Tantrika (4 page)

I was ready to leave this life. I had departed from family tradition as a woman. I had moved away from home alone at the age of twenty-one, earned my master's degree, and then pursued a prestigious journalism career at the country's largest newspaper. I'd set up homes for myself in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and finally New York, crisscrossing the country, jetting into strange cities for assignments, renting cars and navigating my way for everything from interviews in a
Minnesota maximum security prison to the crash site of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. While I had broken new frontiers, my life of single abandon had left me with a longing for home and a sense of belonging. I needed the emotional support of my family.

I called my mother. “I'm coming home.”

I
DRAPED SILKEN SARIS
over my curtain rods. My wedding
dupatta
went over the sofa. I pushed my mattresses into my walk-in closet, clearing the bedroom floor for my Tantra going-away party.

I bought dozens of Catholic religious candles from the grocery store emblazoned with the images of Jesus and the Holy Mother. I scored a keg and poured Jell-O mixed with vodka into Dixie paper cups for Jell-O shots. A man on the Internet claiming to teach Tantra came by the office so we could meet beforehand. He didn't seem to know very much, to tell the truth. I asked him to teach PG-rated Tantra since the guests were mostly friends from work. Little did I realize they'd appreciate an R-rated lesson.

The party was a wild mix of jokes with Larry Ingrassia, the
Journal'
s handsome third-section editor, and his beautiful wife, Vicki, cuddling during the Tantra workshop. I wrote the invitation with a Tantric pun: The last to come would get a special door prize.

On a cold winter day after Christmas, my father arrived in our blue Chrysler minivan to help me escape New York single life.

Samsara is the Buddhist concept of worldly attachments. Although I left many of these behind when my father and I packed our rented U-Haul truck, somehow the truck was still packed with boxes filled with the symbolic representations of samsara.

This was the beginning of my lesson in nonattachment, a word I didn't even know yet. To me, Buddhism taught detachment. My father told me Buddha was detached when, as Prince Siddhartha, he left his wife and newborn son in his kingdom so he could wander and find the answer to relieving suffering.

“It's not detachment,” a dear friend of mine, a student of Buddhism, told me gently but firmly. “It's nonattachment.” I thought she was just being a highbrowed stickler for words, but my departure from New York
was my first step in understanding this principle by which I could exist engaged with the world but not obsessed, possessed, or consumed, a tall order for a woman in a culture where every other friend, including herself seemed, to be battling OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Tantra says that the base chakra, called the root chakra, is located at the bottom of the spine. Its Sanskrit name is the
muladhara
chakra. It's supposed to be the force that empowers us by grounding us to the energies of the earth. Its color is supposed to be red. The organs associated with the
muladhara
chakra are the body's physical support, the base of the spine, the legs, bones, the feet, the rectum, and the immune system. The mental and emotional issues associated with the
muladhara
chakra are safety and security, kinesthetic feelings, movement, and the ability to provide for life's necessities. Not paying my Time-Warner cable bill on time meant, I figured, I'd failed on this account.

The other emotional issues include the ability to stand up for yourself, feeling at home, feeling a sense of belonging, emotional support, survival, self-esteem, social order, familial conditioning and beliefs, superstitions, loyalty, instincts, and physical pleasure and pain. I struggled with most of these emotional issues and knew that it was in Morgantown, my hometown, where I could start to bolster my
muladhara
chakra. The physical dysfunctions associated with this chakra are chronic lower back pain, sciatica, varicose veins, rectal tumors and cancers, immune disorders, and depression. Depression. That one I knew well.

As I saw the last bit of the Manhattan skyline in the rearview mirror, I thought back to the world from which my family and I had catapulted into this reality.

It was 1962, and my mother and father stood on a railway platform in Hyderabad waiting for the train that would take my father to Bombay to catch a plane to America. Garlands of jasmine flowers lay over my mother's arms like a shield in front of her belly swollen with her unborn first child. My father had won a fellowship from the U.S. Agency for International Development to study at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. His teachers at Osmania University's Agriculture College in Hyderabad had earned their PhDs at universities from Ithaca, New York, to Wales, United Kingdom. Kansas State University had a partnership with the col
lege to transform it into a land grant university in the spirit of American universities in which the government gives land for research.

