Tantrika (20 page)

When we arrived in Lahore, we spent our days in the house of my eldest paternal uncle, Baray Abu. Between meals and prayers and naps, Dadi told me about my ancestry and her life. My dada's father's name was Mohammad Isaq Nomani. His mother's name was Saboohath. They lived in Bindwal. Shibli Nomani was my dada's most renowned ancestor. I'd heard about him throughout my lifetime, but I'd gotten most interested in him as I tried to understand my ancestry. He was a scholar of Islam and the founder of Shibli College in Azamgarh. He was renowned for biographies he wrote of the Prophet Muhammad and Hazrat Omar, the second caliph, or leader, of Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. I wondered more about him. I felt I was carrying on his legacy, as a researcher of religion and philosophy, even if it was, yes, with quite a different twist.

Dadi estimated she was eighty-seven, born into the rural town of Hinganghat in India when the British were still colonialists. Although not fluent in English, Dadi could spell her name, Zubaida, meaning “quintessence” in Arabic. She was married at fourteen to my grandfather, Mumtaz Ahmad Nomani, who became a successful defense attorney in the old city of Hyderabad. Before that, she traveled alone with her children in 1942 to the bustling Hindu holy city of Benares from Wardha, a city where Dada had moved the family in order to build his law practice. My father grew up there, affected by the nonviolent movement of
Gandhi, who himself had moved to Wardha, using it as a headquarters for his battle for India's liberation. Their family would picnic at Gandhi's ashram. It was a time when few women dreamed of doing such a daring thing as traveling unaccompanied by a man. But after the family moved to Hyderabad, Dadi even drove a car, learning on a racecourse, and driving until she hit a rickshaw. There were no power brakes back then. They paid off the rickshaw driver for maybe fifteen rupees, twenty rupees tops (between three and five dollars then).

“He was happy,” she insisted.

Three sons and five daughters settled in Pakistan, uprooting themselves from their lives in India in the years after India won independence from the British in 1947. She did not shun the Hindu yogic traditions that ran through the culture but instead twisted her body into the yogic postures that I'd learned at the Eastern Athletic club in Brooklyn Heights when I signed up for my first yoga class years earlier. My father learned alternate nostril breathing from his mother, something she did proudly, inhaling deeply and exhaling with great force. Dadi pressed on the spots that I learned in the Canadian hinterland as the acupressure spots of our chakras. She pressed on the dip in the back of the neck below the nape of the neck. “It opens your blood.”

One afternoon, I went with Dadi to a famous Sufi shrine in the middle of Lahore, Data Darbar, dedicated to an eleventh-century mystic, Syed Ali Hajveri, popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh. I didn't have a discipline that allowed me to have spiritual communion. I touched my forehead to the cool marble tile and felt a light connection to the mystical world.

Dadi took me by the elbow and made way for us in the men's section so I could take good pictures. She ignored the men who protested. To one, she said, “This is my granddaughter. She has come from America, and she wants to take a photo.” This was Dadi in action. No fear. No rules. My cousin-brother, Sohail Bhai, an engineer, worked across from the shrine that we visited. It was the red-light district, alive and prospering in this Muslim nation. Criminals, he said, kidnapped girls from the Sufi shrine. His boy was with us today, his daughter at home, but he told his wife to watch their child closely.

We went to another shrine. Sohail Bhai's wife said,
“Tawba. Tawba.”
seeking forgiveness in Arabic, slapping one side of her face gently and then the other for what she saw before her: Muslims bowing their head to the shrine. To her and other Muslims, it was a sin to bow your head to anyone but God.

My uncle, Baray Abu, and his wife, Bari Ammi, represented simple devotees to me. They punched a small handheld counter with their thumbs as they recited a
dua,
or prayer, over and over again to earn blessings for their son's impending marriage. Baray Abu rose before dawn to do
fajr namaz.
He wouldn't take me to the
masjid
with him because the subcontinent culture didn't allow women to enter anymore. When he returned home he unlocked the door from the outside. I hated this security system, because we were essentially locked inside the house when he went to do his prayer. I would wait for him to accompany him on his walk in the park as the sun rose.

He talked about selfless generosity to family. He made me think that I hadn't given enough to my own family. Living alone had made me selfish even if I had good intentions. Late into the night, I talked to Baray Abu. Somehow the subject turned to the Kama Sutra. He admitted that he read it. He didn't approve of its teachings. “It allows for immoral activity. It says it is okay to sleep with the wife of your enemy.”

