the depth of emotions of a girl less than two.

  My mother did something I hadn’t heard her do since I shushed her into silence. She sang. I heard her through the door to the living room. Somewhere inside of me the song was familiar. It was as if I could remember the gentle lullabies she sang to me as a child before she left India. Tears sprang from a well I didn’t know existed.

  By day, I was a warrior. After Bill Clinton won office, I switched beats to cover international trade, exposing a behind-the-scenes smear campaign against a trade attorney vying for appointment as U.S. trade representative. I ran around town, digging up details for the story, including a document slipped to me in a brown envelope in an elevator. At home I was a different person. I sobbed, readying myself for this wedding I was beginning to understand should not happen. But suffering was what I saw staring back at me in my mother’s eyes in her bridal photo. The understanding and devotion showered upon me by my last boyfriend haunted me. I tried once to reach out to him in a postcard on which I added “P.S.” from Billlie and Billluh in the crooked handwriting of my left hand. It was meant to look like the scribbles of a cat if he got a pen in his paws. I never heard back.

  I wept as I packed, but I figured if I endured this marriage would endure. It was the path of the Indian woman, to suffer, to survive, to endure. I plucked a white sweater studded with white beads from the rack at Neiman Marcus. It was long enough to cover my butt when I landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, an act of modesty.

  The three days of wedding festivities took on a momentum beyond my control. I allowed my relatives, mostly my father’s side, who had migrated to Pakistan from India, to drape a bright golden yellow dupatta over me like a shroud. It was for the mehndi ceremony where my first cousins gathered on the ground to sing songs making fun of the family into which I was to marry. The other family retorted with their own songs. I only knew because I peeked out from beneath my veil. I sat on a chair with tall cardboard tubes tied to the back and decorated with bright gold wrapping paper and green tinsel to make the chair resemble a throne. I wore only kajal, kohl eyeliner, and pink lipstick. This was supposed to be the plain me before I was decorated for my wedding.

  Much later, I looked again at the silver ribbons sewn like endless diamonds on the fabric of my dupatta. I saw in them the shimmer that glittered from the stainless-steel wires around Cheenie Bhai’s cage. Golden sequins were strung in the middle of each diamond with orange thread. They reminded me later of the shiny grapes I tucked between the wires of Cheenie Bhai’s cage. At that time in Islamabad, though, I saw only a blur of yellow and orange in front of me.

  I tried to talk to one of my cousins from under my golden veil. A phuppi, my father’s sister, came over to scold me. “Stay quiet for at least one night.”

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  Two days later, I sat in a chair at the Mee Lee Beauty Parlour run by an immigrant from China, Mrs. Lee Chu Liu. A hairdresser caked foundation on my face like I’d worn only once before, when I’d had a free makeover at a Merle Norman beauty salon in New York City. My mother watched anxiously as they sprayed my hair into a high bun five inches above my head so that my heavy wedding dupatta wouldn’t lie flat upon me, making me look more peasant girl than princess.

  “Now, we wax your arms and bleach your face,” the hairdresser told me, ever so enthusiastically.

  I protested.

  “Yes, yes, you’ll look more fair and more beautiful,” she said.

  My cousins uttered not a word. No one jumped to my defense to shield my arms from this violence and my face from this violation. I did it myself, refusing a tradition meant to beautify me in the ways that were important here, smooth skin and fair skin.

  It was more a wedding factory than a beauty parlor. Brides in various stages of preparation sat around me like tulip bulbs ready to pop open under the sun lamps of hair dryers. We resembled each other. Red streaked their cheeks. And mine. Glossy strawberry lipstick enflamed their lips. And mine. Pitch-black kajal lined their eyes. And mine. It was something my dadi had put on my eyes and even my brother’s eyes since we were infants to ward off evil.

  I walked with stutter steps and a beaming smile to the front door of the Margala Motel, white lights strung upon its edges like bead necklaces. I was getting married in a motel? I tried to forget that fact. Traditional brides weren’t supposed to beam. But I didn’t want photos without a smile, like in my mother’s wedding. I wore six rows of shiny twenty-four-karat gold necklaces from a wide jeweled choker down to the heavy necklace my mother-in-law had worn on her wedding day. I resembled a dark ruby set in gold. The dupatta, embroidered heavily with gold, lay like a weight upon my head. A golden teeka, like the one my mother wore, rested in the middle of my forehead. The dupatta flowed over a heavy velvet shalwar kameez. My doting phuppis flocked around me like peacocks in bright saris, wearing twenty-four-karat gold jewelry pulled out of their safe deposit boxes for the night.

  “Bay-toh, bay-tee,” they instructed me. “Sit, dear.”

