Authors: Asra Nomani
I hit the road again for a place called Chintpurni, weaving along a back road as I passed a glorious splash of lake. Darkness descended, but I kept riding.
Smoke from a fire in the fields filled the sky. It was heaven on earth. I slowed down for a lizard crossing the road. Piglets danced at street's edge. A train passed me. I was the motorcyclist that I saw from the train door on the journey from Chennai to Lucknow. I was what I wanted to become. I saw a woman in a
shalwar
riding a bike. She didn't know it, but she gave me silent moral support.
After I pulled in safely to Chintpurni, I stared at an image of Durga on her tiger at the STD/ISD/PCO, acronyms dear to this traveler's heart, Subscriber Trunk Dialing/International Subscriber Dialing/Public Call Office. She sat sidesaddle with eyeliner accenting her eyes. Her feet were laced with the artistry of
mehndi,
the temporary henna tattoo Madonna popularized in the West. I wondered if her back ached as mine did. Even my butt ached a little. I wondered if Durga's butt ever hurt, riding that tiger of hers into battle. Sati's feet supposedly fell here. Pilgrims flocked
here because they believed that Ma Chintpurni cleared away the worries of any devotee who visited her.
I slipped into an STD booth. I hadn't called home until now because I hadn't wanted to admit to my mother that I was riding a motorcycle alone. She hadn't heard from me in so many days, she knew I was up to something.
“Be careful,” she told me gently, but she said nothing to dissuade me. My parents always let me fly.
Two middle-aged men and a young man came inside and sat down at a table. After I got off the phone, the men invited me to join them and told me the story of how they had walked ten hours to get to Chintpurni. I had probably passed them on my ride here. One of the older men promised Shakti Ma sixteen years ago that he would walk to her if she gave him the strength to win a lawsuit at work. He won the lawsuit in 1984 but forgot the promise. He said, “Ma didn't forget.”
He said she roused him awake while he slept two nights before and told him to fulfill his promise. He told his best friend, who agreed to set out with him on this pilgrimage. The devotee's grown son was with him. The next morning, he planned to travel the one and a half miles to the Shakti pith by doing prostrations. He said he'd allow me to join him.
“Jai Ma”
rang outside on speakers in the early morn before the sun rose.
He wore maroon MacGregor shorts marked XXXXL. We set out just after 6
A.M
., the father limping from his walk the day before. The sun rose as we passed a sign for NIT Computer Institute, a reminder of the modern day. The father slipped out of his
chappals,
sandals. He crouched and splayed his body out straight on the road, stretching his arms over his head, his bald spot staring at the sky. His friend used a small rock to mark a line in the road beside his outstretched fingers. He lifted himself up and stood up, stepping toward the line his friend had marked. He crouched and lay outstretched again. A man walked by and yelled encouragement. “
Hai,
Mataji!”
He panted before he replied. “
Hai,
Mataji!” He continued with his prostrations, over and over again. Sweat dripped from his forehead, sit
ting on the tip of his nose. He spoke to Mataji. “
Jai
Ma! Call me! Give me shakti!”
He took his shirt off, his bulging belly squeezed only under a white
bunyain,
a cotton undershirt.
His friend pointed out the glory of the rising sun to us. He turned to me. “Do you have the sun in America?”
Water splashed against his
bunyain
as our devotee lay in a puddle. He picked himself out of the puddle. A dog with a stubby tail drank from it. He walked past Neha Beauty Parlor with its advertisement as a “Treasue of Beauti treatments cum training centre.” We went past stands selling the temple staple, including more black plastic guns. A sign over one stall made me smile. “Get a key ring with your lovely name.”
His friend exhaled, “
Jai
Mataji!”
Wet dirt clung to the hair on our devotee's arms. We reached the steps leading up to the
mandir.
Our devotee told a sadhu reclining on the stairs his story about his unfulfilled promise to Shakti Ma. The guru listened and agreed, “She doesn't forget.”
The devotee continued. The front of his
bunyain
was soaked through. A friend recognized him. He asked him if he fell. Not quite.
We bought
prasad,
an offering of flowers, at a stall in front of a sign for “Krishana Prashad Bhandar.” His friend started marking his progress with just his foot. Our devotee smiled now, glowing from his sweat. We crossed the threshold into the
mandir.
He had fulfilled his promise. The
mandir
was under a tree. We slipped with the flow of the crowd in front of the shrine. Two eyes stared out from under colorful
dupattas.
