Tantrika (6 page)

She was clear about what I had to do. “Stop dating him.”

The rules had always been clear to me. No dating allowed. But, having taken a bite out of the forbidden apple, I defied the rules. I started living a double life. I moved into an apartment on Wiley Street with friends. One day my father dropped off a letter, a pink rose gracing the bottom of each page. He wrote, “Asra
baytee,”
meaning “Asra, dear,” on the envelope, centering
786
in Arabic letters upon the top of the first page. “I am not a psychologist or a politician or a double talker,” he wrote. “In my very own way I would like to express my feelings to my daughter, whether it makes any sense to her or not.”

He wanted to tell me that friendship did not have to be expressed with sex and marriage. He asked me whether my lifestyle wouldn't destroy my parents, close relatives, and even myself. Did I think differences in religion, culture, and values would hold my husband and me together? My family and my husband's family? Love, he told me, should be viewed realistically, not with a blind eye.

I could hear his voice echoing as I read his words. “Number seven. If you walk in a coal mine, you expect to get coal dust on you and not
perfume. In the same way, if you move in a perfume factory, your body will expel fragrance.”

I wondered, did I want coal dust? Or perfume?

Across town in my childhood home, my mother sat on a wing-backed chair in the living room, trying to distract herself with
General Hospital.
Tears that she thought had dried up streamed down her cheeks. She propped a yellow legal pad on her lap and penned a New Year's admission of the hurt that consumed her.

“What did I do wrong that you have rebelled against me to the extent that I cannot handle?” she asked me. She sought the same divine comfort that had helped her deal with deep pain before. “May God help me in this ordeal.”

The truth was that I was staying in a bad relationship because of the loyalty that my culture had taught me between a man and a woman. Throughout our relationship, Mike had made me feel bad about myself as he lusted, one time, after the bouncing breasts of a coed crossing the street in front of our car and other times trying to convince me that a ménage à trois would be exciting, slipping his
Playboy
magazines in front of me hoping I would develop a lust for other women. One night he confessed to me that he had slept with someone else. I ran down High Street in the rain, my hair dripping. I wept. And I took him back. I thought that was what a woman was supposed to do, even though he came from a world in which I was an outsider. He told me a ROTC friend called me “a sand nigger.”

The poet Maya Angelou came to campus. She had a message for the young women who were gathered in a classroom in Woodburn Hall. “In your lifetime,” she said, “men will come and go. But you will always have your work. Always stay dedicated to your work.”

I dedicated myself to a vision of becoming a great writer and journalist. The previous summer my father had broken tradition and allowed me to live on my own so I could be a summer intern at
Harper's Magazine
. The next summer my father drove me to Washington, D.C., to State's News Service, a scrappy operation that gave me clips in newspapers from the
Allentown Morning Call
to the
South China Morning Post
and a regular stint, snaking through the Pentagon to write about military affairs. My parents lifted their worries about my studying away from home and sent me with their blessing to do my master's degree at American University
in Washington. There I spent my days working for Reuters news agency while going to school at night. Mike wanted me to have more sexual experiences. “You can sleep with other men. Just don't fall in love.”

I fell in love. My boyfriend was a gorgeous and doting classmate from graduate school, a surfer from San Luis Obispo, California. When I asked him if he wanted me to do a ménage trio with him, he answered, “Why would I want to share you with anyone else?” Then, after I moved to Chicago to start my career with the
Wall Street Journal,
I met a man who made me swoon with CD serenades by Randy Travis, bouquets of flowers, and adoration so gentle and thorough I was always strong and secure with him.

My mother had to be wrong. This dating business was working out after all.

It was 1989, and my family was returning to India. My aunt, Nuzhat Phuppi (phuppi meaning “father's sister”) had arranged my brother's marriage to a Hyderabadi girl born in 1969, the year my brother and I had left India. My mother and I went to see her. She was demure and young with wide eyes cast down. She spoke not a word to us. My brother saw her for the first time after they were married when he looked into a mirror into which she also looked. He saw her reflection. She didn't dare to look for his reflection.

I returned to Chicago wondering what my reality should be. In Morgantown my father was getting his own pressure. Dadi had written again asking when I would marry. He was powerless between the expectations of our culture and a daughter who wouldn't abide by the unspoken covenant into which she was born. Dadi wanted me to marry one of her other grandchildren. I protested whenever my mother made the suggestion. “It'd be incest!”

My father stirred my mother awake one night. “When is she going to be married?”

“I don't know! Ask her,” my mother murmured, rolling over.

“Either she gets married or I'm leaving the house!” he yelled. “It's time to start looking. If you don't apply for research grants, how will you do any research?”

