Authors: Asra Nomani
I
OFTEN RETREATED
to the (not so) Fast Business Centre seeking solitude. One day, I met a physical trainer named Michael Cowasji. We started talking motorcycles.
No sparks flew, so it was easy to go with him when he offered to show me motorcycles. I sat sidesaddle behind him on his LML scooter as we wove through Lucknow traffic to the Suzuki, LML, and Honda dealerships. On the ride, he told me that some years back in Delhi he had married a Hindu woman although her family didn't approve because he was Christian. They had lived together peacefully, but then she started visiting her family without him because he wasn't welcome in their house. She would return from every visit disheartened by him. She finally left him to stay with her family.
In Delhi the year before, he had gone to a Hindu Tantric who told him to feed a black dog a
roti,
a type of bread, with the wife's name tucked inside on a piece of paper. He searched through the night until he found a black dog. The dog wouldn't eat the
roti.
He chased after him until finally he ate the
roti.
Then he had to slaughter a certain-sized lamb. He realized that the Tantric had a scam going when he became displeased that Michael had brought his own lamb and didn't spend three thousand rupees on the lamb the Tantric wanted to sell him. Even though the dog ate the
roti,
Michael's wife never returned.
At the Suzuki dealership, I learned about a team of Indian army doctors set to start an expedition through the Himalayan foothills to Kargil in Kashmir on a new Suzuki launch, the Fiero. The sales and marketing men for TVS-Suzuki Limited encouraged me to sit on it. They took me seriously. They didn't ask why I wanted to ride a motorcycle. They just wanted to know which one I wanted. The bike felt sleek and powerful and sweet. Would this be my tiger? It was symbolically right. The banner
showed a man in a leather jacket hunched low upon the Fiero, a blaze of fire behind him. Except for a sales consultant, Runita, I was the only woman in the showroom. She, too, encouraged me. A singer, she told me she sang to Shiva in front of an image of a lingam. “It keeps me calm.”
On this trip, I somehow stumbled upon a real estate agent I had met once before. He ran into me as I scurried down Hazratganj. He told me he needed help. He hadn't been able to have an erection since a girlfriend left him ten years before. “What was your relationship like with your mother?” I asked, trying to test my theory of psychological male castration by overbearing mothers. I, obviously, still didn't appreciate the difficult task of raising a child, let alone a son. His mother gave his brother presents on his birthday when he was growing up, an explanation he gave for his impotence. I was dodging shoulders as I listened to him. “You have to unblock your chakras.”
“Help me.”
I looked over at him to see if he was serious.
“I'm impotent. I won't be a danger.” We stopped at a building down the alley from the Fast Business Centre. He suggested I give him a lesson in his apartment upstairs. “Don't worry. We won't be alone. My servant will be there.”
I remembered my promise to two friends in San Francisco before I left for the first leg of my journey, never to meet a man alone to talk about Tantra. I told him to masturbate pressing his heart chakra. I headed homeâas fast as I could.
Over the phone, I talked to Dadi, my grandmother, visiting a daughter in Bombay, and she told me that she was headed back to Pakistan on a bus from Delhi.
I was wondering whether I should join her when I wandered into Ram Advani Bookstore on Hazratganj, a quiet and sophisticated enterprise with the latest in titles. Ram Advani was a gentleman scholar with a full-headed tuft of white hair and a silver beard to match. When I first came here, I had tried to speak to him in Hindi. He had responded to me in English. I wondered aloud to him whether to go to Pakistan with my dadi. He helped me make my decision by telling me his story. Before India's independence, his family had a bookstore empire in what was now
Pakistan. A well-read British officer told Ram's family that they could have a warehouse in Lahore if they used it for only one purposeâto sell books. They took the warehouse and turned it into a sprawling bookstore. In Lahore, he fell in love with a Muslim girl, Sara, pronounced the Indian way, “Sah-rhuh.” Then, the partition happened. The Hindus were fleeing Pakistan. His family sold the bookstore to a Muslim family, who renamed it Feroze Sons. He fled, too, leaving Sara behind. He settled in Lucknow and fell in love with an academic researcher with a PhD. He showed me a book his son, a former editor at Oxford Press, had just published,
The Indus Civilization.