That was supposed to be the Shakti Ma we came to see. A pandit standing inside the shrine explained to me, “Shakti Ma has the power of Shiva lingam.” We offered our flowers. A man took them and guided us to step aside to let new devotees bask in Shakti Ma's aura. I sat down on cool tile, trying not to discount the power of this Shakti pith by the rushed moment in front of the deity. I hoped to absorb the energy of this site sacred to Hindus through quiet meditation. Just as I crossed my legs beneath me, a pandit found our small group. He muttered a prayer, handed us sweets as our
prasad,
our gift blessed by the goddess, and opened his hand, looking
for a donation for his prayer. This place wasn't inspiring much in me. I felt conned.
I found out that cute girls who seemed to be venturing out for school were actually going up the hill to beg for money from pilgrims. One tagged after me as we descended the hill. She was beautiful with dark skin.
She glared at me. “If you don't give me money, Shakti Ma will curse you.”
I laughed at her threat and suggested she didn't have to be so dark spirited in her begging. I gave her money with a smile. One of her young friends grabbed the money from her hand. She tagged after me for more. My pilgrim friends shooed them away, although I would rather have talked to these girls. All of us returned to our hotel the regular way, on our feet. Back at the hotel, the father admired my Nike windbreaker. Trying to learn to be selfless, I gave it to him. It was sunny as I headed out again, this time on to a temple called Jawalamukhi. Boulders and purple flowers lined the road, and I passed a storefront with a sign for Shakti Studio. She seemed to show up in the most unlikely places.
The temple sat in the south of the Kangra Valley. It was the temple to Jawalamukhi, the goddess of light. From the distance, I saw the golden spire that topped the temple. A wealthy devotee had built it.
This was where Sati's tongue supposedly fell. Legend said Jawala Ma took form in the perpetual flames called
jyotis
that sprang out of nine different rocks in the temple. This was the first
mandir
that I ventured to enter without an escort. No one stopped me. I went into a tiny square chamber where a pandit muttered a mantra and waved a flame. Natural gas was said to come out of a copper pipe that shot out a tiny blue flame. This flame was worshiped as the manifestation of Jawalamukhi. I walked around the pit and touched a corner of the temple from which a flame burst out. There was another flame in a pit in the center of the room. A man gave me white kernels for my donation. He put Hindi newspapers and green leaves over the fire. A chant broke out.
As I left the temple, I asked for the relatives of the pandit family whom I'd met at Naina Devi. I was guided to a narrow store that sold the symbols of
prasad,
bright red fabrics, goddess pictures, coconuts, and
sweets. The pandit's son began talking with me. He practiced Tantra. A baba came by and told the young man, “You should be married.”
“But you want to find your Shakti,” I told him.
At that, he confided that he was a Shiva plotting the kidnapping of his Shakti. He was in love with a woman who came on pilgrimage from another town, but her parents had rejected his marriage proposal. He belonged to the highest caste, Brahmins, but he came from the wrong caste for them. They had arranged her marriage to someone else. A friend came from Delhi to help the pandit's son carry out a plan to whisk the woman away from home. She was party to the plot. But our Shiva had doubts in himself. “I am not strong.”
This was modern-day romance in India, the assertion of choice through kidnappings. There was so little personal liberty here. I wished him well.
I hit the road again, cold from having given away my Nike jacket. The warmth during the day had felt so wonderful. Now, as day turned to night, I passed rocks and boulders, making a hairpin turn. I rode through a tunnel, so confining and so cool. My bike stalled when I stopped to read directions, and then it fell over. A cow with a full belly and dark eyes came up the hill. It was fall number 4, not that I was counting. The owner of the cow came running out to help me. The cow sniffed a yellow flag and a bush before walking away uninterested.
On the road to Dharamsala, I rode through Kangra, once the seat of the Chand Dynasty, which ruled over the princely state of Kangra. I went to find the famous temple of Bajreshwari Devi. Muslim visitors of the past had a different mission than me. The temple had so much legendary wealth that just about every Muslim invader took the effort to swing through here. A Turkish invader, Mahmud of Ghazni, supposedly stole a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels in 1009. Another ruler, Firoz Shah Tughlaq, ransacked it in 1360. It rebounded. By the time the Muslim emperor Jehangir's reign came, the temple was paved in plates of pure silver.
Lonely Planet
said the temple was in the bazaar at the end of a serpentine series of alleys flanked by stalls hawking
prasad.
I ended up asking directions at a bus stop where an eager young student wanted to practice his English. He told me to forget the Shakti pith.
