Authors: Asra Nomani
It was their company that brought me to places like this experimental colony called Auroville. A stretch of land was dotted with homes of foreigners who had settled there, trying to live with the rules and philosophies laid out by Sri Aurobindo and Mother Meera. Esther was horrified at how most of the Indian faces belonged to the hired laborers.
We edged close to a looming building, Matrimandir. Scaffolding covered the outside of the dome. A tour guide told us the history of Auroville.
“The Mother sees a dream,” he started. She worked with a French architect, Roger Anger, to create an experiment in international living. It opened on February 28, 1968, and included some seventy settlements now spread over about twelve miles with about twelve hundred residents.
“Mother says⦔ the tour guide started again, telling us the precise dimensions that Mother wanted the meditation room at the top of Matrimandir to be. We walked in circles around the mandir, “Silence” signs posted on the wall.
The way people worshiped Mother Meera made her seem more like a cult hero than a divine inspiration. It was a reflection of her power,
though, that she stood out as a living saint in this country where the women revered by the citizenry were usually fictional.
Before we stepped inside the main meditation room under the dome, we were handed white socks. Inside the room, yards of white sheets spilled into each other, bathing the entire floor in a sea of white. A crystal hung from the epicenter below a sky window. A star was reflected upon the ceiling. Light danced. The crystal created a star with the shadows. We sat on white pillows. As I meditated, the energy bounced from the crystal to Lucy and Esther on the other side of the circle and then back to me.
We headed back to Chennai that night and stayed the night in a hotel across from the train station. We needed three towels. The clerk said that wasn't possible. He could only give me one towel.
“The
dhobi
not come,” he said, referring to the man who washed clothes.
“Give me six sheets!” I figured we could dry ourselves with our sheets.
“Not possible. Not possible.”
The next morning at the Chennai train station, a woman lay on a bench sleeping, wrapping her turquoise sari around her body to sleep with modesty. Our train had been canceled. We went into another building to get refunds, passing men as they urinated outside.
We stood at the counter trying to get our money back. I asked a man whose train was also canceled about the schedule to Lucknow. He answered briskly. I was about to fill out our refund forms. He looked at my pen, wanting to borrow it, and snarled, “Your pen!”
I thought maybe I'd repay his albeit small effort at helping us and gave him my pen despite his rudeness. When he left, Lucy laughed at his arrogance. “Your pen! Your pen! Your pen!” she repeated.
“Your pen!” became a symbol to us of a man's sense of entitlement.
We walked to the baggage hold. A dead body lay on the floor with a printed cotton sheet draped over it. I couldn't tell if the body was a man or woman. The only part of the body that peeked out was mangled toes at the end of worn, dirty feet. Flies fluttered around the toes.
We had a day to kill in Chennai. I got the address for the Enfield showroom. The store was too far away, but the dream of riding my own tiger continued to germinate in my mind.
We ducked into Jim Carrey's
Me, Myself, and Irene.
I understood now the popularity of Bollywood in India. Even if it was an afternoon with Hollywood that gave me the realization. We bought popcorn in cones. And we escaped from the traffic, the blaring horns, the Hulk Hogan billboards advertising large-sized men's suits. Men wolf-whistled when the Jim Carrey character went to kiss Renee what's-her-name. That was sexual repression in India. A young man named Krishnan left as we did, introducing himself to us. He asked Esther, “Would you like to go out tomorrow?”
The next two days we passed on the train back to Lucknow, listening to the train's catering manager tell us his Tantric meditation practice, which consisted of eschewing deity worship and embracing silent contemplation.
India. I loved it this time with Esther and Lucy. I didn't know what I'd do without them. It was a country that had such a public face of male energy. Sometimes I was angered by it. In fact, I hated it. Yet I felt like a powerful shakti force. How much I had learned.