Didn't they realize it wasn't a simple question for me to know with whom I would want to spend my life? Besides my mother's brother, Iftikhar
Mamoo, who had wed the British girl Rachel, I only had one example in my family of a relative who had married outside of our culture, my mother's cousin-sister, a woman I called Anjum Khala,
khala
meaning “mother's sister.” She visited me in Chicago with her husband, Tim, and I stole time away from my workaholic life to tour the Art Institute of Chicago with them. I liked Tim's gentle nature, and the two loved each other deeply, but his white skin beside her brown skin didn't seem like a match to me.

Our family's first generation in America was born on May 30, 1991, to my brother and his wife. Safiyyah Zohra Nomani. Safiyyah means “best friend” and “tranquil” in Arabic, and this smiling bundle of joy was just that to all of us. Zohra was the name of my maternal grandmother, my nani. My mother sang again, but she wasn't singing the sad songs I remembered. Safiyyah's arrival stirred desire in my heart for marriage and motherhood.

My Greek girlfriend Vasia was dating a Greek man for the first time. “It is so beautiful to make love in your own language,” she told me. English was the language of my fluency. But how nice would it be to share my native language at the most intimate of times?

Even the Grimm fairy tales of my childhood had instilled in me an early message to love my own. In the tale of the hare and the hedgehog, the hedgehog outwitted the hare for mocking hedgehogs as slow. He accepted a challenge to race the hare. They started off together. When the hare reached the finish line, the hedgehog's wife was there waiting in a leisurely way, tricking the hare into believing she was her husband. She clinched the victory even though her husband had ridiculed her when she protested that he was racing the hare. “Woman,” the hedgehog had cried, “don't try to understand the affairs of men! This business doesn't concern you. Just do as I say.”

She stood dutifully at the finish line, repeating as her husband told her to say, “Here I am already.”

The hare finally accepted defeat after their seventy-third race. The moral of the story, the Grimm brothers told me, was that “when you marry, be careful to marry someone just like you. Especially if you are a hedgehog, you should make doubly sure that you marry no one but another hedgehog.”

I started searching for my hedgehog. He needed to speak Urdu.

O
N A CRISP DAY
in January, I got a voice mail at work. “It's Omar. Remember me?”

I replayed the message twice to make sure I'd heard it right.

I did remember. Omar was the handsome man with a bounce in his step and an easy smile that I remembered meeting on the steps of the American University Mary Graydon Student Center. He was the first man from my culture who intrigued me. Before I even talked to Omar, I confessed to my boyfriend in Chicago that I was distraught over how to resolve the most intimate question of my identity: whom to love?

My boyfriend was more noble a man than I could imagine. But I couldn't commit my future to him. I was anxious to find a man from my culture and religion. That's what my father wanted. That's what my mother wanted. That's what my brother wanted. I thought that was what I wanted. I tried to explain to him the pressures upon me as we walked through Chicago's Lincoln Park.

“A dark cloud hangs over me.”

“I'll convert. I'll learn Urdu,” he told me. It wasn't enough. He looked different. He was a Lutheran blond of German ancestry.

“It wouldn't be the same. I have to decide what I want.” The next day he was distant with me.

“It's not fair you're so mad at me.”

But he wasn't even angry. “I'm not mad. I'm sad.” My heart shattered for the hurt that I was causing.

Not enough, though, to stop me from calling Omar back. We seemed to have lived parallel lives in Muslim families divided by the border of the Indian subcontinent. We were born the same year, he in Karachi, Pakistan, I in Bombay, India. His mother was born in Lahore in the province of Punjab, an important fact to some, but it meant little to me.
His father was a native of Delhi whose family migrated to Pakistan after the partition. As a Pakistan International Airlines executive, his father moved the family around mostly outside Pakistan in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and France, where Omar studied at École Anglaise de Paris S.A.

He ran around his apartment, his two cats, Sylvester and Tweety, chasing him. I did the same with my two cats, Billlie and Billluh. He knew
khatoon
meant “lady” when I told him my sister-in-law's name was Azeem Khatoon. He knew the name of the silver paper laid atop the
burfi,
a dessert made on the subcontinent. His parents lived in the F/8 neighborhood of Islamabad. My phuppi and phuppa, my paternal aunt and uncle, lived in F/9 next door. When he was eight, his mother taught him how to cross-stitch cushion covers and handkerchiefs for his home economics assignment. He pronounced my name right. I cross-stitched roses onto a table cover in my mother's childhood home in Panchgani.

His mother, too, sang when she was sad.

It was 3:36
A.M
. when we finally got off the phone. I whispered to myself, “I think I'm falling in love again.”