Come see his village's Shiva temple. Why not? I spent my day with a village baba and the disciples he protected from Tantric spells. He looked younger than his forty-three years, his uncombed hair framing his easy smile. Mortal women weren't allowed into his inner sanctum, plastered with images of gods and goddesses. He took ash from his
havan,
a fire pit, put it in the palm of his hand, and had a woman disciple drink the ashen water from his hand. As I headed out for Dharmasala, I followed his instructions and dipped the ring finger of my right hand into the ash and put a
teeka
on my forehead. He guided me, too, to drink ashen water that he poured into my right hand. It tasted wretched.
This motorcycle trip through the Shakti piths, ending with this taste of ash as a gesture of hospitality, was important not so much for the places I visited but for the simple fact that I made the journey safely and peacefully. Bandits didn't rob me on the Grand Trunk Highway. Pandits didn't drug and rape me in darkened corners of Hindu temples. On the contrary, I, a Muslim, was greeted with hospitality and enthusiasm for the curiosity I expressed about this Hindu culture foreign to me.
As I nosed my sleek Splendor away from my newest friends, I turned around one last time to wave good-bye to the half-dozen children who had led me through the narrow passageways between their houses to show me their village.
“Ta-ta!” they yelled at me.
“Ta-ta!” I yelled back, happy to adopt their colloquialism inherited from British colonialists.
I
RODE PAST SUNSET
, again breaking my rule not to ride in the dark. The road through Dharamsala was a cluttered bazaar. I pulled over but didn't even get off my motorcycle.
“A sweater, please,
bhai sahib,”
I said, referring to the sweater
walla
with a respectful honorific for brother. It was something that I had learned from Dadi. Always try to relate to men as either my brother or father to deflect any connection to me as a sexual being.
I continued on the road, winding around the mountain, wondering when I might reach this place called McLeod Ganj, up the mountain. Here, too, I didn't have a plan. I had a few names of both Buddhist representatives of the Dalai Lama and regular Tibetan citizens, but I hadn't called ahead to let anyone know I was coming. I wanted to leave with some lessons from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism, because it seemed to express itself in the modern day with more of the light of spirituality than the darkness of Hindu Tantra's black magic, but I was leaving my experiences and lessons to fate.
When I arrived, I rode past a garbage dump. It wasn't what I had imagined. I drove through town to the Himachal Pradesh guest house but decided to stay instead across the road at a guest house run by a Tibetan. I had taken a liking to the Dalai Lama. When I had returned to Delhi from Pakistan, I had gone to Buddha Park for a teaching by the Dalai Lama. It was a hot and sunny morning, the Dalai Lama sitting on a dais in front of thousands of disciples. Early in his talk, he spotted an elderly woman in the front, chin dropped to her chest and head slightly askew in a wheelchair. The sun was emerging from behind clouds, and the Dalai Lama gestured for an aide to go to the woman and stand with an umbrella over her to protect her from the sun. This act seemed to be the embodiment of the gentle compassion that we should show each other. When the Dalai Lama finished, he shook the hands of elderly
women and monks who lined up to see him off, leaving each one of them laughing and smiling in his path. Later, as I sat for the evening session, I looked for a man whose name I had gotten from Mrs. Amy Wen, a dear family friend in Morgantown and the mother of my childhood friend Pauline. Mrs. Wen's niece had married a nephew of the Dalai Lama, and the nephew advised me in an e-mail exchange to find his eldest uncle. Somehow, I had ended up sitting beside him, a distinguished-looking man in a jacket. I'd told him about my project.
He had told me, “Read the sutras. Read
The Way of the Bodhisattva.”
I'd never heard of it, but I plucked it off the bookshelf at Khan Market and read in iambic pentameter this Tibetan Buddhist classic on how to be compassionate.
I didn't know what I'd learn in McLeod Ganj. Would I learn from the Dalai Lama? He was supposed to be in town. It was Halloween when I arrived. I daydreamed about passing out candy in one of the Tibetan schools. I felt as if I was living a masquerade party, pretending to be a great female spiritual seeker. A monkey walked by my veranda at the guest house, delighting me in the surprises of India.
In my walk through town, I noticed advertisements posted for Tantra teachings by Dudjom Tersar Ngondro, also known as Rigdzin Namkha Gyamtso Rinpoche, to be held on the rooftop of the Tenwang Hotel. He even had a Web address, www.flamingjewel.org. Flaming Jewel. Sounded dicey. He was born in a nomadic highland of Tibet and was supposed to be an incarnate of a hunter of treasures hidden by Padmasambhava and his Tibetan consort, Yeshe Tsogyel. I ventured up to the rooftop and stumbled onto a young man with long sleek black hair and a golden robe sitting on a veranda. I chatted with him, thinking he might be our teacher but not knowing. He asked, “Where are you from?”