He had found religion again. He said it was a personal violation for him to hear anyone question the Qur'an. Faith amounted to belief in the sanctity of each word of the Qur'an, he said. He had a
mowlana,
or Muslim teacher, who came every day at 3
P.M
. to teach him how to properly read the Qur'an in Arabic.

In her room, Dadi taught me that shakti can be expressed in many forms. In Hindu mythology, female energy manifests itself through the fierce Kali, the protective Durga, the knowledgeable Saraswati, and the monetarily successful Lakshmi. I wondered how to understand Dadi's special brand of shakti.

On the one hand, she was pioneering, aggressive, inspiring. After all, she drove a car and traveled alone in the 1950s when few women did. “I never had any problems. All men were my brothers.”

On the other hand, she was aggressive and offensive. She made my innocent mother's life a living hell when my mother moved into my father's extended family house in Hyderabad. For a decade after she left for America, my mother had nightmares about my grandmother. I sat across the dining table from Dadi, and I was brazen enough to ask her that question that Rashida Khala had warned me would be impolite. “Do you like my mother?” I asked, trying to reconcile the shakti forces within my life.

She didn't bat an eye. She wasn't surprised by the question. She defended herself. Of course she liked my mother, but somehow my mother got the wrong idea because my grandmother asked her to help wash the clothes. “We all washed each other's clothes.”

I was dumbfounded. How to continue this conversation after it turned to dirty laundry? Somehow that was a good way of understanding what we were talking about.

Ready to change the subject, too, Dadi told me the tale of our mystical Sufi ancestry.

She said her great-grandfather was a Sufi who isolated himself in a nearby jungle to pray. He married at his mother's request but returned to the jungle. When his mother asked him to bear children with his wife, he took a leaf and chewed it. He gave the chewed leaf to his wife to eat, and she became pregnant.

I knew this was controversial territory. Sufism was to Islam much like Tantra was to Hinduism. It was shunned and whispered about quietly as a fringe culture that deviated from the main religion. Many Sufi philosophies mirrored Tantra: the transcendental meditative oneness with the universe, the sense of divinity in all people, and the renunciation of things material.

Dadi told me about her devotion in Hyderabad to a Sufi
pir
, a healing saint. My brother accompanied her on those visits. She didn't call herself a Sufi, but she took up the practices of Sufis. She fell asleep reciting
zikr,
remembrances of God, on her
tuz'bi,
her prayer beads, after doing her
namaz.
She kept
duas,
prayers, by her pillow, waking up in the middle of the night to recite them. When Baray Abu got something in his eye, Dadi said a
dua,
pulled the eyelashes aggressively, blew into the eye, and cured him.

My uncle called a friend who belonged to a Sufi family. The man suggested I meet his sister. I talked to her and agreed to join her for a women's gathering to discuss the Qur'an.

She told me she hadn't missed a single of her five daily prayers in her entire lifetime. At our women's session, she told the story of helping even an ant by giving it sugar, at the same moment that I, not very absorbed in her lecture, happened to give an ant some sugar.

I met her brother. He was an elderly man, serious and pious. He told me he couldn't teach me unless I was a good Muslim, praying five times a day. “Do you pray five times a day?”

I knew this was no time to lie. I admitted that I didn't.

“I cannot teach you unless you pray five times a day.”

We continued talking anyway. He told me he went to a camp for
mujahadeen
fighters in Kashmir. “They had a glow on their faces as if they were angels.” His sister went, too. She was beaming, remembering the light that she said shone from these
jihadis,
fighting a “holy war” against India for Kashmir.

She brought out a receipt book for donations for the
mujahadeen.
I bought two coupons. I returned home and started praying five times a day, continuing to meet with him over the next two days. He read my
Wall Street Journal
Tantra article by our third visit. He took me upstairs. “I have a book I want to show you.” He turned to the topic of my Tantra article.

“There are some things I didn't understand,” he began.

“What?”

“G-spot? What is a G-spot?” I had mentioned the G-spot in the description of the sacred spot massage taught in Santa Cruz. I figured a lot of people would like to know. Delicately, I tried to explain its location and purpose.

He continued. “Where is the clitoris?” I didn't remember mentioning anything like that in the pages of the
Journal.

