Tantrika Read online

  I talked to the pandit. I didn’t even know that pandit was an honorific that said this man came from the highest Hindu caste, the Brahmins, who were the scholars and caretakers of temples in India. I just figured it was his first name. He invited me to come. “Bring your mataji and pitaji,” he said. I didn’t know who he was talking about.

  My dad agreed to go with me. Turned out he was my pitaji, or “father” in Hindi, the language of Hindus. The Urdu spoken by Muslims is very much the same as the Hindi spoken by Hindus, although Urdu writing is like Arabic text, compared to the Sanskrit text of Hindi. But I found that some important words differentiate Hindus from Muslims. Pitaji is abba to a Muslim. Mataji is ammi.

  The guru of the Himalayan Institute was a man called Swami Rama of the Himalayas. A big tennis player and smoker, he came from India and set up the Himalayan Institute in the eastern Pennsylvania mountains in a small town called Honesdale. There, Swami Rama was simply “Swamiji.” The institute said he had died a few years before. A dark secret lurked on these grounds about Swamiji. Few dared mention it, but the Himalayan Institute had lost a $1.9 million lawsuit filed by a young woman who testified that Swami Rama had seduced and raped her as a nineteen-year-old virgin, claiming he could heal her of physical ailments when she came to the institute.

  My father drove our Chrysler minivan over the roads blanketed with a fresh snow. We turned into the compound, where a staffperson ushered us to a comfortable home. We went straight to our first session and folded our legs beneath ourselves on the floor. My father sat beside me in Western shirt and pants.

  We learned about something called sadhana. It was a part of Tantra, and it was a Sanskrit word that meant “means for attainment” of a state somewhere between relaxed and concentrated. I was looking for a practice that could just make me a lot less irritable. And I didn’t want to find the answer with Prozac. When we returned to our chalet without the ski resort, I scolded my father, “Why do you have to ask so many questions? This isn’t your classroom! Don’t talk so much!” I wasn’t proud of my relationship with my father. I didn’t understand him well.

  My questions about sacred and divine love were leading us, as a family, into territories usually left untouched. My father was a man brave enough to bare his soul. He threw his body to the ground and wept. “When I first had sex with your mother I thought she was my spiritual soul mate.” But my mother, it seemed, didn’t like having her virginity stripped from her without her being ready.

  “She has taunted me for thirty years for having sex with her on the wedding night.”

  Since I started the Tantra assignment she had stopped, he said. “Maybe she sees that sex is a normal thing.” I thought about my Journal front-page middle-column story the year before about the demise of sex on the wedding night as more couples, already having consummated their relationships, spent the night partying with the friends they hadn’t seen for years. Maybe my mother read that story and saw that most couples are expected to have sex on their wedding nights. The truth was that I also understand my mother’s sense of violation. She went into her wedding night with romantic notions of her husband’s devotion to her. What she heard was his loyalty to a mission serving his family and humanity. Not the words of the Barbara Cartland romances my mother read growing up in Panchgani.

  But my father was always a man trying his best. My mother told me the story that not long after their wedding night, my father showed her a Buddha calendar that sat beside him as he studied. She didn’t care about Buddha. She wanted romance. My father finally put it away. But that didn’t mean he kept Buddha’s philosophies out of his heart. With a belly in his early thirties to match that of the Happy Buddha and principles of serving humanity, my father was always like a selfless Buddha, struggling like any man with the frustrations of life on this earth.

  For the next session, my father changed into the white kurta and pyjama that is the traditional attire of Muslim men on the subcontinent.

  Luke, the meditation instructor, advised us to move our breath from our mouth through our body. My dad raised his hand. No. Not again.

  “The breath doesn’t actually move. You should say, ‘Visualize your breath moving.’” I had to admit that my father made sense. His advice stayed with me every time someone told me to move my breath through my body.

  The pandit met with me privately in his office.

  My father had told him about our ancestry. The pandit had advice for me as I traveled in India: Many of the Hindu pandits wouldn’t want to teach a Muslim. He looked at me from across his desk, his hands folded together, and offered his suggestion for my Tantra travel: “Tell them your ancestor was a Rajput, Thakur Shivraj Singh.”

