Tantrika (29 page)

Yes, I was born in India. Yes, I lived in this house alone. Yes, I was writing a book, and, yes, I was on leave from the
Wall Street Journal.

He tapped his walking stick. “We don't suspect you.”

I didn't know what to think about Danny's disappearance. I went to the gate in the early evening. Two of my boyfriend's friends were standing there, looking anxiously for my boyfriend. “Is he here?”

“He isn't.” I told them I had just talked to his boss, and he said he expected him back soon. “Do you want to come inside?”

“No, we'll be going,” they said and rushed off.

My boyfriend soon appeared in his dark business suit and a clipped walk. His face had fallen. I'd never seen him like that before. He looked afraid. He sat at the dining table with two of the Pakistani investigators. My boyfriend thanked one of them. “You got the people off my back.”

We went upstairs. My boyfriend looked intently at me. “I can't come over much.”

“Why?”

“You'll have a lot of things happening here. You shouldn't have just anybody walking through here.”

“You're not just anybody.”

He told me that he had gotten a phone call from Pakistani intelligence. We knew he and I were on their radar screen because he had gotten stopped once after visiting me at the Sheraton by a man who said he belonged to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, known as ISI, a group with a dark side of torture and harassment in the country's history books. “I talked to my parents. They don't want me coming over.” He told me that a mamoo, one of his maternal uncles, disappeared some years back for days, and his family didn't want the same to happen to him. I couldn't believe my ears. I actually thought this crisis would give him the opportunity to stand by my side, even stay with Mariane and me as male protection. Didn't he understand what we were going through in this land foreign to us? He was adamant. “I have to leave.”

“How can you do this?” I screamed.

“I have no choice,” he responded.

“You always have a choice.” I could only think of the many times I had chosen to displease my parents for my own independent judgment. What about his love for me? He responded with a finality that pierced my heart with a dagger unimaginable.

“I've made my choice.”

“Your family?”

“Yes.”

I closed the door and retreated upstairs to the closet that was my meditation chamber. I wept.

The outside world sees Pakistan as a monolithic Muslim nation, but it isn't. When I had been in Lahore the year before, a relative had told me, “We don't have our Urdu-speaking girls marry Punjabis.”

When I wed I thought I was satisfying the desires of my culture and religion to marry one of my own. I had no idea about the identity trap into which I was walking. My family is Urdu-speaking Muslims from India, a minority called
mohajirs,
or immigrants. We are culturally and linguistically different from the Punjabi-speaking Muslims of the region of Punjab that dominates Pakistan politics, military, and bureaucracy. While the two often get along, there is also often a divide of distrust. I married into a Punjabi family, and now I was dating a man from a Punjabi family.

My relative told me, “It's often said that a Punjabi man will give a Punjabi woman a chauffeur-driven car, a house, a refrigerator, and all the luxuries in the world. She will use the luxuries to appease herself while she looks the other way as he has affairs. But an Urdu-speaking girl will say, ‘Take all your luxuries but give me your loyalty.'”

The headline said, “Baffling Questions about Indian Lady in Pearl Case,” when it showed up in
The News
, an English-language newspaper related to Jang, the country's largest circulation newspaper with an estimated two million readers.

From that moment on, I became “the baffling Indian lady.” I read the allegations with both horror and amusement. It said that I was denied my visa twice, that I arrived in Pakistan and then simply disappeared. The article was a direct plant from the Pakistani consulate in New York. It quoted from the letter I had written to Rizwan Khan, the New York press counselor, everything about my vision to cross cultures, my failed marriage to a Pakistani, even my phone number at Sumita's apartment in Brooklyn—the contact number I'd left for the consulate—and the address of Latif Manzil, gotten from the back of my business card. I couldn't understand why they were going after me. So what if I was born in India? With Pakistan's current leader, General Musharraf, born in Delhi, did they judge me an enemy just because of my birthplace? I became enraged at their judgments, but I remained quiet, because our mission was only one: to find Danny.

