Authors: Asra Nomani
His father asked, “Did she cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for him?”
My father explained, “This is America. Both of them work all day. At home, men and women share jobs.”
“If my son ever cooks, I will chop off his hands!” his father shouted into the phone.
I didn't understand what was happening. Much later, my mother told me that a cousin-brother who had once criticized me for baring my arms in my Morgantown High track uniform told her, “No matter if you're a journalist or a medical doctor, you have to cook for your husband.”
Not long after, I got a call from his father. “It's over,” he told me in a deep voice. “Omar doesn't want to try.”
I didn't know what to say. “This is an unusual way to hear the news.” I paused. His father said nothing. “If this is the way Omar wants to do it, fine. I don't have much more to say.”
I collapsed into my bed, in tears. My father prayed two
rakats,
or complete prostrations, of a prayer called
shukranah,
meaning “thanks.” He was grateful to God that I had survived the emotional prison of this marriage.
My parents took me to the Masjid Al Hijra in the suburban Virginia neighborhood of Falls Church. A Sudanese imam told me that a man seeking divorce couldn't have sex with his wife. I was finally starting to understand that a life with the man I married was not the life for me. I also knew that I was a gem that he had thrown back into the ocean. My luster would radiate forever. I made a pledge that it must. I had to believe my own pep talk.
“N
EXT!” I SHOUTED.
I had abandoned any hope that the East offered me a spiritual union of anything to do with love and sex. I was finding my new life at the Mall behind the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., with the most unexpected of activities: beach volleyball. I'd played volleyball at Morgantown High, making the team not because I had any talents but because Coach Rice liked the way I sacrificed my body to reach balls before they hit the gym floor. I was perfect for volleyball on the beach.
The Mall to D.C. volleyball players is a grassy inlet tucked between a triangle of roads that lead to Rock Creek Parkway, the Arlington Bridge, and downtown D.C. Dug into the lawn are rows of volleyball courts filled with a mix of sand and gravel. I ventured down to the Mall one Saturday morning with my new pal, Danny Pearl, who had just moved to Washington from the
Journal'
s Atlanta bureau. The child of immigrant parents, like me, he had a father who was also a professor, and he was tall and handsome with a playful smile and a ready laugh. We discovered an informal hierarchy on the courts. The outer courts closer to the Lincoln Memorial were left for beginning B-level players. Farther from the memorial, the play got better. We started on the outer courts, Danny helping me unleash the leftover rage from my marriage and heal with one of the best therapies possible: play. Danny hurled himself at any ball, sacrificing leg and limb just so the ball wouldn't hit the sand. “You fly!” I exclaimed as Danny shocked me with one soaring defensive save after the next.
“Mine!” I screamed, to claim the ball, when a serve came across the court to me.
Meanwhile, I tried to find bliss the modern Western way, dating a trail of ill-suited boyfriends who followed my ill-fated marriage. Danny helped me host the first party I ever threw, the theme, “A Midsummer
Night's Prom,” for the high school prom I had never attended. In all ways visible, I counteracted my upbringing. I sent my mother the billowy “Made in India” cotton skirts I'd been wearing since my graduation day as a college senior, the first day I wore not only a skirt but also nail polish since my childhood. Like the skirts of my twenties, it fell to my ankles. “Make them miniskirts, please,” I asked my mother. She complied, even though her legs had never seen the sun.
In volleyball, we called “Next” when we wanted to play. I applied that principle to my love life. At my Wednesday morning sessions with Dr. Kozuch, I learned an important lessonâto do what I wanted to do, not what I should do.
I ran as far away from the Marriott Islamabad as I could get. A DHL package sat inside my mail slot one day at work. I took it back to my cubicle and pulled out a brown paper envelope. Inside the envelope was a single page marked at the top with the crescent and star, the symbol of Islam. The words
FIFTEEN RUPEES
spread like a flag fluttering over ornate scrolls. That converted to about twenty-five cents. The man I married declared that he said before witnesses the magic words of
talaaq,
divorce, in Islam: “I divorce Asra Nomani. I divorce Asra Nomani. I divorce Asra Nomani.”
The document minced no words: “She is a stranger to me.” I saw my husband's familiar signature below the words. I tucked the divorce paper back into the envelope, relieved. After work, I did what came naturally to me now. I ran down to the volleyball courts and called, “Next.”
Years of play followed until I moved to New York to be near the virgin boyfriend and my cousin-sister Lucy arrived to rescue me from my despair.
