Tantrika (30 page)

“It is. I think I missed it.”

Her eyes widened. She sent me in the Eurocar on John and Steve's nightly ride back to the Sheraton. A police escort followed me up the stairs to the night counter at Sani's. I prayed he wouldn't stand right beside me.

“A pregnancy test,” I asked the clerk. I considered buying all the tests on the shelves but left with just one. Mariane waited at home in
anticipation. I was nervous. Scared. I opened the box. We studied the instructions. She forced me to leave my seat on the sofa and venture into her bathroom. The drops fell. I returned with the Band Aid–sized test. We watched a pink line come across. “It's negative,” I sighed. Then with only my expressed relief as a pause, the next line came across making a very distinguishable cross, a positive result.

“You're pregnant!” Mariane yelled. I was dazed when Mariane started laughing hysterically. She covered up her face, apologizing unnecessarily. “I can't wait to see the look on John Bussey's face,” she said, continuing her gales of laughter. I had to laugh, too. It was the best response we could have had.

I had been pregnant, then, when Danny was kidnapped, and spent the first month of my child's creation trying to find terrorists. I didn't have any of the symptoms of morning sickness or fatigue. How could I, in the face of horrors more awful than hormonal imbalances? A Muslim scholar in Islamabad had told me that women were
jihadis
from the time of conception to the time of delivery, waging a battle for their child's health. I didn't know what to do. Mariane was clear in her vision for me. “I don't think everyone who gets pregnant should keep their baby. It's not that. But you'll be a beautiful mother. You must keep the baby.”

I told my boyfriend the next night. “I'm carrying your child.”

He stared back in silence. I should have made the first words from his mouth his last. “I have to go.” He told me he had to pick up dinner from his nani's house for his mother.

“You have to go?” I screamed. “I tell you something like this, and your response is that you have to go? Get someone else to pick up the dinner from your nani's house. Skip dinner!”

“I can't. I'll be back.”

He left. Downstairs, they couldn't believe it. I invented that he was picking up
biryani
from his grandmother's house. In my mind, such an important mission had to be for a dish of feasts like
biryani.
He returned, still stunned. He couldn't talk about the baby. And, again, he had to leave quickly. “I have work tomorrow.”

We talked over the phone into the night. He was inarticulate and
frustrated me. I couldn't forgive his decision to leave me to pick up dinner from his nani. It seemed a warning to me of things to come. As if I needed any more warnings.

“You're pushing me against a wall,” he shouted at me. “I don't want this baby. I don't want it this way. I didn't really love you. It was just about the sex.” I couldn't believe my ears. I hung up the phone on him.

He sent me an e-mail, repeating himself like a mantra. He didn't want the baby. He didn't want it this way.

I remembered a woman I'd met in Delhi over a year ago before I embarked on my motorcycle ride through the Himalayan foothills. She wore tight white jeans with pink flowers embroidered, stretching up the right calf up to the right pocket.

She was the tall and flamboyant Brazilian wife of a diplomat in the embassy of Denmark, long-legged and slender with a long mane of thick black hair. She paid no attention to the taxi
wallas
assembled at the corner of Khan Market, staring at her as she glided by them. As we sat, first at a friend's bookstore in Khan Market and then at the Yellow Brick Restaurant at the Hotel Ambassador, she espoused breathlessly her views on motherhood and Buddhism. She had twin teenage sons. She was a great admirer of the peace activist Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in Burma and pulled out her biography from her purse.

“Being a mother is the ultimate expression of oneness with the universe,” she said. “To love a child is the greatest exercise in unconditional love. To leave a child to the forces of the universe is the greatest exercise in nonattachment. You could not separate from your child unless you believed your child was one with the universe.”

I understood the awesome truth that this baby chose me to be its mother. My boyfriend had told me that he didn't want me to continue the pregnancy. This forced me to ask myself whether or not I did. I turned to the written word. When asked about coitus interruptus, called
azl
in Arabic, the Prophet Muhammad was said to have declared that it was lawful for individuals to do as they will, but if God intended for a child to be born, the child would be born.