Images of pink flamingos danced in my father's head as he embarked for America. One day when he had gone to class as a student at Osmania University, his professor had showed the class slides from America. Pink flamingos perched on their skinny legs filled one slide. Another showed a long bridge on the Overseas Highway, U.S. 1, connecting the mainland to thirty-four islands in the Gulf of Mexico, ending with Key West, Florida.

He had stared at the bridge, surrounded on both sides by clear water, and marveled at the manmade creation. Many years later, we ventured to Key West on a family vacation, and my father asked eagerly, “Where are the flamingos?” We didn't find them.

For now, at night in Kansas, he read his wife's letters into the night on the top bunk in the room he shared with his best friend from Hyderabad. Aftab Ahmed watched him curiously from below. “Go to sleep, Zafar,” he said before rolling away from the light.

My older brother was born during my father's absence. My father returned to India after a year in America. I was born two years later just before the monsoon on June 7, 1965, at Noor Hospital on Mohamed Ali Road in Bombay, the “hospital of light,” bundled into a red-and-white checkered outfit. I belonged to India's first generation born after independence. What was I to learn about freedom?

In the tradition of new mothers returning to their maternal home, my mother took me to Bella Vista in the hill station of Panchgani a few hours outside Bombay. An elder cousin, my Choti Momani, “small aunt,” who had raised her, greeted her with a cold glass of
hareera,
a mix of buffalo milk, pistachio, and almonds.

My mother's first cousin, whom I grew to know as Baray Mamoo, “big uncle,” gave me an Arabic name rarely chosen: Quratulain.
Ain
meant “eye.”
Quratulain
meant “coolness of the eye,” a description of calm. My most famous namesake was a legendary Urdu novelist named Qurratulain Hyder, who wrote poetically about identity, spirituality, and India. The ritual in Islam is to recite the first verse of the Qur'an and slaughter two goats for the new name of a boy at an
aqeeqa,
a welcoming and naming ceremony. One goat for a girl. Two goats were slaughtered at my
aqeeqa
.
But I discovered years later that only one was dedicated to my name. The second was for food because there were so many guests in the house.

We returned south to my father's house in Hyderabad. My maternal grandmother, Dadi, didn't like my name. She changed it to Asra, meaning “to travel by night,” guided by the divine hand of God. Pronounced “Us-ruh,” it is mentioned in the first verse of surah Isra, the seventeenth chapter of the Qur'an. It told the story of a mystical journey by the Prophet Muhammad from the Sacred Mosque in Mecca to the Farthest Mosque in Jerusalem, where today al-Aqsa Mosque sits next to the Dome of the Rock. I'd always heard that it was so timeless a journey Prophet Muhammad's bed was still warm and his doorknob still shaking when he returned. Prophet Muhammad first flew to the seat of the earlier revelations in Jerusalem, then through the seven heavens, even to the Sublime Throne, where he was initiated into the spiritual mysteries of the human soul struggling in space and time. It's said that this great mystical story of the ascension, al-Mi'raj, reflected the journey of the human soul in its spiritual growth in life. A Spanish scholar, Miguel Asin Palacios, credited this tale with inspiring the medieval writer Dante to create
The Divine Comedy,
the wonderous human journey through the netherworlds.

We lived together those two years in Hyderabad. My father returned to his job as an assistant professor at the agriculture college. But he didn't lose sight of America. It wasn't about the lure of this new country. It was about getting a good education. The sad truth, too, was that not all of India welcomed his type. One day as he sat with a Hindu colleague, a friend, on campus, he was shocked at what he heard.

“
Ahray,
” Hindi slang for “c'mon,” “Muslims should just leave and go to Pakistan.”

It was a constant chorus that stung the heart of a boy born of India. So one day, at the airport, I sat perched in my father's arms next to garlands of white flowers draped over his dark suit. It was a moment of celebration captured in a black-and-white photo in front of a sign for BOAC, the precursor to British Airways. Not one smile broke across the grim faces. Indians hadn't yet learned to smile for photos.