When Ken approached me with the Tantra assignment I remembered what Lucy's father, Iftikhar Mamoo, had told me about the power of my writing: “If the real world is bad, you can create a new world.” I realized that I had to create a new world for myself. I decided to make Ken's assignment my road map to a new future with the hapless stops in Canada and Santa Cruz, California, as the first on my itinerary.
If I was going to do this right, I had to go to the source. I set my eyes on India. Writing about Tantra became the excuse with which I could
journey back in time across the Atlantic to my native land. At first, it truly wasn't much more than an excuse. Tantra's principles about finding the divine within a soul mate and the self appealed to me, but I was by no means a convert.
When I left New York to return to my home in West Virginia in the hills of Appalachia, my sister-in-law, Azeem Bhabi, wanted to see the Golden Temple that the controversial Hare Krishnas had built years earlier in a West Virginia rural enclave just hours north from us in a town called Moundsville.
We set off in our blue Chrysler minivan, my mother, Bhabi and her children, Safiyyah, now eight and Samir, now six, and me, winding our way over narrow West Virginia roads. Along the way, we pulled over to watch the sun descend into the hills, and joy welled up within me, for the company I had with me was purer than any I could imagine.
Shakti,
the Sanskrit word, is supposed to be divine female energy or power. To me, this car was filled with shakti. My mother sat beside me. To me, she was my raw shakti.
When I read about the goddesses of Tantra, I thought of my mother. I learned of Lakshminkara, who represented a female deity known as the Severed-Headed Vajrayogini. In my mother's family, as in most of traditional India, the women tied their hair in a single braid that ran down their backs. Islam considers hair a symbol of seduction, thus ordering women to hide their hair. It's a tradition in Hindu and Buddhist cultures, too, to plait the hair. Lakshminkara freed her hair from a braid. My mother, too, loosened her hair during my teen years as she saw me standing up for her and challenging the rules as she knew them. The severed head meant the slaying of dualistic thinking. Like Lakshminkara, my mother reached deep within herself to liberate herself and others, in ways small and big. One night, when my mother and I were tired, we saw there was only enough food for a full meal for either us or my father and brother. “Let's eat it,” I said, rejecting the tradition of feeding men first. We ate part of it, leaving enough for my father and brother. A friend of my mother's laughed heartily at the tale when my mother recollected it for her later. “You're more liberated than all of us,” she told my mother.
My mother freed my father from the traditional definition of manhood by refusing to accept the roles that her culture told her would make her a devoted wife. She ran a boutique, which gave her economic independence none of her sisters ever experienced. Her personal determination gave her a will few women in her family asserted. To me, she was the female Buddha, beheading herself to slay the dualities that otherwise define men and women in my cultureâthe wife who sacrifices her personal self for her marriage and family, the husband who is obliged to financially support his extended family and cloak his emotions. More than anything else, my mother freed me. For my mother, her choices were not without detractors. My father's sisters judged her critically, and his nephews, staying at our house, made jokes at her expense about her control over my father, although he never complained. He always said his mother's strength made him respect powerful women.
When I entered a Mother's Day contest to write about my mother in twenty-five words or less, I wrote, “Coming from India in sari and sandals, she gave me the life she couldn't imagine. She inspired by example, breaking cultural boundaries, setting me free.” My mother laughed that she didn't literally wear sandals because of America's winters, and I lost the contest to a boy with cancer whose mother took care of him, but my appreciation was solid.
I looked over at Bhabi in the backseat with her children, and I was in awe of the personal journey she had traveled. Until she was married, Bhabi never emerged in public without first cloaking herself in her black
burqa,
following the rule set by her father, a kind but orthodox Muslim. A young beauty with lush black hair and infectious laughter, she accepted without protest an arranged marriage to my brother that would send her thousands of miles away to America to live with a stranger and his family. My liberal parents freed her from traditional restrictions, and, in an ironic way, while my brother loved her dearly, his delicate situation propelled her toward even more independence. She didn't completely understand this stranger who was her husband, but she was intuitively compassionate to him beyond anything I had ever seen. Fittingly, she was studying at West Virginia University's School of Nursing, destined one day to trade in her black
burqa
for the white uniform of a nurse.
In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, I had learned there were twenty-one female deities manifested in the form of a goddess named Tara. She was the most adored of the deities. The ancient tales said that she was a woman just like any woman. Many ages ago, she took the bodhisattva vow to work for the benefit of all beings until all were enlightened. Embodying compassion, she was known as White Tara. Bhabi was the White Tara I knew in my life.
