Tantrika (18 page)

“Ammmma!”

My mother's voice and footsteps echoed on the stone steps that led upstairs to where I sat on Latif Manzil's top floor.

She was a young girl and had skipped school again, as she was prone to do. She was calling out to her mother who was downstairs, tending one of her children or cooking or doing one of the many things a woman running a household in the village does. My mother raced up and down these stairs all day long, playing with the
chamar
children of the village, born of a Hindu caste considered untouchables because their parents cleaned the toilets and cesspools.

But today Nani couldn't answer. Nani had tried to keep her family together but hadn't succeeded. She sometimes wondered why she hadn't died in the cholera epidemic along with her sisters. But Nani didn't weep about her lot in life. That wasn't her way. She was a model of
sabr,
an Urdu word of Arabic origin that meant more than the “patience” it usually described. It was wisdom. Compassion. Steadfastness.

My mother's shouts filled the village air. The day had turned into darkness. She had been piled onto an
ikka,
a horse-drawn cart. She saw only darkness and more darkness. Her mother was sending her to live with another relative where she could get a proper education. All she wanted was her mother.

She was taken, instead, eastward to Bombay, now Mumbai. She refused to live with a relative she didn't like. She was then sent to a hill station called Panchgani. A British officer had tried to convert Panchgani into a European health resort decades before. It was now home to some of India's finest boarding schools. She lived in a sweeping house, Buena Vista, where two older married cousins shepherded the education of their younger cousins.

One day at school, the nuns handed out Cadbury chocolate and roasted rice treats called
liee ke ladoo,
sweets that looked like today's Rice Krispies treats only they were white. It was 1947. India had just won independence from the British, and my mother was lined up in a hallway at her convent school, collecting her treats. The country was liberated. A new Muslim nation called Pakistan was carved out of India's northernmost region. Murder, rape, and pillage followed the migration of Hindus to India from Pakistan and Muslims to Pakistan from India. It mattered little to this girl. Her heart hadn't yet been liberated. Every night, she sat on a rocking chair and wept for her mother who still lived in the village.

“Amma!” the cries continued when she returned to the village. There, she didn't cry. But she asked her mother, “Why did you leave me?”

She grew into a young woman with a face as smooth as porcelain. Her eyes were a deep pool of brown light. Her cheekbones were high and her face narrow. She had a soft voice that called to her best friend with the lilt of birds. At each other's urging the two of them ripped off the black
burqas
that cloaked them on the way to their girls' college, Nirmala Niketan Home Economics College.

“We're not going to wear our
burqas!
” they yelled to each other.

It was the servant who told on them. He told her elder cousins that she and her friend took off their
burqas
when they got on campus. For this infraction, they pulled her from school. It was time, anyway, that she got married.

Her eldest sister, Rashida, and another sister, Shahida, had found a prospective groom at a wedding. What the two sisters liked about him the most was the way he bounced around the wedding, snapping photographs with boundless energy. His name was Zafar.

 

Khala told me more about our family. A snake bit her dadi. The wife of her father's eldest brother, her bari ammi, made a
masjid,
a mosque, in front of our village home in Jaigahan with the money she received as her wedding gift. A relative tore the
masjid
down and replaced it with a new construction, thinking he had done a great thing, not realizing he had dismantled family history. One night, Khala told me, she dreamed long ago of seeing a tree with an orange hanging from it. The orange fell into the
water. She was pregnant and lost her baby that night. She said she felt sad at coming to Latif Manzil. “There are many regrets that surface here,” she said.

She guided us through the alleys of the big house into doorways I wouldn't have known to enter. Zaki had told her about porcupines that had raided. Latif Manzil and Khala captivated our relatives with the tale as we sat in the courtyards of their neighboring houses. Khala unknotted a corner of her
dupatta
into which she had tucked a porcupine needle to pull out as evidence of these creatures. They had chomped through doors throughout the house. She had never heard of such a thing happening here before.

