Read Online Tantrika by Asra Nomani - Free Book Online Page B

deck built onto my childhood home. Bhabi wrapped my girlfriends in her and my mother’s silk wedding saris. My girlfriends were worldly adventurers, Vasia from Greece, Chiyo from Japan, Pam from Seattle, Nancy from Birmingham, Alabama, and Sumita from Morgantown via her ancestral in Bihar, India. I centered paste-on paisleys, called bindhis, my mother brought from her store, Ain’s, on their foreheads, between their eyes. I had no idea what these markings meant, but my friends looked like exotic princesses.
    â€œYou put one on, too!” Sumita coaxed me.
    â€œNooooo! That’s okay.” I was a Muslim girl. We didn’t wear bindhis.
    When my fiancé put the engagement ring on my finger, my friends and family applauded. We were bold. Traditionally, the boy’s mother putthe engagement ring on the girl, since the bride and the groom saw each other for the first time on their wedding day.
    Bhabi was returning to India for the first time. She would take Safiyyah, her and my brother’s first child. Safiyyah crawled on the ground and tried to eat the cat food. She was to be parted for the first time from her dada, dadi, and father. She cried and refused to sleep. I consciously knew for the first time the depth of emotions of a girl less than two.
    My mother did something I hadn’t heard her do since I shushed her into silence. She sang. I heard her through the door to the living room. Somewhere inside of me the song was familiar. It was as if I could remember the gentle lullabies she sang to me as a child before she left India. Tears sprang from a well I didn’t know existed.
    By day, I was a warrior. After Bill Clinton won office, I switched beats to cover international trade, exposing a behind-the-scenes smear campaign against a trade attorney vying for appointment as U.S. trade representative. I ran around town, digging up details for the story, including a document slipped to me in a brown envelope in an elevator. At home I was a different person. I sobbed, readying myself for this wedding I was beginning to understand should not happen. But suffering was what I saw staring back at me in my mother’s eyes in her bridal photo. The understanding and devotion showered upon me by my last boyfriend haunted me. I tried once to reach out to him in a postcard on which I added “P.S.” from Billlie and Billluh in the crooked handwriting of my left hand. It was meant to look like the scribbles of a cat if he got a pen in his paws. I never heard back.
    I wept as I packed, but I figured if I endured this marriage would endure. It was the path of the Indian woman, to suffer, to survive, to endure. I plucked a white sweater studded with white beads from the rack at Neiman Marcus. It was long enough to cover my butt when I landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, an act of modesty.
    The three days of wedding festivities took on a momentum beyond my control. I allowed my relatives, mostly my father’s side, who had migrated to Pakistan from India, to drape a bright golden yellow dupatta over me like a shroud. It was for the mehndi ceremony where my firstcousins gathered on the ground to sing songs making fun of the family into which I was to marry. The other family retorted with their own songs. I only knew because I peeked out from beneath my veil. I sat on a chair with tall cardboard tubes tied to the back and decorated with bright gold wrapping paper and green tinsel to make the chair resemble a throne. I wore only kajal, kohl eyeliner, and pink lipstick. This was supposed to be the plain me before I was decorated for my wedding.
    Much later, I looked again at the silver ribbons sewn like endless diamonds on the fabric of my dupatta. I saw in them the shimmer that glittered from the stainless-steel wires around Cheenie Bhai’s cage. Golden sequins were strung in the middle of each diamond with orange thread. They reminded me later of the shiny grapes I tucked between the wires of Cheenie