Daydreams captured my mind. I saw him clearly by my side in a delivery room, leaning over me as we both held our newborn baby. I couldn't see my boyfriend and me like this. It was as if he was the answer to my questions. An angel of God. Torn between the loss of my boyfriend and the possibility of Omar, I pulled out my first self-help book,
The How to Survive the Loss of a Love Workbook.

“Describe your pain,” this book demanded.

“It is numbness now.”

Words sat upon the page like blood spilled from the heart. “Circle or highlight the ones you're feeling now.” I pressed hard around
Pain
with my blue felt pen. Muddled? Yes. Overwhelmed? Yes. Beaten? Yes. Self-hatred? Yes. Fear? Yes. Inferior? Yes.

Lost? I circled it so many times I must have thought I would find myself in one of my circumambulations of the pen.

Angry? I didn't circle it.

“Is there some magic to carry all of us home?” I wrote. “To bring us to a point where we can live with ourselves and our lives? Where is the
magic? I want some. I need some. Or shall I spend my life as lost a soul as I am? Please let me journey toward that magic.”

I admitted my struggles to my mother. She stayed awake until dawn with the weight of this sadness upon her. She confided my struggles to my father.

They called me together, and we talked into the night. I told them the truth of my struggle between East and West. My relief was unimaginable. My father didn't disown me. He didn't even have a heart attack. Instead, he told me, “I love you.”

I invited Omar to be my date at a friend's engagement dinner celebration in Washington two weeks later on Valentine's Day.

First, I went home to West Virginia. Bhabi, my brother's wife, pulled out the
shalwar kameez
suits she had gotten as her wedding outfits. The
shalwar
resembled baggy pants like the kind worn by women of harems. The
kameez
was a long tunic. A
dupatta,
or long scarf, topped the
kameez
—or the head, for a more modest look. We settled on a suit with a hot pink silk
kurta
with gold embroidery and shiny smooth stones decorating the front. She was giddy with excitement. I descended into the Bombay Palace on K Street, blocks from the White House. My date waited at the bottom of the steps. He turned his brown eyes shaped like almonds up the stairs toward me. His wide face with angular cheekbones filled with a smile. I fell for him instantly.

We went to the movies that weekend. Indian director Mira Nair's
Mississippi Masala,
of all things. It was the story of a beautiful Indian girl who emigrated from Uganda. To her family's chagrin, she fell in love with a boy who wasn't from India but was rather an African American carpet cleaner, played by Denzel Washington.

During a sultry phone scene, the girl lay back on her bed, a bumper sticker behind her, “My dharma ran over your karma.”

Omar jetted to Chicago two weeks later.

“You are like a miracle,” I told him after a dinner of tandoori chicken and Coca-Cola. “My bridge between the East and the West.”

By Sunday morning, we were high on the euphoria of falling in love. He turned to me and said, “I never want to lose you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

We laid our
janamaz,
prayer rug, upon the floor facing east. After doing
namaz
toghether, we cupped the palms of our hands together and said our
dua,
prayer, into our hands. I asked God again for the
suhkoon,
Urdu for “peace of mind,” I'd been seeking since I was a child. We washed our faces with the palms of our hands and then
phoonked
upon each other. It meant to blow a breath of blessed air. Our mothers had done this to us ever since we were children.

When I told him that he was my
chand ke tukrah,
he knew it meant “a piece of the moon, a saying of admiration.”

I called my parents, giddy with new love and happiness that I had fulfilled my familial obligation. “I feel such relief,” I told my father. He told me, “A weight has been lifted off my shoulders.” A few days later, my brother woke up with a panic attack at 6:30
A.M
. and jolted awake my parents.

“Who is he? My sister calls one day, says she is going to be married, and we say, ‘Okay?'” he screamed. “You're so immature!”

Little did we recognize my brother's wisdom.

With my engagement, I felt as if I had created a modern picture of that old black-and-white image of my parents on their wedding day, completing the circle of our immigration with an Eastern marriage even though I was raised in the West. Not many of even our generation dared love marriages. I was one of just a few of our cousins who married in the name of love. One insisted until her parents relented. Another evaded her brother's chase down the New Jersey Turnpike to marry in a
masjid,
a mosque.

We dreamed of an outdoor wedding. I wanted it in my home state of West Virginia. His mother argued ill health. She had always dreamed of the day she would open both her front doors to welcome her daughter-in-law to her new home. I agreed to wed in his hometown of Islamabad. I tried to accept this idea.

I was in such mania. My brother had a nervous breakdown for me, becoming seriously ill. I asked God, “Why?”

Why this calamity upon my brother? I sat on the
janamaz,
the prayer rug, my
dupatta
pulled tightly over my hair and tucked behind my ears.
Was he haunted by the curse I'd made when we visited India years earlier? “I wish you'd die!” I had said, jealous because I was sick and he was outside enjoying himself. Could trauma from the malaria that he got soon after have stayed with him for years? Allah, I was repentant.

