Tantrika (27 page)

Hatred had never spewed from his mouth or from that of my father. Both were religious Muslims, rational and fair men. Now, in the midst of this war that America was launching in retaliation for the World Trade Center attacks, I heard the voice of hatred coming from other circles of devout Muslims. And they weren't strangers. They were my relatives and their friends, preaching about the virtues of Islam and the fraternity and sorority of Muslims. One morning, about a hundred women gathered in a two-story house off a neat lane. They wore head scarves and sat cross-legged, listening to a woman guiding them through a translation of a Qur'anic surah. Inside a small room off to the side, about a dozen organizers of this Islamic educational organization sat on the floor, listening to a woman sitting on a bed. They were impassioned, like others, about the U.S. decision to bomb Afghanistan. They too prayed
duas
against the enemy in time of war.

One of them grabbed my elbow. “You must write about the Jewish conspiracy,” she pleaded. “They are evil. They want to destroy us.” I
furrowed my brows and grimaced, for the first time shedding my journalistic tolerance and getting visibly irritated at this rhetoric of hatred.

 

I went to Karachi, where I got a window into the bifurcated society that was Pakistan. Karachi was a crowded metropolis where I reported on the culture of hopelessness and helplessness that was driving record numbers of Pakistanis to suicide, even though the Qur'an warned the act was a one-way ticket to hell. The family of the man I married had called me crazy because of the depression I suffered after my marriage. I saw the irony in the fact that I was now slipping in and out of psych wards in the country of my wedding, very much empowered and not ashamed of an illness that should be treated, not judged.

Even now, though, I was being judged. I wrote a profile about Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, expressing my admiration for a man who dared to challenge traditional Islam by photographing himself with his pet dogs and drinking alcohol, both of which were deemed
haram,
or illegal, in Muslim culture. I got an angry missive from the cousin, now settled in America, who had told me not to ride a bicycle when I was eighteen years old. “Everyone in Pakistan knows about Musharraf's drinking, but even Islam also says to cover up things like that, as it is between Allah and him.” He had already attacked me once for taking one of my adult cousins with me for my tea with the Taliban. “You don't mix with these kinds of people if you want to live in peace in Pakistan.” He was arguing for hypocrisy over truth and fear over action. Yet his argument hit an emotional chord within me because I knew all too intimately the path of deception this society would prefer over the truth about itself. I sat quietly in my hotel room at the Karachi Sheraton Hotel and Towers and wept over the lies and cowardice that defined this culture in which I was rooted.

I saw the other side of Karachi when I reported on the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in this Muslim land. I saw a side to Pakistan and the Muslim world that I didn't know existed, and I felt connected to it because it so resembled the world I had come to know in the West, traipsing through Eighteenth Street bars, dance clubs, and restaurants in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood and zipping around in yel
low cabs in Manhattan. A nineteen-year-old Casanova told me about getting busted by local police when he took a girlfriend to a hut at a place called French Beach. A friend of a relative suggested that I talk to his twenty-something son to find out more. I met the son, and he invited me to join him and his friends at French Beach. I knew a beach existed in Karachi. During the trip of 1983, I had plunged into the waters off Karachi with my relatives, but only to my knees, to where I had rolled up my
shalwar.

On a late Sunday morning, I hired a Eurocar for the trek to this place called French Beach. We drove out of Karachi past the port on a busy road crowded with stalls and traffic until we got to the hut, not far from a nuclear power plant down the beach. I saw two figures in the water below a cascade of boulders. I climbed over the boulders, kicking off my black sandals. I approached the water and saw that it was my new friend, along with a man I hadn't yet met, both wading carefree in the water. I turned back to tell the driver he could go and waded into the Arabian Sea fully clad in my mother's black pants and her gray sweater. The water enveloped me, and a smile broke out over my face. When I looked at the stranger before me, I felt something remarkable. Whenever I turned toward him and gazed into his eyes, a smile crept across not only my face, but also my heart. I wondered about this recognition that transpired between us. The Tantric teachings said that contact between the sexes was experienced in so many ways from the glance of an eye to intimacy. Everything preceding intimacy was dedicated to raising consciousness and relieving tensions. Consciousness was definitely raised, as we spent the afternoon together.