I told him about my travels from America. “And you?” I asked, able to come up with little else in striking conversation.
“Tibet,” he said, as if I should know.
I figured it was time to join the class. A young woman with a mane of dark hair made room for me beside her. She picked up the brochure I put on the ground beside me. It had the guru's photo on it. Turned out it wasn't a respectful gesture to put a guru's picture on the ground. She had gone to
a cave where Princess Mandarava had supposedly meditated on the road from Delhi. I had stopped there with Lucy and Esther on our ride back to Delhi from the Kalachakra initiation. The daughter of a king, Mandarava refused the many offers of marriage that came her way, wanting instead to meditate and retreat in the forest. One day she met Padmasambhava when the yogi who came into her kingdom. They went into meditation together. The king was angry and had Padmasambhava burned in a fire. The yogi emerged unscathed and withdrew with Princess Mandarava to caves that surround a lake now called Rewalsar Lake. The king of Tibet, King Sron Btsan Sgampo, heard about the wisdom and marvels known to Padmasambhava and called him to Tibet to spread his dharma. He is said to have left for Tibet from Rewalsar. Some consider it the most sacred site of Buddhism in Himachal Pradesh. Legend says that the spirit of Guru Padmasambhava still lives on the islands floating in the lake.
Esther, Lucy, and I had passed the base of the mountain, where we had once dodged an avalanche and wound our way around the mountain to Rewalsar. The lake was now a collection of Pepsi banners and guest houses. We had circled the lake counterclockwise and gotten caught in a rainstorm when we saw a sign that said, “Princess Mandarava's Cave.” An elderly woman with a shaved head waved us into a small alleyway to a doorway. I entered a small room and then through another doorway stepped into a room with cave walls. The woman was a nun at one of the
gompas
there, taking care of Princess Mandarava's cave. Her Hindi wasn't fluent. My Tibetan, nonexistent. She gestured to all of the photos of various lamas, it seemed to test to see if I knew their names. I knew not a one, though one looked like the incarnate I'd met at Ki from Karnataka. I fumbled an answer and was relieved she seemed pleased. I sat and meditated in Princess Mandarava's cave and imagined the presence of this spirit of yesteryear.
Back on our rooftop retreat, I asked the woman next to me, “Do you want to be a
dakini?”
She looked at me. “Who wouldn't want to be a
dakini?”
The man with whom I'd just had my uncomfortable chitchat stepped forward as our incarnated teacher. I felt like an idiot. We slipped into a
lesson. “Visualize on the right your father, on the left, your mother. In front of you is your greatest enemy, worst enemy. The reason we visualize our worst enemy in front of us is that this is a path of patience. Our parents have been inconceivably kind to us. They cannot be objects for patience. They are people who are kind to us. They let us practice. If there is somebody in our life who harms us, and we are angry, then we have lost a great opportunity. Our own worst enemy is considered to be kind to us. Imagine all sentient beings at our side and behind us. We do this to benefit them.”
I thought of an oppressive man that I loathed. I tried to send him the same affection I felt for my mother and father. It wasn't easy, but I made the effort.
A place called the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives was a magnet for the Westerners who come here to study Tantric Tibetan Buddhism because it hosted daily classes taught in English. I sat in a morning session. It was an earnest group of students asking long questions with many independent clauses. I wasn't sure I could stomach these teachings. But I found my way into the office of the Venerable Achok Rinpoche, director of the Library. He was a robust, bespectacled man, sitting behind a desk in a neat office. I wanted to know more about Padmasambhava, known to many as Guru Rinpoche, and his consort, Princess Mandarava.
Library Rinpoche was surprised to hear their names.
“You know about them?”
I nodded.
“Guru Rinpoche looked outrageous,” he said. “I would say he was a crazy human being. She must have been a crazy human being, too.”
I wanted to know if there were any Padmasambhava aspirants among the Buddhist adepts of the modern day, such as Library Rinpoche. At the Kalachakra initiation at the Ki
gompa,
the Dalai Lama had led us through such an intimate meditation with a consort sitting in a mandala, I wondered, as blasphemous as it may seem to think such things of a monk, if he had a consort. I hedged my curiosity with Library Rinpoche.
“Would you want a consort?” I asked him.
“If I have a consort, enjoyment is there, but I might have to live with squabbling, hate, and jealousy. It may not be easy for me, I would say. Padmasambhava, and also Tantric saints, had sexual practice. It didn't affect his emotions. He was still a free man. I'm afraid I'm scared. I have enough to go through. It is easy to strike me.”
