Tantrika (13 page)

“You were put on this earth as a Mohammedan,” he told me, “because you committed a sin in a past life. This assignment came to you for a reason. It is an examination. If you go into the
mandir
and feel a connection, you have passed.”

I feared I was going to lose my mind, torn sick by the divide between Hindus and Muslims. I was confronted by the tug of two societies who hated each other. Hadn't Hindus gotten the memo? Muslims weren't Mohammedans. They didn't worship the Prophet Muhammad. We prayed to Allah. Could they be any more ignorant? And Muslims could at least celebrate the fact that Hinduism teaches a spiritual discipline even if it was expressed through worship of brightly painted deities.

“Did you know today is Ram's birthday?” he continued, peering over the counter. I did, but I didn't know much about its significance. “It was ordained for us to meet on this day.”

His family arrived to go to the temple with him. As we stood outside his shop, he looked at me and said convincingly, “You will become a spiritual healer. People will come to you and you will help them. You are on the right path to find your salvation.”

As we parted, he inflated my spiritual ego. “You will be a saint.” On my way home, I just hoped none of the juvenile young men of Lucknow would attempt a cheap grope.

At home, I sat with Rehan Bhai amid piles of
kurtas.
He wore his trademark
sherwani,
the long suit coat of formal Muslim culture, and
topi,
his hat. There was a lion, he told me, that hung out with
bukras,
or goats. The goats bleated. The lion roared. “A lion can hang out with goats, but he can't become a goat,” he told me. “This is the same with Hindus and Muslims.”

I was tired of stories with absurd morals about the divide with which some people wanted us to exist. “Just because you're a lion hanging out with goats doesn't mean you want to be a goat,” I responded, thinking about the time I had gone to visit neighbors of Akhtarul Uncle. He had looked at me then told the girls there, “She doesn't speak Urdu.”

“Yes, I do,” I'd exclaimed.

“Do you pray five times a day?” asked one of the girls, using a classic Muslim barometer of gauging piety.

I wondered what she would think if I said I actually yelled curses at the sun.

Just before I left Lucknow, a familiar man ascended the stairs to our home in Jahingarabad Palace. I was filled with comfort.

He was my mother's youngest brother, Anwar Ansari. He had persevered in a life marked by the need to grow up early, and then a tragedy. After his father died, Anwar Mamoo raised chickens in the mango orchard that filled Latif Manzil's backyard. When Iftikhar Mamoo proved to be more a poet than a salary earner, Anwar Mamoo abandoned his passion for writing and sports and started the business of
Lucknowi chikan.
He built a Bombay export empire shipping intricately embroidered
Lucknowi Chikarikurtas
to America and the West. His second-oldest daughter, nicknamed Bubli, was on her way to his factory in Bombay when she died in a gruesome car accident, her crushed body, the word went, left for some time unceremoniously in a morgue. She was in her early twenties and beautiful.

Anwar Mamoo was always a philosopher-athlete wrapped in a business coat. In that room in which his elder brother captivated his audiences
and, ultimately, his English bride, I spilled to him my frustrations with the divide and negativity in India. He shared with me his philosophies. They were the first ones I'd heard in days similar to my own. “I believe in universalism,” he said, as Khala slipped in and out of the room, making certain he was eating his lunch. “Those who awaken for
puja
get up at the same time as those who awaken for
namaz.
What is the difference?”

To conquer India, he said, “You have to take the bull by the horns.” It was a mantra I would repeat to myself often.

The next day, I planned to break free from the palace and accompany Mamoo on a business trip to Benares, the City of Lights. I had to take the bull by the horns. I sped to Benares with Mamoo and Rehan Bhai, a business supplier named Raju driving us on this one-day jaunt.

We rode on long stretches of highway past trees with red and white stripes painted at the bottom of the trunks like candy canes. A goat sat on bended knee. Strands of black thread were knotted and tied to the middle of the grill of a passing car. Shards of glass lined a boundary wall, like the walls in Aligarh, meant to keep intruders out. Mamoo told me that a strong will was the most important element in personal achievement. He didn't believe in the powers of Tantric black magic. “I once said to a sadhu, ‘You can go ahead with your mantras and put a curse on me, but I have enough willpower that it won't have any effect on me.'”