The next day, my friend Danny flew into town for a day of reporting. It had been so long since I'd seen him, almost two years, although we had continued to e-mail to each other about the bizarre nature of our travels. He had become the
Journal'
s South Asia Bureau Chief, politely asking me if I was interested in the job before raising his hand. I never visited him and his wife, Mariane, in Bombay, however, because the city was such a congested and depressing memory from my childhood days.

The days were over when I would travel to parties with an entourage. So, even though my new friend from the day before had invited me over
to his house with other friends, I made plans to go to dinner with Danny at a restaurant called Haveli, the Urdu word for a large house like our Latif Manzil in Jaigahan. When Danny arrived at the Sheraton, we were so happy to see each other, embracing in the hugs of friends who had scraped their knees on the same playground. We talked through dinner of the possibilities for books that he could write. Mariane called from Paris during dinner, and Danny spoke with uninterrupted affection to her. I told Danny we could get together with a friend I'd just met.

“A guuuuuuuy?” Danny knew me too well.

The stranger whom I had met the day before had told me to call him if I was free. I called him now to see what he might be doing. He said he could pick us up from the restaurant in ten minutes. Danny smiled. Looked like he would be my chaperone for the night. “Okay, what'll be our sign for me to go?” he asked.

“I'll go like this,” I showed him, running my fingers through my hair.

The three of us returned to my room at the Sheraton, where I pulled out a water bottle of Scotch that my friend's friend had brought me, thinking I actually drank hard liquor.

“Well, I think I'll be going,” Danny said awhile later, stretching his legs.

I was relieved to see my new friend didn't move.

We were alone. I suggested that we try again to see if I could inhale a cigarette, something we had practiced the day before. We sat on the floor across from each other. I could feel a magnetic pull bringing us closer together.

“I have another way we can try,” my new friend suggested.

He leaned toward me and brought his lips gently toward me, resting them like the gentlest flutter upon my lips. I was supposed to inhale his breath. I held my breath instead.

As I was writing my article about the secret world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Pakistan, I'd forgotten the word for “illegal sex” in Islam.

I called my new friend to ask him.
“Zina,”
he told me, and I scribbled the word on my notebook cover, perchance above his name.

We weren't married, which we both knew would make our sex illegal in the eyes of Islam and the state of Pakistan. But he talked to me about getting married. “I want us to start making babies right away,” he told me. He was a man unlike any I thought I'd find and, certainly, wasn't looking to find. He was not only dashingly handsome but also smart, navigating through balance sheets and privatization efforts, working on Karachi's Wall Street. And when we gazed into each other's eyes, I was reminded of something I'd learned in Hyderabad. The doors of heaven opened to a husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes. I told him. He smiled and looked into my eyes even more deeply.

Ramadan started. We found ourselves driving through Karachi as the hour approached to break fast for the first day of Ramadan. He planned to go to his khala's house. Unexpectedly, he invited me to join him. “Is it okay?” I asked him, my hand always seeming to stroke his arm as he shifted gears. I came from a family in Pakistan where none of my cousin-brothers could bring a woman home except as his bride.

He assured me it would be fine. I played Ping-Pong on the dining table with his young cousins and helped his khala put dishes out for
ifthar,
the meal with which we break fast.

I knew the meaning of
zina
with him for the first time on the fourth day of Ramadan in a cove that was the shore off the Arabian Sea waters where our gaze first locked.

Our legs entangled around each other. We looked into each other's eyes. It was a coincidence, but we eased into the mystical posture encouraged by the Tantric texts. The gods and goddesses made love this way. But I didn't think they got sand up their
muladhara
chakras. It was the sea breeze that clothed us, and the boulders that were our walls. The waves of the Arabian Sea crashed behind us. The stars were our canopy, as they had been mine in Latif Manzil. I was so in love with him. And he continued to gaze deeply into my eyes, writing poetry to me about his love for me.