My boyfriend told me he would visit me around 9
P.M
. I tried to look nice. Mariane, a devout Buddhist, sat upstairs chanting. I sat beside her. I
was distraught, watching the time slip by without a word from my boyfriend.

Her Buddhism was a different branch from the one I had been studying the last two years. Instead of internal meditation, she chanted, her eyes focused on a scroll with a special mantra written in Japanese and Sanskrit, representing the highest ideals of Buddhahood. I had joined Mariane on the third day after Danny's disappearance, sitting slightly behind her every day. Now, as I waited for my boyfriend, we chanted to again overcome fear and to surround Danny with strength.

It was on the Sunday morning after Mariane and Danny's wedding at a chateau in Normandy that I'd first uttered the words she chanted,
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”
They represented the ideals of loving and compassion written about in a scripture called the Lotus Sutra. I was sharing a room with a friend of Mariane's, Rebecca, a pretty and tall blond woman whose striking good looks had the attention of several men at the wedding. She invited me to chant with her. I walked into a quiet corner past the grassy lawn on which I had led the children and adults through picnic games. Mariane and Danny had giggled as they ran down the lawn with their legs tied together in the three-legged race.

Rebecca and I sat on a stone bench, and she pulled out the small scroll that she used when she was traveling. She wrote the chant in red pen in my address book and chanted slowly so I could keep up.

I raised my hands together beside Mariane as we sat together in Karachi, uttering the same words. Mariane told me again she wanted me to have the baby because she believed in me as a mother. “Danny would be so happy.”

The toll of the mystery of Danny's whereabouts was starting to kill us.

“This is a matter of life and death,” she said to me with a clear gaze. “If Danny dies, I die.”

“That's why we have to win,” I said.

“I have no other choice,” she said.

I watched the clock turn past 11
P.M
. I swallowed my pride once again, locked the door to my bedroom, embarrassed to call my boyfriend, and dialed his mobile number. He answered his mobile. “Where are you?” I asked, trying to sound as calm as I could. My voice trembled.

“At a friend's party.”

“A friend's party?” I answered, my voice cracking from the pain. What friend?

“A friend of my ex-fiancée's sister.”

“You told me you were going to be here at 9
P.M
. And you're at a party?” I spoke through my anguish, my voice cracking even more. He talked about obligations. About being polite. He finally offered an explanation that seemed plausible. His parents weren't allowing him to visit me. He was allowed only to go this party. “I'll come over later.” I could only offer him my mental defeat: “We'll see.”

I slumped into my chair at the dining table, my fingers poised on the keyboard, trying to find some relief. Steve asked me about my boyfriend. I started to explain. John rushed into the room, fiddling with his mobile in his hand.

“Let's go,” he commanded Steve.

“Asra was just getting her time,” Steve offered.

“It can wait until tomorrow,” John answered briskly.

The rejection felt personal for the moment it took me to realize that in fact something had to be terribly wrong. They stuck around only long enough for John to offer that they were going to see the U.S. consul general in Karachi, a kind man by the name of John Bauman, for an update. After 1
A.M
.? Something was definitely wrong. Mariane entered the room after they left.

“Something is wrong,” I told her, explaining the scene that had just unfolded.

I called Randall Bennett, the regional security officer at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, the Rambo of our investigation. “What's going on?”

He tried to explain that John and Steve were coming over for a regular briefing.

“That doesn't make sense,” I said.

He shouted at me. “You want me to be so callous that I tell you something like this over the phone?” Something was clearly wrong. Everything was wrong.

I pushed the dial pad on my mobile for every mobile number we had. Turned off. Turned off. Turned off. Turned off. Where to turn? I called
former cricket star Imran Khan's cousin, the dashing new police chief of Karachi. I could hear the sound of a TV in the background. He sounded tired. “What's going on?”

“I'm out of the loop.”

We had to move. I called Eurocar to send us a car immediately. We'd go to the consulate ourselves. Mariane was ready to go. We were about to walk out the door. John walked in. Everyone walked in.