Someone in the car quipped, “But give the sadhu some
cheras,”
the mixture of hashish and tobacco that sadhus in Kathmandu were smoking at Shivarathri, “and a spell will be put on them.”

We slipped into the showroom of a Benarsi silk manufacturer, a silver-haired man with silver stubble on his face and buckteeth reddened from chewing betel in a leaf
paan.
We stood at his counter as he talked quietly to me, so Rehan Bhai and Mamoo couldn't hear. They were examining silk pillows made for Mamoo's daughter, nicknamed Cookie, who had started a business designing Western fashions with fabrics from India for chic Soho boutiques in Manhattan.

“I don't want you to write this because you will become Salman Rushdie, but Islam came after Hinduism. It received much from Hinduism.” I agreed with him that, from what I'd seen, the parallels between the religions were many. He gave me a name, Sita Ram Kaviraj,
as someone who would be a contact for my Tantra research and identified him as the VHP president of Benares, the VHP being a Hindu fundamentalist party.

Meanwhile, I was here to try to find an Italian scholar of Tantra recommended to me by someone in Delhi, a man named Mark Dyczkowski. I marked a spot on my
Lonely Planet
guide where I'd agreed to meet my uncle in a few hours. I slipped alone into a taxi and headed toward the Ganga River.

A boatman, Kailash, named for a mountain in Tibet where Shiva lived, rowed me down the Ganga. This was supposedly a place overcrowded with pilgrims, but that afternoon it was still and calm. It was the most sedate and peaceful place I had yet found in India. I didn't have clear directions to the scholar's house. “There is a
yantra
in the front.” I didn't even know what
yantra
meant. Kailash landed me at a ghat on the Ganga where steps led up, in fact, to a giant symbol on a stone floor. Only a few people were doing their laundry on the steps. An old bearded sadhu lay in front of the door where I knocked.

A bear of a man with a thick beard and a hole in his right sleeve opened the door and welcomed me inside, ushering me into a room to the left. He left his slippers by the door and sat down with his back to the Ganga, so I could see the still river over his shoulder through the open window. There were stacks of books and papers piled in the room. I was to learn they were something called
shastras.
Mark was a window into intellectual Tantra. Tantra, he explained, was a substructure of yoga. It was based on an oral tradition and a written tradition of sixty-four
shastras.
Mark, it turned out, was a scholar of the
shastras.
A computer sat in the corner.

“Do you think Tantra is magic?” he asked me.

“I don't think it has to be,” I told him.

“It isn't,” he answered definitively, citing the
shastras
that he studied.

He flailed his arms. “What is Tantra? Is it the Tantrics who take away bad spells? It isn't. Tantra is the people who study Tantra
shastras.”

“Do you practice Tantra?” I asked him.

He smiled. “There are many paths in Tantra. I'm a householder.”

It was a term I hadn't heard much, but “householder” was a way of describing a man or a woman who practiced Tantra but still married and
had families. It sounded like a path that appealed to me, to stay engaged in this life but aspire to a higher level of existence than mortgages, minivans, and Mickey Mouse vacations.

What had brought him to Benares? “I came here thirty years ago to find a guru, like everyone else.” He no longer searched, yet he didn't leave.

In a symbol of how no space is protected in India, there were blouses and sari petticoats on the boat when I approached it to leave.

Finally, it was time to leave India. As I slipped out of Jahingarabad Palace, sorry to leave Rashida Khala, a half moon hung over my shoulder. The Muslim call for prayer broke through the air, as Hindu
mandir
bells clanged. Darkness sat in the morning air.

It was a moment of quiet contemplation for me on the train ride to Delhi for my connection to Bangkok, my first layover. What a journey upon which I'd embarked! I'd learned about the place of souls, Allah, goddesses, prayer, and spirits in Islam and Hinduism. Before leaving Lucknow, I had sat upon the raw wood
takht
whose base Khala had fortified with bricks and strips of white packaging fabric. I had heard her voice near the kitchen. It had reminded me of the gentle singsong voice of my nani, my maternal grandmother. I'd learned Khala's wisdom. I'd asked her the day before what she did to get
sukoon,
peace of mind, when there is much
gurbur,
or tension, in her mind. Her answer:
dua,
prayer. Five times a day she prayed quietly on the
janamaz
upon the bed.

