Tantrika

Chapter One
Learning American Tantra
My search for Tantra, sex, and love began with a gnarly foot wash in a forest of pine trees in the Canadian countryside.
I washed the scaly feet of a lanky stranger, cloaking them with soft soap suds and warm water. We sat on the porch outside a sprawling log house, the sun draping itself over us like the gentle touch of a velvet glove. The scent of home cooking wafted toward us from the kitchen inside and mingled with the lavender smell of the soap that I caressed on the bottom of this stranger's feet. I massaged each toe separately, stretching them under my fingers, pressing my thumb into the small dip where his ankle began. As I slid my hands underneath, he flinched. My touch tickled him. He giggled. I smiled politely and averted my gaze.
"What am I doing here?" I asked myself, trying not to look at his gangly toes and smashed toenails.
I had been living in a bird coop of an apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side.
I had just finished writing an article about how gorillas in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo lived in cages with more square footage than the apartment of a couple who recently moved to Manhattan. I hated my home. The windowsills were splattered with bird droppings. I was in a miserable relationship. A metal safety gate spread across the windows like an accordion, reminding me of the jahlee, or screen, through which my Muslim sisters in purdah peer when they are hidden from the outside world.
I wasn't hidden, but I wasn't happy. I had been looking for love in all the wrong places, first my failed marriage, then a string of bad relationships. Now, in humiliation, I was finally letting go of this latest boyfriend when I escaped to a new apartment across the Brooklyn Bridge. When I arrived, my cat, Billluh, sat in the window, his nose twitching at the gentle waft of a summer breeze that swept into the apartment, the first fresh air he had breathed in months. I breathed in at last when my nineteen-year-old cousin-sister Lucy Ansari arrived in Newark, New Jersey, on an early morning Continental Airlines flight. In India cousins, especially first cousins, are considered brothers and sisters. All her belongings were packed into a knapsack on her back. It made me yearn for a life in which things could be so simple. She came to visit me at the tail end of her adventures around the world. Her father, who had died of a heart attack a few years before, was my mother's eldest brother. I called him Iftikhar Mamo, and had helped me unfurl my wings. When I was a college freshman considering journalism, an unorthodox field for a child from India, he encouraged my mother to support me. At one low point in my life, he reminded me of the power within me.
"You are creative," he told me. "If the real world is bad, you can create a new world. Through your writing, you can create a new world."
Now, his doe-eyed daughter, a long-legged gazelle of a poet in flip-flops and cargo pants, brought the beauty of the world to me again. She helped me recover what the damaging relationship had obscured. Lucy cooked dal and chawal, lentils and rice, for me. She stirred me awake before work to run through the tree-lined brownstone streets of Brooklyn Heights, down the Promenade. Step by step, life began again, but I was disillusioned by romance. I wondered if I could ever find love.
Then Ken Wells, one of our page-one editors at the Wall Street Journal, came to me with a reporting assignment. "We want you to look at the business of Tantra. Go find Mr. and Mrs. Tantra." Ken told me Tantra was America's hottest new fad. It was a natural assignment for me. I'd earned an informal reputation on the tenth floor among my fellow reporters as the Journal's sex reporter, the rising incidence of "Mile High Club" sexual misconduct on airplanes among my page-one stories.