Rail tie workers huddled on the track parallel to us. They carried metal rods in their arms. They wore scarves around their heads like crowns and
dhotis,
the fabric tied around a man's waist like pants. They rocked their bodies together against the ties to pull them up. A man with beautiful almond eyes had more cuts on the side of his torso than a workhorse. He wore baggy mustard-colored pants cuffed up to his calves. Together they chanted, led by a white-haired man in a pink-and-white-checkered shirt.
They threw their shoulders into the tie at the same time, like a serpent dancing.
We drifted away as they chanted, “Ooaaay.”
I sat on the edge of the steps of the open door. A push from behind and I would have tumbled onto the tracks below. But I wasn't afraid. I was so enjoying the rush of the wind against my face. My hair flew so fast
behind me. My toes peeked out from the sandals I propped against the edge of the stairs.
A herd of cattle grazed beside the track. The herder stood behind them with a checkered
dhoti
wrapped around his slender hips and a black Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt above it. He chased the cattle from track's edge. Slivers of silver shone through the green grass of rice. Shafts of white flower thrust above the carpet of green. Drizzle fell upon my ankles and feet. The train had a music of its own. Its whistle. Its rock. Its rhythm.
I had stepped off the train momentarily when it stopped at a station. The only other woman on the platform was wrapped in a sari and stood at the train door's edge. Otherwise, the platform was populated by the men from the AC compartment, including one with a khaki shirt and another with a golf shirt that said IBM.com. Cow dung sat piled nearby, covered with flies. It took the determination of my female energy to tuck my hands into my cargo pockets and walk from train door's edge to platform edge. Why in this land of goddesses were women so repressed?
Now, riding the rails, I breathed in India.
Brown rocks of earth lined the track's edge. Water sat in a field with a green grass edge. Colors blossomed everywhere. The silver lush of gravel. The bronze rush of track's edge. The red and white rush of the platform edge. A man stood thigh high in a blue
dhoti
in rice paddy waters. I sat perched at the door as the train approached a bridge. I felt the rush in my stomach. But I didn't stir. We crossed the bridge. My arm was taut against the silver handrail. The train door was painted dark blue. My feet sat on steps that had silver and black edges.
The caterer came by to visit. Later in the day I guided Lucy and Esther through the narrow corridor to the caterer's compartment. He didn't have enough supplies for the rest of the run. He had sent a telegram ahead for more ice, cups, and rice. Was Caterer Sahib worried? He wasn't. “All will be solved.”
We were about to enter a town called Jhansi, and I read aloud to Lucy and Esther the tale of the Rani of Jhansi, a queen who dressed as a soldier to fight the British. In 1803 the British East India Company arrived here and took control of the state. The last of the rajahs died in 1853. Conveniently, the British had just passed a law letting them take over any
princely state under their patronage if the ruler died without a male heir. They gave the rani, the queen, a pension and took full control of Jhansi.
The Rani of Jhansi wasn't happy about the British forcing her into retirement. When the Indian freedom movement exploded four years later, she led the rebellion at Jhansi. The Indian revolutionaries massacred the British soldiers stationed there. Then, the next year, when the rebel forces were embroiled in infighting, the British took control again.
The rani fled to a city called Gwalior and, in a brave last stand, rode out against the British disguised as a man. She was killed. Her stand, though, earned her status as the Joan of Arc of India and a role as the heroine of the Indian independence movement.
Her tale inspired us, and I was happy to find a model for a real Tantrika in Indian history, even if she had failed.
We arrived in Lucknow. Rashida Khala was as immaculate and caring as ever. Esther and Lucy, the two
dakinis,
argued with a men's tailor in Hazratganj who didn't believe they actually wanted their pants stitched at a men's tailor, something women here didn't do. “We do want our clothes tailored here,” Lucy insisted.
I didn't know why I mentioned to Rehan Bhai my idea of riding a motorcycle. He was all against it. He told me about the highway bandits who made a motorcyclist pull over, stealing his motorcycle at gunpoint. I told Azfar Bhai and Rehan Bhai, “I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm not interested in your negativity.”
