Tantrika (28 page)

The long grass stirred around me as I walked. In their wind dance I could see my soul stir. I had flown far not only in body but also in spirit to walk along these banks. I concluded it wasn't important for me to cling to the notion of doing a cartwheel with my body as long as I was free to do cartwheels in my mind. That was where true liberation lay, wasn't it? I turned around with this realization, and I willed my boyfriend to walk toward me. I gazed forward, imagining his figure, imagining and imagining, until I blinked and he was actually there, pacing toward me. I ran toward him. I was so happy to see him.

“I was afraid you were angry,” he told me.

“How can I be angry? I love you.” He embraced me, relieved.

This was a land of forests and underbrush where
dacoits,
the hardened robbers of the Indian subcontinent, hid from the law. The gunmen armed with Kalashnikovs guarded our every move like sentries. They had ridden with us the night before in the darkness as we bounced over the rocky terrain to hunt. By day, they walked with us as we climbed into a wooden boat to cross the Indus River to the other bank. As the boat glided through the waters, a man guiding our way with a single oar, I searched for the blind dolphins that swam here but saw only my reflection.

As we left, my boyfriend asked the driver to stop, grabbed a rifle from one of the guards, and shot a soaring white bird out of the sky. The armed guards looked at it. “It's
haram,”
one said, meaning it wasn't kosher to eat in Islam. We had to leave this beautiful white bird behind, dying. Its death haunted me, but I wasn't sure why.

On assignment, I left my boyfriend for a few days and headed for Afghanistan. When I was in Pakistan as a teenager, I had only jumped across the border into Afghanistan. This time I wanted to venture deeper into this land from which the Sufi poet Rumi hailed.

The day after Christmas I walked into Afghanistan. Less than an hour later I walked straight out. The Afghani soldiers at the border, allied with the Northern Alliance leaders who had taken over the country, were clearly running an extortion racket.

Liberation, I discovered, came in strange forms. A volleyball streaked through the clear night sky in Karachi.

Across the net, an athletic player in spectacles and Nike shorts threw his body across the dirt court to save a hit from touching the ground. His team set the save and scored. “Bravo!” his teammates yelled to their defensive hero. “Well done!”

He wiped a layer of dirt from his shorts and shyly smiled.

It was a long journey that had brought me across the net from my pal Danny on a dirt court at Alliance Française in Karachi, on Saturday, December 29, the last weekend before New Year's 2002. It happened to be the anniversary of my wedding. In the summer of my divorce, Danny had tossed me a volleyball at Modell's Sporting Goods on L Street in Washington, D.C. I had turned the ball in my hands and seen its scarlet letter: “Made in Pakistan.”

“No way,” I'd said, hurling the ball back to Danny. “Made in Pakistan” conjured up too many memories of boundaries eschewed when I flung my Speedo bikini-clad body for a shanked pass.

Days earlier, one afternoon just before Christmas, I had found myself standing on a ridge outside the Shamshato Afghan refugee camp, looking over a dirt valley tucked between the rugged hills outside the northern Pakistani town of Peshawar. That morning, I had left a traditional Pakthun home with a
dupatta,
a head scarf, worn so that only my eyes would peer out as I interviewed allies of the Taliban and Northern Alliance. I stood looking down at a game of volleyball played only by Afghan refugee men. I turned back to the car, certain that I couldn't cross this barrier. I looked toward one of my companions, a burly, bearded Pakthun Pakistani Muslim, Shaukat Ali, with two wives at home.

“I'd really like to play,” I told him.

“Let's go,” he said in Urdu, to my shock, rolling up his sleeves.

I ran down the hill. I kicked off my sandals and walked onto the court in bare feet, crossing more than the lines drawn in the dirt.

In Karachi, my boyfriend had zipped Danny and me to the Nike store to outfit Danny in new shorts and running shoes before dropping us off at Alliance Française. Danny played according to the character that defined
him off the court with the indefatigable fire and goodwill he had taught me. “Nice save!” I yelled to Danny across the net.

“Did the ball say, ‘Made in Pakistan'?” Danny asked as we walked off the court.

“I don't know,” I said, realizing that on this path on which my great friend had taught me so many lessons, it really didn't matter after all.

I was reminded of the superficial judgment made in this society, where people rejected others without even knowing them. My boyfriend told me one night when he visited me in my room at the Pearl-Continental that two of his former girlfriends commented disapprovingly on our age difference, not surprising in a society where a woman is most marketable as a young virgin. He was twenty-eight. I was thirty-six.

