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ON THE ROAD TO TANTRA
The Star, StarMag, Dec 14, 2003
IF the book cover does not get your attention, the author surely will.
Asra Q. Nomani’s Tantrika: Travelling the Road of Divine Love has
flower petals at the top and part of a curvaceous woman’s body resting at
the bottom.
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It is a cover that teases and tempts, yet does not reveal too much.
Asra’s writing follows that same vein.
She takes her readers on a journey through emotional, physical,
spiritual and psychological upheavals which sometimes border on
experiences that are so personal you wonder how she could even bear to
share them. Yet, there are things that Asra chooses not to share.
It is a game she plays with us – sharing bits of information so we’ll
want to learn more, yet not so much that Tantrika, published
earlier this year, becomes a cheap, tell-all book. In doing so, Asra
endears herself to us, yet maintains her dignity.
Asra was born in India but her family moved to America when she was
four. Like many immigrants, she faced frustrations trying to balance her
Asian background with the Western culture that contained her. She tried to
give religion a proper place in her life, but had to contend with
questions of where and how.
Then came the assignment at the Wall Street Journal, where Asra
was working as a journalist. She had to do a story on tantra and the new
fad in America then – tantric sex.
“In the summer of 1998, one of my editors, Ken Wells, asked me to write
about the business of selling tantric sex in America,” Asra explains in an
e-mail interview.
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Asra with her son Shibli in a 2005 photo.
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“I was a 36-year-old single woman right out of Sex and the City,
lonely and often depressed, prone to belting out ‘I believe in loooooove’
with Cher, in the New York apartment I shared with two cats and a futon.”
She did her research, attended courses on tantra and tantric sex, and
filed her story. But it did not end there.
That assignment turned into a personal journey as Asra continued with
her research for a book on the same subject. It took her on several trips
to India and the Indian subcontinent, where she encountered love, the
kidnap and death of her Wall Street Journal colleague and close friend,
Daniel Pearl, and finally found love, albeit not in the form she had
envisioned.
Just before New Year 2000, she had left New York for Morgantown in West
Virginia, her hometown. It became her base. She jetted four times to the
subcontinent, then journeyed from Kathmandu, Nepal, to her ancestral
village in India. She then walked across the Pakistani border into
Afghanistan, “a wave of women in blue burqas floating by me”.
In Tantrika, Asra starts out as a Muslim American divorcee in search of
divine love. She closes the book as a single mother caring for her newborn
son.
With tantra as her theme, she covers three different yet intermingling
topics – the universality of religion, convergence of dualities, and the
effects of Sept 11 (through the death of Pearl).
Asra’s travels in the land of her ancestors helped her better
understand and accept the different aspects of her own identity. Her
ancestral village, Jaigahan, is tucked within the state of Uttar Pradesh.
“When I walked through my maternal ancestral home, it was as if I had
entered my secret ‘mandala’ – a Sanskrit word that refers to a place of
essence. There, I was able to confront the expectations I felt I had
inherited as a Muslim woman.
“Although the women around me stayed in their homes most of the day, I
walked to the village bazaar and bought purple carrots without reproach. I
had to express myself respectfully but freely in the place of my ancestry,
so I could boldly express myself in the world.
“Each journey (to the Indian subcontinent) was wrenching, painful and
beautiful. After each trip, I would find refuge in Morgantown, restoring
myself after confronting the truths about my shortcomings, insecurities
and fears.
“I closed the circle in my journey of self-discovery when I descended
into Pakistan for my last trip after Sept 11, 2001. I returned to
Morgantown, again battered from being on the road, and about to enter my
ninth month of pregnancy.”
Asra sent her book to her editor, electronically, the morning after her
baby’s due date – Oct 10, 2002. She finished her epilogue as she nursed
her newborn.
It had been almost four years to the day she first typed the word
“tantra” into an Internet search engine. “It felt as if I had enough
experiences to keep several karmic incarnations alive,” she said.