Lucy, Esther, and I ventured out alone into the farm fields, as the village men did every day but rarely the Muslim women. As we walked through the fields, Lucy warned me, “Watch out for the shit.” It was an appropriate warning to keep us from soiling our spirits as Tantrikas as we traversed through life. A cow skull lay in the fields. We crossed into Khadnapur, the name of the village land that bordered Jaigahan.

Here we could feel the squish of the earth on our feet. A yellow butterfly danced in front of us, near white flowers. A rugged and handsome cousin of ours, Gama Bhai, led us over the land. He lived in the shadow of Latif Manzil with his wife, daughters, and son in a humble two-room house with a courtyard and open-air kitchen. His slow gait, measured speech, and the gray lining his trim hair gave him a dignified air beyond his forty-something age and his status as a small farmer in these parts. He was not a landowner, a
zamindar
in the tradition of our family, but plowed the land to support his family and eke out a small living. He impressed me as a stark contrast to Bluebeard.

“This is all of yours,” he said, sweeping his hands over the land.

What a thought—to have a lineage that tied us to the land. It bound my heart even deeper to this magical place. Lucy swung a blue plastic bag filled with eggplant. Esther carried a bag of tomatoes and lemons. We went to Gama Bhai's house, where his mother, Bilkees Khala, sat in front of us. She was one of the elders of the village, a cousin to Rashida Khala, Iftikhar Mamoo, and my mother, so she became an aunt to Esther, Lucy, and me. She had lost most of her teeth so her cheeks were sunken, but,
like Khala, she carried herself with grace, and beauty was chiseled into her face through a lifetime of village life. She reminded us of the essential: “This is your home.”

Esther and Lucy did consider Jaigahan and Latif Manzil their home. But there was Zaki to reckon with. He was always the black sheep of the family, leaving a string of failed business ventures in his wake and such troubled relationships with family members. Esther and Lucy remembered how our cousin-sisters called him “Yucky Zaki” when they were growing up.

Now Zaki's wife, Shubnam, had joined him here after about two decades of living with her parents in Calcutta. They were running a school named after my great-grandfather, Latif Convent Academy. It was “English-medium,” which meant that school was taught in the English language. But it was rote just like my young cousin Shaan learned in Lucknow. The young schoolchildren lined up in their uniforms in a room off the courtyard. It should have been an inspiring scene. But it was tortured. Shubnam Momani and Zaki Mamoo barked at the children all day. Zaki carried a ruler, a “scale” in India, which he used to rap the children's hands when he wanted to discipline them.

At 8:20 one morning, Zaki stood over the line with a ruler. At 9:08
A.M
. I heard the smacking sound of the ruler hitting a child. Bluebeard was such a dark force.

Teenage girls slipped into the house in black
burqas
in the afternoon for “private tuition” with Shubnam Momani. She spoke an inspiring message about wanting to educate the girls so that they could be somewhat literate.

But the spirit of the house was oppressive with Zaki in it. Bilkees Khala sent food over for Khala. It was a ritual of respect accorded to Khala for her years. Zaki went crazy. “It's a sign of disrespect to me! Isn't my wife's cooking good enough for you?”

Khala was horrified. She slipped out of the house.

Esther and Lucy were shocked when they went upstairs to the two rooms in which their parents had slept. Clothes their mother had carefully folded spilled out of trunks, and the rooms were in disarray. “My mother packed everything so neatly,” Esther said wistfully. “We left
everything so tidy.” Her mother had also given Zaki the keys to the rooms. His family seemed to have taken over. The rooms were now a mess.

I had read from one of my books about purification in Tantra. The room where a Tantric ritual was to take place had to be cleaned. Incense should burn there all the time. The room should be decorated with flowers. A meal would be laid out, consisting of four different ingredients, and wine decanted. Candles would burn or, better still, an oil lamp with oil that creates a special red light. Then the room and the house could be cleansed, sprinkling water and using mantras. Normally long verses of mantras were used. It was to go on so long and so thoroughly that you became completely absorbed, giving yourself seriously and without reservation to the purification.