I tried to remain clinically vague. He paused. I asked him if something was the matter. “What a shame. I was almost going to ask you to show me your clitoris.”

I tried to be forgiving. “God will forgive you.”

“And God will forgive you, if you show me—for just a moment.”

I saw the man now as a man. He was no Sufi from whom I could learn higher levels of existence. He was still quite base. In case I wasn't certain, as I left he embraced me, planted a kiss on my cheek and forehead, and tried to kiss me on the lips. I turned my head quickly to make sure he missed. He tried again. Disgusting. When I returned home, I didn't tell Dadi.

I
KNEW THAT
I
WAS
more like Dadi than not. I had lived under her tutelage for the first four years of my life and inherited from her the strength and willpower that made us determined yet obstinate. Even at eighty-plus years old she wasn't restrained by convention.

Things hadn't changed much in Pakistan since I was eighteen and stopped in Lahore as part of my cross-country jaunt through Pakistan. That summer, I jumped on a bicycle to take a spin around the neighborhood. My cousin Aamir chased after me to get me to return home.

“Don't embarrass the family,” he yelled at me. “Girls don't ride bikes here.”

During this trip, we didn't leave my uncle's driveway—I was too afraid Dadi would fall and break a bone—but Dadi wasn't afraid to climb onto the back of another cousin-brother's motorcycle with me in front. She settled onto the back, sidesaddle in her sari. I gave her my shades and wrapped my
dupatta
around my face so only my eyes peeked out. We looked like two
dacoits,
the subcontinent term for a brand of criminals straight out of gangs like the one led by a poor Indian woman dubbed the Bandit Queen.

Later, my cousin Omar happily let me ride his Hero Honda CD-70 through the streets of Lahore. We visited Ferozsons, the bookstore that used to belong to the family of Lucknow bookseller Ram Advani. The bookshelf included
The Hite Report on Male Sexuality.

When we pulled out of a McDonald's, a young woman did a double take and yelled, “
Ya
Allah!” meaning, “Oh, God!”

I returned to Delhi, this time knowing that I had to tap into the boldness I'd inherited from Dadi to overcome the fear that so inhibited freedom in India, freedom of movement. I wanted to go to the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile in the town of Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, but
from the traffic I had seen on the Grand Trunk Road first with Lucy and Esther and then with Dadi on the Peace Bus, I didn't feel safe driving my own car. The roads were too narrow. I realized there was no better expression of my independence than a motorcycle.

The creature stood before me, sleek, powerful, and intimidating. I stared at him in the gentle evening breeze and wondered if I could tame him.

Quietly, I did what I needed to do to bring him to my temporary home in the posh Golf Links neighborhood of Delhi. I couldn't even drive him there myself. I had to ride—sidesaddle—behind an employee of Khanna Motors, as he nosed my new black Hero Honda Splendor into the parking space where I was staying. I'd done something I'd never even contemplated doing in America. I'd bought my own motorcycle. My bike was nothing more than the power of a scooter back home, a 100cc machine that wasn't even allowed on the interstates in America. But here the Hero Honda Splendor was the tough bike of tough young men. It was a big machine for me to control in the stop-and-go traffic of urban India, where being able to pick up a bike toppled to the ground by an errant bullock cart was as important as gunning the engine.

There was a reason I had gotten this bike. It expressed the independence and fearlessness with which I wanted to live. I'd be riding alone. No Shiva for this Shakti. My motorcycle was my tiger. It would rile the Shiva energy within me. Mastering my tiger would require concentrated meditation. I knew overcoming fears was an integral part of spiritual liberation. That's why the darkest of Tantric yogis meditated with corpses on their laps. In my case, I wanted to be free in this land of my birthplace from the stranglehold of others' fears. I wanted to travel India without the fear of rape or murder but rather in the spirit of adventure. I purchased two helmets with the company maker, Studds, emblazoned across them and strapped them on the back. Now, how would I get this tiger to purr?

For help, I turned to a British woman, Kate Lee, who happened to be staying in my guest house. Back in England, she taught people how to ride motorcycles. Now she sat in front as she took me around Golf Links, teaching me the gears. I sat Western style behind her. Then she sat behind me as I stopped and started, practicing with the gears. I braked too hard. I
started too fast. I did everything wrong. But I was moving. And I hadn't fallen over yet.

