Tantrika Read online

  At that moment, the phone rang. “For you, Asra,” Nabina said.

  It was my mother. “Billluh came back home!” My niece and nephew, Safiyyah and Samir, had spotted him from the backseat of the family minivan as my father pulled into the driveway. I was relieved. I had to wonder if Vishnu Uncle had special Tantric powers over lost cats thousands of miles away.

  Vishnu Uncle and I walked again to Pashupathinath by rows of bazaar shops. We stopped to step into a tiny gem shop. He studied the gems and handed me one. “It will give you special powers.” And then he told me a mantra. “Keep this for yourself.”

  I really didn’t understand the phenomenon of mantras. A mantra is a name, syllable, or word used to connect with the mind. The sound of the mantra is supposed to create a vibration that is supposed to strengthen and relax the mind. The word is derived through Sanskrit from two Indo-European words. Man means “to think” and comes from manas, which means “the mind.” Tra comes from trayate, which means “to liberate.” Mantras actually struck me as a bit freaky. I couldn’t see myself actually believing in a mantra. That was something hippies did. Still, I wrote my new mantra on a brown paper bag I borrowed from the gem walla, seller.

  We navigated through the grounds and ended at a small temple. In the center sat a brass lingam larger than any I’d seen in reality. I felt strange. Vishnu Uncle gestured for me to circle the lingam. I did. And then he told me to say my mantra over and over again in front of the lingam, as he continued to circle this huge brass penis, muttering mantras, I presumed, out of a small book he was holding. I had to admit, I didn’t get it.

  We slipped into a room facing the Pashupathi River where one very old man sat, coughing and hacking.

  Vishnu Uncle introduced him as Pagal Baba, pagal meaning “crazy” in Hindi and Urdu. Water dripped from his eyes. A young man stood nearby as his attendant. Vishnu Uncle whispered something to him. He ran off and returned with bhang, a home brew mixed with cannabis and a favorite of the babas, along with Bagpiper Whiskey.

  These babas were the saints of the subcontinent. What little I knew about sadhus made me leery of them, but here they became men with hometowns and families. As a child, I had seen them, walking slowly along the edge of the roads, leaning on crooked sticks, sometimes begging for money. They were also the bogeymen of India. When my mother was a child in Panchgani, the elders yelled, “The sadhu is coming! The sadhu is coming!” when they wanted to quiet the children down.

  When I was nineteen years old, my brother, who was twenty-one, declared he was a sadhu. He had gone to India to explore our homeland. Encouraged in part by me, my parents allowed my brother’s journey as an inquiry into our culture. If the Americans did it, shouldn’t we? That was the year I was on my own journey, kissing for the first time. India claimed the brother who had brought me safely to America’s shores. When he returned to Morgantown, doctors diagnosed him with a serious illness of the mind. “I’ve lost my brother,” I cried one night, staring out the window of my friend Eric Maclure’s apartment in Pierpont House, overlooking the faculty apartments where we had once played baseball games of Indians versus Americans.

  My brother had wandered from home to home among our relatives, his raven black unkempt hair growing down his back and falling like a tangle over his eyes. He would whisk it away from in front of his protruding eyes with fingernails that he wouldn’t cut. He would stare with piercing brown eyes on his hollowed face, certain of his mystical powers. He would declare to those who dared to ask, “I am a sadhu.”

  Hearing the reports from our relatives, my mother had journeyed to India to rescue him. She appeared before him in a black shalwar kameez. “Are you a jinn?” my brother asked, absorbed in the black of her clothes. They were the spirits written about in the Qur’an, souls who return to earth to do both good and bad. I had heard about them since my childhood, usually as something to fear. But I chose to consider them my friends. My mother wept at the sight of her son. The doctors said he had a genetic predisposition to the illness, but its onset was most probably aggravated by the trauma of his return to India. It made me fear the consequences of my return.

  For now, I sat behind Nabina’s brother-in-law, Keshab, as he skirted me through Kathmandu to an old section of the city, Darbar Square, on his scooter.

  We sat at a rooftop restaurant. I studied the menu and wondered aloud, “Do they have samosas?”