The heart of the Indus civilization was in Pakistan, not far west from Lahore, where Dadi was headed.
He confirmed my thoughts. “Go to Pakistan with your dadi.”
My father's family had come from the village Bindwal in the same Azamgarh District where my mother's father took his last breath. My dada, my father's father, settled his large family in the city of Hyderabad, supporting them with his law practice. My grandmother, Dadi, sold her twenty-four-karat gold wedding jewelry to pay to register my grandfather's practice in the state's high court system.
Born in the summer of 1935, my father as a child climbed a tree to watch Mahatma Gandhi during his noncooperation movement when Indians defied their British rulers. During his college days, my father studied with the image of the Buddha before him. He was handsome, educated, and ambitious. He graduated in the class of 1955 from Osmania University's Agriculture College in Hyderabad with a first division rank that it was said no other student had earned in seven years. Panthers roamed the grounds of the rural experimental station in the village Rudrur where my father researched ways to stop the damage of the insect
Schoenobs incertelus
burrowing into the stem of rice crop, destroying the harvest. He slept on the farm to the roar of tigers outside the village. His top graduation ranking earned him a government appointment as an assistant professor at Osmania University's Agriculture College. His marriage was quickly arranged.
Her large eyes stared out so hollow and yet so deep on her wedding day. She was a virgin bride leaving her home to enter a new home of strangers, including her husband. She was too naive even to be frightened.
Her sisters clipped a gold chain in the part of her hair. A gold star hung from the end of the chain, slightly askew between her delicate brows, a ruby glittering in the middle. Her sisters lined her eyes with
kajal,
so the black lines met in the corner as they did centuries before on Cleopatra in a far-off kingdom on the Nile. They draped a sheer peach-colored
dupatta
over her head so only wisps of her hair peeked out from beneath the gold lace stitched on the edge. Her deep eyes were haunting not only because she dared to look into a camera, but also because they betrayed the promise not to reveal unspoken sadness.
She was filled with hope for a new life with security and a sense of home. She had spent her young life in the homes of relatives. Marriage gave her a home of her own, security, happiness. That's what she thought.
It was a small wedding in Bombay at a guest house. She was led forward with a gentle touch to a future she couldn't imagine. She pursed her lips tight and only kept her eyes downcast. My mother went to her family's house. My father stayed at the guest house with his family. The next day, she journeyed with her new husband and his family to Hyderabad. It was a city rich with the history of Muslim nawabs who ruled over the people. When they descended at the train station, her new mother-in-law, my grandmother, stared at the black
burqa
in which my mother was enshrouded.
“What is this?” my grandmother said, staring at the
burqa.
“Take it off!” she yelled, ripping the
burqa
off, shocking the new bride.
My father wasn't surprised by the move. Dadi had caused quite a stir in 1942 in Azamgarh when she'd pioneered her own woman's movement, removing her
burqa
and shopping freely in the bazaar. But the liberation movement hadn't yet touched my mother's family. My mother felt as if she was standing naked on the railroad platform, the
burqa
that cloaked her now just a bundle of black fabric in her hands. Certainly, my mother had gotten into trouble for taking off her
burqa
when she was younger, but it was in the safety of a girls' school. Here menâstrangersâcould see her. This was the first of so many shocks she endured quietly to adjust in this new home. The people were so different from her family. My grandmother spoke her mind forcefully. She ran her house with an iron fist. She cajoled all of her children, sons and daughters, to study and succeed.
She didn't listen to my mother's protests and made her finish the high school degree that she hadn't completed because of the
burqa
incident that got her pulled from school.
My mother's first day in Hyderabad, two of my father's aunts, his Mahjabeen Khali and Bilquis Momani, joked with him that he would consummate his wedding that night. He bet that he wouldn't. He lost.