“But look at the Prophet Muhammad and his wife Khadija,” I told him. She was forty and he was twenty-five when they married.

“That's right,” he assured me. “It doesn't matter to me. You're the only woman I know who can do cartwheels.”

But, sure enough, the daggers were out for me. “She looks older than you,” said the former girlfriend who had gone into his house with me.

He used our argument. “So what? The Prophet Muhammad married a woman older than he.”

“Well, you're not the Prophet Muhammad,” came her reply.

The other former girlfriend called from Ithaca, New York, where she was studying for her master's in business at Cornell University, angry that he sent her an e-mail that he was in love with someone else and wouldn't spend New Year's with her, as he'd agreed.

“She's too old for you,” she told him. “It's not practical.”

He hung up the phone on her. She called back to apologize.

“What does it mean my age isn't practical?” I asked my boyfriend.

“That it'll be difficult to have a baby. I told her, ‘I've been smoking since I've been fourteen. I'm probably the one who's infertile.' Anyway, we'll adopt.”

“Really? That's sweet.” He had confided to me once that he wanted one day to open an orphanage in Pakistan.

I draped my legs over my boyfriend and settled my head upon his chest, as he drew me closer. I thought I couldn't have been happier.

“B
OY
!” the message flashed.

My Nokia handset had just beeped, breaking the quiet of an afternoon in Karachi, as my friend Danny sent me a text message from Islamabad. He and his wife, Mariane, had just emerged from having a sonogram done on the baby they were expecting.

“Ibn Pearl!” I wrote back, using the Arabic for “son of Pearl.”

A smile crossed my face. After so many years of the dating scene, Danny had found true love with Mariane. She was eclectic and a practicing Buddhist, just the right combination, it seemed, to enrapture Danny without threatening his delicate sense of space and endearing spaciness. Just three weeks before, Mariane had jetted to Karachi on New Year's Eve, and I had spent my first time together with them since their wedding in August, 1999. I still owed them the wedding gift I was cross-stitching for them. After the wedding, I'd accidentally left it at the Parisian boutique hotel where I'd been staying up the street from their apartment in the cute Montmartre neighborhood. Danny sent it back to me with his familiar scrawl on the front.

“Hi, I was so curious but I ‘restrained' myself from looking.”

Danny had come into Karachi a few days before New Year's for our volleyball game, and he was intent on finding Mariane the perfect New Year's gift as we meandered through Park Towers, a mall right out of Americana except for the drivers outside waiting for their elite lady bosses to emerge with their shopping.

“I don't know,” Danny had said, studying a smooth-toned silver choker he'd spread out on a glass counter. “It looks crooked. What do you think?”

I had studied the choker. “Looks okay.”

“I don't know…” Danny had said, trailing off.

I had studied the choker some more He had been right. It was crooked.

Mariane had arrived with her belly full with their unborn baby and socks with a colorful animation at the ankles, part of her New Year's gift for Danny. He had pulled them on right away and danced on his toes in their hotel room. “I love them!”

We had returned together to the mall. I had known Danny had great tales to weave from his travels. “You've got to write them all down!” I had told him as he, Mariane, and I had plucked three spiral notebooks off the shelves at an office supply store.

We had all tumbled into my boyfriend's car for New Year's. The last time I had spent New Year's with Danny he was a foreign correspondent in the
Journal'
s London bureau, traipsing through the Arab world, interviewing kings and revolutionaries, but never forgetting to send me additions to the barf bags I'd been collecting for years for an article I never wrote. My cousin-sisters Lucy and Esther had come in from Maidenhead to meet us at a London club to see a band called Egg, and I had helped Danny throw a New Year's breakfast party at his apartment in a London mew. At the stove, Danny had respected his and my religious ban on pork, frying sausages made from everything but pork, even pulling vegetarian sausages out of his fridge.

“Voilà!” he had proclaimed, spinning in his kitchen, using the little French he knew until he met Mariane.

It was a different scene in Pakistan. For the first time in that country, I had worn a dress, a sleek long number I had borrowed from Mariane, a funny “Save The Queen” label at the nape of my neck. We had thrown shawls over our dresses.