Azfar Bhai still wasn't ready to talk about ideas or vision. “Let me get you ice cream,” he told Esther and me. We were grown women. I wasn't much younger than he was, but he still treated us like little girls. We dutifully walked down Hazratganj, the shopping corridor outside Jahingarabad Palace, with him always a few steps away from us. It was at least worth a good laugh.
For Lucy's birthday, we walked down Hazratganj, arms swinging, feeling powerful. A Shakti fortress. Most other women were escorted by men. It was so insane this town. During one of our walks, a man riding as a passenger on a motorcycle pushed me as Esther and I walked in front of our palace home. Another time in Haszratganj, a man tried to
feel Esther's breasts. I caught up to him, gave him a swift shove, and screamed at him.
How could a town live with itself when its women lived in fear? Where were the parents? What were they teaching their boys? They were expecting to marry them into beautiful homes after a young adulthood of indecent behavior. It was warped. Sick.
Evening came. The motorcycle dealership was closing, but I had an appointment to learn how to ride one. I took a lesson on a Bajaj motorcycle with a Mohammad something sitting behind me. I drove, riding on the road beside the stadium where schoolgirls played volleyball. I felt the power of independence and possibility.
I enlisted Parvez in my quest. Parvez was Khala's handsome young servant whom she had raised from childhood with his brother, Anis. Parvez was a male not threatened by my ambitions.
One day at dawn I awakened Parvez and Anis to accompany me to the grounds to learn to ride the downstairs Hindu neighbor's Kawasaki single engine. At the grounds, girls sat on scooters, learning to steer. A brother sat behind one, a girl behind another. I started the engine of the Kawasaki and skirted cow dung and cows lounging in the open field. A beautiful energy coursed through me. A boy sat behind his mother. Another girl practiced alone. She fell over and picked up her scooter herself. Two
mowlana
types, orthodox Muslims with long beards, sat on an Enfield Bullet. It must be the chariot of Tablighi, men who belong to the conservative Tablighi Jamaat organization of my cousin from Aligarh; Rehan Bhai rode one.
I was the only woman on a motorcycle, not a scooter. I felt powerful. I did crazy eights sleeping cows, like the kind of crazy eights I used to run on the West Virginia University Medical Center hill when I was in high school cross-country.
I invited Akhtarul Mulk, Iftikhar Mamoo's friend, over to meet Esther and Lucy. They'd never spent time with him. He now carried a business card, “Chief Editor,”
Area of Darkness,
an English weekly he had started. He gave me a card he had prepared with my name on it as a correspondent for
Area of Darkness,
marked
PRESS
in big red letters.
We were on a
takht,
the wooden platform, on the veranda. Akhtarul Uncle sat on a chair and leaned toward Esther and Lucy. “I knew your father. Your father was unhappy in England. He wasn't happy being away from India. He always had a longing for India.”
Esther tried to speak up. Akhtarul Uncle tried to continue. Esther persisted: “No, let me finish. This is very important to me. Of course, my father missed India. But he was where he wanted to be. He was
in love,
” she screamed. “He and my mother were in love. They were deeply in love.”
Esther and Lucy scolded this elderly friend of their father's. “Love isn't a place,” they exclaimed.
I admired the way my cousin-sisters stayed true to their convictions. Trying to be polite, trying to absorb, trying to decipher, I seemed to get so distracted from my core beliefs. I turned to Rashida Khala and asked her how she dealt with the
bukwas,
or garbage, outside that makes us go
pagal,
or crazy. She told me the story about going to the crowded bazaar in an old part of Lucknow called Chowk. A relative complained afterward that she hadn't even noticed her as she had passed by.
“I just look forward,” Khala said. I wondered if I could ever be so focused.
K
HALA DESCENDED
with regal grace and threw an order over her shoulder to those remaining at Jahingarabad Palace from the household: “Be good.”