John walked to Mariane. He told her something in a very serious voice. It fell on my ears garbled, but I knew what he was saying. Captain was the one to put it clearly. He put his arm around Mariane. “I'm sorry, Mariane. I couldn't bring your Danny home to you.” This reality was never possible in our minds in the four weeks of sleepless nights and constant vigil we'd kept for Danny. It couldn't be true. Mariane was six months pregnant. Danny still had to meet his son.

My mobile rang in the darkness before dawn. My boyfriend. “My mother finally went to sleep. I'm coming over.”

“It's not a good time.”

“Why?”

I was silent.

“Why?” the question came again.

How could I explain? “Danny is gone.”

I fell asleep beside Mariane under the softness of a gray jersey cotton comforter. John awakened me. My boyfriend had come over.

I led him upstairs, stunned, groggy, wondering if he had come over because he cared or so he could tell his friends about his witness to history, but so sad and tired I hardly cared.

I heard the rain before I saw it. I had missed rain so much that when I had called home not long before, Safiyyah had put the phone receiver to the window so I could hear the rain pouring in Morgantown. Sure enough, the heavens had suddenly opened, and rain poured upon the parched earth before me. Danny was dead. The heavens were crying.

I sat on the carpet before the window, a sheet wrapped around me. Until the end, Danny, who had taught me how to have fun, had been planning parties. We planned to return to the site of my ill-fated wedding, the Margala Motel in Islamabad, and throw a bash—our way.

“Let's call it I Slama Jama bad Party,” Danny had said. It took me a long time to fully appreciate his wordplay on
Islamabad.

Now, my boyfriend embraced my shoulders, leaned me against his body as a buttress.

Too little too late. But I needed comfort. The weeping erupted from within me as if the veneer of my soul had transformed itself into dark rain clouds. I thought I heard the doorbell ring. I walked quietly past a sleeping Steve onto the veranda where we had our picnic lunches to swap theories about Pakistani intelligence. The rains were real. They mingled with my tears. I returned to my bed.

My boyfriend held me. I allowed him to make love to me. I needed to know life. The lovemaking slipped into hallucinations as I drifted between wakefulness and sleep, and he slipped into me, morphing into a penetration unrecognizable. I escaped into a sensibility as Rabia of Basra. I was beyond the existence of my body.

Before we left Karachi, I neatly packed Danny's garment bag for Mariane and stumbled upon a reminder of the great spirit of play that defined this man who flew through the air to dig balls others would let drop. Inside was his one Nike waiting to find its mate.

We walked the steps into President Musharraf's residence on this clear sunny day. Guards in turbans stood on both sides of the carpeted steps.

I pondered these steps I was taking into the home of the leader of this Muslim nation, this shirt of Mariane's with paisleys snug upon my breasts ripening from pregnancy. With each step in my black sandals, the swoosh of my black Nike pants sashayed just slightly. Under the code of Pakistan's
sharia
law, I could be arrested with one pregnancy test as evidence against me. As the Jamaat-e-Islami leader had once told me,
sharia
normally requires four witnesses to testify to the act of penetration. In the case of a pregnancy, a prosecutor wouldn't even have to rely on four witnesses. A prosecutor could use confirmation of my pregnancy and the absence of a
nikah nama
as evidence of my act of
zina.

I was a lawbreaker entering the residence of the army general who was the leader of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

General Musharraf turned to Mariane. “Can I ask you a question?”

She nodded.

He described the Western perception of Pakistanis as fundamentalists and countered with his perception of most Pakistanis as moderates. “What have you seen?”

As Mariane delicately described the many moderates she had met, I knew what I wanted to tell him. The words spilled out of my mind without my lips giving voice to them. Yes, many Pakistanis were moderate. Maybe most. I had a family of educated engineers, doctors, and professionals. Yet they were held hostage by one great deterrent to power: fear. Except for a teenage cousin in Karachi, none called me to offer me condolences upon news of Danny's death. They were a majority made silent by fear—and the fear was related to the absence of a civil society where they trusted neither government nor law enforcement. I wanted to tell him how I was targeted for political propaganda that came straight from within his government, just because I was a child of the same country from which he was born, India. The message I wanted to send to Musharraf was simple: “Remove the fear, and you will give voice to the silent.”