We snaked through the hills and found the Golden Temple, a place where the men and women walked in robes with shaved heads except for tails of hair descending from the crown. One of the men told us the story of Krishna. We didn't buy his exaltation of this god my mother spoke disparagingly about because of his many dalliances with women and girls who were
gopis,
or goat herders. “A playboy,” she called him. What I didn't know was that Krishna is supposed to represent the aspect of God, or the divine, that attracts us, whether it's his creation of the moon or the latest BMW series. And the dalliances are supposed to symbolize the way God loves all creation. The man led us into a large room lined with statues, just like Virgin Mary manger scenes, only these statues were shimmering with gold and silver, devotees decorating them with garlands.
A chant and buzz rang through the air. We looked around, trying to figure it out. The Krishna devotees were breaking into a frenzied dance. Bhabi always wanted to dance, something not allowed in her conservative upbringing. I figured no time better than the present. We jumped with the disciples to their chants of “Hare Rama Hare Krishna Hare Hare Rama Hare Hare Krishna.” What was this all about? My mother jumped with us, too, flailing her arms around and ticktocking her head. If only her mother could see her now.
I didn't know it, but we were flailing ourselves in something called a
kirtan.
Unlike a
bhajan,
which is organized singing, a
kirtan
is supposed to be an ecstatic, free form of expression, much like the Native American sun dance and Sufi dervish dancing, which changes the state of awareness, much like meditation is supposed to do.
Let's admit it. The Nomani family wasn't quite ready to flow for too long without reservation. But we danced enough to have smiles on our faces as we slipped out of the room. Safiyyah bought herself a little purse
to dangle on her wrist with “Hare Rama Hare Krishna” stitched onto the side in cursive. We didn't know she was supposed to drop her prayer beads inside and chant her mantra quietly to herself, using the bag to hide the movement of each bead under her fingers. She figured it'd be a cute place to put her Barbie lipstick.
Before leaving, we pulled our minivan close to a lake where devotees were gathering. A bonfire raged at lake's edge. The stars splashed overhead, turning the sparklers passed to us into starbursts. Bhabi, my mother, Samir, and I twirled them. Shivering, Safiyyah wilted in my arms but still twirled her sparkler. Swans glided in small patches of water not frozen over on this lake. Then flashes of fireworks ignited the blackened ceiling of stars. I couldn't have scripted the beauty of this celebration, bringing in the new millennium for the Nomani family.
With the new year, I started asking my parents about roots I had never cared to pull at before.
I learned it included a rich mystical past. I was the twenty-second generation traced back on my paternal side to Raja Turloq Chund, a Hindu prince who ruled the state of Rajpathuna between Gujarat and Rajasthan in western India, on the southern edge of the Indus Valley where Tantra began.
The Rajputs were a warrior caste with a committed and almost fanatical belief in the principles of chivalry, both in war and in running the state. It was their obsession with honor that helped me understand my stubborn difficulty in excusing what I deemed dishonorable acts. They were like the knights of medieval Europe. The Rajputs fought foreign intrusions into their land but couldn't coordinate their powers enough to battle superior forces over a long time. They became folded into the Mogul Empire, but their skills in battle were much appreciated and they were considered among the best of the warriors in the emperors' armies.
My ancestors spread from the north of India to the state of Uttar Pradesh, where temple bells echo over farmlands, dark-skinned peasants till fields, and the city of Agra sits in the western corner with the Taj Mahal as its crown jewel. It is a region known as the Hindu Belt for its coveted place in Hinduism. It is India's most populated state with a population the size of Brazil, producing many of India's prime ministers. The
Ganges River, the holiest river in Hinduism, cuts a swath through the middle of the region. Four of Hinduism's seven holy towns are in Uttar Pradesh, the most important of which is Benares, renamed Varanasi by Hindu leaders.
The soldiers of the Muslim sultans conquered lands in India. And great sheiks, or
pirs,
of the Sufi orders converted Indians to Islam from Hinduism. The Sufis were the mystics of Islam, most commonly known to the west as the whirling dervishes of the Ottoman Empire. Their spiritual philosophy taught followers to be aware of the presence of the divine in each moment.
It wasn't Tantra. But it had a similar message that followers should experience ecstasy of the divine to the fullest. The sheikh taught
zikr,
or remembrance of God, sometimes simply by repeating words like
Allahu,
meaning God, the divine essence, to a prescribed pattern of breathing and head movements, much like the teachings of Tantra.