He had left his family at the age of three. The goal of the practice is a divine state of enlightenment. “I didn't know if it was attainable.” He remembers his mother and father squabbled. “Relations between people have to be honest.”
He continued, “Whether you have honesty or not, that question must be answered by yourself. The divine knows exactly how much you're honest.” He reflected on the emotions that interrupt relationships. “If you can rationalize and concentrate, you can control hate and jealousy. These are the worst traits.”
Padmasambhava and Princess Mandarava faced great humiliation and harassment from her father. “They just didn't care. You get most crazy.”
Would he seek the Tantric path? “I don't practice Tantra. I have too much attachment to the privileges of my position.”
It was true. To fully adhere to the Tantric path required a certain nonattachment to
samsara,
the worldly life that I symbolically left when I drove out of New York, even if it was with a moving van packed with belongings. “At least you are honest,” I said.
He laughed. “I have a few good virtues.”
I wondered aloud, “What does it take to learn Tantra?”
Across his desk, he answered, “You have to be a little crazy. Are you crazy?”
I nodded. Riding alone from Delhi to Dharamsala on a motorcycle certainly qualified me as a little bit crazy.
To me, Library Rinpoche was definitely a little crazy. He looked at me with his crooked smile as we talked about searching on the Tantric path. “Maybe you'll help me?”
I hoped he wasn't serious. He answered the question with another crooked smile, perhaps sensing my discomfort with such a proposition, and offered me an assurance he was content on the celibate path. “I'm not really looking.”
The evening set in. He said, “Will you give a prayer for me?” That was a cue for the door. I said my surah from the Qur'an for protection and blew a
phoonk,
a breath of protection, in his direction.
Volleyball was my ultimate release, the play that had taught me so much behind the Lincoln Memorial after my divorce.
I was so happy to find volleyball on a blacktop court on the campus of the Library. I made a twenty-something friend, Kelsang Tsering, who worked in the Library. He was a classic new generation of Tibetan Buddhist born in India, singing Bollywood songs and practicing his English on Westerners. He joined me on the court, and I played with ten other young Tibetan Buddhist men. I loved the game even if this was the gentlest game of volleyball I'd ever played. The Tibetan boys only hit hard once. And even then they giggled. I went for a pass. I felt a rip in my right knee, followed by an excruciating pain. I hobbled to the side. My knee locked, and I couldn't put any pressure on it. I remembered something my friend Kent had told me. “Don't ever let them see you in pain,” he'd said one afternoon when I stumbled as we left a New York Yankees baseball game.
In retrospect, maybe that was ego talking, an important element of competition, and maybe not appropriate to recreational play in the middle of the Himalayas. If I hadn't pretended to be so strong, I could have gone straight to the hospital. Instead, I was about to endure a painful dharma lesson. I sat on the side until all the men cleared out after the last game was over. Kelsang invited me over for dinner. His cousin was cooking. We hobbled together through the Library dormitories. I couldn't even contemplate going up the mountain to my guest house. I decided to take the risk with this stranger and spend the night in his dormitory room. I slept not one moment. Kelsang slept peacefully on the floor below. It reminded me of the nights I had lain awake in emotional anguish while the man I married slept calmly beside me. I tried to awaken my new friend but failed. I tried to meditate through my pain.
By morning, my knee had swollen into a balloon. I winced from the shooting pain that flew through me. Kelsang got a taxi to take me up the hill to McLeod Ganj. I resorted to my strategy to go into five-star hotels when I needed help. The road was so bumpy I wept from the pain. I
limped into the Surya Resorts. Kelsang left me in the lobby to go to work. I crumbled into a chair, weeping from the pain. A Thai woman from a tour group studied me sympathetically and gently handed me Tiger Balm. Another taxi came. The manager told a dark-skinned, scrawny Indian man to accompany me to the hospital, and I went back down the hill again, tears to accompany me on this trip.
This stranger carried me into the Tibetan Delek Hospital. I knew this hospital. I had come here the day before to visit the doctor whom I had met at the Kalachakra, tending to the boy who had just had a seizure.
I had asked the doctor, “Do you practice Tantra?”
He had looked at me from behind his desk. “I don't practice Tantra,” he said. “I am still not compassionate enough.”
That was hard to fathom from a man who spent his days healing refugees, monks, and children, but his reflection made me contemplate the extent of personal growth I had to achieve before aiming for such noble pursuits as personal enlightenment and divine love.
I couldn't even bite my lip through my own pain.