On the train, a young student started to quietly tell me his story. “You look so peaceful,” he said. Dazed could certainly pass for peaceful.

He'd started an affair awhile back with a married woman liberated, ironically, through her marriage to mix more freely with single men. Before he left to take an exam in Delhi, she told him she would kill herself if he didn't return. He knew there was no future with this woman, but he was frustrated in a society where his future was dark in a sea of corruption, bias, favoritism, and prejudice. “India is bankrupt,” he said sadly.

I stared out the window at the blur of fields. He echoed my feelings.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED HOME
from my travels, I hated India. I relished the beauty of Morgantown. Flowers were in bloom in North Hills. I breathed in the fresh air and knew deep within me why West Virginia's license plates read, “Almost Heaven.”

As I pulled the Jeep out of the driveway one rainy morning to zip to North Elementary to volunteer for Safiyyah's third-grade phys ed class with Mrs. Garten, I stopped. There was Jaz, the wild calico cat who ate the food we put out for her but hissed and never came close. She stood with her legs wide apart with a black creature that resembled a rat underneath her belly. I stepped out of the Jeep to look closely. Jaz was using her body as an umbrella to protect a creature from the rain. “Why would Jaz be protecting a rat?”

I followed Jaz's path to the neighbor's driveway. I shimmied on my belly to look below a pile of logs where Jaz had gone. Kittens. There were kittens here. Jaz ran away. I scooped the kittens into a box and put them in our garage.

The kittens were the celebrity guests at Safiyyah's birthday slumber party. It was like the weekend from the Tantra workshop in Canada without the foot washes and explicit material. Al and Pala had told us that play was an important part of Tantra. Through the gift of my niece and nephew, my return to Morgantown was very much about play. Tantra is about being a child well. We dressed up. We threw a dance party. Stella, Bhabi's friend from Ghana, danced a traditional African dance. The girls were riveted by her mesmerizing swaying. Safiyyah's friend Breanna glided to “Genie in a Bottle.” It was a
kirtan
à la Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Late into the night, the girls lay belly down, and I lifted the heels of their feet to the sky and swung their legs together. “You're flying,” I told
them, just as I had learned to do at an R-rated
dakini
workshop in Los Angeles in which I learned the fine art of Tantric massage, only the intention here was strictly G-rated.

On Safiyyah's actual birthday on May 30, I enforced my rule that we never worked on our birthdays, and Safiyyah's mother let her stay home from school. We heard a mew that came from under our neighbor's deck. We crawled under it to inspect further. Indeed, it was another kitten. He teetered out to a bowl of milk we had. He couldn't be from Jaz's litter. He couldn't have survived all these days without her.

“What shall we call him?” I asked Safiyyah.

“‘Special' because we found him on my birthday.”

We dropped Special into Jaz's litter and stepped back to watch our wild, stray mother cat. Safiyyah and I looked at each other in amazement as Jaz started licking Special as if he were her own. She let him suckle freely at her nipples. Jaz was a lesson in unconditional maternal love, an untamed creature who accepted a stray as if her own. To me, she was my first Tantrika, free from labels, showing this love and compassion whether she was his mother or not. The kittens became Tantric teachers, showing me nonjudgmental love, playfulness, and innocence.

A few days later, I returned to Manhattan, one of four single women in a VW Bug headed to a wedding shower. From them, I heard about the six-minute date, the theme of an Upper West Side bar that hosted a night where men and women mingled for six-minute interviews with each other before moving onto another six-minute interview.

The girl in the front seat said, “I just want some Sunday morning sex.”

What did that mean?

“Where you know each other well enough that you have sex on Sunday.” Not quite the purity of the kittens.

Nothing had really changed in the singles culture of New York. I was relieved not to be a part of it. Sundays were claimed by a game I played in Morgantown with my family and Safiyyah and Samir, heading out for a drive where we took turns yelling “left,” “right,” or “straight” as our only directions for our day's travels. Somehow we always found our way home.

Another Sunday, I sat in the Morgantown High auditorium where a
high school senior, Tim Maxey, had arrived with another girl after I'd enforced my no-dating rule when he asked me out and taught me one of my first lessons in dating.