Some of those experiences involved meeting and living with Muslims and
Hindus in India. As she observed how Hindus practised their faith, it
struck her that devotion and the everyday rituals were really not so
different from one religion to the next.
“When I first travelled to India for the book, I was immediately
confronted by the modern day divide between Hinduism and Islam,” Asra
writes. “That same divide exists between so many religions. But then I
went from the ‘mandir’ or temple, in Chawla Aunty’s house in Delhi to the
prayer rug beneath the feet of my aunt, Rashida Khala, in Lucknow.
“Both women expressed their religion in different ways but they were
the same in their simple devotion. It was expressed through daily
chanting, regular prostrations and a firm belief in the soul, even if it
was called ‘roh’ in Islam and ‘athman’ in Hinduism.
“By showing the parallels between religions, I hope to emphasise the
common ground in which people’s beliefs are rooted, so that ultimately
humanity – not dogmatism – triumphs.”
Exploring religions also helped Asra realise that dualities can
co-exist peacefully if we honestly acknowledge their presence and allow
them to express themselves freely.
“That means that we don’t repress ourselves or allow ourselves to be
repressed. It was extremely painful and difficult confronting my
dualities, but the hardship forced me to accept myself. That meant, for
example, that I prayed last night, wearing the hood of my sweatshirt to
cover my head. It means I live without shame as a single Muslim mother,
writing against the criminalisation of other mothers like myself in places
such as Nigeria and Pakistan, where women are punished for becoming
pregnant out of wedlock.”
This is an issue Asra feels strongly about. Last June, she had
highlighted the plight of Nigerian Amina Lawal, sentenced to be stoned to
death for committing adultery. In September, Amina won an appeal against
the sentence. Asra could have been condemned to the same sentence just a
year ago. She was a single, and pregnant, in Pakistan. The father of her
child had betrayed her trust and abandoned her. Yet, she has chosen to
protect his identity – he remains nameless and faceless throughout her
book.
“I haven’t heard from Shibli’s father since after I gave birth, so I
don’t know if he has read the book. I thought I had found divine love with
my son’s father. I discovered it wasn’t true love.
“In a moment of epiphany ... I realised I could not surrender myself to
my son as long as I was distraught in a false love. Now free, I’ve found
the space within my heart to simply be grateful (to Shibli’s father) for
the blessing of life that sprang from within me, and I wish him well.”
Despite her fears of being judged and condemned by certain sections of
the community, Asra not only went ahead and had a baby out of wedlock, she
also wrote a whole book about it!
“I was prepared for a fatwa of the kind some clerics slapped on Salman
Rushdie for Satanic Verses. It’s not that I considered my writing
blasphemous, but rather, I wondered if my brutal honesty would be too much
for Muslims to absorb (and, if not my honesty, then the book’s risqué
cover).
“But I have been flooded with the voices of Muslims who are heartened
by my message of universalism, tolerance and compassion. Like me, many
have felt alienated by traditionalism and disoriented by feeling alone.”
Support and encouragement came to Asra when she least expected it.
“The first reader who wrote to me was a young University of Georgia
student who said the book spoke to her about many Muslim identity issues.
On the humorous side, another Muslim woman in Los Angeles wrote me a
message of support with the subject line, ‘Fellow Muslim Bad Girl’.
“It’s not that we have to act up. But, borrowing the theme of a
progressive Muslim website address, we do have to wake up. So many Muslims
have written to me, grateful that Tantrika pierces the hypocrisy that so
often surrounds discussions of love, marriage, identity, sexuality and
religion.
”I didn’t quite realise the universality of this struggle and search
for love and peace of mind until I started hearing from readers. My father
put it well when he told an audience at a book reading, ‘This isn’t about
Asra Nomani. This is about everybody’s struggle and search for peace of
mind.’
“What I have discovered is that the truth liberates not only us, but
also the people around us, to express themselves honestly.