On their wedding night, the third night after their actual marriage, my father couldn't contain his enthusiasm. He was a staunch Muslim, but he told his new wife about his philosophy of life, about his sympathy with the teachings of Buddha. He told her about his deep sense of spirituality and obligation to help humanity, how he wanted to alleviate suffering in the world. He saw her as his spiritual partner. She listened quietly. She just wanted to be loved. Her ideas about wedding nights came from the Barbara Cartland novels of her teen years, and Buddha was nowhere to be found.
In my mother's morning routine, she walked slowly to prepare chai for her husband and his parents. Her sisters-in-law scurried to school. She cleaned the dirty breakfast dishes under a hand pipe. She took a
jharu,
a broom made from the branches of a tree, and crouched to whisk the broom over the dirt floor of the courtyard in the center of the house. One day, one of her sisters-in-law compared her to the eldest brother's wife. “Raunaq did it better,” she said.
It was probably true. She could admit she didn't play the part of Cinderella very well. It was harder when she was pregnant with her first child. As she swept, she coughed dirt into her lungs. The new bride felt under siege. She wondered how her husband could worry about saving humanity when his own wife was crying herself to sleep. That's when she made her husband put away the Buddha picture. A lingering sadness always remained with my mother, also, for she never saw her childhood home again in the village of Jaigahan, even though her mother-in-law visited there once, inspiring a story I heard of admiration about my grandmother's persevering energy.
I saw this energy explode in front of me in Delhi as my grandmother stepped down from the train from Bombay. She was older, but I could tell she still had fire in her belly.
The back of her hair had the orange-red of the henna with which she dyed it. The hair around her face framed her in silver. Her face was creased with a lifetime that had seen imperialism, revolution, war, famine, and the extension of her family to the far corners of the world. In Pakistan, she was part of the older immigrants from India who still wrapped yards of sari around her waist, throwing the
pallu
over her shoulder, instead of switching to the
shalwar kameezes,
the tunic
kurtas,
harem pants, and
dupattas
that were the style of Pakistan. She was certainly daring compared to the chadors that shrouded the conservative Muslim women of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan in a sea of cloth. But she was an elderly woman and was allowed her fashion statement.
Since my earliest days, as my mother's daughter, I had had a conflicted relationship with my grandmother, probably because I had grown up more like her than not. When I was in Aligarh, my cousin from Azamgarh, Azfar Bhai, lounged on the bed and regaled me with the story of how my dadi traveled fearlessly even when religious divides split Hindus and Muslims after partition, crisscrossing into Muslim areas with a
dupatta
over her head and then into Hindu areas with a
bindhi
on her forehead. She was happy to get away with always pushing the envelope, something with which I was kind of familiar. She always loved India, but her sons convinced her to sell her house in Hyderabad and settle in Pakistan, where they could take care of her.
“Mataji, sit down here,” the Indian police officers said respectfully to her the next morning before sunrise, using the Hindi term for mother, as we waited to have our luggage inspected before boarding the Peace Bus to Lahore. She chatted them up, as she chatted up just about anybody. They still confiscated my road map of Delhi, afraid it would be used against India in Pakistan, ignoring the fact that it was probably easily available online. But this bus ride was a political gamble.
The Peace Bus started as a stunt orchestrated by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to show friendlier relations between the two countries. The bus ran between the Pakistan city of Lahore and India's New Delhi on the historic Grand Trunk Road. From the densely populated paradox of Calcutta, the Grand Trunk Road cut through northern India, hitting the
Ganges at the holy city of Varanasi before charting a course to the capital, Delhi. It proceeded north on the road Lucy, Esther, and I had taken. Twenty-six kilometers, or sixteen miles, after the dusty city of Amritsar, the road crossed the Pakistan border and headed into Pakistan's grand center of art and culture, Lahore.
Despite ongoing tensions between the countries, the crossing usually wasn't a problem. The road followed an arc up through the capital, over the Indus River to Peshawar. Travelers could then head to the Afghanistan border at the famous Khyber Pass. It was an adventure, as were all outings with Dadi. Armed police sat in the front and the rear of the bus. I didn't know if they were guarding us from terrorists in India or guarding India from terrorists on the bus. Dadi didn't care. She went about her business. She tried to arrange the marriage of the Peace Bus official working on our bus.