  I nodded my head, accepting his advice.

  On the way home, following snowy roads, I got impatient as my father drove slowly. I wrote into my notebook that I didn’t want enlightenment. My only goal over the next year was to simply stay calm even when my father braked for green lights. I looked over at this amazing man who had driven these treacherous roads to help me expand my mind. I wanted to one day be able to express my appreciation to my father with the simple act of showing him respect and patience. Could I accomplish such a humble, yet distant, goal?

  Stress consumed me as I readied for this pioneer journey to India on my own. I wheeled a shopping cart through Wal-Mart, throwing in Cover Girl lipsticks and barrettes marketed by Sixteen magazine as gifts for my vast network of relatives.

  What clothes to wear? Western? Traditional? Shalwar kameezes? What sandals to wear? I didn’t want to be obviously Western as I traipsed into temples. I was a wreck, but a wreck with a day-timer. At Office Depot, I bought my first day-timer, figuring the one marketed by Chicken Soup for the Soul was an appropriate theme. In Buddhist Tantra, a yogini often carries a knife with a carved handle and a blade shaped like a crescent. It’s not meant to harm. But it is a meditative tool for slicing through illusion, negative energy, and ego with the sharp edge of wisdom. My father came through the door at my mother’s store as I stood behind the counter. He handed me a bag from Pathfinder, a store down High Street. I pulled out a shiny red Swiss Army knife with sharp silver blades. I didn’t have a blade the shape of a crescent. But I had scissors that flipped up.

  A stranger walked through the store doors before my departure, a tall and slender man who seemed as if he could stretch himself into a pretzel. He wanted to see if there might be a market for handicrafts his wife might bring from their native Nepal if she got her visa approved to enter the U.S. He introduced himself as Deepak Pant.

  I started talking to him about my study of Tantra. To my surprise, he told me he had studied Tantra. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Here, in Morgantown of all places. His wife’s family had a Tantric guru. “Vishnu Uncle,” he said.

  I was excited, but Deepak warned me that walking down the path of Tantra could lead to a confrontation with dark realities that might not be pleasant or easy to endure. I had heard that in India, the most extreme of Tantrics spent their nights at cremation grounds, practicing rituals meant to overcome one of the greatest fears of humans, fear of death, even seizing the energy of the dead for their own energy. It wasn’t much spoken about, but the most brazen of Tantrics were said to even have sex with the dead body of a woman, setting the body upon them as they sat in meditation posture. There were other dark elements, Deepak told me during visits to our house, that I would discover for myself.

  Shivarathri was a Hindu holiday, he told me, important to Tantrics as a celebration of the god Shiva. Tantrics and disciples traveled by foot, bus, and train from throughout India to converge upon an ancient Shiva temple in his native Kathmandu, where his wife and family lived. Vishnu Uncle would likely be there, too.

  He gave me a gift, a necklace of dark brown beads. “It is a rhuda raksha,” Deepak explained. “Every Tantric must have a rhuda raksha.” It was a protection of sorts. I sat at the top of the stairs to my childhood home as he wished me farewell and good luck on my jour
ney. He turned around and looked at me earnestly. “Be careful.” It’s a dangerous world.

  I giggled. “I will.”

  He said, “I’m serious.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Worshiping the Lingam

  MONKEYS WITH PINK-RED BOTTOMS glided from a temple rooftop to overhanging branches. A small rock stood before me where people stopped to pay their respects, touching the fingertips of their right hand first to the rock and then to their third eye. I did, too, though I didn’t know why.

  I was in Kathmandu on the occasion of Shivarathri with a brother of our Nepali friend Deepak and Prakash Joshi, a friend of Deepak’s who taught at the chemistry department at Kathmandu University. Prakash paused in front of the rock and explained, “It’s a Shiva lingam.” At my Santa Cruz workshop I’d learned about the lingam, the Sanskrit term for a penis. This rock, then, was the phallic symbol of Lord Shiva’s power. Worshiping the lingam amounted to worshiping Shiva and the male energy residing in all of us. But try to tell someone at Wal-Mart that you just bowed your head to a penis, and it doesn’t translate so well.