We had no food of our own. We had no flowers. We certainly didn't have wine. But we had to cleanse these two rooms upstairs that Lucy and Esther's parents had called their bedroom. We cleaned like fanatics. I burned incense. I said my protection verse from the Qur'an. I twirled the incense sticks in circular motions around the room to clear it.

All the while, I learned lessons from Khala. She told me that if I had a nightmare, I should turn over on my right side to sleep and then give money to somebody poor in the morning.

Khala told me that in Islam it was said that if a husband looked at his wife with a smile then he would see the gate of heaven. Zaki Mamoo spoke loudly to his wife with not a smile to be found. His voice was full of so much anger. She and her husband had hardly lived together over the decades of years they had been married. Khala said, “The best thing is for the husband to be with the wife.”

We lived in the village as we wanted to live. I even went behind the wheel of a Mahindra jeep. On the way to Khetasari, I gave an elderly man a ride. Our usual driver, a handsome young man named Abu Saad, told me later the man was Dr. Amanula Hakim, a doctor of Eastern medicine. He had probably never had a woman drive him around before. In Khetasari, we ventured unescorted to buy steel trunks. Esther bought new locks for the doors on her parents' rooms upstairs.

A runaway cow roamed the village. A woman stopped me in the street. I didn't know who she was, cloaked in a black
burqa.
She pulled
the flap up to reveal her weathered face and a smile missing many teeth. She was our driver Abu Saad's mother. “You drove!” she said.

“What do you think of that?”

“It's a good thing.”

To me, her affirmation far outweighed the haughtiest condemnation by the status quo.

It was the morning of September 11, 2000. How could we know how the world would be transformed a year from that day? For now, I was in this village where homes didn't have refrigerators because there were frequent electrical shutdowns, girls went behind the veil by the time they were teenagers, and there was no such thing as an Internet connection. It was 7:41
A.M
. Khala emerged with a flowered
kurta
with embroidery on it and a white
dupatta
over her head. Khala and I sat on the
charpai.
Khala told me porcupines were called
shahee
in Urdu, information no more important than the fact that it came from Khala and made me one word closer to the pulse of my ancestors.

Esther came to tell us she had discovered one of her artist brushes missing. She wasn't angry about the brush, but its absence was symbolic of the violation she felt Zaki had made into the sacred space of her parents' rooms. She yelled at Zaki about the missing brush. He was adamant. “None of the children would steal.”

Esther used the opportunity to tell him she didn't like the intrusion of the school into the space of Latif Manzil as a family house. Zaki started getting rude. “I have half of this house. We will split the house in half, then.” As one of the descendants of the four brothers who shared Latif Manzil, his side of the family had a one-fourth share of the house, and he had gotten control over another quarter share by a side of the family made closer by marriage.

I joined the conversation. Zaki rudely tried to cut me off. “I will only talk to her.” I didn't let his ego ensnare me. He tried to tell Esther that he considered himself like a father to her. When Khala talked to Esther later, privately, Khala told her to be strong against darkness. “Don't cry.”

A
STORY GOES THAT
Buddha's decision to seek an end to suffering was inspired by his first deep comprehension of suffering through meeting a sick man, a beggar, a dying man, and a monk. His journey began on that day. On the streets of Lucknow, my
dakini
spirits Esther and Lucy transported back to their lives as students in England, I met my sick man, and he made me think, “There but for the grace of God go my brother, me, all of us.”

I saw him first in front of the Clark Hotel, a naked man standing in the middle of traffic as if he wanted to be hit. I saw him again at Hazratganj, the street of businesses with Ray-Bans and Nike. I tried to feed him water from my Bislera bottle. He lunged at me. I was not scared. I looked him straight in the eye, as if I was disciplining my cat Billlie, and said, “No!”