I knew I had to jump-start my riding lessons if I ever wanted to get out of Golf Links. I called Hero Honda Motors Limited and talked to the marketing manager. He told me he would have an employee give me lessons. He assigned Amit Chopra, senior engineer in service.

When I talked to Amit, he asked, “Can you drive over here?”

How could I admit I couldn't? Easily. “I can't.”

I got a ride to the Hero Honda corporate office. Amit looked like a sincere man in his late twenties, bespectacled and serious. “You have a motorcycle license back at home, right?”

It was one of my guiding principles never to lie. But this time I didn't think I could tell him the truth, although the obvious would soon become apparent. “Yeah, sure, license back at home. Yeah.” Biggest two-wheeler I'd ridden at home was my Gary Fisher twenty-one-speed mountain bike. We rode back to my Splendor at Golf Links. Amit hopped on the front and took us to India Gate, a massive monument in the center of a strip of land made to resemble the Mall in Washington, with the Capitol, the phallic Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial lined up in a row. The India Gate was a monument to India. There I learned how to ride the Hero Honda, even though I still braked too hard. I felt brilliantly powerful and free.

I continued riding circles around Golf Links. I used my turn signal for turns, a clear sign that I was a foreigner. I braked to see if I could stop without the engine dying. Sometimes I could, other times I couldn't. I restarted to see if I could start without the engine dying. I was moving slowly, but I felt great. So independent.

One afternoon I nosed my bike slowly around Golf Links, passing a band of
hijras,
or eunuchs, collecting money door to door. They were men who dressed as women. Many people were frightened of them, and the
hijras
used the fear to extort money. Some of them, it was said, were castrated. I remembered first seeing them as a child in Hyderabad. Dadi hurled money into their hands with a grunt. Parents tugged their children away, afraid they would kidnap their young ones, castrate the boys, and make them beg. I was never afraid of these colorful characters. Since
I broke gender boundaries with my motorcycle, I related to them. Finally, I emerged from my circles at Golf Links to ride through Delhi, following my map to the embassy enclave where the streets were wide, clean, and mostly free of traffic. I explored. I meandered. I found myself at Buddha Park, where I paid my respects to a giant statue of Buddha. Couples hid in quiet corners behind trees.

I rode to Khan Market and walked up a flight of stairs into a beauty salon called Shahnaz, intending to defy the traditional image of beauty in India. Cascading long hair was a trademark of a woman's femininity. My peers had already abandoned our mothers' style of parting their hair in the middle and tying it into single braids that stretched like ivy down their backs. Sometimes, if our mothers were feeling particularly sultry for a photograph, they swung their braids over their shoulders, like Bollywood heroines sometimes did. Today's women let their hair loose like a dark waterfall, an act of liberation. I usually wore my hair wavy and thick, free. Since I had been a child, I'd had it above my shoulders only once, when Nasheed Apa cut it into a bob.

I sat in my chair and told the manager, a woman named Sabeeha Shah, “Please cut it short, like a boy.” Although women rode scooters in the urban centers, I hadn't yet seen a woman on a motorcycle. I wanted my hair short enough that none of it peeked out the back of my helmet. I wanted to avoid attention on the road. And harassment. My hair fell to the floor with each snip, and I watched myself rid my identity of more than my hair. In Tantra, cutting the hair also amounted to shearing our egos.

Sabeeha asked me my birth date.

“June 7.”

“Seven. That's independent and unconventional.”

To some, that would by synonymous with stupid. Around the corner, I stepped into a man's world in the auto market to get my license plates made.
Kajal
lined my eyes, my effort not only to ward off the evil eye but also to express something feminine. I wondered what it meant in India to have power outside the home as a woman. Did it mean becoming a man?

It didn't matter much to me, as I sat behind Amit as he rode through the streets of Delhi, my Studds helmet secure on my head.

Amit had come by after work to pick me up at Khan Market. I had straddled his CBZ—Western style—and we careened through the crowded bazaar lanes outside Connaught Place to exchange my Studds helmet for one that fit. We roared to the Nike store, and I bought myself a Nike windbreaker. I felt strong behind him.

Amit, an educated, modern man, lived with his parents in India, like most single men and women. He told me that he had a woman he liked whom he had met working in Chandigarh, the city where Lucy, Esther, and I got our Kundalini lesson in the Rose Garden. But he wouldn't marry her because she came from a different caste that wouldn't meet his parents' approval.