She carried a small black leather bag as her only luggage. We climbed into a big white Ambassador car with a skinny driver named Ayub behind the steering wheel. Lucy, Esther, and Khala were my escorts for my first pilgrimage to our ancestral home in our village, Jaigahan. Esther and Lucy had spent their early years in the village, waddling into the fields with a Hindu gardener, Hardu Ram. During our adventures from the Himalayas to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, I'd learned that I could be the master of my own destiny, even in this land so foreign to me. I looked forward now, and restrained myself from casting sideways glances to see what others were doing. That way I could create a reality different from the first oppressive trip I'd made to India. I saw the modern-day divide between Hindus and Muslims, the pursuit of real spiritualism versus spiritual opportunism, and the raw strength of women who ran households. Now, it was time to make a symbolic journey to my home in India. It was my maternal ancestral home, Latif Manzil, where I hoped to walk upon the land from which I came and know the ancestors whose voices rang within me.
It was early morning as we traversed a railroad crossing with the morning rush hour of bicycle traffic spinning past the eucalyptus trees that lined the highway. Khala wouldn't let me drive. I sat up front by the window with Khala's servant Anis between the driver and me. Khala sat in the back behind me, beside the window. Lucy and Esther shared the backseat with her. Khala said that Iftikhar Mamoo stopped going to Latif Manzil because of
sadma,
Urdu for “sadness.”
Red Mahindra tractors, something like the Caterpillar tractors in America, passed us by. Khala wore glasses with a cream
dupatta
over her
head. We rode behind a lorry that asked, “Horn palese,” with the sort of incorrect spelling that was a common source of amusement in India.
Women here sat sidesaddle on bike racks as lanky men pedaled easily. Watching the spokes on the wheels turn slowly, I lost myself in the rhythm of village life. A woman in a bright yellow sari sat leisurely behind a man as he edged her past a gas station with a Bharat Petroleum sign. It was joked that women rode on the back of bikes and motorcycles as if they were sitting delicately on their living room sofas. We passed a woman doubled over with a bag on her back. Workers put grass over tar to fill potholes. Rows of bricks lay adjacent to road. A scarecrow stood in front of a bungalow. There were
tongas,
carts drawn by horses, just as my father had told me traveled on these roads. The signs were all in Hindi. I spotted a faded photo of the Hindu god Shiva on a wall.
Thatched roofs sat on bamboo legs. A sign for Nerolac Paints hung not far from a canopy of mango trees. Men's shirts billowed behind them as they pedaled in the cool air. A woman in a bright orange sari leaned on a stick, watching goats.
Dirty green Mahindra jeeps passed us with their window flaps bound close but their doors open. A man ran to make sure his goat didn't amble out in front of our blaring Ambassador. Rain snapped and crackled on our windshield. We passed a “Colgate Super Shakti” sign painted on the side of a brick building. We passed yet another sign declaring, “P.C.O. S.T.D.,” the signage in front of stores with phones for the public. Men fished in a place called a
thalab,
throwing their netting into the water.
All of a sudden, our right bumper met a Mahindra tractor. It was a little after 11
A.M
. We'd been on the road less than three hours, and already we were disabled. The driver pulled over to survey the damage. The hood could easily scrape and puncture the front right tire. The driver's side door wouldn't shut. I climbed out. I helped the driver and Anis move the car forward and backward, trying to jostle parts into place. Men stared. I didn't care. The driver slid into the mud.
The driver's side door wouldn't stay shut, so I whipped my sheer green
dupatta
from over my shoulders and handed it to Anis to tie the door closed. “Another entry in our 101 uses for a
dupatta,”
I told Esther and Lucy. The
dupatta
was a symbol of modesty, but to us it had also
become a practical accessory, wiping up spills and now securing our safety. Back on the road, we passed a pastel green vista around us with mossy waters at road's edge, wild purple flowers in the water. We took a left at a garbage dump and barreled over a road flooded with rain, past the New Shahganj Medecal Stor with its misspelling and over more flooded waters. I didn't know it, but Shahganj was the closest urban center to our village, a small town of maybe a thousand residents and a crowded bazaar along both sides of the main road. Schoolchildren ambled by with books under their arms. Outside town, I looked out at fishermen sitting on the edge of small pools of water with bamboo rods. We passed Eastern Montessori School.