The shoe
walla
threw water on him to make him leave his storefront. Then he locked the door with us inside. As he gazed out the locked door, this seller of shoes told me he had gone to a Tantric to try to get back his wife who left him. About the naked man getting water thrown upon him, he said, “In India, if you are falling people will only push you down harder.”

I stood for an hour to watch the man as he crossed back and forth over the busy lanes of Hazratganj.

He was actually concerned about a scooter that hit a car. He went to the traffic cop to make sure he knew. The traffic cop hit him with a switch meant for horses. Was he mad or were we mad?

There was a psychiatric hospital nearby. It was Nur Manzil Psychiatric Centre in Lalbagh, a short rickshaw ride from Hazratganj,
nur
meaning “light,”
manzil
meaning “resting place.” I asked to see the director, a man named Dr. Arun Thacore. After waiting awhile, I was beckoned in to see a serious man behind a desk. He shook his head. He said the psychiatric
hospital wouldn't take the poor man. “He is an indigent. Try the Sisters of Charity, and return tomorrow morning for an appointment at 9
A.M
.”

I headed back to Hazratganj to walk to the Sisters of Charity. I asked two women who dressed like nuns for directions. “Walk with us,” they told me.

I waited in a corridor facing a courtyard. Images of Mother Teresa were everywhere with quotes about the light that shines within us. I thought about Mother Teresa as I never had before. It was true. For her to accomplish what she did, building a charity for the poor, this force of virginal female energy in this land, she had to be Shakti incarnate. I had never seen her that way before. The sisters said, “We can't take him because he's
pagal,”
mentally ill.

I visited a tailor that night. Rishi Puri, the tailor's son, hung around in the back of the store where his aunt took my measurements for new
shalwar kameez
outfits. He was a first-year commerce student. That meant he would have been a college freshman in America. He had driven by the naked man that day. He was so saddened he made himself look the other way.

His aunt had been working in the store for the last thirty years with the encouragement of her
bhaya,
her older brother. Her young nephew admired her. “She is very strong.”

She wore the golden image of a goddess on a tiger on her chest. It dangled on the end of a slender gold chain.

I didn't recognize the image. “Who is that?”

“Durga.” Ah, Durga. I was still getting to know her.

In the morning, I returned to Nur Manzil.

As I waited in the reception, a young man approached me. “Are you a nurse?” he asked with a voice that matched his gentle brown eyes and smooth skin. His dark hair had silken threads of golden brown spun into it. I laughed. I was the furthest thing from a nurse, though trying to find help for one naked man. He was Lokendra Subedi from Birendranagar in the Surkhet District of Nepal, a traveler far from home, at the hospital because he had been suffering from depression.

We started talking to another man in the waiting room, Lalee Takur, an engineer with the Survey Branch Office in the city of Dhangahi in
Nepal, who had also come from across the border to find help for his son, Kisore Sharma, who had epilepsy. His family had told him to take his son to a village Tantric to cure him. He got him medicine instead. But the rational mind at the hospital provided them little compassion. Both these patients had been waiting to see the hospital director, yet I was beckoned inside first. The psychiatrist was immediately interested in my position as a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal.
He was one of India's few subscribers, he told me. Now I knew why he wanted to meet me.

I told him about my project. He told me that parents came to Nur Manzil after failing to find success with Tantrics who claimed they could cure their children of mental illnesses by ridding them of spirits and spells that had supposedly seized their minds and souls. One set of parents brought their daughter in after she was tied to a rock, beaten, and starved to remove an evil spirit from her body. It showed me the horrors of Tantra being abused in the name of healing, another reminder that I didn't want to go down the path of learning secrets of black magic or spiritual power. I would rather be motivated by simple kindness. Despite all my intentions, however, I ended up as successful in helping the naked man as the tailor's son who drove by and did nothing. The inclination for compassion and empathy was low in this land of so much suffering.

I returned home to Jahingarabad Palace, where Khala shook her head, listening to the story of how I'd spent my day.