I sat now in my lipstick red
kameez
with its golden
churidar,
tight pants that bunched at the ankles, part of the
jahayz,
or wedding gifts, I'd received from the family into which I had married. So what if the American parents showed up in shorts and T-shirts? We were from India and proud to wear our wedding finest at any special occasion. And this was a special occasion, Safiyyah's recital from Mindy's School of Dance. I was too uncool to ever be a student there. Safiyyah had a visa into a world I never knew.

These girls were a gyration of moves to songs that defied political correctness.

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend….”

“…it's raining men.”

“Make way for Prince Ali. Show some respect.”

A band of little girls threw themselves into handstands to the sound of a Minnie Mouse exercise song. One girl in pink remained lying down while the rest of her class moved through its routine. Her friend tapped her on the head. The girl wouldn't join them, remaining on the floor. She clapped for herself, to the delighted laughter of the audience. I laughed at this expression of her individuality. It was something I had missed among even the children I saw in my travels on the subcontinent.

Safiyyah's friend Breanna danced as the words “My boyfriend's back” filled the auditorium. Safiyyah took to the stage with her nimble body and flew through flips and somersaults with her friend Tali and the other girls from her gymnastics class.

Tears came to my eyes.

 

In the parched heat of India's travels and troubles, I had a dream of finding a respite for myself in the lush green mountains of West Virginia.

I told a friend of mine about this dream. She had been my friend for fourteen years since our orientation days at American University when we compared notes on the men from our new graduate school class. “Lou asked you, too, if you wanted a cup of coffee? And Larry flirted?
Me, too!” It kept both of us free from internecine romance, and we had remained great friends over the years. There was a part of her that I couldn't understand, however, in her spirituality and approach to life. It always seemed just slightly disconnected from my life. She watched my love life ride its roller-coaster with patience and guidance sprinkled just lightly. “I know it made you very sad, but you had to do it,” she told me after my failed marriage. “You have to answer these questions about yourself.”

Long before, she had told me about a Buddhist monastery she had been attending for years, tucked in the West Virginia hills with a lily pond beside it. She used to tell me about the calm she got at this retreat house started by a monk from Sri Lanka. I always admired my friend and politely heard what she said but had never really absorbed her positive experiences with Buddhism and meditation. But now, on this quiet day in June, I found myself enrolling for a weekend workshop at the monastery she talked about.

I felt as if I was walking on eggshells when I arrived. I didn't know how to act at a monastery.

The rules were spelled out. This would be a silent retreat. No talking except when absolutely necessary. A woman named Debra Jones greeted me with a beaming smile. She asked where I would like to stay. My friend had recommended the individual houses. “The
kuti?”
I suggested, hesitantly. The
kuti
was a peaceful one-room hut tucked into the woods with a single bed and a Buddha sitting on a table in a corner.

We gathered in a cavernous meditation hall where a golden Buddha stared back at us from an altar in the front of the room. Students sat on both sides of an aisle. I sat down on the left side, realizing only later that I was on the men's side. The monastery's monks sat in the front rows, clad in robes. Women sat on the other side of the aisle. It didn't surprise me that I had gravitated to the male energy. That's what I wanted to tap within myself. I sat cross-legged, mimicking those around me, my butt resting on the edge of a pillow. The senior monk from Sri Lanka sat in front of us below the Buddha.

“I am here,” he told us, “to talk to you about mindfulness. It is about having control of our mind and our actions.

“You must develop insight. Look within. Each distracting thought is a cloud that passes you by. Control the mind. Think of yourselves as charioteers and the horses as your mind. You have the choice whether to be a charioteer or simply a person holding the reins on wild horses.”

I felt stupid. So when I was depressed, I had to escape the quicksand of my negative thoughts. It was that simple. “Banish them,” the senior monk said.

If he knew, he probably would have also told me to turn off Country Music Network after three songs, if not sooner. I felt so much lighter.

One afternoon, I experienced my first concentrated meditation. It felt wonderful. As part of the retreat, we had to do chores. I chose to pull weeds and couldn't help but observe the obvious symbolic value of digging my fingers deep into the soil to ease weeds out by their roots.