  I wove with Prakash and Deepak’s brother on narrow pathways until we came to a long row of stone steps lined with skinny men naked except for loincloths covering their lingams. They were the babas and sadhus of Hinduism and Tantra. We sat on a brick wall across a slow, narrow, dirty creek from two-storied temple houses that resembled pagodas with gold-plated roofs. The buildings made up this temple, Pashupathinath, upon which thousands had descended. Hindus consider it one of the most sacred shrines in the world. A sign outside banned non-Hindus. Eastern Nepalese Kiranti rulers built the temple before the fourth century, but the temple got its current shape and design in the early eighteenth century. Inside sat a sacred lingam, although I couldn’t pretend to really understand its significance.

  Thousands of devotees stood in lines snaking around the main temple, waiting to go inside.

  I was staying at the home of Deepak’s wife, a modern, pretty woman named Nabina. At home, a middle-aged man in a saffron robe sat with Nabina’s mother. He looked like he was in his forties but youthful. I whispered to Nabina, “Who is he?”

  She answered, “Vishnu Uncle.” I felt a bit in awe being so close to him. I didn’t quite know why. I sat beside him on the takht, a wooden platform for sitting and sleeping.

  I tried to introduce myself, explaining my acquaintance with Deepak back in Morgantown and my mission to learn about Tantra.

  After I finished, he asked, “Who are you?”

  I was confused by his question. I figured there was a right answer and I didn’t know what it was. He gestured to a string around his neck to ask if my father wore a string like the one he wore as a Brahmin. I remembered what Pandit Tigunaut advised me to say. “I am the descendant of a man named Thakur Suraj Singh.” I even fumbled on his name, mispronouncing his middle name, Shivraj.

  Vishnu Uncle smiled, pleased. He asked what I would give him for imparting knowledge to me.

  “Love from my heart.” This seemed to please Vishnu Uncle even more. Nabina clapped her hands in amusement. I was confused that somehow I had stumbled upon the right answers, but I felt like a fraud, not admitting I was Muslim. This truth burned inside me.

  The Tantric texts say that a Tantrika has to be initiated by a guru, male or female, who belongs to a Tantric lineage. “If merely by drinking wine, men were to attain fulfillment, all addicted to liquor would reach perfection…. If liberation were to be ensured by sexual intercourse with a shakti, all creatures would be liberated by female companionship,” says a text called the Kularnava Tantra. Followers of Tantra seek to adore these gurus. I had misled my potential guru with an inauthenticity about myself. I didn’t think you were supposed to do that.

  A commotion awakened me at 4 A.M. Vishnu Uncle was storming out of the house with his suitcase. I sat up and quietly watched. He was drunk. He said he didn’t know what he could teach me.

  He sobered up under the gentle coaxing of Nabina’s mother. He told me, “We’ll now go to the temple.” I eagerly rose. Nabina’s mother dispatched a nephew of hers as an escort. We slipped out into the dark early morning. Few people were on the street. As we walked past a karate school, Vishnu Uncle held my left hand with his right hand. It was a strange gesture in a culture where married men and women didn’t even hold hands in public. But I didn’t know the ways of these gurus, so I kept my hand in his.

  As we arrived at the temple’s gate, Vishnu Uncle gestured for me to cloak my head with my dupatta. He put his fingers to his lips. I was to stay quiet. He thrust into my hands a bowl made of leaves, filled with a garland of flowers and other bright objects. I walked past the sign that banned non-Hindus from the temple, glancing at it just slightly, and stepped through a set of silver-coated doors into the Pashupathinath Temple, an act that could have had me arrested and jailed because of my religion.