My father was leaving to earn his PhD at Rutgers University in
America. He was part of the brain drain out of India of those seeking advanced degrees in the West. The Indian diaspora. Not long after, my mother also left to join my father. My brother and I stayed with Dadi and Dada. U.S. immigration laws and my father's paltry student wages kept us from crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Every night for two years, my mother wept for us in a tiny apartment my father had rented at 10 Union Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey. By day, she baby-sat kids named Eda, Laura, and Kerry to eke out a tiny savings to buy my brother and me tickets for futures in America she could never imagine. One day in 1969, it was our turn to make the journey. My parents had saved the $593.60 they needed for the tickets.

“Bhaya! Bhaya!” I called after my brother, using the honorific for older brothers in India.

We wore outfits stitched from the same striped fabric so that we could be reunited easily if we lost each other on the TWA plane. My brother was six. I was four. We stared into the camera with the dazed look of children who didn't understand.

When we arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport, my brother vomited. At least that's what he always remembered.

I didn't remember a thing. My mother said I looked over my shoulder for Dadi because my grandmother had told us she would be following us on the next plane. Apparently, I didn't recognize my own mother.

In the tradition of India, my date of birth was written incorrectly on my passport, making me a year older, so that I could go to school earlier. I was not ready.

I came home from kindergarten every day crying. My mother was sympathetic. She let me stay home. The principal called. “Mrs. Nomani, it's against the law to keep your children at home and not send them to school.” Back to school I went.

I didn't feel pretty there, where girls had lovely names like Elizabeth and Sarah.

English was my second language at this school named after Martin Luther King Jr. in Piscataway, New Jersey. I made the new language my first. In the tradition of lonely children everywhere, I turned to books as my best friends.

I caught fireflies with a neighbor girl, Pinky, who was also from India. We punched holes into jar lids and stuffed the bottom with grass, as if we could imitate nature for these creatures so gentle they would let us catch them so easily in our pudgy hands. I refused to answer back in anything but English when my parents talked to me in Urdu. It was a poetic language with influences from Persian. I didn't care. I just knew it didn't sound American. I rejected some things American, too. On my way home, I'd ditch my mother's bologna sandwiches in an open basement window.

“AAAAAAAAhhhhhhhsssssssssss-ruh,” sang the taunts at school in Morgantown, West Virginia, where my father took a position at West Virginia University as an assistant professor. I headed down the stairwell at Evansdale Elementary School as a sixth grader to the annoying sound of my name being abused. Our school was a squat three-story yellow brick building just across University Avenue from the faculty apartments where we lived.

At home, it wasn't easy for my mother, either. My father, now forty, worked long hours in his new job. English was his second language, too. Succeeding as an immigrant was harder for him than for me. One night I found my mother sobbing. She had been softly singing Indian film songs lately, often as she stood at the sink washing dishes. My brother and I usually begged her to stop.

“They're so depressing!” we whined.

As my mother wept, I wrapped my arms around her to comfort her. At ten, I wondered if the women of our culture always had to quietly suffer. Finally, after midnight, my father came home. He had been at work, anxious to win tenure and job security.

For me, God became my refuge. In the solitude of being strangers to a new city, my mother taught me to do
namaz.
At the end of each prayer, I followed her instructions. I turned my head to the right to wish peace upon the angel whom my mother said sat there to jot down my good deeds.

“As-salam-u-alakum wa-rahmatullah wa-barakatuh,”
I said in Arabic, evoking, little did I know, one of the fanciest of greeting. “May the peace, the mercy, and the blessings of Allah be upon you.” I then turned my head to my left shoulder to wish peace upon the angel who sat there and noted my bad deeds. My mother didn't tell me it was also a part of some
thing called hatha yoga. She wouldn't have known. Yoga. That was foreign to her. I finished my
farz namaz,
my mandatory prayer, the same way each time. I joined my open hands together in front of me, buried my face in my palms, and asked God for the same thing every time.

“Allah pak hum kho suhkoon dho,”
I said in Urdu. “Dear God, please give me peace of mind.” I would add, “Please give my mother, my father, my brother peace of mind.”

One sunny afternoon a family that looked like mine stopped their Honda station wagon at the traffic light beside the WVU faculty apartments.

The father spotted me and yelled to his family, “Look! An Indian girl!”