  They didn’t, Keshab Bhai said. “Let’s have momos,” he said. It was something Deepak called traditional Nepali food. When they arrived, they looked to me like Chinese dumplings. Keshab Bhai crossed one ankle over a knee. “Reebok” peeked out from upon his socks. The sun beat upon us. American tourists sat nearby. Keshab Bhai told me the story of his spiritual quest. He had been a teenager involved in Nepal’s democratic movement. He realized, he told me, that freedom was a principle vital to existence. He had gone across the border and spent a year in Benares at an ashram. There, he realized the universal truth about what we needed. “Freedom for the soul.” He paused. “It means freedom for the woman, too.”

  This was a simple man whose logic I could follow and also embrace. He took me to the home of a famous Nepali artist, Romio Shrestha, painter of Buddhist thangkas, ornate depictions of deities often used as points of meditation in Tantric practices. A photo album was filled with pictures of him beside the likes of models Naomi Campbell and Iman. Romio was struggling with pressure from his family to take money he said he’d received from Deepak Chopra for building a meditation center and invest it, instead, in the family’s carpet business. “What do I do?” he asked me. I thought he should get the quiet guidance of a man such as Keshab Bhai.

  On the road again, Keshab Bhai said he learned to create a peaceful vibration within his body through meditation and mantras. It gave him balance. He didn’t look for special Tantric powers. “I’m only happy,” he said. We headed out. I wasn’t certain where we were going.

  We parked on a busy street and slipped into a narrow alley where I ate two of the most delicious samosas I’d ever had, not counting the ones made by my mother or Bhabi. They were spicy and fresh, just pulled out of a vat of hot oil.

  He told me, “You wanted samosas. In Tantra, your every desire is fulfilled.”

  I bit into my samosa, its mix of spices and warmth spilling through me. I was breaking the code of safe international travel by eating something off the streets, but I indulged. I had immersed myself quickly and deeply into a world foreign to me. I had to flee now with what I had learned. I didn’t find a teacher in Vishnu Uncle, but he made me confront the most essential question of understanding my identity. And Keshab Bhai inspired me in the ideals of my search, freedom. I boarded an Indian Airlines flight to New Delhi, a string of rhuda raksha prayer beads given to me by Vishnu Uncle around my neck, knowing that to free myself I must begin to be able to honestly answer the question Vishnu Uncle posed to me: “Who are you?”

  CHAPTER 6

  A Cremation Ground

  THE WAILS OF WOMEN emerged from the house. Relatives and friends streamed past me to go inside to pay their respects to the man who had died the night before.

  I wanted to go inside but thought it would be more polite to stay outside. Friends of my family, Nandi Uncle and his wife, Chawla Aunty, let me accompany them to this corner of Old Delhi to the cremation of a relative. The houses were narrow and close together, unlike the neighborhood of sprawling houses and wide yards where I’d been staying with the Chawlas, their young servant girl, Poola, and their big dog, Rufus. From Kathmandu, I had jetted into Delhi without a plan or a place to stay. I slept the first night at a five-star hotel, spending what felt like an eternity in the shower, trying to wipe away the grime of my inauthenticity in Kathmandu. My one principle in travel was to always have the phone number of a personal contact wherever I might be visiting. For Delhi, my mother’s brother, Anwar Mamoo, gave me the name of his good friend from the garment industry, Nandi Chawla. When I called him my second night in Delhi, he gave m
e a boisterous greeting.

  “Come over in fifteen minutes!” he bellowed into the phone. “We’re going to a wedding!”

  I found myself at a festive outdoor Punjabi wedding on the lawn of a military club. It was a free-spirited scene like none I’d ever seen in the more sober settings of my family gatherings. Aunties and uncles danced together, drinking gin and tonics and rushing to the buffet when the waiters brought out the chicken biryani. A long-legged niece of Nandi Uncle’s swept across the lawn, her shimmering dupatta flowing behind her. “She’s a model,” Nandi Uncle told me. I wore my best shalwar kameez, but I felt inadequate. I had no secrets about my identity with the Chawlas. They knew that I was Muslim because they knew my uncle, Anwar Mamoo, so well. And it wasn’t a dividing line for them. Nandi Uncle had a clear philosophy about religion, he told me between sips of Scotch. “I believe in universalism.”