  They urged me onto a royal red sofa with golden curls edging it like a gilded frame that should have encircled a black velvet Elvis painting. Instead, it was I sitting inside this golden frame like an actress upon a dais in front of three hundred guests assembled in rows as if they were about to watch a theater production. I refused to sit in the side room where the bride usually waited for the nikah nama papers of a Muslim marriage to be signed, the bride and groom traditionally separated from each other in different rooms. In front of me were more strangers than familiar faces. The celebrity guest was the wife of the Pakistani army chief, a general and a phuppi’s brother-in-law. I sat quietly under instructions to utter little.

  The barat, the groom and his party, arrived, leading the man I was to marry into the side room usually reserved for the bride. Since I insisted I wouldn’t
be shuttled to the side room, he went there.

  A few days before, I had told my father and Baray Abu, meaning father’s eldest brother, “I want women witnesses.” Under Islamic law, I had to have two witnesses. In Islamic law, two women equaled one witness. “We’ll see,” he’d told me.

  Now, as they brought the nikah nama to sign, an uncle, my grandmother, and youngest aunt, Ishrat Aunty, gathered beside me. My eyes scanned this curious document. Line number five asked, “Whether bride is a vergin, widow or divorced,” virgin spelled incorrectly. VIRGIN was typed in capital letters as if writing it boldly would make it true. Line number thirteen asked, “The amount of Mahar.”

  FATIMI was typed beside it in bold letters.

  It was said the Prophet Muhammad asked his future son-in-law, Ali, for only a small wedding dowry, the proceeds from the sale of a shield, for his daughter Fatima. Doing the same now wore her name, as if making it virtuous. I signed. My dadi signed as half a witness, her hand grazing the page from right to left as she wrote her name in Urdu script. Ishrat Aunty followed, as the other half of a witness.

  Moments passed.

  A flurry of action filled the room. Seated there alone, my head bowed under the weight of my dupatta, I had just been wed to the man in the next room. My fiancé had become the man I married. It was sometimes the bride led to the groom, a heavy dupatta veiling her face. This time, it was the groom led to the bride. He wore garlands of red roses and white jasmine flowers over his dark sherwani with its high collar and regal air. His father led him into the giant ballroom, surrounded by my uncles, cousins, and my pensive father. A cone of a towering silver turban sat on his head with a gold ribbon coiling around its base like a serpent, a stiff plume over his left ear reaching to the sky.

  When our eyes met, I smiled. My marriage was the completion of my struggle to bridge my culture with my adopted country, I thought. Brides are supposed to cry when they walk toward the car that will take them to their groom’s house. I didn’t cry. I figured he should cry. We were returning to America. He was the one who would be living far from his family. Not me. My father’s wrist curled from the weight of a Qur’an he held for us to walk under. As someone else took hold of the Qur’an, it slipped and fell on my head before Ishrat Aunty, my father’s youngest sister, caught it. Was God trying to tell me something?

  With huge ceremony I was led to my in-laws’ house. The doors were massive wooden double doors with intricate carvings. Red rose petals showered upon the man I married and me as we stepped out of a gray Honda. A black bukrah, a goat, on a chain greeted me. It was the goat to be sacrificed for the wedding. My new sas, my mother-in-law, opened both doors as she dreamed of doing. The man I married carried me inside in his arms. My mother-in-law fed me milk, a symbol of fertility. His relations handed me gifts of jewelry and envelopes of cash that I was told to pass to my father-in-law. I did.

  The man I married led me to the wedding room that had been decorated for the night. Garlands of white jasmine flowers hung from the bed as if it were wearing a thousand strands of pearls. A few days before, I had asked Omar to arrange to have us spend the wedding night away from his parents’ house. When I saw the bed I wanted to stay there. It had the magic and scent of romance.

  But he had already hatched an escape plan. He sneaked me away from the relatives strewn like a big slumber party in the front hall. We arrived at the Marriott Islamabad, a sweeping hotel with brass doors leading to a glittering lobby. He took me upstairs and opened the door on a sterile room with two double beds and without the garlands of jasmine. I lay on the bed closest to the window. He pressed a button on a tape player. The theme song from Beauty and the Beast dripped out, as we did that which we had avoided during our engagement.

  The next day I went to another hairdresser. I was told this one was where Benazir Bhutto supposedly had her hair curled before her marriage to a mediocre polo player. Now she was under house arrest for crimes aplenty during her tenure as Pakistan’s first and only woman prime minister. I insisted on light makeup. Subtle pink lined my lips tonight. It was my walima, the reception thrown by the groom’s family to mark the consummation of the marriage. I broke tradition and walked around the reception. Traditional brides sat quietly. I couldn’t do that.

  We returned to my husband’s house. It was quiet when his father turned to me, as we sat in the front hall.

  “You are a Muslim. You must speak Urdu. You are Pakistani,” my husband’s father told me.

  I stayed silent, but his proclamation infuriated me. My identity was instantly being remade to mimic the bumper stickers I’d seen in the bazaar proclaiming national pride. “PROUD TO LIVE IN PAKISTAN.” “GOD BLESS PAKISTAN AND PLEASE HURRY!” I didn’t like it.