We had entered a Muslim enclave of India with
786,
the Arabic numerals I used to write on the top of my childhood exams, stenciled onto the window of one of the many Mahindra jeeps that bounced by us. When we reached a smaller city called Khetasarai, we passed an
ikka,
a horse-drawn cart, filled with Muslim women in black
burqas.
We drove by a band of young Muslim girls in school uniforms of blue
kameezes,
white
shalwars,
and white
dupattas.
A safety pin secured the
dupatta
in the back.
Simple village life flowed around us. A herd of pigs with testicles bouncing below their haunches grunted by our car. On road's edge, a child screamed, kicking his legs into the cool air. A girl walked through the village with a walker, next to a paraplegic boy spinning the wheel on a homemade wheelchair made from bicycle parts. We made a left at a bright fruit cart with red apples hanging on a string of red thread. We stopped beyond the cart to buy Esther's and Lucy's staple of fruits. A man with a mouthful of tobacco confirmed Khala's directions to the village. Water dripped from the tits of pigs emerging out of a muddy watering hole. A water buffalo chased another water buffalo.
“Look, they're playing tag!” I imagined.
Our car rattled, giving us little reassurance we'd actually make it the short leg remaining to the village. I was excited, but I didn't know what to anticipate. We took a right after a vegetable cart at a faded Union Bank of India sign. More purple flowers floated in a pond. We braked for a baby water buffalo and took an important right turn at a pile of rocks.
Through a narrow alley tucked between ancient-looking houses, we drove in front of our home called Latif Manzil. It was like a white phoenix rising from the rice paddy fields. I was in awe.
I felt as if I was in a magical place. It was beyond my wildest imagination. My mother played here. She ran through the doors. She climbed these stairs. It was a place where a lychee tree grew in the courtyard. She'd told of the jinn that lived in a storage space upstairs. I wanted to befriend this one who had haunted my mother for so long in her childhood. One of my mother's uncles, her father's sister's husband, used to tell her and the other children at Latif Manzil that they could see jinns if they put
kajal,
the black kohl of eyeliners, on their thumb. She tried but never saw a jinn.
Two boys worked a water pump in the courtyard so the driver and Anis could wash their hands. These first cousins held each other's hands and loved each other like brothers. Here was where my Khala had lived in her girlhood when her father and his three brothers created this home.
Our first night, Khala awakened and fidgeted with the mosquito coil. Her body was a silhouette of her white
dupatta
and white flowered
shalwar kameez,
all in cotton.
As I lay on my
charpai,
my woven bed, beside her, it was as if the walls talked to me.
The incarnations of so many lives stirred through me. The lives of my ancestors. The lives of my parents. The lives I'd lived within this one
junam,
or birth, that was mine. Not just the stuff of my memory coursed through me but also the memory of others. Tales told by deep eyes that stared back at me from black-and-white photos so old they stuck to the glass of picture frames. The psychic memory of a mother's lullaby. The karma of past livesâmy own, my ancestors', and others'âpaying me a visit. We inherit not only the color of our eyes and the color of our skin from our ancestors but also their legacy. To know our
atman,
our true self, we have to know these people whose breath echoes within us. I had learned so much, but I still didn't know how I fit into the legacy of Ansari women.
The tales began for me with the voice of a wife whose husband was not supposed to die so young. She was my mother's mother. I called her nani.
Her name was Zohra, Arabic for Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. She was the teenage daughter of a landowner when her marriage was arranged to a svelte, handsome, and gentle man from the same village of Padghodia where she grew up in District Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. She wasn't supposed to go to her husband's house until she grew a little older.