The Buddhism taught here was from a school of thought called Theravada, or Vipassana, meaning “insight.” After the Buddha died, Buddhism seeped into other parts of Asia. In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Theravadan Buddhism followed a more ascetic tradition with internal meditation at the center of the practice. Mahayana Buddhism spread through Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan with a practice that incorporated meditation on deities.

The senior monk sat down with me so I could talk to him about my project. He listened carefully and spoke with certainty. “Research Tantra, but do not practice it. Have your own practice.”

“Why?”

“That would be best for you. It is a dangerous practice.”

A young woman named Kirsten helped feed us, a volunteer cook who had quit her job to live at the monastery in her own personal retreat.

In Buddhism, the
sangha
is a spiritual community from which we can learn lessons. I sat one night with Kirsten after evening meditation when we were supposed to be silent. She told me that she was a romantic, like me, but she had found a practice that helped her slay her romantic delusions. “Death meditation,” she said.

“Meditate upon images of death,” she said, “and you'll see the impermanence of life.”

I'd heard about impermanence as a basic tenet of Buddhism but never quite understood what it meant. Could it free me from imagining honeymoons with men who didn't even call back? “It reminds you that death is inevitable and that it just isn't worth it to get caught up in obsessions.”

Kirsten was using her practice to free herself from a crush she had developed on a monk at the monastery. She felt a deep love for him that was sincere and without expectation. Meanwhile, she was e-mailing a man in the outside world who had invited her to vacation with him and his family. She was trying to nurture a love without self-interest, a love that stemmed from only feelings of loving-kindness to the man. I knew that some of my friends would just say get on with it and jump in bed together, but I admired her aspirations. Maybe it was the romantic in me. Maybe she was kidding herself.

I asked another senior monk who lived here about this concept of meditating upon death. He was a former hippie from the States who had wandered the Indian subcontinent. In my mind, I nicknamed him Surfer Monk. In the monastery's small library, he pulled down a photo album from the shelves and showed me pictures of a cremation ceremony in India. Yes, death was a vehicle for liberation. “Recognizing the truth of death can free you in life,” he told me.

“How did you choose the celibate path as a monk?” I asked him.

“Nothing I experienced sexually came close to the power of my meditations. There's nothing wrong with being alone. You don't have to be married.”

I wondered that night about what he told me. It was true, I realized, despite all the pressures upon me to marry. I didn't have to marry. The bullfrog croaked in the pond, as if he agreed.

Over the next days, I meditated upon images of death and the potential for calm in this life. I saw the image of Iftikhar Mamoo lying before me, as he did, in a peaceful, dimly lit room at the hospital where he died from a heart attack. He was the only person I had ever seen dead. I wept hard when I saw him, but now his image didn't sadden me but rather simply showed me, yes, that concept of impermanence on earth. From the pits of darkness, I began to emerge liberated a bit from the shackles of
illusory love. My loves had been filled with obsession, insecurity, and clinging. I wanted to strive toward the ideals I'd been told about, a love centered upon loving-kindness. I left the monastery with a meditation practice and a very clean minivan.

I was giving the monk that Kirsten liked plus an aspiring monk, Matt, a ride to Washington, D.C., and out of respect to them, I spent the afternoon before our departure cleaning chewing gum out of the drink cup holders, applying the concept of mindfulness. As we pulled away, I was nervous behind the wheel, not knowing how to relate to two men on the spiritual path. So what did I do? Told West Virginia jokes.

“What's the official state flower of West Virginia?”

They didn't know.

“The satellite dish!”

The cute monk smiled politely. When we stopped to let him duck into the post office, I swung around to appeal to Matt. “Help! I'm just blabbering, telling West Virginia jokes.”

He looked at me through the gap in the front seats. “You know, he doesn't expect you to say anything.”

Relief descended upon me, spilling over me as if I'd been freed from a burden that I'd carried of my own free will for so many years. I considered this idea. I didn't have to talk. I didn't have to talk? I didn't have to talk. I breathed with the relief that my breath didn't have to be a companion to spoken word. Matthew fell asleep quickly. I felt calm now with the monk. I wanted to ask him how he managed his sexuality on this path that required him to be celibate.