  A haze of smoke inside the temple grounds hit us. Virtually naked babas lay sprawled on the ground, their skinny bodies stretching in all directions. We turned to the left where a crowd pulsed in front of a small door. Women pushed each other, holding onto shoulders with one hand and brandishing offerings with the other. The push of the crowd finally landed me at an opening to a shrine, only no one was allowed to enter but could only peer through the open window. A bleary-eyed boy sat on the ledge, his eyes dilated, staring at me. I wondered if he was high. The smell of marijuana was thick in the air. I watched the other women and mimicked them. Like them, I thrust my offering at the boy. He took it, tossed it behind him toward a statue so festooned in garlands I couldn’t make out whether it was a man, woman, or lingam. He smeared my forehead between my eyebrows with a thick paste. It’s written in Tantric ritual that Shakti dips her finger in red powder mixed with a little soapy water and oil. She places a red mark on the eyebrow center of those before her. She is given a mark, too. The mark symbolizes the levels of concentration and participation of the ajna chakra, or the psychic eye in the center of the forehead between the brows. It’s written that if the ajna chakra is awakened, you will participate in the Tantric act without tension and without being blocked by emotions or shame or frivolity. The crowd pushed me away from this moment of illumination as quickly as it had thrust me there.

  Vishnu Uncle beckoned me toward him. We swept past bodies strewn around, smoking water pipes, hookas, filled with hashish and tobacco. I knew I didn’t want to experiment with drugs. Before I left New York, I’d had a night of morphing doors and pulsating lights after I’d tried brownies baked with marijuana. Before that, I’d ended a snowboarding vacation in Telluride, Colorado, after doing mushrooms at the Beaux Art Ball, a costume ball where I, along with other women, dressed in lingerie. It was my first time. I flew back to Washington, D.C., wearing shades the entire flight to shield myself from the light. My father drove my mother from Morgantown to nurse me back to health. One afternoon, as I sat outside the Dupont Circle Starbucks, I studied the flowers planted outside and muttered to my mother, “The flowers are soooooo pretty.” I’d had enough bad experiences with illegal drugs. I didn’t need a bad trip in Kathmandu.

  We returned home in time for a Sunday outing Nabina and a sister had planned for me. I just got in the car, not knowing quite where we were headed. Vishnu Uncle wore his orange robe. Nabina and her sister, who had never traveled outside Nepal, were more modern in jeans and shirts than I appeared to be, still drowning in the tentlike shalwar kameez I’d been wearing when I stepped off the plane the day before. What was wrong with this picture?

  On the ride there the lush green vistas were beautiful. They told me we were going to the Dakshinkali Temple, where every Tuesday and Saturday the local people give offerings of live animals—hens, goats, and buffalo—to the goddess Kali. The pandit’s feet were said to bathe in flowing blood those days.

  On the road outside the temple sat rows of stalls, where women sold flowers and other offerings to the goddess. Vishnu Uncle bought offerings and put them in our hands. He led us
up many stairs that wound around the side of a steep hill. He gestured for me to go forward into an open-air room with a shrine at the end. I watched Nabina. She handed her offering to the man to the right of the statue and bowed her head to a goddess statue meant to be Kali. The man was the pujari, who oversees the rituals at the temple. I followed Nabina’s cues and bowed my head to Kali. The pujari smeared the third eye on my forehead. I could feel the quake of my Muslim ancestors, for whom this was an unthinkable act. What would I tell my mother?

  Nabina’s sister sat in a corner of the room, her legs crossed in lotus position, eyes closed. I sat beside her, crossed my legs, and rested my hands on my knees, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I figured she was meditating. I still didn’t have a quiet practice, and the scene was strange to me.

  Vishnu Uncle settled into a small veranda behind the Kali statue. He opened his cloth bag and pulled out a bottle of Bagpiper Whiskey.

  He did what looked like hand tricks over the bottle. I discovered later they were mudras, symbolic hand gestures meant to harness energy. He insisted Nabina’s sister take a shot. He insisted that I drink some, too. Images of villagers made blind by moonshine liquor deterred me. I insisted that I didn’t want to join his drinking. Nabina’s sister slipped Vishnu Uncle some money. I followed her lead and slipped him a thousand Nepali rupees.

  Vishnu Uncle sat with me in his room later that evening, drinking more Bagpiper Whiskey and asking me what troubled me. It was stupid, but I told him that in transit to Kathmandu my mother had told me over the phone that my cat Billluh was lost. It was a crazy obsession, I admitted, but it was on my mind. He smiled patiently. “All will be fine.”