“Please bring peace and balance to my brother's mind.”

Even though my fiancé had had sex with girlfriends, he and I chose to do everything but. Afterward, one time, I told the man I was about to marry, “I'm so in love with you.”

He stirred. What sweet words would come from him?

“I think I'll jump in the shower.”

My heart fell to the pit of my stomach as he rolled away from me.

I wrapped my drinking glasses in the
New York Times
Sunday newspaper and tucked them into juice boxes I picked up from Jewel, my neighborhood grocery store. I was turning my life upside down in one month's time. I had just left my sweet blond boyfriend. I had gotten engaged to another man. I was about to leave my dream apartment in a 1920s building off Chicago's Lake Michigan and move into my fiancé's apartment in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on the fifteenth floor of Highland House West, opposite a Jewish community center. It was the kind of sterile high-rise apartment building I had told my Chicago real estate agent never to show me. I went shopping for the first time at the professional woman's store, Ann Taylor, to buy a dress to interview for a new job that I got in the
Wall Street Journal
Washington bureau.

I went through with a traditional engagement ceremony on the new wooden deck built onto my childhood home. Bhabi wrapped my girlfriends in her and my mother's silk wedding saris. My girlfriends were worldly adventurers, Vasia from Greece, Chiyo from Japan, Pam from Seattle, Nancy from Birmingham, Alabama, and Sumita from Morgantown via her ancestral in Bihar, India. I centered paste-on paisleys, called
bindhis,
my mother brought from her store, Ain's, on their foreheads, between their eyes. I had no idea what these markings meant, but my friends looked like exotic princesses.

“You put one on, too!” Sumita coaxed me.

“Nooooo! That's okay.” I was a Muslim girl. We didn't wear
bindhis.

When my fiancé put the engagement ring on my finger, my friends and family applauded. We were bold. Traditionally, the boy's mother put
the engagement ring on the girl, since the bride and the groom saw each other for the first time on their wedding day.

Bhabi was returning to India for the first time. She would take Safiyyah, her and my brother's first child. Safiyyah crawled on the ground and tried to eat the cat food. She was to be parted for the first time from her dada, dadi, and father. She cried and refused to sleep. I consciously knew for the first time the depth of emotions of a girl less than two.

My mother did something I hadn't heard her do since I shushed her into silence. She sang. I heard her through the door to the living room. Somewhere inside of me the song was familiar. It was as if I could remember the gentle lullabies she sang to me as a child before she left India. Tears sprang from a well I didn't know existed.

By day, I was a warrior. After Bill Clinton won office, I switched beats to cover international trade, exposing a behind-the-scenes smear campaign against a trade attorney vying for appointment as U.S. trade representative. I ran around town, digging up details for the story, including a document slipped to me in a brown envelope in an elevator. At home I was a different person. I sobbed, readying myself for this wedding I was beginning to understand should not happen. But suffering was what I saw staring back at me in my mother's eyes in her bridal photo. The understanding and devotion showered upon me by my last boyfriend haunted me. I tried once to reach out to him in a postcard on which I added “P.S.” from Billlie and Billluh in the crooked handwriting of my left hand. It was meant to look like the scribbles of a cat if he got a pen in his paws. I never heard back.

I wept as I packed, but I figured if I endured this marriage would endure. It was the path of the Indian woman, to suffer, to survive, to endure. I plucked a white sweater studded with white beads from the rack at Neiman Marcus. It was long enough to cover my butt when I landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, an act of modesty.

The three days of wedding festivities took on a momentum beyond my control. I allowed my relatives, mostly my father's side, who had migrated to Pakistan from India, to drape a bright golden yellow
dupatta
over me like a shroud. It was for the
mehndi
ceremony where my first
cousins gathered on the ground to sing songs making fun of the family into which I was to marry. The other family retorted with their own songs. I only knew because I peeked out from beneath my veil. I sat on a chair with tall cardboard tubes tied to the back and decorated with bright gold wrapping paper and green tinsel to make the chair resemble a throne. I wore only
kajal,
kohl eyeliner, and pink lipstick. This was supposed to be the plain me before I was decorated for my wedding.

Much later, I looked again at the silver ribbons sewn like endless diamonds on the fabric of my
dupatta.
I saw in them the shimmer that glittered from the stainless-steel wires around Cheenie Bhai's cage. Golden sequins were strung in the middle of each diamond with orange thread. They reminded me later of the shiny grapes I tucked between the wires of Cheenie Bhai's cage. At that time in Islamabad, though, I saw only a blur of yellow and orange in front of me.