  The music got louder, and Nandi Uncle pushed me to dance. “Have fun!”

  The Chawlas were a modern Delhi couple whose daughters had left the nest and settled into new lives with their husbands in nuclear family homes, not the extended family arrangements of my mother’s generation. “These educated girls are writing new rules,” Chawla Aunty explained to me. Their only son studied in the U.S., and one of his friends set up the computer in their home so Nandi Uncle could e-mail him regularly. Chawla Uncle was a vivacious businessman with charm and enthusiasm. His name, Nandi, came from the name of a bull that protected the god Shiva. Devotees at Shiva temples rub the bull’s loins and haunches to have some of his strength rub off on them, much like the way tourists have always rubbed the testicles and haunch of the bull that stands at Wall Street in lower Manhattan, making these appendages the shiniest part of the bull. Nandi the Bull also represents the Lord of Joy, loving music and dance, not unlike Nandi Uncle.

  Born into an old Delhi family, Chawla Aunty was a more simple and quiet woman with great patience for the bad eating habits that threatened her husband’s health, like his love of barbecued chicken wings. He had diabetes but at the time of my visit wasn’t doing much to watch his weight, despite all of the sweet, fresh papaya she fed him for breakfast. Over the next days, Chawla Aunty took me into her private world of Hindu devotion. Ducking her head, she led me into a tiny alcove of a closet underneath a stairwell. Her mother-in-law used to pray there until her death. Chawla Aunty kept a pile of thin books on a shelf opposite the alcove door, spiritual guides by Indian philosophers and saints. She sat down on a small stool in front of a shrine with images of Hindu deities. I sat on the mat behind her. Although Chawla Aunty was inviting, I felt like an interloper. This was my first time in someone’s personal mandir, temple. She pulled the thin books from the shelves, touching each one to her third eye in a gesture of respect when she picked them up. Her rituals were foreign to me, but she practiced them quietly, lighting incense before starting to read.

  From the safety of their house, I explored Hinduism, Tantra, and the fine art of doing business in India. Plenty of warnings accompanied my search. A woman named Pravati activated my mobile phone account. When she heard that I was researching Tantra, she squealed. “Be on the safe side. Don’t just carry a phone. Carry a gun.”

  Another day, Chawla Aunty took me on a short walk through the neighborhood to visit her pandit at Shri Sanatan Dharam Mandir in the F-block of Nanak Pura, a neighborhood. He sat behind a desk in a small building next to the mandir, a simple structure with a quiet ambiance. I asked him about Tantra. “It’s very bad,” he said with a look of disapproval. Chawla Aunty, too, didn’t think highly of Tantra because of its modern-day reputation for black magic and scams, not spirituality.

  On our slow walk home past wide houses, Chawla Aunty told me about the law of karma, which defines Hindu philosophy, plucking one of the simple analogies found in the spiritual guidebooks of her mandir. “It’s like a bank account,” she said. “All of your good deeds are credit. All of your bad deeds are debit. At the end of your lifetime, you hope to have a positive balance. That is the karma that follows you into your next lifetime.”

  I thought I might be in trouble. I could never balance my checkbook.

  One morning, I opened the Tata white pages to see what I might find under “Tantra.” The “Tantra Foundation” jumped out at me. The man who answered my call said to come by. I hailed an auto rickshaw for this ride, and it dropped me off at a huge billboard of a sign so cramped with writing it reminded me of the rambling letters we’d get at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, cursive filling every bit of the page with allegations of FBI conspiracies and CIA surveillance. The billboard claimed this was the site where former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi came for a special fire blessing.

  A man outside directed me to a room. When I entered, a terrible smell hit me. The man who had talked to me on the phone lay before me like a reclining Ganesh with a potbelly, the revered son of Shiva and Parvati, created out of a father’s rage. Jealous at the presence of even a boy in his wife’s room, Shiva, just back from a trip away from his palace, chopped off his son’s head. When Parvati told him this was his son, a distraught Shiva put an elephant’s head where his son’s head had been.

  This sleeping Ganesh pointed to a rock in front of me. “Do you know what this is?”

  I didn’t.