I remembered the bespectacled manager of the Kwality Restaurant and Fun Foods off Montieth Road in Chennai, a man by the name of Ravindar Visht. Lucy, Esther, and I were waiting at his restaurant for our car, overdue for our trip to Pondicherry. He didn't have to help us, but he repeatedly called the car service to check on our reservation and, then, Indian Railways for our future train trip to Lucknow.

“Thank you,” I told him.

“It is my
farz,”
he told me. His duty.

That's how I felt now. It was my duty as Danny's friend to find him. In choosing to protect Danny, Mariane, and their unborn son, I chose to aspire to values of selflessness,
nairatmya
in Sanskrit, the name of a Tantric Tibetan Buddhist female deity, “No-Self.” It meant I had to risk losing my
own identity. Ego couldn't define me. Fear couldn't deter me. My own questions couldn't hinder me. Mariane and I were beyond fear, anyway, suspended in a place past terror where there were no rules. We had to persevere. We became powerful beyond tears. I had made my choice.

My boyfriend, meanwhile, would not be swayed from his choice. He returned on the second night, again after work. I couldn't understand why.

We went upstairs again to the room in which Mariane and I had held our vigil the night of Danny's kidnapping. He asked me for the book contract my literary agent's assistant faxed to his office for me days before Danny's kidnapping.

“Could you rip the top off?” he asked.

What was he talking about? I asked, but I knew the answer. He wanted to discard any trace of his company's name on the transmission record at the top of the page.

I rifled through my papers, angry and again humiliated. I thrust the paper at him. It didn't even have his company's name across the top, just the sender's identification. I walked away without saying good-bye. After he left, I looked at the paper upstairs. He had torn the top line off.

In the kitchen one day, I confided my personal troubles to a chief Pakistani police investigator whom Mariane and I had started calling Captain and whom we trusted. “Captain, the police have cost me love.”

He listened carefully, looked me in the eye, and said matter-of-factly, “It's in times of crisis that you discover the true nature of a person's character.” It was true. I was learning this lesson through a crash course.

The first night after Danny's disappearance I had curled onto a sofa in my living room so I could be near my home phone in case Danny called and, better yet, near the front door, if Danny should walk through it. Instead, a Pakistani stringer who had helped Danny make contact with the man who set up his Karachi interview had walked through the door, summoned by the police. Before law enforcement got to him, Mariane and I had drilled him for every bit of information. Danny had met his contact at a Rawalpindi hotel. We had already found the trail of e-mails that followed. The man had called himself Bashir. My Urdu from bad Bollywood movies told me that he was trouble. He had put “nobadmashi” in his e-mail address.
Badmashi,
literally, meant troublemaking. Who was he?

The stringer had linked the man to a dangerous militant Islamic group, Harkatul Mujahadin, fighting Indian troops in the state of Kashmir in northern India. Pakistan claimed the state as its territory ever since partition.

“You never told Danny!” Mariane had exclaimed.

The stringer had admitted that he hadn't.

The Sunday morning after Danny's disappearance, Mariane and I readied to go to Pakistan Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider's house with a cadre of police officials who looked like overgrown boys dressed for Sunday church. Haider oversaw law enforcement. We needed him on our side. The day's early quiet was broken by a phone call.

“We've got a ransom letter with pictures,” a
Journal
colleague told me.

We ran to Danny's laptop. I opened my Yahoo account. A
Journal
bureau chief had forwarded the letter. It came from an e-mail with “kidnapperguy” in the address. It claimed Danny was a spy for the CIA, later spinning him into a spy for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. The charges were ironic. Danny had been one of the first to document the widespread feeling in Pakistan that September 11 was a Jewish conspiracy to pin the attack on Muslims. As we drove around on New Year's Danny had joked about the notion of a Jewish conspiracy: “I missed the last meeting.”

The photos showed Danny with a gun to his head.

“Is it Danny?” Captain asked. Mariane looked for his wedding ring.