  The man I married turned out to be my emotional nightmare, and I his. We were incompatible. I had too many ghosts to be patient with his emotional distance. He was too young to know how to soothe me. The black-and-white image of my mother, her eyes downcast in her wedding picture, haunted me.

  Within four months, I’d borne all I could bear and slipped into depression. I dispatched my friend Rachel Kessler, a buoyant, cheerful pal, to buy me books about overcoming depression.

  My parents took me to a psychiatrist. He recommended a psychologist, Dr. Donna Kozuch, whose name my father scribbled on the back of a flyer advertising a four-session program, STEP, Systematic Training for Effective Parenting. She was next door to the Holiday Inn in a sterile office building. But she filled her office with antiques and magazines like People and Good Housekeeping. She was commanding as she welcomed us with a firm handshake. Her hair was a wildly tousled mix of blond and brown. Her face had the seams of a woman who had stitched much fun in the sun into her life.

  Dr. Kozuch heard my story. “You don’t have depression,” she told me. “A woman who’s depressed doesn’t get a pile of books to research depression. You’re just in a depressing situation. Get out!”

  I was stunned and shocked. Get out? But we didn’t do that. We suffered. We endured. But I wasn’t enduring. I was suffering.

  I feared the wrath of failing my parents. I was clearly not yet wise about such things. “We don’t care about the marriage,” my father told me, his face twisted in anguish, but his eyes gentle with love. “We care about you.”

  I went home to Morgantown to recuperate. When I returned, I still wasn’t ready to leave my marriage. The man I married agreed to meet me. He picked Hoolihan’s behind our apartment building. It was the kind of chain restaurant that I avoided. But I agreed. I made sure I looked pretty, putting some pink lipstick upon my bare lips.

  I walked past the bar and cheesy wall prints and saw him waiting for me in a side room at a table for two, his back against the wall. His eyes looked vacant. His face, weary. Bags hung from his eyes the way they sometimes hang from the underbelly of a woman’s behind. I took a seat across from him and offered a weak smile. Wary. Weary. I, too, had gone through hell.

  I started, gingerly: “I’m willing to give it a try.”

  He was flat in his response. “I’m not.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not. It’s too much work.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  He pushed his chair back, as if about to leave.

  “You’re walking away?”

  “It’s too much work.”

  “What about the promise to make this forever?”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “This is now?” I was stunned that he was abandoning the marriage.

  He pushed his chair back completely and bolted. He ran out onto the patio. There was no way out. Even more stunned, I watched him hurdle over the black metal railing around the patio. And he kept on running. I ran around the side entrance, chasing after him. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do such things. This was my marriage. I couldn’t let go that easily. I made a commitment. He couldn’t just run away. But he was running away. Literally.

  Forever never was.
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  Defeated, I turned around and returned to my apartment where my parents listened to my tale, as stunned as I was as I related it to them.

  I moved out. Some days later, I made an appointment to return to my apartment with my childhood friend Sumita to collect some of my things. The man I married appeared at the door rumpled and sluggish. He dragged himself back to a mattress laid in the corner of the living room upon the parquet floor. He lay in a crumble. I wanted to help him. Ingrained in me was the message that suffering was the natural destiny of the women of India. We didn’t leave our marriages. My heart still belonged to the man I wed. I didn’t want to abandon him.

  I stayed the night, massaging his headache away and nursing him with Sudafed. Cautiously, I lay beside him for the first time in weeks, our bodies barely touching as I drifted in and out of tense sleep. In the darkness of the night, I felt him edge closer to me. My heart rose in hope. Perhaps the vision that brought us together could be realized.

  I allowed myself to be available to him as a wife to her husband. His familiar breath lay on the back of my neck as he breathed heavily upon me. When he collapsed and lay still, my heart hoped his intimacy consummated both of our desires for reconciliation. Then, he slowly crept up from the mattress.

  I lay alone. I heard the bathroom door click shut. Moments passed. I waited for him. He didn’t emerge. The morning sun crept in through the slits in the blinds. It cast a shadow over my heart. I gathered my strength to rise, and I tapped on the door. I heard his voice, muffled by the door. Two words emerged: “I’m sorry,” punctuated by a meek plea: “Don’t hold it against me.”

  Then, uttered with the next breath, the finality: “Leave.”

  The sun had risen and set on my heart. It was my first one-night stand. And it was with my husband.

  His parents flew into the country. I had moved with Sumita into an apartment with just the style I liked on Seventeenth Street in the heart of Washington’s Dupont Circle. Wood floors, high ceilings, and an eclectic street of gay bars and the 7-Eleven. Our apartment was in a historic building called the Whyland. My therapist didn’t miss the irony of its name at this juncture in my life. My father and his father talked over the phone. My parents didn’t want me to meet his family in person for fear they would try to humiliate me by having their son declare his divorce, Muslim style, uttering the words, “Talaaq. Talaaq. Talaaq,” meaning, “I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.”