At the level of practice I was never a ‘good’ muslim. Fasting in Ramadan was an activity we did sometimes as kids because it was fun to wake up at the crack of dawn for Sehri (dawn meal) and stuff yourself silly. You also got lots of attention and the power to choose the delectable food you would consume at dusk. You could lie around all day and feign weakness and get others to do your chores for you. Really quite a break from the rest of the year! However the patience (despite the benefits of Ramadan) never lasted long enough and at best we would end up keeping six fasts. Not an issue, since no one else in my immediate family fasted and if anything we were dissuaded because our parents felt we were too young.

Five times prayers, the other ritual that Muslims must follow, was also quite an alien concept to me growing up. No one in my house said their Namaz. So no pressure really to do anything or follow anything. The only thing my parents did ensure was that we learnt to read the Koran. But since we learnt to read it in Arabic, we never really understood anything! Despite this I completed it three times and wore that as a laurel, until I was finally old enough to realize how idiotic it was to be proud of reading something which one never understood.

In order for us to read the Koran, we had to have a Maulvi come to teach us. He was a humourless disciplinarian who spoke in monotones and whom we constantly tried to escape. Sometimes, we would spy him from the window, fling open the door before he rang the bell and say “Mummy has said that we shouldn’t read the Koran today because we have exams so don’t come for a week.” At other times we’d hide his motorcycle keys, or keep distracting him by saying that something was stuck in his beard. Poor man! He bored us to death and we in turn made him pay for that!! Of course he didn’t take it lying down either. There were endless raps on the knuckles and complaints to our mother.

Given that my immediate family was so laid back about being ‘muslim’ didn’t mean that religion and the God that monitored it all was in anyway ‘invisible’ for me. In a theocracy like Pakistan, religion is everywhere (especially where it should never be) and whether it’s the media, the school, the mosque next door, the interfering stranger who considers himself to be the ‘soldier of God’, or the restrictive/censored/morality driven society that you live in, religion seeps into your being and resides under your skin in ways which you can’t even begin to imagine.

Growing up the God that got created for me was clearly masculine (there was no possibility of a she or it). He was extremely strict and was to be feared. He was capable of the most horrific kinds of punishments if you were ‘bad’. He could condemn you to hell where there would be rivers of pus to drink, fires to roast you over, worms and other icky creatures to eat. Whips would flay your body, and your cries for mercy would make the heavens tremor. And then he would ultimately take mercy and rescue you if he felt your repentance was complete.

Being woman meant that at best you were a second-class citizen and at worst a sheep to be herded around as men saw fit. Told what to wear, what to do, where to go, whom to marry. Temptress, slave, child bearing machine, suppressed and suffocated, wrapped in yards of cloth and kept enclosed in cages. Slaughtered, abused and violated at the altar of so-called religious injunctions and men’s fragile egos. To be kept away from mosques lest the sight of us tempt poor men away from their God. So impure when we menstruate that even God can’t be prayed to. So incapable of truth that even when we are raped, four men must bear witness to the act for us to be believed.

I had a clear struggle with Islam and my identity as a Muslim. I tried to find answers in modern interpretations of the Koran and in trying to forge ahead with my own ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. I knew I was living a fragmented life, caught between liberal notions and feminist ideology and a spiritual chaos that was keeping me from feeling whole and integrated. Answers were hard to come by and living and breathing in a theocracy, you tend not to look at other spiritual schools for guidance fearing that to be the ultimate blasphemy.

I had no idea then that my life was soon to change irrevocably. That I would come to India and meet the Aghora. A spiritual path/master so unique and dynamic that it/he/she would test and detonate every idea, concept and belief I had grown to believe was mine. Especially my idea of life, death, self, God, hell, heaven and most importantly the sacred and the profane. In effect, the Aghora would mean death to all that I knew as me.
(To Be Continued)