“There could be trouble,” my boyfriend had said, behind the wheel of his Honda. Islamic fundamentalist groups didn't think highly of the alcohol and dancing at the parties of the elite. Danny had tucked into his pocket a business card from an official at the conservative Islamic group Jamaat-e-Islami just in case we needed a friend. Indeed, the ringing of Danny's mobile phone had broken our chatter as we drove through town to go from one party to another. A bomb had gone off at a bowling alley, Area 51. I'd bowled there with my boyfriend during Ramadan when it
was open all night, whipping Brunswick bowling balls down a lane, wearing a T-shirt with “
PAKISTAN
” across my chest.

“Don't get close,” Danny had warned me as we'd stepped out of the car. “They often plant two bombs, one to go off after the other.”

Subdued, we'd continued jotting notes along the way. On the way, my boyfriend had gotten directions from a woman friend.

“Okay,
jaan!”
he had yelled into his mobile to his friend.

Jaan?
My ears had prickled as I sat beside him.
Jaan
was the term of endearment my boyfriend had taught me. It literally meant life. I thought it was a term we'd reserved only for each other. I had become sensitive. The realities of having a Western relationship in an Eastern world had started to catch up with us. My boyfriend had started cutting short his visits to me to get home for dinner with his parents. “I don't want them to hate you,” he had tried to explain to me. So why, since I'd met them, couldn't I join him? I didn't understand. He'd had many girlfriends. He had taken me to his house. I'd spent time with his parents. Since I moved out of my childhood home and into a rental with a lopsided floor, I'd spent nights freely with my boyfriends. It was a different existence here, I knew. This was a world where I'd discovered all things of the West happened. Men and women played strip poker, frolicked in ménage à trois bedroom scenes, danced at a nightclub called Equinox, and freely smoked hashish, but boyfriends and girlfriends often met on the sly. They rarely spent nights together even if they were having sex. Our Saturday nights at French Beach were a luxury. But now he was calling someone else
jaan.

We had dropped Danny and Mariane off at the party to go park. “
Jaan
just means dear,” my boyfriend had insisted. “It's nothing.”

I'd felt even more slighted. I had gone to cuff him on the side of the head to mime a hit for digging such a deep hole. Instead, I'd boxed his ears. Hard.

Both of us stinging, we'd lost each other at the party. I had peeked outside. Danny and Mariane were snuggling heads, oblivious to the thumping music and swirl of men and women around them in black on black. I'd wished that I felt so happily in love.

Until Danny met Mariane, he had never been a model of an attentive boyfriend, but this striking and beautiful woman of Dutch and Cuban
ancestry had transformed him. I had surprised myself the next day, seeking relationship guidance from him.

“Can I ask you something?” I had asked in the lobby of the Pearl-Continental.

“Sure.”

“How do you become patient?”

He'd smiled his askew Danny smile. “You can't learn to be patient, but because you love someone you can pretend to be patient.”

Oh. “There are times when you get impatient, but you don't show it?”

“Because it's not worth upsetting Mariane.”

I tried, but I had started to worry. My boyfriend flirted with a woman, both of them drunk at one of the many Karachi balls thrown around the city after New Year's. He had gotten on his knees to apologize to me. Still, things had been getting strained. He had told me that it would be best if I returned to the States, because he wouldn't be able to spend as much time with me as he had during the shortened work days of Ramadan when he could juggle work and family with our budding relationship. He had thought it best if we continued long distance for six months until we could be together.

“No, it'll be okay,” I had said, optimistically.

On New Year's Day, before setting off for Islamabad, Mariane had looked at an unfurnished house that I was thinking about renting in which I could write my book and nurture my romance. “You'll even have to buy air conditioners,” Mariane had warned. “Get a furnished apartment. Make your life simple.”

That day, I had found a beautiful home on a posh lane next to the Clifton neighborhood where my boyfriend lived. Bright flowers, trees, and
chowkidars,
or guards, lined the street called Zamzama after the name given to holy water that supposedly sprang out of the parched desert outside the revered Muslim city of Mecca at the time of the prophet Abraham. Wide carved doors opened into an immaculately furnished three-bedroom home with everything down to a table clock with a golfer's club as a second hand, swinging to mark each passing moment. I envisioned it as the perfect home to which I could beckon my family so they could see the life I'd built for myself on the subcontinent, comfort
able, fun, and independent. I had gotten my second set of keys to a home on the subcontinent. I always kept my keys to Latif Manzil with me. I also had signed the lease with a mind to see more of Danny and Mariane.

“It's got a great guest bedroom!” I had told Danny.

He was no pushover. “Does it get sun?”