Then cholera swept through Padghodia, seizing the lives of her young sisters. To save the young bride's life, she was sent to her husband's second home in the neighboring village of Jaigahan. Her husband became a well-respected lawyer, rising in the political circles of District Azamgarh. The British still ruled India. There was still a system of
zamindars,
or landowners, who owned the country's vast rural farmlands. His family was one of those
zamindars
with acres of fertile land of wheat and rice.
Her husband's name was Abdul Ali Ansari, my nana.
He was one of four brothers whose names began with Abdul. Their father was Abdul Latif. He was my
per
nana, my maternal great-grandfather. Latif is one of the ninety-nine names of God in Arabic, meaning “the exceedingly benevolent,” protecting for suffering. He would treat his sons with great congeniality, referring to them as
ap,
the respectful way of saying “you” in Urdu.
My per nana had a vision to build a house in the village where his four sons' families could live as extended families under one roof. And so Latif Manzil rose from the earth. The villagers knew of it simply as the
kothi,
the “big house.” Architecturally, it was designed as a
haveli,
a grand house, in the finest tradition of homes designed by Hindu Rajput kings and Muslim Mogul emperors. Latif Manzil and the Jaigahan culture were testimonies to the harems that spread in India with the conquests of invading Moguls. They had nothing to do with the Western concept of haremsâsultans in palaces with their concubines, slaves, eunuchs, and countless wives in billowing silks. These were vestiges of domestic
harems,
an Arabic word that meant the seclusion of women behind boundaries. My dear friend Vasia had introduced me to a Muslim scholar in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi, when I visited her in Rabat one winter. It was Ramadan, and we had dinner together. The scholar said she wasn't fast. “Too much work to do,” she said. She was a Muslim woman to
whom I could relate. And the life she chronicled of the domestic harem into which she had been born was the same as the one my mother was born into. She, like my mother, had to break the
hudud,
the boundaries, that traditional Islam imposed upon women. It was the
hudud
of our culture that also settled like a noose around my neck. In India, the domestic harem translated into purdah or
zenana.
This was how my nani lived, behind a boundary that kept her from her husband's side even in death, and this was the rule into which my mother was born. But it was a boundary that Esther, Lucy, and I didn't accept.
The crickets and frogs of Jaigahan inspired my mother's eldest brother, Iftikhar, to pen the Sufi poetry he would one day read on the BBC. The family often returned to Padghodia. One day, Nani gathered with Nana and their children for a rare photo in the doorway of their home caked with the smooth mix of mud and cow dung. She looked down like the demure woman of India that she was raised to be. Nana told his children,
“Hasi mazaaq ke saath rahoe.”
It meant: “Live with fun and laughter.”
It was a pure and innocent image of a family before its world turned upside down. Nana came home one afternoon just as he did on so many afternoons. He ate his afternoon meal like usual. Then he fell sick.
Nani stayed by his side but then slipped out of the room like a ghost whenever men would come to visit him, bowing to the rules of her religion and custom to do purdah and not show her face to men who weren't relatives. He died after one of those times when she left his side. She lived with this quiet regret.
Nani also lived with a family secret. The doctor said her husband died of a heart attack. Descendants would say he died after coming home with a stomachache. Iftikhar Mamoo once confided to my mother that the cook told Nani a different story, that someone, jealous of Nana, told the cook to poison the food. The cook didn't know for whom it was intended. He did as he was told. And Nani lost her husband.
For years, his daughters remembered the
kajal
he always kept in his pocket to line the eyes of his children in black to ward off
nazar,
the evil eye. It was as if he died with
kajal
in his pocket, for it seemed that the evil eye lingered upon his widow and her children.
The family mostly left the village. We were fortunate in one regard to have a descendant living at Latif Manzil, protecting it. He was Zaki, a pocked-faced man who acted like the lord of Latif Manzil. Lucy, Esther, and I soon start calling him Bluebeard because he exuded so much terror, even in the company of his wife and younger son. He hadn't committed the horrible deeds of the mythical Bluebeard, but he ruled his grand home in the same way.