We rode now in the darkness, the streets mostly empty, headed to the shrine of a famous Sufi saint, Nizamuddin Auliya, renowned for his generosity and compassion, always feeding his guests while he sometimes fasted. I was on my bike. Amit was on his bike. We skirted broken glass. We parked in a narrow alley and quietly entered the shrine.
Dupattas
were draped on the lattice. Beggars stretched out on the shrine marble. I did my Muslim
namaz
as Amit sat quietly beside me in meditation. My helmet sat beside me. I was so happy in my independence.

I had no itinerary except a plan to ride out of Delhi onto the Grand Trunk Highway toward the place where the clouds met the roads. I planned to veer off and head a different direction than Lucy, Esther, and I had followed, moving instead through the foothills of the Himalayas into a hill station called Shimla made famous by Rudyard Kipling and then on to Dharamsala, home to not only the Dalai Lama but also thousands of Tibetan Buddhists. For me, this motorcycle journey was a new birth. My stomach was tight because of the fear people had expressed to me. A friend, Ravi, told me danger lurked on the Grand Trunk Highway. “There is a murder every two days. I wouldn't do it.”

In my experience, to live in India was to live a lie. My mother taught me to change from my jeans and T-shirt to baggy
shalwar kameez
outfits while in flight to Bombay. From early on we hid the truths about ourselves to satisfy the quick judgments of relatives. I learned to be a chameleon so well my father told me I would make an excellent diplomat. But now I
realized that as a Tantrika I had a choice to accept myself as I was. I simply had to be strong in the face of judgment.

I hadn't accepted who I was during my first trip to India. This trip, I had learned with Lucy and Esther to accept myself without looking over to see what the
sabzi walla,
the vegetable seller, thought. It wasn't the
sabzi walla
who intimidated me. It was my own relatives.

On the eve of my departure for Dharamsala, I gazed at my image reflected back to me in the mirror. My Nike windbreaker and Gap knockoff cargo pants was my night suit. My haircut. My cheekbones. My eyes. I felt beautiful. I felt my own power, and I loved it. Choice, strength of will, personal expression, following one's dream, self-knowledge. I felt free.

In the early morning, as the blazing sun rose above India Gate, it was just me on my tiger, circumambulating the monument in homage to this place where I found my liberation. A man waved his arms in circular motions, exercising them as he walked. It was a glorious moment as the sun rose into the sky, a blaze of orange.

In Tantra, the perfect human being is supposed to express the fusion of male energy and female energy with
ananda,
or eternal bliss. Tantra is the union and harmony between the polarities of masculine and feminine. In Morgantown, it hadn't been enough to call rough-and-tumble girls “tomboys,” the nickname of my youth. Safiyyah had called them “heshes.” That was how I felt with my
kajal
and Studds helmet.

I pulled over after a few hours to sit down for chai. Two men, brothers who owned the chai stall, sat on a bench outside. When I sat down, one of the men admitted to me that when I pulled up his brother was betting him two hundred rupees that I was a man. But before he could close the deal, I had taken off my helmet.

At the end of my first day on the road, I had watched pigs and water buffalo jog across the road and learned meditation tricks from a hotel manager as we sat in a boat made out to look like a white swan. I turned off the Grand Trunk Highway into the parking lot for a hotel called King Fisher in Ambala.

It wasn't the serene respite that I wanted. A rumble of cars blared by the hotel. But if I didn't stop, I'd collapse. It was past sunset. I'd broken my rule not to drive in the dark. I sat in my room and meditated again on
the image of Durga on her tiger. What I'd learned was that the deities in Hinduism were a point of meditation through which we, as humble human beings, could aspire to some value each embodied. In the case of Durga and my motorcycle journey, I was trying to absorb some of the fearlessness of this goddess. The Buddhists, too, used this technique in their practice. In a meditation called
anusmrti,
they cultivated a vision of a deity. Using a practice called
atmotpatti,
they envisioned themselves as the deity. That's what I did as I sat on the soiled carpet in the King Fisher.

But what was I doing? Was I crazy? I had come near death with lorries passing by me, ready to crash into me with the slightest turn in their steering. A man pulled a horse-drawn cart right in front of me on the road to sit on the median and wait for the passing traffic. To understand India meant driving its roads. I saw a boy on the road today, blood spilling from his head. Near death there was no fear of death.