While the world made war, we made love. U.S. planes dropped bombs just about every day over Afghanistan. I didn't understand this war. I didn't accept President Bush's amorphous enemy called “al-Qaeda.” I did know that each day I fell more deeply in love with this man who pressed me against the mirrors in the Karachi Sheraton elevators to kiss me deeply. “I've met the woman I'm going to marry!” he yelled into his phone one day, answering a phone call from a friend as we got onto the elevators.

He introduced me to a world in which it seemed my dualities could coexist. For once, I didn't have to choose between them. He took me every night to play volleyball at Alliance Française. One night, we stopped by his house first so he could get a change of clothes. I was nervous about going inside. I would be meeting his parents for the first time. I was wearing pants and a T-shirt. And strangely enough, we were with a former girlfriend of my new boyfriend. She was thin and bouncy. He was relaxed and comfortable as the three of us walked inside. I was in shock that he so freely walked into his home with a former girlfriend and a new girlfriend, but I tried my best to be at ease. I talked to his parents with warmth, wondering all the while if I was breaking a taboo.

We started visiting his house regularly. I didn't know if he had told his parents about our relationship, but I figured they must know. I so appreciated that we could be honest about it. I was wary about getting involved again with a Pakistani, but my boyfriend's life didn't seem impinged by values separate from mine. I was so touched when I saw his father sitting next to his mother, holding her hands gently.

One night his father asked me, “What do you see as your identity?”

I was taken back to that awful moment after my wedding when the father of the man I married told me my identity. I slipped back into the present moment, impressed that my boyfriend's father was so curious about that which I had much reflected upon. “I am a Muslim born in India and raised in America. The pulse of my ancestors courses through me, but I have values of modern-day America,” I told him. I knew I hadn't expressed myself well, but I was breathless in wonder that I had even tried to express my own identity with some clarity.

It was Friday. My boyfriend got off work early for
jummah namaz,
Friday prayer.

He worshiped instead with me. Husbands and wives were allowed to kiss while they fasted, as long as they didn't cross a line. “Are we allowed to do this?” I asked. First of all, we weren't married. Second, we crossed the line.

 

We went on a road trip to a place where blind dolphins swim.

We crossed the Indus River to camp upon its banks, guests of one of the feudal lords of New Jatoi, a village tucked into the deep interior of the Sindh province in central Pakistan. The canopy of stars under which we fell asleep beside a gentle fire transformed the morn into a clear blue sky with petals of clouds whisking overhead. When I awakened, the Indus River flowed before me, a sleepy current of brown water washing against rocky banks. I stretched my body into a cartwheel on these shores.

My boyfriend wasn't happy that I flew upside down in the air in front of the gunmen with Kalashnikovs who were our escorts.

“You don't do that here.”

It was the first time he had drawn a line for me. I studied his face to see if he was serious. He was serious. I felt hurt.

I swallowed my hurt and went for a walk along the banks to reflect. The Indus River was the last place I expected to find myself but the first place that I had planned to go when I had embarked on my journey to the subcontinent of my ancestors two and a half years earlier. The mysterious Tantric practice was said to have sprung from goddess worship in the ancient Indus Valley civilization, India's first major civilization, born on the banks of this mighty Indus River. From here, historians and archeologists say, Tantra wove its way into Hinduism and spread to Tibet, China, and other parts of Asia with Buddhism. Now, I was here at the wellspring of the civilization with the first documented presence of Tantric teachings. Along the banks of the Indus River, Tantra taught that disciplined minds could reach liberation through sexual intercourse, sensual living, and other joys that would give disciples a boundless ecstasy. For
me, it was a place where I had to spend the night on a separate
charpai
from my love so that the guards wouldn't be offended.