Now, they were planning to come to Karachi on their way back to India. I needed friends. The city had turned lonely for me. My boyfriend had been right. He was spending less time with me, and somehow I wasn't welcome at his home anymore. Although I had enough confidence to know my self-worth, I also knew that I wasn't the ideal pick for his parents. I was older. I was divorced. I came from India. And, to top it all off, I was a woman who had her own home without a chaperone, and their son stayed out late alone with me. I was not Islam's girl next door.

I had found myself getting depressed and isolated. I went to Pakistan to bridge misunderstanding between people with sincerity and honesty, and both my work and I were being attacked. I had found myself weeping every day, and I had started contemplating the darkest thoughts. When Danny and Mariane's car pulled up outside my gate, I jumped out of my seat to run into the sunshine to greet them. Somehow I felt they could give me a reprieve from the depression into which I had sunk.

I led Danny and Mariane upstairs. “Look,” I told them, opening the screen door onto the veranda. Four parrots that lived across the street were gliding through the sky. Their twerps filled the air, transporting me to those magical moments where the
junglis
would fill the sky over Jaigahan with their chatter.

Danny set up his Toshiba laptop at my rolltop desk. “Have you seen one of the Nikes I bought to play volleyball?” he asked.

Uh, no. “Why?”

“I lost it.”

Goofy Danny. By night we listened to Phil Collins, Bruce Springsteen, and the sufi Pakistani rock band, Junoon, and I escaped for some time alone with my boyfriend.

Danny was in Karachi to do an interview with a Muslim leader. The day after he and Mariane arrived, he set off for the interview. The Sheraton didn't have any cars available to send over. Danny was getting
anxious about being late. I asked the
chowkidar
guarding my house, Shabeer, to find taxis for Danny and Mariane, who was setting off for a separate interview. In the bright shine of an early Wednesday evening, shortly after 5
P.M
., Danny slipped into his yellow taxi, fumbling with his notebook, mobile phone, and shoulder bag, as he was prone to do. I waved to my dear friend as the taxi pulled away.

“See you later!”

He returned my good-bye with a gentle wave and smile.

Daylight turned to darkness, but Danny didn't return home. Mariane had cooked a Cuban dinner that night to which I'd invited my boyfriend and some of his friends. She and I spent the evening calling Danny's mobile. “It's still turned off,” Mariane said after each try. She remained calm, but with each passing hour the tension rose.

“I'm worried,” she admitted. Danny never turned his phone off. He always wanted Mariane to be able to reach him.

We wondered aloud if he'd gone to a
madrassa,
a Muslim religious school, outside Karachi. I remembered that Danny had told me he might spend some time with the religious leaders' disciples. “Maybe he's out of range.”

After the last guest left, Mariane and I climbed the stairs to peck for clues in Danny's e-mails and Palm Pilot on his computer. We found the name of the man he was supposed to meet: Gilani. I tapped the name into a Google search. What we found was frightening. The FBI wanted Gilani for bomb attacks in the U.S., staged from an organization called Muslims of America that converted many black Americans to Islam. He and the organization denied any wrongdoing. We found a
Boston Globe
article in Danny's e-mails about Gilani. I couldn't believe my eyes. It quoted one of the friends of the family whom I'd met in Islamabad, a man named Khalid Khawaja, as a close friend of Gilani.

The night was slipping into dawn. My boyfriend had fallen asleep as we had trolled for clues. Each passing car had given us hope that one would stop in front of our gate and Danny would emerge, kept overnight by overeager hosts. But the new day's first light arrived without Danny.

I called this man I'd found quoted by the
Boston Globe,
a fundamentalist Muslim whom I'd spent hours interviewing, as other Western jour
nalists including Danny had done, because he was an educated and articulate spokesman for the cause of not only the Taliban but also Osama bin Laden, whom he claimed was his friend. When I called him, as the cry broke out for the sunrise prayer, he preached to me about the destruction America was causing Afghanis instead of agreeing to help. I wondered about these Muslim values of goodwill that he preached. He knew Danny, but still he was balking at helping.

That day, my writer's retreat became the command center for the hunt to find Danny. Mariane and I steered the police through all that we knew. I didn't bother wearing a
dupatta,
as I did when I met elders or more conservative Muslims than my boyfriend's crowd. I didn't even clear away the Murree Brewery beer bottles that littered the house from the night before.

The police asked me questions about my life and work. “I'm an open book,” I told Inspector General Kamal Shah, the police chief for the province of Sindh, in which Karachi sits as the capital.