“I was afraid when I embarked upon this project. I had a dream in which
I walked the streets naked. Initially, I had called my book, Naked Truth.
Part of the journey meant overcoming my fears. That’s what I set out to do
when I wrote without censor. Rather than feeling more vulnerable, I now
feel the strongest I’ve ever felt in my life. I am not afraid to
acknowledge who I am.”
The blessings of her family strengthened Asra’s belief that she was
doing the right thing.
“My family has been beautiful. My family members are fearless,
independent thinkers. When I gave my father my draft, he read it non-stop
until two in the morning. When he finished, he wept. He said he felt so
much empathy for the struggle I’d chronicled, trying to reconcile the
identities that I straddle.
“My mother jokes it’s the second book my father has read, after the
Quran. She threw a book party for me at the boutique she has run for 22
years. She is probably one of my best booksellers. In the spirit of South
Asian culture, my family accompanies me to book readings.”
The last part of Tantrika deals with Daniel Pearl’s kidnap and
death. Pearl and his wife Mariane had been staying with Asra in Karachi
early 2002. Pearl was there to interview a Muslim cleric who was said to
have ties with alleged “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid. On Jan 23, he never
came back from his appointment.
Soon after that, Asra discovered she was pregnant. Then she and Mariane
were told of Pearl’s murder, supposedly by Pakistani militants.
“Danny’s life and death transformed me. We bonded in the newsroom of
the Wall Street Journal, in part, because we were both explorers of the
unconventional. He taught me the beauty of enjoying play, a lesson that
had evaded me as a child of immigrants. Also, Danny knew no boundaries in
this world.”
Although Tantrika started out as an exploration of tantra, it became a
“vehicle to explore the corners of (her) identity”.
“So many teachers have told me, ‘I cannot teach you tantra. You have to
live it.’ I lived it. To me, tantra is liberation of self from fears,
boundaries, ego and other forces so that we can really capture our
‘shakti’ – Sanskrit for energy. Tantra gets attention in the West because
it recognises our sexual energy as a part of our power.
“I believe that is true, but it is literally just one of the seven
‘chakras’ or energy centres in our body. Tantra’s message is incorporated
in the Star Wars theme, Find the force within you. To me, tantra is
about finding the force within us and channelling it towards higher good.
“I try to practise many of the philosophies of tantra that are really a
part of all of the world’s major religions and spiritualities.
Non-attachment, equanimity, compassion – they’re all concepts found in
Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity.”
Still, knowing the theory and putting it to practice are two totally
different things.
“To me, a tantrika is a woman who aspires to free herself from the
boundaries within which others try to define her. In that way, I consider
myself a tantrika. But I’m also just another ordinary human trying to live
on this Earth as best she can.”
When her book leave ended recently, Asra decided not to return to the
Wall Street Journal for personal and professional reasons. She
currently contributes to Salon.com and her website is
www.asranomani.com.
Asra has written for Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated for Women,
the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the Dominion Post in
Morgantown. Her Salon.com articles on Pakistan made her a finalist
in the feature-writing category of the 2002 Online Journalism Awards,
organised by Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism. She was also a 2001 finalist for a feature story that
explained why the brutal murder of a black gay man in West Virginia was
more than a hate crime.
Asra’s next book, Daughters of Hajira, will chronicle the lives
of women in Islam – both historical and present-day – through the tale of
her own pilgrimage to Mecca earlier this year.
“The inspiration is the story of Hajira, who is known as Hagar among
Christians and Jews. The world calls Abraham the father of Muslims and
Jews, but Hajira, like Sarah, represents the matrilineal lineage. When
Hajira became pregnant with Abraham’s son Ismael, she found herself
abandoned in the desert by Abraham. From Ismael, sprang the tribe of
Muslims. I hope to chronicle the lives, struggles and triumphs of the
Muslim daughters of Hajira,” she explains.
Copyright Star Publications (M) Bhd
ALSO:
Warrior of Light, Sept 24, 2003
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