“It's Danny,” she said without a cry. There was no room for emotion to overtake us.

“We'll find Danny,” I told her.

“I know we will,” Mariane replied.

We created a surrogate family in my house, Mariane and I, the only women in this investigation, joined by John Bussey, the
Journal'
s foreign editor and Danny's boss, and Steve LeVine, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter who worked with Danny in Pakistan. We hunted for every clue. Mariane stuck a yellow Post-It on a computer disc and marked it, “Danny's floppy not checked,” until we could check it. I installed a chart on the wall to map a family tree of the links between suspects, the same kind of family tree I'd used to understand the teachers of American Tantra. In that case,
I included ties between men and women who had slept together. Now I was studying ties between militant Islamic groups.

A regular visitor from Pakistan's ISI came by our house. He described himself only as Major.

“How can we help?” he asked one day.

We asked him to research two suspects for us. He came back to us with useless information. I sat on the glass coffee table opposite him and told him so. His eyes widened. This was an agency that wasn't used to being challenged by civilians, but we didn't have room to be anything but efficient. Our surrogate family took to talking secretly on the veranda where Danny had once gazed at the parrots. We didn't know whom to trust as we swung between moments of worry, hope, and even levity when gallant, burly men from the French consulate delivered crepes homemade by their wives after I told them Mariane needed home cooking.

My boyfriend begged me to see him. I consented. When he arrived, I led him to the stairs by the servants' quarters. We climbed the narrow circular stairs to the roof, where I figured we could talk without surveillance from Pakistani intelligence, and I sat down on the cold cement. He sat down beside me.

He was irritatingly silent. The kidnappers had sent their demands and the wretched photos of Danny with a gun to his head and bound in shackles. I couldn't indulge my boyfriend.

“What do you want?” I scowled.

“I don't know.”

“Why are you here?”

“I miss you.”

I couldn't take his weakness. His mobile phone was blinking, turned on. I was just waiting for it to ring. I was so used to enduring the sound of his mother's voice on the other end, cajoling him home. I started punching his shoulders, my blows so hard they forced him to fly backward, spread-eagled. I threw the key chain I'd bought for him across the roof. I threw his phone across the roof. And I kept pounding him.

“You're an idiot!” I screamed, happy to release my wrath into the dark sky that surrounded us. “A coward and an idiot.”

“I am.”

I sat again in silence. I started to cry, my body convulsing from his torture and the cold night air seeping through my thin shirt.

“I would have died for you,” I told him before wiping my face defiantly, forcing myself to my feet and leading him downstairs and out of my home in silence.

Our battle to find Danny continued. We fought to track down clues and plotted strategy. Meanwhile, it wasn't just my boyfriend who abandoned me. The friends whom Mariane had cooked for the night of Danny's kidnapping disappeared. And I heard not a peep of support from my relatives in Pakistan who had lectured me so much about the values of being a good Muslim, praying five times a day, and giving
zakat
to the poor. I heard from only two of my cousins, one through e-mail, the other through text messages on my mobile phone. They said they couldn't phone me for fear of being investigated by the police or Pakistani intelligence.

I felt alone except for my family in West Virginia and my mother's cousin-sister in Alaska, Anjum Khala, who had visited me once in Chicago with her American husband, Tim. Through e-mail, she was a lone voice in our extended family, encouraging and supporting me. As with the implosions during the journey through India, my family in Morgantown stood by me and encouraged me. My parents quietly worried about my safety but never asked me to return. “You are doing the right thing for your friend,” my father told me.

Safiyyah sent me an e-mail, “You'll find Danny because you're cool.”

A realization hit me. I seemed to have missed a period. I didn't have a calendar, so I created one in my Winnie-the-Pooh book. I was late.

I sat alone on the striped sofa in the sitting room, curled up with the classic
The Little Prince.
Mariane saw me and sat beside me. Unspoken words crossed between us. “Is it your period?” she asked.