  “It’s a Shiva lingam!” he yelled at me. “The entire power of the universe is here. All of the world will follow Hindu dharma,” he said.

  I listened to him silently. His dogmatism scared me.

  Still seeking—elsewhere—I found myself some days later in a place that felt like a spiritual waiting room.

  The spiritual doctor was the son of a man I’d found on the Internet, a man called Revered Gurudev Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji, leader of the Mantra Tantra Yantra Vigyan. Beside me sat my driver, an earnest, clean-shaven, balding man named Deepak Soni. On our ride over in a big white Ambassador, he had told me he read Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji’s magazine in Hindi whenever he could afford to buy it.

  We found ourselves at a house in a neighborhood outside Delhi. Around us, the floor was packed with about a hundred men and women sitting shoulder to shoulder. To our right, a man stood behind a counter selling Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji books, buttons, and scarves, things I’d just dropped money to buy. The day before, we’d paid 520 rupees each to get blessed by Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji’s son, a man we were allowed to meet privately for just a few moments. An Indian woman who took my money spoke with admiration about “girls” like me who kept Indian tradition alive, wearing shalwar kameezes instead of “jean and shirt.” I knew this judgment call well. A good girl wore the clothes of her culture. A bad girl didn’t. When I met the son, he looked so bored I wondered if he would rather be napping. As I sat wondering what was to come next, a disciple called the driver and me forward. For our diksha, or initiation, my driver and I ascended a few steps into a room with a larger-than-life-sized photo of Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji.

  We sat cross-legged on the floor. Beside us sat a young man, Abhishek Chandra, who lived outside Delhi, the son of a retired colonel, A. C. Chandra. The son came for a blessing to help him fight an evil spirit that had taken over his body after, he thought, a man jealous of his father had cast a Tantric spell upon him. He had already paid Mantra Tantra Yantra Vigyan thousands of rupees for protection mantras and his diksha, which symbolizes rebirth. Now he was back for more.

  After we’d gathered, the son of the guru walked somberly forward and took a seat in a chair in front of us, the picture of his father behind him. He looked as bored as the day before. He chanted with glazy eyes, vacant without emotional expression, and flicked water on us with his fingertips. He called us bachchay, or children, and sent us on our way to practice every day a mantra he’d given us.

  The colonel and his son were pleased. Deepak the driver smiled broadly on the ride home. We passed posters plastered all over Delhi with the cherubic face of a woman called Mataji Shri Nirmala Devi. She was at Ramlila Ground a
t Delhi Gate holding a teaching about “Self Realization Through Kundalini Awakening.” Her posters called us to “Attain Freedom from Physical, Mental and Emotional Problems.” I considered going, but I was tired. I didn’t have the energy to have my energy awakened.

  I sat in my room instead, pulling out a bright red book on meditation by Dr. Narayan Dutt Shrimaliji. I started going through the exercises, the breathing, focusing on a fixed point. I exhaled hard, as one exercise told me to do. It was weird. I felt power with his exercises. “Close the eyes. Count the breath in. Count the breath out,” I read, and then I did. I felt a calm and a power. White light filled my closed eyes.

  When I went to brush my teeth, I looked down at my toothpaste. It was “Colgate with Shakti power.”

  Now, as I stood outside the home of Nandi Uncle’s relatives, watching somber-faced mourners go by me, I wondered about power in life, especially when faced with death.

  My thoughts were interrupted when the dead man’s daughter emerged from the house, wailing and weeping, crying out to the sky. Tears rose within me as I watched her cry. I thought of my own father. How would I mourn if he died? How much would I regret the impatience I had shown him when he stopped at green lights? A flurry of activity awakened the street, as a procession of men came outside with the body of the man strapped on wood planks and hoisted on their shoulders. The daughter set out behind the men, along with a few young women. I followed. Nandi Uncle was in the procession, a plank on his left shoulder. They shouted to a Hindu god. I shouted with them, not knowing what I was saying.

  The girls drifted back from the procession. I was neither with them nor with the men up ahead and continued to follow the procession. Nandi Uncle faltered. He stepped to the side to catch his breath as the other men continued with the body. I caught up to him. “Are you okay?”